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Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness
Mind megjelölése nem lejátszottként
Manage series 3597082
A tartalmat a Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness biztosítja. Az összes podcast-tartalmat, beleértve az epizódokat, grafikákat és podcast-leírásokat, közvetlenül a Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness vagy a podcast platform partnere tölti fel és biztosítja. Ha úgy gondolja, hogy valaki az Ön engedélye nélkül használja fel a szerzői joggal védett művét, kövesse az itt leírt folyamatot https://hu.player.fm/legal.
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Mind megjelölése nem lejátszottként
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A tartalmat a Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness biztosítja. Az összes podcast-tartalmat, beleértve az epizódokat, grafikákat és podcast-leírásokat, közvetlenül a Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness vagy a podcast platform partnere tölti fel és biztosítja. Ha úgy gondolja, hogy valaki az Ön engedélye nélkül használja fel a szerzői joggal védett művét, kövesse az itt leírt folyamatot https://hu.player.fm/legal.
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Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness
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A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally. The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational. But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness. Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship . Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap Connect With Nate Klemp 80/80 Marriage website Nate’s website Nate on LinkedIn Nate on IG Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship, from tangible things like childcare insures to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going, is supposed to be divided equally. The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness, and that seems sensible and rational, but my guest says it actually sabotages relational happiness. Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of the 80/80 marriage a New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to relationship what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of radical generosity can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’ respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/8080. All right, Nate Klemp, welcome to the show. Nate Klemp: So good to be here with you, Brett. Brett McKay: So you co authored a book called the 80/80 Marriage with your wife, and in this book you both propose a new framework for thinking about marriage. And you start off the book with a story of what kickstarted the idea of the 80/80 marriage. Tell us that story. Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, I’ll give you maybe even a more complete story than what we say in the book, which is to say that when we first got together, we had this fairytale, like, beginning to our relationship. So we met in high school. We were both seniors in high school. We were chemistry lab partners. We went to senior prom together. And then we pragmatically broke up before we went to college. And seven years later, it magically came back. We started dating again, we got married, and if you had asked our friends at the time, they probably would have told you we were like the perfect couple. And in some ways, that ended up becoming a trap for us because a year or two into marriage, as anybody who knows who’s been married knows, like, things got real. And for us, that looked like I was in my final year of getting a PhD, struggling to get a job as a professor. I had a serious bike accident. We were just locked into all sorts of conflict to the point where we almost got divorced at the time. Luckily, we didn’t we were able to push through that. But over the decades, it’s now been 19 years since then, we started to just ask this question, like, what was the fundamental essence of our conflict? And what we arrived at is that essentially we were fighting over whether it was fair and the it being all sorts of things like childcare and housework and finances and all the different things that go on in our life. And so we decided to see were we the only people experiencing this? Were there others out there locked in this battle for fairness? And that’s what ultimately led us to write the book. And we interviewed a number of different couples, and what we found is that on some level, most modern couples seem to be stuck in this conflict over fairness for what is or isn’t fair. This practice of keeping an elaborate mental scorecard of all the wonderful things you do juxtaposed against all the things your partner doesn’t do. Brett McKay: And, yeah, you call this framework of thinking about fairness in a marriage. You call it the 50/50 marriage. And on paper, it seems like that should be a good idea. But you found that it doesn’t work. It just makes things worse. Why doesn’t it work? Why does focusing on fairness in a marriage make things worse? Because people might be thinking, that doesn’t make any sense in a 50/50 marriage. You’re trying to be fair. And isn’t that a good thing? Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, and. And this is so surreptitious. Like, it’s happening all the time, mostly under the radar of awareness. For example, just the other day, I think it was last night, actually, I was unloading the dishwasher, and I thought to myself, man, this is like the third time in a row I’ve unloaded the dishwasher, and I could feel the agitation. And. And that’s just a micro example of how this shows up. It’s this thought things aren’t fair, which is then followed by some experience of anger or resentment. And the reason this doesn’t work, it’s actually kind of interesting. There’s this, like, really cool science coming out of the field of marriage research, where they do these time survey studies. And they found a couple things. The headline here is that we’re basically really bad at assessing what is or isn’t fair. So if you’re saying, man, I contribute 60% or 70% to my relationship, that number is based mostly on pure delusion. And there are, like, two things that contribute to this. One is what psychologists call availability bias, which is basically just A fancy way of saying, in my marriage and my relationship with my wife, Kaley, all of the wonderful things that I do, like all those contributions are available to me. I see them happening in real time when I’m taking our daughter to her violin lesson or whatever it might be. When it comes, though, to what Kaley’s doing, all of a sudden things get a little bit blurry and foggy, like she’s contributing. But I don’t really see any of that happening in real time. And most of it I don’t see happening at all, and I don’t even know about it often. So there’s this tendency, then, to systematically underestimate what our partner is doing. You add on top of that, one other cognitive bias, the overestimation bias, where they found in researching couples that people tend to radically overestimate the amount of time they spend on household labor and on childcare. So what that means is if I say, like, hey, I spent an hour yesterday cleaning up the kitchen. It was probably more like 30 minutes. And you put these two together, and you start to see, okay, we’re systematically underestimating what our partner does. We’re systematically overestimating what we do. And then we’re having this conversation about trying to make things fair. And you start to see that the numbers are just based on delusion. And that’s why we think this idea, this mindset of 50/50 fairness just doesn’t work, and it leads to perpetual, constant conflict. Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’re keeping a mental scorecard when we have a 50/50 marriage. But the problem is the scorecard is probably not accurate. Nate Klemp: Yes. Wildly inaccurate is the way I would put it. Brett McKay: Yeah. And you talk about some of the reoccurring problems or conflicts you see in couples that you interviewed when they try to do everything. 50/50. You mentioned one in your own marriage, the domestic scorekeeping fight. It’s like, well, man, I’ve done dishes three nights in a row. What’s going on here? What are some other common areas in a marriage where people try to do things? 50, 50. And it just causes a lot of tension. Nate Klemp: I’m so glad you asked that, Brett, because it was really interesting when we would ask couples, do you fight about fairness? Most couples said, no, we never have a fight like that. And then we would ask them about things like who does the chores around the house or money, and they would reveal all of these different conflicts that were, in essence, conflicts over fairness. So that’s what I was saying earlier. Often this is happening beneath the Radar of awareness. So seeing the kind of classic archetypes of this fight can be really useful just as a way of cultivating awareness. So, yeah, you mentioned domestic scorekeeping. That’s one way it shows up. Another way it shows up often for couples is trying to make the balance of time spent with each extended family or each set of friends equal. So, for example, in our life, we used to live in Los Angeles, and we’d come back to Colorado, where both sets of parents lived for the holidays, and we would have these epic, explosive fights over trying to figure out the right balance of time spent with my family and then spent with Kaley’s family. And many couples that we’ve interviewed have something similar going on. There’s also a fairness fight for many couples around money. So a lot of couples fight over who’s saving more, who’s spending more. And then another way this shows up, especially with couples who have children, is as anyone who knows who has a kid, once you have a kid, all of a sudden free time and leisure time becomes like, we like to call it domestic gold. It’s this insanely scarce resource. And so we were interviewing one woman, and she was telling us about how she went to Target. Right. And she spent an hour at Target, and she got home and her husband was like, oh, cool, you had your hour of free time. Now I’m going to go to the gym. Which of course, triggers this huge fight over again, this balance of the amount of leisure time that each person in the partnership gets. Brett McKay: Yeah. And for the wife, she. She’s probably a Target. Not for leisure. She’s probably buying stuff for the house. So, like, for her, it’s just a chore. Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. For her, it was a chore. And that was the essence of the fight that she was talking about, is that she’s like, that wasn’t leisure time. Like, that was me buying a bunch of crap for the family. Are you kidding me? And you can imagine then how that fight would ensue from there. Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 split on time with in laws or family. I remember when we first had kids, that. That can actually get exhausting. Because you do try to be fair because you want your parents to see the kids and you want your wife’s parents to see the kids. But then trying to do two Christmases in one day, it was exhausting. Just, like, wore you out. I mean, we were fair, but in the end, it was like, I’m tired. That was not fun. Nate Klemp: It’s funny that you mentioned that we had a similar experience I’ll never forget it. We were. Had just gotten through the holidays, and our system was my parents got Christmas Eve and Christmas, her parents got the next four days because they didn’t get the real holiday. They got a bonus two days after. And we got to the end of that one year. And I remember we had the same experience of just, like, this is exhausting. Like, this is just torture. Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that everyone’s definition of fairness is going to be different because everyone’s got a different calculus going on in their head. So you’re like, well, we didn’t get to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with my family, so we get to add an extra two days. And then the other person’s like, well, no. Why would we do that? I only got to spend two days with my family. So you only get to spend two days with your family. Like, that’s fair. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Well, and what’s also interesting is that it’s not just you and your partner generally. The families are also in on the whole game. Right. There’s a lot of guilt and a lot of pressure coming from each set of families or each set of parents saying, like, hey, we need you. How could you miss Christmas this year? So it becomes this very complicated thing to navigate. Brett McKay: Yeah. And this can also happen with friends, too. It’s like, well, we spent time with your friends. Now it’s time to spend time with my friends. And then there might be this negotiation that goes on back and forth and just causes conflict. Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think it’s just important to mention here that there is nothing inherently wrong with this effort to achieve fairness. I mean, it really is a noble goal, but the problem is that it can become such a pervasive mind state that it really starts to pit people in relationship against each other, and it starts to create a culture in a relationship that’s very individualistic. That’s very me versus you, what I want versus what you want. Right. It. It kind of turns the relationship into a negotiation which ultimately isn’t very loving, isn’t very sexy. So that’s why I think it starts to break down for most couples. Brett McKay: And one of the things that heightens the conflict over fairness In a modern 50/50 marriage is that there’s a lot of role confusion. When you talk about this in the book, like in an older model of marriage, like a 1950s model of marriage, it had its downsides, but it also had its benefits in that everyone knew what they’re supposed to be doing. It was like, well, mom, does this. Dad does this. And there was no confusion. Now, today, most people, they want a more egalitarian relationship. Both spouses might be working, Both are taking part in childcare. But then the question becomes, okay, well, how. How do we divvy all this stuff up? There are any set roles, and they’re just kind of winging it, and then this just causes all this conflict. Nate Klemp: Yeah. So one of the big shifts to our current state of relationships and this mindset of 50/50, is that we are now both equals in this relationship. And that means we’re both equally capable of being a rock star or an amazing scientist. But it also means that we’re both equally capable of cleaning the dishes or unloading the dishwasher or doing the laundry. So what that creates, to your point, is this state that we like to call role confusion, where it’s like, wait, we could both be doing all of these different things, so whose job is it to do them? And when we would interview couples about this, it was really interesting because we’d ask them how did you decide on your structure of roles in your relationship? And basically, everyone we talked to had the same reaction. They kind of looked confused for a moment, and then they said some version of, I don’t really know. I guess we just are kind of winging it. And we actually started to call this the wing it approach to roles, which is the standard approach that most couples take to creating a structure of roles. You know, one guy I remember I talked to, he was like, somehow I’m the toothbrush guy with our daughter. Like, every night when it’s time for us to put her to bed, I’m the guy who brushes her teeth. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how I ended up in that role, but that’s just, like, the role that I ended up in. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this accidental approach to roles, but we think there’s a better way to think about this, and that is this shift from accident to something more like design to actually having a conversation with your partner. And most couples have never done this, where you take a step back and you say, like, hey, let’s look at the structure of what we do. Let’s look at what we enjoy doing, what we don’t enjoy doing, what we’re good at, what we’re not good at, what we might be able to outsource, and let’s actually, like, design this thing to work for us. So that can be a huge thing for most couples to do. Brett McKay: Yeah, we’re going to talk about some questions you can ask to figure this out. But before we do, let’s talk about the 80/80 marriage. So you and your wife proposed. Instead of looking at marriage through the rubric of 50/50 fairness, we need to have an 80/80 marriage. So what does an 80/80 marriage look like? Nate Klemp: The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the math doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as a 160% hole. That’s just a mathematical impossibility. But the basic idea behind 80/80 is shifting the expectation or shifting the goal from just doing your 50%, which locks us into that mindset of fairness, to striving to contribute at something more like 80%. And that’s a mindset shift from what we call fairness to what we like to call radical generosity. And we know that it’s not going to work. Right. There is no way that you and your partner can both contribute at 80%. But it’s kind of this radical, illogical goal that’s really meant to uproot this habit in our thinking that most of us have developed. And the idea is that if we approach our life and our marriage together with this goal of striving for 80%, all of a sudden we start to radically change the underlying culture of the relationship. And I will say here that usually when I get to this point, there are many people who start voicing objections, like, wait a minute, you’re saying I should do 80%. That is just a recipe for my partner to totally take advantage of me. Why would I do that? And so I think there’s a really important response to that objection that I just want to get to briefly, which is we like to say, and this is validated by psychology, that your mindset is contagious. So if you’re operating in that 50/50 mindset where there’s a lot of resentment and a lot of anger and a lot of scorekeeping, your partner will generally mirror that back to you at every turn. You’ve created a kind of contagious atmosphere of resentment. If, on the other hand, you and just you shift to something more like the 80/80 mindset of radical generosity, that is also contagious. Your partner might be like, what is happening? Are you on drugs? Like, did you go to a yoga retreat? What is wrong with you? But what also tends to happen is that your generosity opens up a space for your partner to also be a little bit more generous, and you can start to create this Virtuous Upward Spiral. Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 mentality can get you stuck in a tit for tat trap. It’s like, I’ll do this if you do that. And if that’s how you approach the relationship, your spouse is going to. Is going to start syncing up with that pattern you set up, and it just becomes this vicious downward cycle. And it. And it’s all just unsolvable conflict. Try to make things exactly fair, because how do you decide if work done outside the home is weightier than work done inside the home or if this chore is harder than that chore? I mean, it’s, it’s all just unsolvable conflict. So instead of trying to make your responsibilities and contributions mathematically equal, just operate with an attitude of generosity, and then that can become contagious. It’s like, well, if you do that, then your spouse will see it and she’s like, oh, wow, he’s doing a lot. I appreciate that. I’m going to do something for him. And then it becomes a positive tit for tat. Nate Klemp: Totally. And it’s kind of a fun experiment to do. If you’re listening to this podcast and it’s just you without your partner, try the experiment of taking a day or a week where you just really consciously start to live into this mindset of radical generosity and just see if your partner’s behavior doesn’t. Doesn’t change in subtle ways. We call it, like stealth 80/80. It’s a fun experiment to try. Brett McKay: And one of the big takeaways I got from the idea of the 80/80 marriage, or the overarching principle, is that it’s about, if I win, we both win, or if you win, I win too. It’s like you see your marriage as a team effort, whereas the 50/50 marriage, you’re mostly thinking like, well, what can I get out of this relationship? Like, how can this marriage help me become a better me? Which, I mean, marriage can do that, but like, that, if that’s your goal, then you’re just going to get stuck in this. These tit for tat traps. But when you kind of approach it from like, hey, we’re on the same team. What can we do so that we can both succeed? Everything just goes so much more smoother. Nate Klemp: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s really interesting that many couples do get stuck in this trap of basically thinking, like, what can I do for me? How can I stand up for number one here? And I don’t think it’s an accident that this happens. You Know, we are raised in a culture that celebrates individual excellence. For me and Kaley, we went to college, and the message we received was, you need to do something amazing. You need to achieve success as an individual. And so then we got married, and the expectation becomes, okay, now you’re supposed to shift from individual success to this collective project together where you’re sharing your life and your space and your money. And that shift is really radical. And most people aren’t really able to make that shift quickly. So that’s where there is this more conscious effort that I think we all need to make in our relationships to see if we can shift the emphasis in our own thinking from individual success or how do I win alone, how do I win in my career, in my life, to a goal that’s more like shared success. How do we win together? Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that because, like, sometimes it might mean one person gets to achieve, like, their personal goal because it helps the family out in the long run. And then sometimes it means the other person gets to do that. And, like, you just, maybe you take turns. It’s not like fairness, but it’s just like you kind of intuitively know, okay, well, it’s time for me to do this thing, or it’s time for you to do this thing. Let’s marshal the our resources. We make this happen. And then it can change as the relationship progresses. Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. You can alternate between whose background, who’s foreground. And that’s a really cool thing to do. Kaley and I do that a lot. You know, if I’m writing a book, I’m foreground. When it comes out, if she’s doing a big engagement, she’s foreground and I’m background, kind of holding the house together and our daughter together. And so that alternation can actually be really quite fun and just a way to grow together. And I would say, like, the main shift to try to aspire toward is when your partner has a big win, even if there is, like, a little tinge of jealousy or envy, which happens in a lot of partnerships. See if you can really celebrate that, because ultimately, if your partner wins big, that is a win for both of you. And so. So it’s like that shift of just trying to celebrate the wins together rather than as individuals. Brett McKay: As I was reading about the 80/80 marriage, it made me think about pioneer days in America, like living out on a farm on the prairie. You know, back then a couple had to be this real unit the husband and wife. They had roles, the kids had roles. Everyone had responsibilities. But everyone pitched in with everything. I mean, if one person couldn’t do something, then the other person had to pick up the slack. It wasn’t about fairness. It was just like, okay, what do we need to get done to survive? Let’s all work together here. Nate Klemp: I love that. It’s actually funny. I was just interviewing a couple in Australia. We’re writing a new book on busyness and love, and they were farmers in rural Australia, and they were basically living what you described. Like, the guy was telling me his calves had pink eye, and they were out there trying to get the pink eye treated while they were feeding the calves and getting them ready for taken down for purchase or whatever it was. And it’s a cool analogy. The other analogy that I really like here is if you can imagine your family as something like a business. We like the name Family Inc. For this. In fact, this was something we ended up cutting from the book. But the reason I think that’s helpful, and some people resist that because they’re like, no, it’s about love and spontaneity. And I don’t want to think of my family as a business. But what’s helpful about that is just thinking, hey, if we were a kind of collective business, then it doesn’t really matter who’s making more money or who’s achieving more success. What matters is that we’re lining up what we each do such that we maximize the success of the collective enterprise. And that’s a really different way of thinking of it. You know, we also use the analogy of basketball sometimes, right? Like 50/50 is kind of like playing basketball where you and your partner are on the same team technically, but you’re both trying to drive up your stats and maximize your individual numbers, win the MVP award or whatever. Whereas when you shift to 80/80, the goal is just like, how can we win this game? And if that means that I’m shooting more three pointers than you are, that’s okay, right? If that means you’re passing more or I’m passing more, that’s okay. It’s a very different way of thinking about a partnership together. Brett McKay: We can even go further back. I like this business analogy. So if you go back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, he talked about household management and our word economics oikos, comes from that. But for the Greeks, it wasn’t like economics, like businesses and countries trading for them. Economics was centered in the home. And so he wrote a lot about, like, how do you manage a home properly so that everyone in the family can flourish? And so he talked about there’s. There’s a lot of practical stuff when it comes to home management. You have to manage resources, know where your stuff’s at. You have to think about the income coming into the household so that you can buy things, that you can continue to grow the household. But then also part of economics or home economics for Aristotle is it was like, how do we rear our children so that they can become productive, active participants in Athenian democracy? So I like that idea because the husband and wife. And for Aristotle, there was a lot of gender disparity, of course, because, like ancient Greece. But he did see the husband and wife, they had to work together on this thing to make sure the home had good oikos or good economics, so you could achieve this eudaimonia, or flourishing for the family. Nate Klemp: Can I just say, you talking about Aristotle is like the highlight of my year so far. I don’t know if you know this, but my background is in political philosophy. That’s what I got my PhD in. And my wife actually cut. I had some passages on Aristotle that I was going to put in the book, and she’s like, nobody cares about Aristotle. We’re cutting that. Right. So that was one of our conflicts in the book. But to get to the content of what you were saying. Yeah, totally. And the other piece of Aristotle that I think is really interesting here is if you think about his conception of the ideal political regime he was the one who came up with our typology of monarchy, oligarchy. And what was his other name for it? Polity, I think was the. Or democracy, I guess was the third one. Brett McKay: Democracy yeah. Nate Klemp: And as I recall him, the key distinction between good and bad regimes in politics was really about is this focused on the individual’s interest or is this focused on the common good? And I think that’s another way of thinking about what we’re trying to aspire toward here. In the 80/80 model, in 50/50, we are focused on individual interest, individual success. It’s all about me. But when we shift to something more like 80/80, we’re looking at, like, the common interest. How do we win together as a collective, the two of us? Or if we have kids, maybe it’s the three, four, five of us. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s talk more about the 80/80 marriage. You say there are three elements to an 80/80 marriage. What are those three elements? Nate Klemp: Yeah, so that mindset of radical generosity is kind of an overarching term for a way of thinking about the world, a way of seeing the world. And the question then becomes, how do you operationalize that? If you just say I’m going to be radically generous, that doesn’t really give you much to do practically. So the three pieces to this, the first is about what you do, and that’s contribution. Contribution is really in many ways the essence of generosity. And I like to think of contribution in a marriage. The most useful forms of contribution as these small micro acts that are just reminders to your partner that you’re thinking about them, that you care about them, that you love them. So it’s great to like get your partner a trip to Fiji or get them concert tickets for some amazing artists. Those big acts of contribution are fine and definitely useful. But the essence of contribution is really about what are the daily acts of contribution you can do that are small but significant in terms of building connection. So things like writing I love you on a post it note, putting it on your partner’s computer, things like just getting them a cup of coffee in the morning, filling their car up with gas. Right. These are very simple things. Brett McKay: Yeah, the filling up your car with gas. So a long time ago on our website when we had comments, someone left a comment. This is like 15 years ago. It was like always fill up your wife’s car with gas to bless her. And so I always, that stuck with me for some reason. So I’ll. Whenever I see the, the car it’s almost empty. Like I got to bless my wife. Going to, going to go fill up the car with gas at QT. Nate Klemp: I love that. Yeah. And it’s just like such a simple thing. It takes you what, five minutes on your way home? Brett McKay: Yeah. Nate Klemp: But it’s just one of these actions that reminds your partner, like, wow, there’s a spirit of love happening here. So that’s the first one. The second piece is appreciation. And we like to think of this almost like the response to the call of generosity. So in music there’s this idea of call and response. And generosity is an amazing thing. It’s a contribution. But it often is sort of asking for some sort of response. And that is what we call appreciation. The other thing I would say about appreciation is that this is really counter habitual that most of us have this tendency of seeing our partner through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. Seeing where they fell short or seeing where they didn’t quite do what they said they were going to do. And appreciation is basically just flipping the glasses that we wear in our relationship so we’re actually looking for what our partner did. Right. And then we’re expressing that, like, hey, I noticed that you did this amazing thing with our kids. You took them out yesterday afternoon and took them on an adventure. Thank you. Right. So that’s the act of appreciation. And there’s all sorts of research in the field of marriage science showing that appreciation is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to create more connection in your relationship. The final thing, the third piece of radical generosity is what we call revealing. And what we mean by revealing is basically just expressing your full truth in your marriage. There’s two sides to this. So on one side, it’s expressing what’s happening in your inner world. So there was this interesting study they did at UCLA. They found that the average couple with kids spends 35 minutes a week talking to each other. And they didn’t really study what they were talking about, but if I had to guess, they were probably talking about logistics or, like, the news or the weather. And so one aspect of revealing is just shifting the way you talk to one another, such that when you’re at the end of the day updating each other on your day, you’re revealing what’s actually happening in your inner world, like, what’s really going on with you. The second piece to revealing is when you have those moments of disconnection or misunderstandings or somebody’s feelings got hurt, using that as an opportunity to reveal as a way to get closer. And that’s not that easy to do for most couples, but it ends up being really powerful. If you can start to transform those moments of disconnection into opportunities to get closer. Brett McKay: How do you reveal that second thing? Because oftentimes, if you try to tell your spouse, like, hey, you did this, it can just. It’s an opportunity to get resentful. Nate Klemp: Yes. Brett McKay: Any ways to do that where it doesn’t cause more bad feelings? Nate Klemp: Yeah, absolutely. And this is another one of those areas where we want to see if we can shift from our accidental habits, which mostly aren’t that skillful, to a more skillful way of approaching it. So let’s say Kaley’s late for dinner. She said she was going to be there at 6:00, and she’s not there till 6:15. The actual dental way of approaching that is. Is for me to just lash out at her, Right. To just Be like, are you kidding me? I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes. Like, who do you think you are? You think you’re more important than I am? Right? And you can imagine I could continue that conversation. She’ll get defensive, we’ll get in a big fight, It’ll be a terrible dinner together. So that’s kind of how things go down by accident. What we recommend is an approach that we call reveal and request. And the basic idea is to start by just revealing what we like to think of as your inarguable truth. So what’s really going on with you? What emotion are you feeling in that moment without blame? Just like, hey, I’m feeling X. And then offering some sort of request for how they might be able to make it right in the future. So that would look something like, hey, I’ve been here for 15 minutes and I noticed that I’ve just been feeling kind of frustrated because you didn’t text me to let me know that you were late. In the future, would you be willing to just send me a text if you’re going to be 15 minutes late? So it’s a pretty significant difference if you just start to think about how the other person’s going to respond to those two approaches. Brett McKay: Okay, so 80/80 marriage. The overarching principle is radical generosity. It’s like, hey, we’re a team. If you win, I win. Three attributes. It’s contribute. So find little ways you can contribute to your wife throughout the day. It could be small things. Fill up the gas tank, write her a note, pick up her favorite drink from QT on the way home. Show more appreciation throughout your week, and then reveal. So could be problems that are coming up. Or reveal. Hey, this is what I’m doing. This is what’s stressing me out. Here’s what I’m thinking about. Let them know. One thing you talk about too, in sort of being more intentional about creating a culture in your marriage is establishing common values for the family. Just like any team or any business. I love this business analogy. They have a mission statement, for example, that guides all the actions within the business. You argue a family, a marriage should also have something similar. So how do you recommend couples establish sort of this overarching mission statement, or going back to Aristotle, an overarching telos for the family? Nate Klemp: Yeah, the family telos. I like the sound of that. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really important thing. And it’s really interesting actually to notice that almost every business has a very clear set of values and yet most relationships don’t most relationships are winging it, doing it by accident. So we think that’s really important. And it was interesting, actually, when we had all of these interviews with various couples, what we discovered is that there are no better or worse values for a marriage. So the expanse of different possibilities is really wide. We would talk to some couples where their value was adventure. So there was one couple we talked to, they basically lived out of a van for seven years and just drove around the country, going to different national parks and having adventures. That was their value, and they were aligned on it, so it worked for them. Other couples were more concerned with things like building wealth or security. And you could imagine if you took a partner from the wealth couple and you put them in the adventure couple, where they had, like, quit their jobs in New York and were living out of a van, they totally freak out. But all that’s to say values aren’t better or worse. What is a problem is when you’re in a relationship and you’re not aligned on your values. That’s where a lot of conflict comes from. So we think it’s really helpful to just sit down and think about as a couple. What are the three to five values that we want to guide our life together? The way we parent, the way we show up with each other, the way we show up at work. We think it’s really cool, once you’ve done this, to actually make an artifact out of it. So we have our values right on the outside of our kitchen table on another counter, and we put them on a little whiteboard. And so it’s something we see all the time. And I think that’s important because some couples will actually do an exercise like this. They’ll come up with values, and then the values won’t actually be used in their relationship. So you want to see if you can use these values for, like, big decisions around money or big decisions around your career. And what’s cool about that is instead of getting into that trap we’ve been talking about of what’s best for me versus what’s best for you, values give you a different way to make decisions. They give you a kind of rubric for running your life decisions through, where it’s like, well, in terms of that career move, what’s going to align most closely with our values? That’s a really different question than what’s best best for me versus what’s best for you. Brett McKay: And these values or this telos, it can change as the family progresses or as the marriage progresses. So Keep having that conversation about your telos and your marriage and your family. It’s an ongoing thing. Make sure it’s front and center there as you’re making decisions that affect the entire family. Let’s talk about some more brass, tax things. So we talked about one of the biggest sources of contention in a 50/50 marriage is role confusion. No one knows who’s supposed to be doing what. There’s a maybe a sense of unfairness and how things are divvied up. You mentioned most couples, the way they divvy up roles in a marriage, to wing it just sort of like, I’m the toothbrush guy for some reason. I don’t know why I’m toothbrush guy, but I’m toothbrush guy. Or you’re the grocery person. Any advice on how to be more proactive in assigning roles in a marriage so that it’s a win-win for everybody? Nate Klemp: Absolutely. We actually in the book have a pretty elaborate practice that you can walk through with your partner. But here’s the shorthand version of that that you can do. It’s as simple as take a couple pieces of paper and step one is just write down all of your roles as individuals. And this is a really interesting step because a lot of times we’re not even clear on what our roles are. Right. Like, most couples couldn’t tell you really quickly off the top of their head, hey, yeah, I do these 20 different things. So that exercise is really important. There’s a trap there, which is there can be a tendency when you write those down to start to get into that fairness mindset and compare. Wow, like, your list is really long and my list is really short. This is unfair. That is not the goal at all. Right. The goal in that first stage is just like, get it all down on paper, create awareness of what’s happening today. And then the second step to this is get out two more pieces of paper and have a conversation about, hey, like, if we were to actually design this and not just do this by accident, what are the things you enjoy doing? So, for example, I have like a weird enjoyment for taking the trash out. It’s just not a thing for me. My wife has an enjoyment of folding laundry and doing laundry. It’s just like not a thing for her. So those are obvious no brainers. Like, those should be on each of our respective lists. But that can be a useful process because you start to ask, well, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? And then importantly, what can we outsource? So for some couples There are things that nobody wants to do. Like in our house, nobody wants to clean the toilets. And we’re fortunate that we have the resources that we’re able to bring somebody in once a week who helps us clean our house. And it’s amazing. And actually in our budget that’s under, like marital, like a contribution to marriage, not cleaning. I mean that’s, that’s how we think of it. Like this is a contribution to us because it saves us from all sorts of conflict and fights around who’s going to clean the toilets. Brett McKay: No, I love that we’ve done that in our own family. Like for me, a weird one. I like going to the doctor’s office or the dentist’s office. I don’t know why I like doing it. Like filling out the forms. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Brett McKay: And so I’m the guy, I’m the one who takes the kids to the, the dentist and the doctor and make appointments for them. That’s my, my wife hates it. She hates going to the doctor, hates going to the dentist. [0:40:13.0] ____ I’m like, hey, yeah, I’ll take that one. It’s great. So I like that. So talk about what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and then delegate. And that delegate piece you talked about, this is really important because sometimes what often happens, let’s say your wife delegates something to you because it’s important to her, but she doesn’t have the time for it or something like that. But then you just keep putting it off and you have these check ins. Your wife’s like, hey, have you done that thing? You’re like, no. And the reason why you don’t do, it’s like for you it’s just not that important. It’s like, I just don’t, it’s not that in the grand scheme of things and important, but it’s important to her. And that can be a big source of tension because, like it’s really important to her. And it feels like you’re disrespecting her because you’re not doing it because it tells her, like you don’t think it’s important either. So the solution to that is just outsource that to somebody else, like a third party so it gets done. Nate Klemp: Yeah, if it’s possible. That’s such a great solution because you can have a conversation that goes like, hey, I know this is really important to you. It’s hard for me to complete for whatever reason, or it’s not very important to me. Can we bring somebody else in who can help you? You know, like in our house. My wife is really like, it’s important to her that our yard looks really good and I could care less. And I hate mowing lawns and all that sort of thing. So that’s one of those areas where it’s like, I want to honor that. It’s really important to you that our yard looks great. I also just like, that is not on my priority list at all. So maybe we can see about getting somebody to come in and help us with that. Brett McKay: One issue you talk about in a marriage, that can be a source of conflict. And the 80/80 approach to marriage can help with this is this idea of over functioning and under functioning. What is over functioning and under functioning? How does that cause conflict? Nate Klemp: Yeah, this is a dynamic that shows up in a lot of relationships where there’s an over functioning or over contributing partner, statistically speaking, that’s probably usually the woman, but that’s not always the case. And then there’s also often an under functioning or under contributing partner, which statistically speaking is often the man. And a couple things about this. First of all, it seems like it would be awesome to be the under functioning partner, the under contributor. But I was that partner in our marriage for probably a decade. I’ve interviewed a number of people who have found themselves in that role. And what I hear consistently is that it actually sucks. Like you think, oh, it’s cool, I don’t have to do as much. But it sucks to be in a position where it feels like you’re not actually contributing. Nothing you do is right. And so what often ends up happening is there’s a gap between how much each of these partners is doing. The under contributor feels like nothing I do is right, so I’m just going to stop doing anything. So the gap just starts to widen and widen and widen. And when you approach that kind of a distinction between over contributing, under contributing partner from a 50/50 mindset, it actually makes the inequality grow, paradoxically because like the more the over contributor is begging the under contributor to contribute, the more they just sort of pull back, the more they withdraw, the less they do. So that strategy just doesn’t really work very well. What does work we found is for the under contributor or the under functioning partner, there’s a responsibility there to really see if you can lean in and see if you can contribute, knowing that you might do it wrong, knowing that it might not be perfect. But then the more interesting role is for the over contributor, the over functioning partner. A lot of times they’re stuck in that position unconsciously because there’s like this weird gift that comes from being the over functioning partner, which is that you have control. Like, you know when all the play dates are where all the money goes, you know that you’re getting the right brand of dishwasher cleaner from the grocery store. And so from the perspective of the over contributor, the unlock there is you actually do have to start letting go of control. And your partner might do it wrong, they might get the wrong thing at the store. But that’s kind of like the movement of each partners that you have to make to start to dissolve that dialectic between the two. Brett McKay: Let’s circle back to something we talked about earlier that I know caused a lot of tension in a marriage. And that’s how to decide whose family to spend the holidays with or how often to visit each spouse’s parents and stuff. Do you have any advice on how to navigate that conflict? Nate Klemp: This is such a huge source of tension for a lot of couples. Certainly it has been for us. I think the first thing to notice is that many times when we’re having this argument, we’re having this argument as our parents, kids. What I mean by that is we’re having the argument from the perspective of I’m my parents, kid, my parents really want to spend time with us. We need to make sure that the amount of time we spend with my parents and with your parents is fair. And what that does is it totally takes out of the conversation what’s best for you and your partner. Right. And so there’s almost like a shift here from being your parents kid to being the adults. And if you approach this question from the perspective of, hey, now we’re the adults, then I think there’s a really different perspective, which is rather than thinking of this question of how are we going to divide the holidays from the perspective of what’s best for our parents, like, how do we make our parents happy? How do we be good kids? To shift to a different question, which is what’s best for us as a couple? So in other words, you’re putting your priority on you as a couple rather than on pleasing your parents. And when you’re able to do that, all of a sudden the answers might really change to these questions. So for example, you might say, hey, yeah, let’s go back and visit our parents, but let’s stay in a hotel this time, or let’s make sure that we have a few hours every day that’s for us. You might also notice that from that perspective, you actually end up with A somewhat unfair solution, like you may voluntarily say, hey, let’s actually spend less time with my family, because that’s not what’s best for us. So there’s a way in which you can make that fairness fight almost dissolve by just shifting the priority from what’s best for your parents and how do we satisfy them to what’s best for us as a couple and really stepping into that position of we are the adults, we get to decide what’s best for us. Brett McKay: I like that. I imagine that’s a tough shift for people to make. Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think particularly early on, Kaley and I got married when we were 26, and we really took on the role of our parents, kids. And that caused so much conflict between the two of us because it was almost like we were each the representative of our respective family. And we were having these fights where we were sort of like the proxy representative for our family. And that started to dissolve the moment we said, wait a minute, we’re actually the adults here. We’re going to create our own life. We’re going to do what’s best for us. And that doesn’t mean we’re never going to visit our parents. Doesn’t mean we don’t care about our parents. Just means that we’re going to act like we are adults and autonomous rather than being our parents, kids. Brett McKay: So at the end, you talk about some rituals that you can take part in to sort of bolster this 80/80 marriage. What are some of those rituals that you recommend? Nate Klemp: Yeah, we have five essential habits that I think are worth trying out as a way to just build habits of connection versus habits of disconnection in your relationship. And they’re all based on this idea of living in a more 80/80 structure and mindset in your relationship. So the first one is just creating more space for connection. I mean, when I talk to couples these days, the primary thing I’m seeing is that there’s no space. And so thinking about ways where you can have space together as a couple. And we think about this in three ways. One is just like daily micro habits of connection, some sort of check in every day. Another is having some sort of medium habit of connection. So it might be going on a date night or going on a date hike. That’s our favorite, like something you do every week. And then there are more macro habits of connection where maybe you take a weekend together once every quarter, once every year, maybe you go away for a week. So that’s number one. The second is what we’ve been talking about throughout the podcast, which is this idea of really leaning into radical generosity, so contributing that whole idea of daily acts of contribution. They can be really small, seemingly insignificant, but then also creating a habit of appreciation. My wife and I, we do this every night before we go to bed. It takes like three minutes. It’s just like such a great way to end the day. The third thing is what we were talking about with revealing. So when issues arise, revealing what’s going on for you, revealing that you’re feeling that disconnection and seeing if you can turn those into opportunities for connection. The fourth piece is what we call the shared success check in. So this is basically an idea of having some sort of. Maybe it’s a weekly or a monthly check in where you’re able to talk through all of the complicated logistics of your life, think about what’s working well, what’s not working so well. We found that couples that do this, they save date night from being all about logistics because if you don’t do this, then you end up on date night or whatever your time together is, and you’re talking about, like, who’s going to pick up the kids next week. And then the final piece is creating space from digital distraction. And this I think is really important because when I talk to a lot of couples these days, what I hear is not that they’re in like, really deep conflict or they’re having affairs or things like that, but there’s this, like, subtler force of disconnection where they’ll talk about. At the end of the day, one of us is sitting on one side of the bed going through Instagram. The other person is doom scrolling the news. And there’s this way in which our devices are just like subtly pulling us away from each other. So really seeing if you can create those spaces from digital distraction. Maybe you kick your cell phones out of your bedroom, maybe you kick them out of your dinner, maybe you buy a case safe so you can lock them up for like two hours at night. Whatever you need to do. That can be like a really powerful unlock. Brett McKay: No, I love that. A ritual that my wife and I have been doing for a long time now. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. We’ve written an article about it. But it’s been a game changer for us. And I know the people who have done it has been a game changer for them. It’s having a weekly marriage meeting. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Brett McKay: This was introduced by this marriage therapist named Marcia Berger. And you have this Meeting once a week. And there’s a few parts of the meeting. The first part is you spend time appreciating each other. So you just talk about all the things that you noticed throughout the week that your spouse did. Appreciate that, hey, I saw that you took the kids to this thing. I appreciate you doing the laundry. I appreciate you, whatever. And then you do to do’s. So you talk about all the stuff that you have to do in the household just to make sure the household’s running smoothly. You assign tasks. You follow up on assignments. The next part is plan for good times. So you’re planning for good times as a family or as a couple or even planning individual good times. So it’s like, hey, I want to go to this thing with my friends this weekend. Are you available to watch the kids? Is that okay? So you can kind of coordinate good times. And then the last part, it’s problems and challenges. So you talk about. This is when you bring up like, oh look, Johnny is misbehaving in school. What do we do about it? Like, who are we going to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with? It’s stuff like that. And it only takes about 20 minutes. So it’s sort of our weekly family business meeting that just makes sure we’re staying connected and are both on the same page. Nate Klemp: I love that it’s such a great idea. And I’m sure you find that by having that meeting, then when you have time together outside of that, you can actually just be together and not have to, like, go through all those logistics all the time. Brett McKay: Oh, it’s great. Well, Nate, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Nate Klemp: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Best place to go is 8080marriage.com. So that’s 8080marriage.com. That’s where we have a lot of information about the book. Also, you’ll find there that we have a newsletter called the Klemp Insights Newsletter, which goes out once every couple weeks. And that’s really designed to give couples tools that they can use in the midst of everyday life. And we just try to make it fun. We were talking last week about how to use ChatGPT in your relationship. And so just kind of like practical tools for being more skillful in your relationship. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nate Klemp, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Nate Klemp: Thanks so much, Brett. Brett McKay: My guest today was Nate Klemp. He’s the co-author of the book the 80/80 Marriage. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website 8080marriage.com. Also check at our show notes @aom.is/8080, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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For several decades, people’s reported sleep quality has declined. This, despite the fact that specially optimized sheets, mattresses, and sleep trackers have emerged during that time, and despite the fact that the amount of time people are sleeping hasn’t decreased for over fifty years. In other words, people aren’t sleeping less than they used to, but are less happy about their sleep than ever before. My guest would say that to improve our experience of sleep, we’d be better off looking past the reams of modern advice out there and back in time — way, way back in time. Today on the show, Dr. Merijn van de Laar, a recovering insomniac, sleep therapist, and the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman : Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest , will tell us how learning about our prehistoric ancestors’ sleep can help us relax about our own. He explains that the behaviors we think of as sleep problems are actually normal, natural, and even adaptive. We talk about why hunter-gatherers actually sleep less than we think we need to, how their natural wake periods during the night might explain our own sleep patterns, the methods they use to get better sleep, and why our modern efforts to optimize sleep could be making it worse. Merijn shares when it’s okay to use a smartphone before bed, the myth that you have to get eight hours of sleep a night, how to intentionally use sleep deprivation to improve your sleep, and more. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: 22 Ways to Get a Better Night’s Sleep AoM Article: What Every Man Should Know About Sleep AoM Article: What to Do When You Can’t Sleep AoM Article: The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure AoM Podcast #661: Get Better Sleep by Stressing About It Less AoM Podcast #736: Could Sleeping in Separate Beds Improve Your Relationship? Study: Hadza sleep biology — Evidence for flexible sleep-wake patterns in hunter-gatherers Connect With Merijn van de Laar Merijn’s website Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For several decades, people’s reported sleep quality has declined. This, despite the fact that specially optimized sheets, mattresses, and sleep trackers have emerged during that time, and despite the fact that the amount of time people are sleeping hasn’t decreased for over 50 years. In other words, people aren’t sleeping less than they used to, but are less happy about their sleep, than ever before. My guest would say that to improve our experience of sleep, we’d be better off looking past the reams of modern advice out there and back in time. Way, way back in time. Today on the show, Dr. Merijn van de Laar, a recovering insomniac, sleep therapist and the author of How to Sleep Like a Caveman: Ancient Wisdom for a Better Night’s Rest, will tell us how learning about our prehistoric ancestors’ sleep can help us relax about our own. He explains that the behaviors we think of as sleep problems, are actually normal, natural, and even adaptive. We talk about why hunter-gatherers actually sleep less than we think we need to, how their natural wake periods during the night might explain our own sleep patterns, the methods they use to get better sleep, and why our modern efforts to optimize sleep could be making it worse. Merijn shares when it’s okay to use a smartphone before bed, the myth that you have to get eight hours of sleep a night, how to intentionally use sleep deprivation to improve your sleep, and more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/cavemansleep. All right, Merijn van de Laar, welcome to the show. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, thanks. Brett McKay: So you are a sleep therapist. You got a new book out called, How to Sleep Like a Caveman. And what you do for a living is you help people who have sleep problems like insomnia, they can’t sleep. What’s interesting about your background is you yourself experienced sleep problems throughout your life. Can you tell us about your troubled sleep and how it influences your approach to helping patients? Merijn Van De Laar: I think I was 28 years old when I first developed insomnia, chronic insomnia. So I was suffering from chronic insomnia for three years. And, well, the main thing I found was I was feeling very hopeless and helpless because I was trying to control the sleep problem and checking my alarm clock and it actually pushed me further away from a good sleep. So at one point I even tried taking a sleeping pill and it didn’t work. So that was extra frustrating. So it was a combination of many things, but I think hopelessness and helplessness were really on the foreground. Brett McKay: When you experienced your sleep problems, was it having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or waking up earlier than you wanted? What did that look like? Merijn Van De Laar: I think it was both. Sometimes I had difficulty falling asleep. It would take me about one and a half hours before I fell asleep. And at other points, I was having difficulty maintaining sleep. So I woke up in the middle of the night, checking the alarm clock, not able to get back to sleep again. So it was very different. Brett McKay: So with your book, How to Sleep Like a Caveman, you look to our evolutionary history to figure out, well, maybe there’s some things we can learn from our ancient ancestors about how to improve our sleep. Starting off, like, how do we know what caveman slept like? Because you know we can’t. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s a good question. Because we don’t exactly know. Because if you want to study rhythm, sleep rhythm, you have to have people that are alive. So it’s very difficult to find any clues on how people really slept, like a rhythm from archaeological findings. But what we can do is we can look at people that still live in the same circumstances like we did when we were cavemen. So a lot of research is done in the Hadza tribe, that’s a tribe in Tanzania, and they have been studied a lot and also looking at sleep. So we know a bit more about their rhythm. And their rhythm is much more influenced by their environment, their natural environment. So light, temperature, and that’s how we got clues from the past. Brett McKay: And you also talk about some of the sleep problems we have today, a lot of people experience today, they might have their origin thousands of years ago with our caveman ancestors. Talk about that. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Well, I think one of the main problems nowadays is insomnia, so problems in trying to fall asleep or maintaining sleep. And actually, if you look at evolutionary theory then, they say that being awake during the night was actually kind of a safety thing, because when you’re awake during the night, you could wake, and you can see whether there’s impending danger. And so what we see in the hunter tribe as well is that they’re awake for over two hours on average during the night. And I think that’s the thing that we’ve lost during the past hundreds of years. Brett McKay: Okay, so let’s dig in deeper into what we can learn from hunter-gatherer sleep and how we improve our own sleep. And I think this question I’m about to ask piggybacks off of what you just said about they’re awake in bed for two hours sometimes while they’re sleeping. Let’s talk about sleep duration first. If you read most articles about sleep these days, it’s like you have to get eight hours of sleep. And if you don’t get eight hours of sleep, you’re gonna have health problems, you’re gonna die early, you’re gonna get dementia, and it’s scary. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it is. Brett McKay: So how many hours do hunter-gatherer tribes sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, I think first of all, there’s a big difference between popular articles and scientific articles because they say different things. So what we usually see in the scientific articles is that actually seven is the magic number, and between six and eight is quite average if you look at sleep duration. But if you look at the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, then they sleep between 6.2 and 6.5 hours on average per night. And once in two days, they nap for like, on average, 17 minutes. So that’s their total sleep time. Brett McKay: Okay, so they’re in bed, you said about eight hours. And they’re just, they sleep actually for six hours? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, they’re in bed maybe above nine actually, nine and a bit. So they’re awake a lot. So during the night it’s like two, two and a half hours awake. Yeah. Brett McKay: And that discrepancy between hours in bed and then how many hours you actually sleep, that produces what’s called sleep efficiency, right? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true. Brett McKay: Right. So if you sleep most of the time while you’re in bed, like, you’ll have a higher sleep efficiency, but if you sleep less than you are in bed, then you have a lower sleep efficiency? Merijn Van De Laar: Your sleep efficiency drops. Yes, that’s true. And I think what we’ve done in the past couple of years, we’ve put a lot of emphasis on the sleep efficiency. And in the media, they usually say that you have to have a sleep efficiency above 85%. But that would mean that the whole Hadza tribe would actually be a bad sleeper while they themselves don’t see themselves as bad sleepers. So that’s very interesting. So I think that a lot of that sleep efficiency is also based on what we think is good around sleep. But that’s not what everybody experiences. And you cannot generalize that to other people and other countries. Brett McKay: Yeah, for us, living in the West, we want to compress all of our sleep in just one… We want to get it done in one fell swoop. And so our goal in the West typically is something like, I go to bed at 10:00, I’ll fall asleep in 10 minutes and then I’m going to stay asleep for the rest of the night until my alarm goes off in the morning. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. That’s what people want and that’s what is frustrating because a lot of people don’t get that. Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. And that’s what causes insomnia. It’s like, well, I’m in bed but I’m sitting here staring at the ceiling for an hour, hour and a half and then I wake up an hour, hour and a half before I actually wanted to wake up. And that just causes a lot of frustration. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true. It causes a lot of perfectionism around sleep. And it’s also, I think a lot of things are caused by the things we read in the media and what is coming towards us when you look at information. Yeah. Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about definition of insomnia we’ve been talking about. I think people have an intuitive understanding of what insomnia is. Like you can’t sleep when you want to sleep. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Brett McKay: Is there like a subjective insomnia and an objective insomnia? Is there a difference between the two? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, usually if you look at insomnia disorder then it’s actually always a subjective complaint. So what you see is that people have difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep. To speak of chronic insomnia, you have to have three bad nights during the week. So three nights with sleep problems and also suffer from daytime consequences. Because if you don’t suffer from daytime consequences, then we don’t speak of insomnia. And I think there’s a very big difference between subjective and objective sleep. Because objective sleep is actually the sleep measured by polysomnography or actigraphy. And polysomnography is like a sleep study. So we measure brain waves, but also other indices, body indices. And an actigraphy is a wrist worn band in which you can see what the activity level is. And it’s a medical device, so it’s not to be compared to like an app or a watch. And it can give an indication of how somebody has slept. And there is often a big discrepancy between the objective and the subjective sleep. Brett McKay: Yeah, some people who have sleep problems, they go to a sleep doctor, they get a professional sleep study done and the results say, yeah, you slept seven hours, like you had great sleep. And the person’s like, no, I slept awful, that was not good sleep. That’s where that discrepancy can come from. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I saw a lot of those patients and the thing is that they did a research, a couple of years ago. It was actually from the town that I’m from in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. And what they found was that in general it takes about 20 to 30 minutes for a person to realize that they are sleeping, if they are sleeping. So if you wake people up before those 20 minutes, then more than half of people say, I wasn’t sleeping yet. So that’s really strange. So our brain is sometimes playing tricks on us. Brett McKay: So the Hadza tribe, do they experience insomnia? Merijn Van De Laar: If you look at, there’s been a study by Samson and he asked whether they experience sleep problems and between 1.45 and 2.5% actually experience sleep problems regularly. But if you look at the West, that’s around 20%. So that’s 10 times bigger. The amount is 10 times bigger than in the Hadza tribe. Brett McKay: And that’s because the Hadza tribe, if someone’s waking up for an hour or two, they don’t see that as a problem. They go, okay, this is normal. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it’s quite average. Brett McKay: Yeah. And then in the West, we’re like, oh my gosh, I wake up. This is a problem. So you have more people reporting sleep problems than the Hadza tribe. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. And so in the Hadza tribe, when they do wake up, like what do they do? They just lay there? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, sometimes they talk with tribe members or they just, they stay in the bed usually. So they don’t really get out of the bed. Sometimes they do, but it’s not like they’re really, really active during the night. So they are quite low in activity level usually. Yeah. Brett McKay: And so like, what’s the takeaway from that for us, someone experiencing insomnia and getting really frustrated that they can’t sleep or stay asleep? Merijn Van De Laar: I think if you’re in the bed awake and you feel quite relaxed, then I think a good thing is to be aware of the fact that being awake is actually quite normal. So it is easy to say, but don’t frustrate immediately. But if you feel frustrated or if you feel that your tension builds up, then sometimes it’s best to go out of the bed and do something else that really relaxes you and then go back to the bed when you feel sleepy again. Brett McKay: Okay. Okay. I think that’s really good advice ’cause I know earlier this year, well, it’s actually last year in 2024, for some reason I just started waking up sometimes at 4:30 in the morning. This never happened to me before, I started waking up at 4:30 and sometimes 5:30. And I remember it freaked me out. I was like, oh my gosh, something’s wrong with me. I might have to go see a sleep doctor. And I was worried I wasn’t getting enough sleep. But then I got to the point where I was like, you know what, I’m okay. Like if I get up and I do something kind of relaxing and then I’ll fall back to sleep and I feel fine in the morning, everything’s fine. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that gives a lot of reassurance. And that’s why you don’t have the buildup that usually people have that have insomnia. They really fear the night before they go to bed. Brett McKay: So one takeaway from hunter-gatherers is don’t stress out if you wake up in the night, ’cause that’s normal. And another takeaway with sleep duration is that you don’t need to obsess about getting eight hours of sleep. The Hadza, I mean, they’re getting just about six hours of sleep and anywhere between six and eight for most people, you’re gonna be fine. Merijn Van De Laar: I think it’s very important to look at your sleep need. I mean, it’s also very important to give yourself enough opportunity to sleep. So some people say, well, I only need five hours and then they’re sleepy during the day. So I think it works both ways. So on one end you have to really look at your sleep need. So how much sleep do I need. And really give yourself enough opportunity to sleep. But if you’re tense around sleep and if you can’t sleep and you experience insomnia, then sometimes it can help to really shorten your bedtime. So that’s one of the strategies you do to enhance your sleep. Brett McKay: Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a bit. Sleep deprivation is really interesting. Yeah. So that’s something I saw with my own sleep this past year, when I started waking up earlier. I just kind of embraced it ’cause, like, I would wake up at 5:30 or 5:00 and I would feel fine during the day. Like I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t taking a nap. And I just kind of like, well, maybe I don’t need as much sleep as I thought I did. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. Brett McKay: And I think one of the things too, I had to embrace, you talk about this in the book, as you get older, you know I’m in my 40s now, you have a natural tendency to want to sleep less. What does evolution tell us about that? Like, why do we have this tendency across humanity to sleep less as we get older. What’s going on there? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think the main difference when you’re getting older is that, your quality of your sleep changes. So what you see is that people who get older, they actually have less deep sleep and they tend to wake up more during the night. So that’s what we usually see when people age. And there’s one hypothesis, it’s called a sentinel hypothesis, and it says that as people age, they’re actually better able to wake during the nights. So if older people lose their function of more hunting and gathering, then they have more function during the night because they are more awake during the night. So they can wake for the rest of the tribe. Brett McKay: Okay, so I’m waking up early ’cause I’m looking out for my family. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s it. Brett McKay: I’m gonna reframe it that way. That’s a good way to reframe it. So we’ve talked about the fact that you don’t necessarily need eight hours of sleep, but in the media or online, you see these articles saying if you don’t get those eight hours, if you don’t get enough sleep, there’s all these dire health consequences. You know it can increase your chances of getting diabetes, it can increase the chances of getting dementia, it can increase weight gain. So what does the research actually say if you don’t get those eight hours of sleep, are the consequences as dire as you often hear? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at mortality, then you see that people who sleep less than five to five and a half hours and more than nine hours are actually at risk of dying sooner. So it’s not like if people sleep less than eight hours, this happens. They say that seven is actually the magic number here again. So around seven, the mortality is lowest, but those are only associations. So we don’t know anything about causality ’cause these are big population studies. And if you look at chronic disease, then you see a very clear association between objective sleep problems like sleep apnea, which is a sleep disorder in which you have, breathing stops during the night and desaturation, so lower oxygen in the blood. And that is really associated with things like higher cancer risk, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease. But if you look at insomnia, then this association is not there or much lower. And what you usually see in the media is that it is said, sleep problems lead to, but they don’t define what kind of sleep problems they’re talking about. So this is a lot of confusion going around what they are talking about. When you say sleep problems. Brett McKay: Oh, I think that’s heartening for people who, you know their sleep problem is they just have a hard time getting to sleep or staying asleep, so they have insomnia and they think, oh, my gosh, I’m going to die of a heart attack. I’m going to get dementia. The research says, yeah, there’s not really an association. If your sleep problem is insomnia, you don’t have to worry as much. But if you have a sleep problem, like sleep apnea, where you basically stop breathing while you’re sleeping, then that’s a concern. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell me more about the dementia thing ’cause I’m getting in my 40s now, and that’s something I’m thinking more about. I’m like, oh, my gosh, what can I do to make sure I don’t get dementia? What does the research say about the connection between sleep duration or sleep quality and dementia? Merijn Van De Laar: Here, it also says that if you suffer from sleep apnea, then the dementia risk might be bigger. So I think it’s always important if you snore very loudly, if you have breathing stops during the night, it’s very important to see a physician because sleep apnea is actually a disorder that is often not recognized and it has very severe consequences, very severe physical consequences. So I think that’s a very important thing. Brett McKay: Okay, so if you do have sleep apnea, you might have to get like a CPAP machine, help you breathe during… Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. For example. Yeah. Brett McKay: So I think this is actually really good information because I think a lot of… One of the things that can contribute to the stress of wanting to get to sleep and stay asleep, you know the stress of insomnia, is that these headlines are going through people’s heads like, oh, my gosh, I’m laying in bed here, I can’t sleep. Merijn Van De Laar: And that’s what makes them even sleep worse. Yeah. Brett McKay: So, yeah, I think this information is useful. So it just kind of calms you down a bit and you won’t freak out as much if you’re having problems sleeping. Let’s talk more about cavemen and hunter-gatherers sleep and what we can learn from them. You mentioned at the beginning that hunter-gatherers and potentially our caveman ancestors, their sleep schedule was guided more by their environment. So the physical environment. So we’re talking light, temperature, even seasons affected their sleep. What do we know about that? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, what we see is that, for example, in the Hadza tribe, there’s a bigger difference between the sleep in summer and in winter. So what you see is that there is almost an hour difference between the seasons. And what we see in the West is that actually that difference is not that big. And I think that’s also because we use heating, we use a lot of light. So the differences between the seasons are not that big for us. But what we can learn from these people is that, for example, in the morning they get a lot of bright light, and in the early afternoon, they get a lot of bright light. And you get more bright light if you go outside, because outside light is much brighter than the light you get when you’re in an office. And I think that what a lot of people do is they go to their work, they’re in the office, and then at night they put the lights on in their living room. And there’s not that much difference between the evening and the morning or the afternoon. And I think that we can work with light by being more outside, I mean, and even a walk of 20 to 30 minutes might do, just not sitting behind your desk, eating your sandwich there, but going outside might do the trick already. So it’s not like you have to be outside all day. And another thing is dim the lights in the evening is very important. And also use temperature. So don’t make it too hot, the ambient temperature too hot during the evening, because that is very unnatural. Brett McKay: Okay. So get more light in the morning and then in the afternoon. So get outside, that can help. And if you live in an area where there’s not much light. So if you live in the extreme northern parts of the world during the winter, there’s things you can do. You can introduce things like the light lamp, you can do that, that can help. There’s things you can do to help with that. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it’s very important to look at the lux, so the amount of light that comes from the light lamp. And if it’s… Usually we say at least 10,000 lux would do the trick. Brett McKay: And something you talk about, too, another myth about sleep that you debunk, you hear a lot of people say, well, if you want to improve your sleep, you have to wear blue light blocking glasses or turn your smartphone screen yellow. And the research says that actually doesn’t do much because your smartphone doesn’t emit that much light. Merijn Van De Laar: That’s true. Yeah. A lot of smartphones don’t exceed 10 lux, and you need more than 10 lux, usually to stimulate your biological clock. So, I mean, the light is more blue, and we are more sensitive to blue light. But the amount of light that is emitted from a smartphone is just too little to stimulate the biological clock. Now, if you look at light around you, so that is very important. And also to make it not too bluish, but I mean, you can also dim the lights a bit so that it doesn’t really have effect on your biological clock. You don’t have to wear orange glasses to have the same result. Brett McKay: And you still recommend people not to use their smartphone right before bed because it’s not for the light. It’s just that smartphones can get you amped up and kind of stress you out and get you just thinking more. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right. Brett McKay: And that can prevent you from falling asleep. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s right. And a recent review in 2024 by Gretasar shows that actually, for some people, using a smartphone might even help to fall asleep. I think it really depends on what type of person you are. If you’re very busy in your head, you have difficulty finding enough rest, then sometimes a smartphone can get you off your thoughts, so distract you a little bit. And that might help you sometimes to fall asleep. But that’s… It’s always… You always have to look at the personal circumstances. Brett McKay: Well, you talk about in the book one thing that you did when you’re having sleep problems that helped, I think a therapist or a doctor recommended, like, turn on the TV. And it did, like it worked. It relaxed you and you were able to fall asleep. Merijn Van De Laar: It worked for me. Yeah, definitely. Because I’m somebody with a very busy head. For me, it works. Yeah. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So going back to temperature, you wanna keep it cool. Is there an ideal temperature you wanna keep in your room to help facilitate sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Usually in your bedroom, they say between 16 and 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Brett McKay: Okay. Or is that Celsius? I think It’d be like 60. Merijn Van De Laar: Oh, Celsius. Sorry. Yeah. Celsius. Yeah, yeah. Brett McKay: See, I think it’s like 68 degrees Fahrenheit is the number that I hear. Merijn Van De Laar: Fahrenheit, that’s true. Because otherwise it would be very, very cold. Brett McKay: That would be very cold. Yeah. And something that I do, it’s interesting, my wife, she likes it warmer and I’m a hot sleeper. And so something that’s helped me is I’ve got a chilipad. It’s a thing you put underneath your mattress and kind of runs cold water beneath you. Merijn Van De Laar: Oh, yeah. Brett McKay: And that keeps things down to about 68. And it helps me fall asleep. Something I noticed though is I’ll, right before I wake up, so like 4:30, I’ll wake up and I’m like, this is too cold. I actually wanna be warmer now. And I think you talk about research, we want it cooler when we fall asleep, but then as we get closer to wake up time, we actually want it to be warmer ’cause it helps us wake up. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, it helps us wake up. Yeah, yeah. The body warms up again. That’s true. Yeah. And also it’s very good to have a cooler environment before falling asleep. But sometimes people have very cold feet and hands and that might prevent you from falling asleep because then you have this vasoconstriction. So the blood vessels, they really contract and that creates more difficulty for the body to lose body temperature. And that’s why some people with cold feet and cold hands cannot fall asleep properly. Brett McKay: So if that’s you, wear socks, maybe wear some mittens to bed? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, sometimes that works. Yeah. Brett McKay: And then seasonality, I mean, you mentioned that in the West our seasons are pretty much the same. But I’ve noticed I tend to sleep more during the winter ’cause it’s darker and longer. I just wanna go to bed earlier than I do during the summer. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. And that’s a natural thing. That’s a natural thing. So people tend to sleep like 12 to 25 minutes longer during the winter because it’s more dark. So they get less active during the evening. And their biological clock also gets less stimulated in the evening. So that’s why they fall asleep earlier or lie in the bed longer in the morning because the morning light is getting up later. Brett McKay: Again and that’s useful information to know because if you feel like you’re sleeping less as it progresses through spring and summer and you think, oh my gosh, something’s wrong with me, it’s like, well, maybe not. Like this is just your natural rhythm where you wanna sleep less ’cause it’s lighter out longer. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Brett McKay: So another thing you talk about hunter-gatherers do, is they move a lot during the day. How does that influence their sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at the relationship between exercise and sleep, then you can say that being more active builds up more adenosine. And adenosine is a neuromodulator and it creates sleepiness. So if you have higher levels of adenosine, then you get more sleepy. And so being more active actually makes you more sleepy and tends to give you more rest, so you fall asleep more easily. And have less problems maintaining sleep. Brett McKay: Okay. So adenosine that builds up what’s called sleep pressure or sleep drive in you. Merijn Van De Laar: That’s right, yeah. Brett McKay: Okay. And so something you can do to increase the sleep drive is just move more throughout the day, get some physical activity in. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s the first thing. Yeah. Brett McKay: What about something I read a lot about when it comes to sleep, is that you shouldn’t exercise right before bed. Is that true? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, studies show that if you exercise too much, like one to two hours before going to bed, that might create more problems falling asleep, so that’s right. Yeah. Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah. And going back to movement and sleep. I know if I look at my life, the times where I’ve slept the best, it’s when I moved the most. I remember the best sleep I ever got. And I think about it still, I’m chasing that high. I’m still chasing it. Is when we, my wife and I went to Rome for vacation. And you know in Rome, like you walk everywhere. It’s not like here in Tulsa where you have to drive everywhere. Rome, you had to walk everywhere. And I remember we got back from a day and we just laid on the bed and we both just fell asleep and then we slept, I think 12 hours. I mean, I’m sure there was some jet lag going on with that, but it was the, I think the movement, like the amount of physical activity we did that day, it just… It was like the best sleep. It just felt refreshing and reinvigorating. Merijn Van De Laar: It’s a lot of sleepiness. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Brett McKay: Yeah. And so, yeah, I’ve noticed in my own life when I don’t move a lot, I tend to not sleep as well. So I just try to make sure, not only keep my regular exercise up, make sure I’m getting up throughout the day from my job and doing some push ups, taking walks, because that, it really does help. Merijn Van De Laar: Those are things that work. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the sleeping environment of hunter-gatherers. You know, they didn’t have fancy mattresses. They slept on beds of leaves and grass on the ground. What about sleeping with other people? Did they sleep with other people by them? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, actually, we think… Well, if you look at the Hadza tribe, they sleep with 20 to 24 people around a fire. And we think that the same thing happened in the past, so in prehistory. So, yeah, I think they slept with a lot of people and they could easily take watch during the night for each other. Brett McKay: How did that influence their sleep? Like did that disturb them at all? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, if you look at the research on sleeping together with a partner or with somebody else, then you see a very, very interesting thing. Because on the one hand, people subjectively feel that they sleep better. But sometimes if you sleep with your partner, they find that objectively you sleep worse. So there’s a big difference in how people experience sleep and how sleep objectively is. And possibly that has to do something with safety, with built in safety. When you sleep with somebody else, then you feel more safe. Brett McKay: Okay. But then it can also mess up your sleep ’cause your sleep partner elbows you or takes all the covers or whatever. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Brett McKay: Any recommendations for that? Let’s say your spouse, the person you sleep with, like they’re just a really restless sleeper and it’s interrupting your sleep. Any advice on how to handle that? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think it depends on what the restlessness is. Because if it’s like turning and tossing and turning, then you might think about two mattresses, possibly two duvets. And if a person really snores, sometimes earplugs might help. But in some cases I’ve seen patients who were so tired because of the sleep problems that I advise them to sleep in separate rooms. And sometimes sleep really improves. And I think there’s a really stigma on that in western society, not sleeping together. But then again, if you have a partner that’s totally tired and worn out, then I think that’s not a good thing either. So I think it’s very important to discuss that with your partner to see whether you can make arrangements on that or maybe sleep a couple of nights separately from each other. But I think it’s very important to discuss it with each other. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about sleep hygiene and like what hunter-gatherers do to improve their sleep hygiene. An important part of sleep hygiene is winding down before bedtime. Do hunter-gatherers kind of have a wind down time before they hit the sack? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, they do. They actually sit by the fire, tell stories to each other. They are stories that are not too upsetting. So not about conflicts or things. And what you see is that a lot of people have different rhythms like we have. So we have morning people, evening people and everything that’s in between. And yeah, so they really wind down before going to bed. They are not too active anymore. And I think sometimes the thing with us is that we run to the bed and then expect for us to sleep immediately. And I think that’s not how it works. Brett McKay: So what do you recommend your patients you deal with, who are having sleep problems? Like how early should they start getting ready for bed? Like when should the wind down time start? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, usually I say one to one and a half hours before going to bed. So don’t do anything anymore that has to do with work. Don’t be too active anymore. I think those are things that can really work. Maybe watch a series, something that’s a bit boring maybe, not too exciting. I think those things might work. Brett McKay: All right and then dim the lights and cool down the house or your bedroom. That can help out a lot. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Cool down the house. Yeah. Brett McKay: Something that’s come up more with people in sleep when they’re paranoid about sleep, something they’ll often do is resort to a sleep tracker. So maybe on their Apple watch or they get, the Oura ring or something like that. Do you recommend people use sleep trackers to improve their sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, it depends on what kind of person you are. If you’re a bad sleeper, I would not recommend it. Because first of all, if you look at the measurements of sleep, these trackers are completely unreliable. So sometimes they say you had 30% deep sleep and 20% REM sleep. And the thing is that they are very inaccurate when it comes to measuring types of sleep. What they can do in people who sleep well is they can make an estimation on how long you’ve slept and how long you’ve been awake. Just it’s a rough estimation and that’s actually the only thing they can really do well. So I would not recommend them to people who are already experiencing insomnia. Brett McKay: Okay. Yeah. ’cause it can actually exacerbate the problem. There’s like a new type of sleep disorder. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Orthosomnia. Brett McKay: It’s driven by the devices, to be like, oh my gosh, my sleep score was terrible. And they just freak out even more and it makes sleep even harder. Merijn Van De Laar: That’s how it works. Yeah. Brett McKay: I’ve noticed that. I’ve used some of those sleep tracking devices and they’re interesting. I just kind of used it as I just wanted some information about my sleep. I didn’t really put much credence to it, but I had a few moments where the device said I had really poor sleep. But I’m like, I feel fine, I feel great, I’m energetic. And then there was moments where it said I had great sleep. And I’m like, man, I’m really, I’m groggy, I’m tired. I had to end up taking a nap during the day. So, yeah. Not incredibly accurate. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. And so for some people, it’s very important that sleep score and it really leads the day and how they feel. And then if you have a poor score, then it can really influence your day negatively. Yeah. Brett McKay: Do you recommend maybe keeping a sleep diary in some cases, just like kind of manually tracking your sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think so. I think for insomnia, it helps very well. I think one of the treatment steps we do in cognitive behavioral treatment is using a sleep log, so sleep diary. And it is to create a better picture of how somebody’s sleeping, at what time they go to bed, at what time they wake up, and how many times they wake up during the night. So I think a sleep diary sleep log may help very, very well. Yeah. Brett McKay: So let’s talk about some potential solutions. Let’s say someone’s listening to this and they’re having a hard time sleeping. They’re not happy with their sleep. I think oftentimes people resort to, okay, is there a supplement I can take? Is there a new mattress, I can get a new pillow? You know whatever. Even sleep medication. But what you found is the most effective tools to help with insomnia is cognitive behavioral therapy-I. So CBT-I. Yeah, that’s for insomnia. Merijn Van De Laar: The I stands for insomnia. Brett McKay: And then sleep restriction, which we mentioned earlier. Let’s talk about CBT-I. What does that typically look like for a patient in broad strokes? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. So the full cognitive behavioral treatment, sleep restriction is usually a part of the cognitive behavioral treatment for insomnia. And the full cognitive behavioral treatment starts with psychoeducation. So about what is normal sleep? What can you expect? So those are the first steps. Then you talk about relaxation techniques, and then you start looking at behavioral techniques. And the behavioral techniques are things that people can do to really give their sleep a boost and not be awake stressed out during the night. So the first one is a sleep restriction method, and the second one is stimulus control. We’ve been talking about that before. That’s going out of bed when you’re really tense, doing something that relaxes you, and go back to bed. And what we see is that sleep restriction is actually highly effective. That’s the other method, and that’s shortening your bedtimes to create more sleepiness. You get a better buildup of adenosine or adenosine. And what you see is that people have less difficulty falling asleep and maintaining sleep. So those are actually the steps of the CBT-I. And sleep hygiene is also a part of it. So you look at light, you look at temperature, and especially not watching the clock. I think not watching the time is also very important. Brett McKay: Okay. So CBT-I, you’re gonna start off with psychosocial education. So this is the things we’ve been talking about today. It’s like, hey, you know what? You don’t need eight hours of sleep. You’re not gonna die if you get less than that. If you get six hours, you’re gonna be fine. Even if you get five hours occasionally, you’re gonna be okay. And it’s just reassuring people like, you’re fine, you’re not gonna die. And then, and also just telling people like it’s normal to wake up, that’s gonna be okay. You just got to go back to sleep. And then the sleep restriction aspect, once you start helping people reframing their problem, what they think is problematic sleep. The restriction is like you’re actually telling people, okay, instead of going to bed at 10:00, we want you to go to bed at maybe midnight. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Brett McKay: So that you wake up your normal time of 6:00. The goal is to actually make you sleepier during the day, the next day, ’cause we wanna build up more sleep drive. Merijn Van De Laar: The sleep pressure. Brett McKay: The sleep pressure, and so you fall asleep. That sounds like a hard sell to people. It’s like, yeah, you’re actually going to be tired for a couple of weeks to improve your sleep. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah. Especially the first three to four days are very, very intense because for a lot of people, the problems, they get bigger during the first three to four days. People tend to get more sleepy during the day because of the buildup of sleepiness. Sometimes they get more tired, more concentration problems, that kind of thing. And then after four to seven days, you usually see slight improvements in sleep. So people have less difficulty falling asleep and have less problems maintaining sleep. And then after two weeks, usually people say that they sleep much better. And you also see that the daytime consequences of the sleep problem, they disappear after two to three weeks. So I think it’s a very powerful method that usually works within a couple of weeks. Brett McKay: Okay. And then as you’re… What’s interesting about the sleep restriction, you’re gradually over time, maybe after two weeks, you’re going to increase the time you’re in bed. So maybe you start off going to bed at 12:00, waking up at 6:00, and then two weeks later, it might be, well, you’re gonna go to bed at 11:30 for a while. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, usually we work with a quarter of an hour. So you expand the time with a quarter of an hour. Brett McKay: Okay. So this process could take a few months. Correct? To kind of get you back on track? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, usually what we see is that people… What I’ve seen in practice, is that sometimes people come in, they’re in the bed for like nine hours and they sleep for five and a half or six hours. And then what you usually do is you start out with total bedtimes that are similar to the sleep times they reported last week. So if they say, I’ve slept for five and a half hours, then they go to the bed for a maximum of five and a half, usually plus a half hour. So around six. So they’re in the bed for a maximum of six hours. Then you wait a week to two weeks. Usually sleep improves in 80 to 85% of cases. And then you start expanding the bedtimes again with a quarter of an hour. And sometimes people feel that when they’re in the bed for maybe seven, then they’ve actually reached their optimum because if they go past those seven hours, they have more sleep problems again. So actually, usually it takes about four to six weeks to treat a person with insomnia. Brett McKay: Wow, that’s fast. That’s really great. Any advice on how to figure out how much sleep you need to get? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think the most important thing to do is to look how you sleep when you’re on holidays. So the second week of your holidays, you have to find out at what time you start getting sleepy and at what time you spontaneously awaken. If you do that, you find that out, then you really know how much sleep you need, but also which chronotype you are. So whether you’re a morning person or an evening person or somewhere in between. Brett McKay: What do you do if your chronotype, let’s say you’re an evening person, but you have a job that requires you to be a morning person. Anything you can do to mitigate the consequences of that? Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, I think there are some things you can do is you can work with bright light in the morning, if that’s possible. So that really pushes your rhythm a bit more back. And what you can do is you can create a more dark environment before going to bed and go to bed on time. So I think that’s very important because for evening people, it’s sometimes very difficult to go to bed on time, but still your natural rhythm will always be leading. So you can do something with that, with these methods, but it’ll never change you to being a morning person. So what people sometimes do in the weekends, is they’re in the bed a little bit longer. So one to one and a half hours to compensate a bit for the hours that they missed during the week. And sometimes this may help. But it’s very important to not overdo it. Brett McKay: Right. You don’t wanna sleep in too much because that’s just going to throw off your sleep schedule for the rest of the week. What we’ve talked about a lot of things people can do to help them get a better night’s sleep. Is there one thing you recommend people start doing today that will immediately improve their sleep? Merijn Van De Laar: I think not watching the time. I think that’s a very important one. We know from research that if you watch the time, then it takes up to 20 minutes longer to fall asleep again. So I usually pay a lot of attention to that. And a lot of people with insomnia find it very difficult to not watch the time when they’re awake. But I think it’s a very, very powerful method to decrease insomnia. Brett McKay: All right, so just get the clocks out of your room. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Brett McKay: And for me, the big takeaway from the book is like, just don’t freak out as much about your sleep if you are having problems with sleep, ’cause that just causes more problems. And, when you wake up at 4:30, it’s like, okay, well, you shouldn’t know it’s 4:30 because you don’t have a clock in your room in the first place. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, that’s true. Brett McKay: But if you do wake up earlier, you’re just like okay, it’s okay. I’m gonna pretend like I’m a Hadza tribe member and just kind of sit here and relax and doze back to sleep. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, just let the perfectionism go a little bit and, yeah, be more relaxed around being awake during the night. We need to be more relaxed about being awake during the night. Brett McKay: I love that. Well, Merijn, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Merijn Van De Laar: Well, first of all, the book, I mean you can already order the book, so it can be ordered from Amazon, so Sleeping Like a Caveman. And I also have a website, Merijn van de Laar, I think you have to spell it out in the details. Brett McKay: We’ll link to the show notes. Merijn Van De Laar: Yeah, yeah. So that’s where they can find more information. Brett McKay: All right, Merijn van de Laar, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Merijn Van De Laar: Yes, thanks, same for me. Brett McKay: My guest’s name is Merijn van de Laar. He’s the author of the book, How to Sleep Like a Caveman. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our shownotes at aom.is/cavemansleep, where you’ll find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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1 Podcast #1,054: Familiarity Breeds Contempt (And Other Underappreciated Consequences of Digital Communication)
There has been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression. But as I’ll explore with Nicholas Carr, the author of Superbloom , our digital tools are also changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways. Today on the show, Nicholas unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn’t panned out and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. We discuss why the “messiness” of pre-digital communication might have actually been better for us, how email has evolved from thoughtful letters to rushed messages, and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less. Nicholas also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contexts was actually healthy and the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools. Resources Related to the Podcast Nicholas’ previous appearances on the AoM podcast: Episode #276: Utopia is Creepy Episode #632: How the Internet Makes Our Minds Shallow Charles Horton Cooley AoM Article: More Than Ever, the Medium Is the Message Connect With Nicholas Carr Nicholas’ website Nicholas’ Substack, New Cartographies 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. There’s been a lot of cultural discussion of the way digital technologies and social media contribute to things like political polarization and adolescent depression. But as I’ll explore with Nicholas Carr, the author of Superbloom, our digital tools are also changing our ability to connect with others and our sense of self in less appreciated ways. Today on the show, Nicholas unpacks why the optimistic idea that more communication is always better hasn’t panned out, and how the speed and volume of modern communication is overwhelming our human capacity to process information and maintain meaningful relationships. We discuss why the messiness of pre digital communication might have actually been better for us. How email has evolved from thoughtful letters to rushed messages, and why seeing more of people online often makes us like them less. Nicholas also explains why having different versions of ourselves for different contexts was actually healthy. And the simple rubric for better managing our relationship with digital communication tools. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/communication. All right, Nicholas Carr, welcome back to the show. Nicholas Carr: Thanks. It’s good to be back with you. Brett McKay: So we had you on a long time ago to talk about your book the Shallows, which was about how Google was changing our brains. This is like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You’ve got a new book out called Superbloom where you explore how our digital communication tools, whether it’s text, social media, short form video, how that’s changing the way we communicate, socialize, even just think of ourselves as a self in the world. So the word social media has just become… It’s just a common word we throw around. And I think a lot of people might think, oh, social media, that phrase was an invention of the late 20th, early 21st century, right? We did… Social media did not exist until Mark Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. But you talk about, there was a 19th century thinker who coined the term social media. His name’s Charles Horton Cooley. Tell us about this guy. What was his big idea when it came to communication tools and how we interact with one another? Nicholas Carr: Well, Charles Horton Cooley, he was born in the 1860s in Michigan. He started out as an academic economist, but he ended up becoming one of the earliest American sociologists. Founded the University of Michigan’s sociology department. And the question he set out to answer, the question that really interested him is why does society change? And in 1897, he wrote this very interesting, very obscure at this point article about that subject. And he went through, you know, various possibilities, he talked about genetics and stuff like that. But ultimately he decided that the biggest force that changes society is changes in communication technology, changes in the tools we use to converse, to express ourselves, to exchange information and so forth. And in that article, and when I read it, I was kind of amazed, he uses the term social media. And as far as I can tell, it’s the first time it’s been used. And what he meant by it was that communication technologies allow us to form groups that are independent of location. So, you know, in the past, before we had the mail system and the telegraph and everything else, you know, your social group was whoever happened to be around you in the real world. But he saw that as new technologies allow us to interact with people far away, we can form all sorts of groups without any spatial or even temporal boundaries. And he called these groups social mediums or social media in general. And so that… You know, looking at his work and particularly his stress on the importance of communication technologies, he called them communication mechanisms in shaping society was one of the real inspirations for the book. Brett McKay: And what’s interesting, his ideas that he had in the 19th century, it seems like later thinkers about media and communication, we’re talking like Marshall McLuhan or Neil Postman, they kinda picked up on these ideas, correct? Nicholas Carr: Absolutely. I mean, I don’t know if they were inspired by Cooley, but you know, 50, 70 years before they started looking at this, Cooley had already come to this conclusion. And I mean, what characterizes McLuhan’s most famous saying, of course, is the medium is the message. And by that he meant that we focus on the bits of content that come through communication systems, media systems, but really it’s the technology itself that shapes the way we speak, who we speak to, even how we think. And that’s very much what Cooley was talking about at the end of the 19th century, that to paraphrase his belief, it’s that when mechanisms of communication change, society changes. Independent of the content that’s coming through those mechanisms. Brett McKay: How did he see society changing? So what happened? Did he make any observations about that? As you know, we moved from, say, an oral communication society where we just talked to the people who are around us, around the fire pit or in the town village. How did culture, society change as we introduced letter writing or the telegraph, etc. Nicholas Carr: Cooley saw that new communication technologies do two things. They change the way influence flows among people. And that just means the patterns of the way information go from one person to another. Certainly when you have electronic or electric Communications, everything speeds up. And you can cast your voice or hear the voices of other people far away instantaneously. But also it changes. And this is what I was talking about before. It changes how people form relationships and form social groups. And these can be people in the distance. They can be people who wrote books a long time ago. And so what he saw, and I think this was very prescient, he used the term that as information speeds up and as we can talk to people far away and they can hear us, and there’s all these flows of influence and association that society would come to liquefy. And what he meant by that was, you know, when you’re just talking to people who are around you in the same place at the same time, then you have a lot of social structure, you have a lot of institutions, you have a lot of traditions, and they’re all, you know, sustained through these tight communities. The more you break down those kind of barriers, the more chaotic society becomes. And it becomes, rather than kind of this concrete thing that changes very, very slowly. Society starts to act more like a liquid and it changes much, much quicker. Brett McKay: Yeah. And you can see this if you do sort of a genealogy of communication tools like say the introduction of the printing press. Because of the introduction of the printing press, like you had the Reformation, you had all these changes in what we’re thinking about religion, and you had these splinter groups. And then you also had the rise of, nation states and people thinking about freedom and individual rights. That wasn’t happening before the printing press, that new form of communication that allows you to speak across space and time. Nicholas Carr: Right. And one of the implications of that, and McLuhan in particular is pretty good on that, about that, is that suddenly an individual can determine kind of their own knowledge base and their own intellectual activities. Because suddenly you can read and listen to people from all over the place and you can start selecting which ideas are important to you. And what the argument is, is that this, in addition to all the social changes, this led to the rise of individualism. We started to think of ourselves as kind of self created because we weren’t locked into the traditions and the words of people in our immediate surroundings. We kind of took control of our own intellectual lives and that changed us as individual persons. We started to think much more about ourselves as individuals, but also became another big broad force in reshaping society. When you move from very tight knit communities to a huge civilization of individuals who think of themselves as individuals. Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, you know, going on to that theory that he had as communication speeds up, everything’s more fluid. I mean, we… I think we’ve all seen that if we’ve been on the Internet for the past 25 years. It just seems like there’s just constant change because of the rapidity of digital communication. Nicholas Carr: Right. And there’s this weird combination of individualism and also clannishness as people, you know, join groups very, very quickly. And again, following Cooley and McLuhan and Neil Postman, if you look at the technology itself, you see that the technology is there, exists to speed up the flow of information, the flow of conversation. And that has a very interesting effect on human nature because I don’t think the human psyche is well suited to exchanging information and expressing oneself in gathering information at the kind of speed and volume that the Internet and social media kind of overwhelms us with all the time. Brett McKay: Yeah, and that’s the big argument of your book. You talk about how Cooley, you know, he sees this idea of how our communication changes cultures as it gets faster, things liquefy. And he had an optimistic view of this, like, well, this is actually a good thing. Nicholas Carr: Yeah. Brett McKay: And then you talk about how later social media founders like Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, kind of, they probably didn’t know they’re picking up on Cooley, but they picked up on that idea that the more you can communicate, the more you can talk to people, to different people from different backgrounds from across the world. That is always a net positive. There’s no downside sides to it. What you’re doing in Superbloom is like, well, okay, yeah, there’s some good things that come from this ability to communicate fast in a wide ranging way. But there are downsides to this. And this is what you explore in the book. Nicholas Carr: Right. And so if you look through the history of modern electric communications, from the telegraph to the telephone to radio, tv, fax machines, and onto the Internet and social media. Every new communication technology that makes communication more efficient is greeted as, in utopian terms. So people think, oh, since communication is the way you learn about other people and you gain an understanding of other cultures and you can negotiate or go through diplomacy and stuff, that means that communication is kind of a naturally good thing. And if communication is a naturally good thing, then more communication must be even better. And you see this again, as I say over and over again. In the book, I go through many quotes of this utopianism from the moment the telegraph was invented to the Internet came along, to Mark Zuckerberg playing up how sharing on Facebook would bring the world together. And my argument is that that gets it wrong. You can see why we believe that. It’s all wrapped up in our sense of ourselves as unique creatures, because we can communicate in ways that other animals, for instance, can’t. And it’s also wrapped up in the very popular idea of a marketplace of ideas. The intellectual marketplace operates like a marketplace of goods. If you can create more supply, then people have more choices and they’ll get rid of the bad stuff and they’ll choose the good stuff. And so there’s all these kind of assumptions we make about more communication being better communication. But what I argue is if you actually look through history and even if you look at our own recent experience, you see a very different picture. That, yes, communication can be very, very good and in fact, society is built of communication. But when you speed up communication too much, when you increase the volume of communication too much, it starts to become overwhelming and you create a conflict, I think, between human nature and our ability to make sense of things and to deal with messages and information in the technology. And I think that’s what we’re seeing today. But I think you can see that, as I say, throughout recent history. I mean… I’ll give you a quick story that I relayed in the book. When telegraph and telephone emerged, people like Nikola Tesla, the great inventors, Marconi, the inventor of radio, and lots of other people, religious figures, said, oh, this is gonna create a world of understanding. We’re all gonna communicate instantaneously so we can work out our problems quickly. And this is the end of war. And Marconi made that proclamation in 1912. And of course, two years later, 1914, World War I broke out. And if you read the history of World War I, one of the messages that comes out of here is that these new communication technologies, rather than kind of restraining people from going to war at that time, actually hastened the outbreak of the war. And it’s because the war was set off by the assassination of Austrian Archduke. And when that happened, instead of going the old fashioned route where diplomats would travel to different capitals and sit down together and try to hash out the problems and come to some solution, suddenly all these messages from all the capitals started flowing through telegraph lines and telephone lines, and it kind of overwhelmed diplomacy, and it soon turned into threats and other things. And what historians say is that the acceleration of communication actually was one of the causes of the war. So exactly the opposite effect when you actually look at what happens from what everyone expected. And yet, unfortunately, we didn’t learn from that example because if you go through radio and TV and the Internet and stuff, you see that same kind of very optimistic, even utopian belief that more communication will be better for society. Brett McKay: And we’ve all seen that play out. Faster communication is the more communication you get online. I think initially thought, oh, this will just bring new understanding, new viewpoints, new vistas. And instead we’re just really angry at each other and just, you know. And it’s funny, that idea of, you know, more communication isn’t necessarily better. I think we’ve had a marriage counselor on the podcast before talk about, there’s this idea in a marriage of a marriage is having problems, like you just gotta… More communication, you gotta communicate, communicate, communicate. And he said things like sometimes more communication isn’t actually good. You just end up talking about the problems more and more and more instead of just kind of, okay, maybe there’s some things we can’t change here. And we move on. So yeah, let’s talk about what we can do and learn from history about maybe the benefits of slowing down our communication, having a little bit more friction. And you talk about in the 20th century when we had this development of different modes of communication. There was radio, there was television, there was telephone, there was newspaper, print. There was actually a lot of variety in the 20th century in the mediums we can choose. And I think we all picked up on that. Well, with certain mediums there were certain types of thinking we did with that, but I think we forget that because today our whole information medium is just online. And I think online mediums can kind of encourage a certain type of thinking. Can you walk us through like that variety that we once had with communication and maybe some of the benefits that came with that? Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so now we’ve all gotten used to digital media and to the smartphone as information delivery device. And because computers, which are obviously at the center of this, are general purpose information processors, that means they can do pretty much everything that’s ever been done through communication systems and media. So, you know, basically people use their phone as their newspaper, it’s the radio, it’s their tv, it’s their camera and their photo album, it’s their post office, it’s even their telephone sometimes. And we look back to the pre digital world, I’ll call it analog media. And we… When we look back we see it as kind of a mess because you couldn’t do everything through one tool and one network. There were all sorts of networks involved in all sorts of devices. So you had… You know, you subscribe to a print newspaper that came in the morning. You got some magazines that came weekly or monthly. You had a telephone on the wall, a dial telephone that you used to call up people when you needed to talk to people who weren’t in your immediate vicinity. You had radio, you had tv, you had record players and records and tapes. So you had all of this diverse set of specialized analog media. And as I say, we look back at that now and see it as a mess and say, oh, thank goodness the Internet came along and cleaned that all up. So we can do everything through our phone or our computer. But what I argue is that actually, I think the very messiness of analog media and particularly the specialization of networks and tools and artifacts actually had a huge benefit for us because it held back the flow of information. You know, it had been possible for, say in the 1970s, it had been possible for 100 years to transmit information instantaneously electronically. But because of various physical constraints and constraints inherent in analog media, you couldn’t do that. People had to go out and make choices. They had to say, you know, do I wanna turn on the radio now and listen to the program? Do I wanna turn on the tv? Do I wanna put a record onto the turntable? Do I wanna pick up a newspaper? Do I wanna pick up a book? And having those specialized media and requiring people to make choices actually imposed a kind of discipline on the way we consumed media. We had to use our discretion. We had to make careful choices. You couldn’t do everything all at once, and you didn’t want to. And I think that had ramifications for how we communicate, for how we think about news, for how we think about entertainment, for how we think about art. There was separation among different forms of media. You know, some things we knew were more important than other things. Some things were truer than other things. So it gave us this discretion and this discipline that I think we’ve lost when everything comes at us in all forms, all the time, and we’ve gone from a world of messiness that was still at a human scale and required human decision making to kind of a cleanliness and efficiency that is no longer at human scale. And kind of, instead of us using the tools, the tools start to use us. Brett McKay: Yeah. And that cleanliness or lack of friction with our digital tools, I think that’s a source of a lot of the overwhelm or information overload people feel. It’s like, man, I’ve got these feeds I subscribe to, Instagram feeds I gotta keep up with, Twitter, Email, it’s just a glut. And you just feel, I can’t keep up with this. And I remember, you know, before digital tools, before smartphones, I don’t know, I just felt like my brain was a little bit more calm, a little bit more chill. I didn’t feel overwhelmed like I do sometimes today. So, yeah, that friction, you know, we’ve been trying to get rid of it ’cause like we see the friction, particularly in Silicon Valley, as this bad thing we gotta get rid of. That friction in our communication tools or medium consumption tools. I think it just allowed us to, I don’t know, think slowly, be more contemplative about what we’re consuming. Nicholas Carr: Yeah. And at the same time, also, because you couldn’t do everything at once and you couldn’t juggle dozens of information feeds, you actually were encouraged to pay more attention whether you were listening to a song or having a conversation with somebody on the phone or reading a newspaper or whatever, you know, that was what you were doing. You weren’t also glancing at notifications on your phone. And so it just… It’s a very different mindset or attitude that has basically been destroyed, I think, by digital media. Brett McKay: And that’s sad. Yeah, and I think you’re right. Like it’s a… We have a very surface level attention that we even carry over not just how we consume news, but like how we interact with others. Like our emails, we just kind of glance over them. Text messages that, you know, maybe someone’s trying to communicate and reach out to you because they’re hurting. You know, that text message you’re getting could be one of you know, 20 that are in your unread message section in your smartphone. And so you just kinda glance through it and you really can’t… You can’t do that sort of deep connection with that person, with that person needs. ’cause you don’t have the ability, like your attention span can’t withstand all the influx of stuff you’re getting. Nicholas Carr: Yeah. And it’s kind of a consequence of the technology itself. In order to kind of stay afloat with all this information that’s coming in, you have to be superficial. You have to, you know, make quick decisions and draw on your instinct rather than your reasoning and respond immediately. So it changes the depth of our engagement with information and with other people. I think it changes the way we talk and I think it ultimately also changes the way we think. There’s just… If you want to be successful in digital media, you can’t think deeply or slowly about anything. Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, and you use this, an example of how our technology changes the way we think. Use this… Well, McLuhan talked about this. He says whenever a new form of communication is introduced, whether that’s letter writing or the telegraph or television or radio or email, we use that new form of communication the same way that we used a previous form of communication. So like you use the example of email. Talk about that. I think if people were around when email was first introduced, they might remember they probably used email differently than they use it today. Nicholas Carr: Absolutely. And I certainly remember that. McLuhan had a great phrase. He said, we march backwards into the future. And you can see this with email, ’cause when email came along and became popular in, whenever it was for most people, in 1980s or late 1980s, 1990s, with, you know, AOL mail and Yahoo Mail and stuff, people saw it as kind of a quicker electronic version of the mail system. So they thought of emails as kind of letters in a different form. And I can certainly remember this myself. When you wrote an email to someone, you’d sit down and you’d approach it as if you were writing a letter. You know, you’d write dear so and so, and then you’d have some courtesies, and you’d write in full sentences, and you try to express yourself clearly, and you’d proofread it and then you’d send it off. And that prevailed for a little while. But then as more and more people got onto email and email began to be used for all sorts of things and displaced, you know, letters and stuff, suddenly we couldn’t do that anymore because we had to keep up with the inbox. So you just didn’t have time to sit down and compose a careful letter. You had to write quickly and often sloppily and kind of get your message across, but get it across in kind of the most efficient way possible. So the technology itself changed the way we speak. And it wasn’t only, you know, when we were sending emails to work colleagues or for some administrative purpose, it was how we talked to friends and family members. We got blunter and blunter and more compressed and sloppier. And meanwhile, because the email was so efficient, we stopped writing letters. So the technology shaped the way we correspond with people, changed the very form of it and made it, I think, much less intimate and much less careful and much Less thoughtful. And again, it was because we had no choice. We had to keep up with a email inbox that never stopped growing. Brett McKay: My wife talks about that. She’s noticed that. She’s always like, remember my emails that I used to write? I wrote these like just really long emails to my friends. We had these like long correspondences. And the emails would look like some letter that was written from the 19th century, like you said, had the courtesies. And then, you know, there was like a catch up of what I’ve been up to and then there would be this long like exploration of an issue. And I mean they were really well done. And she says like, I haven’t written those type of messages in a long time. And she’s like, I feel like I’m missing something because I haven’t. ’cause the act of writing a letter like that or an email like that, it forces you to be self reflective. It forces you to contemplate what you’re thinking and think about the other person in a deeper way than you do when you, you know, just send out these, you know, short bullet point missives. Nicholas Carr: Right. And you certainly see that if you look back to when letters themselves, the mail, became cheap enough that normal everyday citizens could actually write frequent letters. This was in like 1860, 1870. There’s histories of that. And it became kind of central, not only to how people communicate, but kind of central to their lives. That when you sat down to write a letter, you kind of isolated yourself from all the business of the world and all the distractions you had to go through. And it gave you time to kind of compose a narrative about your life. You wanted to tell people what you’d been up to and stuff. So you had to kind of shape it into a story and you had to think about what was important to you. So it was really in addition to being a communication tool, this kind of long form writing to other people that you’re friendly with or family members or other whatever kind of had a deep effect on our ability to think about life and put everything that was going on in our lives into some kind of context that made sense. And in the early days of email, I think that was also true. But that’s all gone now. Brett McKay: Yeah. And it’s only gotten worse as we shifted our communication from email to text messages or social media updates. It’s even more perfunctory. Nicholas Carr: Oh yeah. And I… What amazes me and I have a chapter in Superbloom that’s about this because I don’t think it’s been talked about enough, is what’s happened to personal correspondence. You know, now everybody’s texting, going through messaging apps and stuff and their group texts and whatever. So even email now is going the way of the written letter. Brett McKay: Email’s too slow. Nicholas Carr: Email’s too slow. You know, it used to be the fast thing. Email’s too slow. And what you see is just nobody cares. It’s full of typos, it’s sloppy, there’s no punctuation. You know, the application itself is messing things up with autocomplete algorithms and stuff. And people don’t proofread it or anything. So it’s… You can understand why this happened ’cause it’s so fast and so efficient and yet it really tells us something about how we think about self expression today and how we think about other people that we can’t be bothered to proofread a note because we have to be so fast. And it’s a very apparent symbol of kind of the degradation of communication and self expression and even a kind of lack of treating other people with courtesy when you can’t even be bothered to… When you can just dash off these sloppy, strange notes full of emojis and autocomplete sentences and stuff and no punctuation. And yet we do it without even thinking about it now. Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s undignified. There’s no dignity involved in it. Yeah. And you talk about this new form of communication we have with text messages that involves. It’s not just… Not just using text, but we’re also incorporating emojis, as you said, ’cause the emojis are a shortcut for emotional expression. So in a letter we would have had to write about, well, I’m feeling very sad and despondent. Instead you just put the crying emoji. Or you can use like a gif of some person looking sad. And so ’cause you just… Someone can just glance at it, you’re like, okay, I get it. This person, he’s sad. And you call this new form of quick communication tech speak. And I’ve seen other media theorists talk about it as digital orality. It’s got this mixture of text. It’s not completely oral, but we use text and other symbols as if we were speaking to someone in person. ’cause like when we speak with people in person, we do get perfunctory. Like you can shorten things, you can use slang, and you can do that because you’re in the presence of that person physically. And so you’re able to pick up on, you know, body language cues and things like that that you can’t do online. But because we’re online, we try to replicate that same sort of communication with our digital tools. And it just… Something gets lost in that translation. Nicholas Carr: Yeah, I mean… And it’s hard to emphasize that. It’s not all bad being able to have a written communication system that is informal and casual and kind of replicates the way you’d talk to friends if you were out for an evening or something. That’s a good thing. And in fact, I tell the story of how techspeak was invented. It was kind of invented through teenagers instant messaging at, you know, in the late 1990s, sitting at the family PC with a bunch of instant message IM windows open and having all these conversations. And when you’re having that many conversations, you kinda have to compress language. So they very quickly learned how to shorten words and use initialisms and typed emoji and stuff. In some ways this is kind of ingenious and it really worked. The problem is that that kind of casual sort of oral communication has not only displaced a lot of person to person conversation, it’s moved into all forms of communication. So it’s displaced kind of the slower, more considered, more contemplative forms of correspondence. So if techspeak was just kind of digital orality and gave us the ability to chat, you know, casually with friends online, I think it would be fine. But under the pressure of having to keep up with so much information, we now use techspeak… It’s kind of our basic language. And that, to me, is the problem. Brett McKay: Yeah, techspeak tends to be more reflexive and less reflective. Right. Like you’re kind of using that system one thinking that I guess Kahneman talked about, or just like fast. Right. It’s emotional. And that’s why, you know, sometimes text messages or group chats can kind of go off the rails ’cause people are just reflexively reacting to things and they’re not taking the time to use that sort of system two, thinking of, I need to think about this and let me contemplate a little bit about this, let me reflect to make sure that I’m putting something out there that is measured. Techspeak does not encourage that. And the problem with like techspeak or digital orality, that sort of reflexive communication, I don’t think it’s much of a problem when you’re face to face and sort of in real time with somebody because you have the thing, you might have this disagreement in a spat and then you can kind of patch things up and then you move on. And like, it’s just that thing that happened. The interaction that happened is just in the past. Like, you can’t go back to it really, except in your brain. With digital orality or like this techspeak, you have a permanent record of that ephemeral spat. And every time you open up your text messages, let’s say you had a spat with a friend and you patched it up, but then you’re going through your text messages again, you see it, that interaction you had, like, oh, man, yeah, I don’t like this guy. I’m gonna dredge that up again. So techspeak takes something that was once ephemeral, like oral speech, and basically makes a permanent record of it. Nicholas Carr: Right. Yeah. And that definitely makes it harder to kind of get over things because it’s always there in front of you. And also, you know, another difference between “digital orality” and actually having a conversation with a person is that when you’re having a conversation with a person, a lot of information is communicated not with words, but with gestures, with, you know, the look in people’s eyes, with how they’re standing with their smiles and everything. And, you know, we underestimate the importance of all those gestures, all those physical signals. And you strip those out when you converse online. Even if the language you’re using might be similar to what you’d use if you were sitting around a table. Brett McKay: And it’s hard to add back with emojis or gifs or whatever. You can do maybe a little bit, but it’s not the same thing. Another thing you talk about is that social media or techspeak or this quick communication that we have, not only does it encourage us to be reflexive and just kind of have the surface level attention to the communication we’re having with others, it also allows us to be ever present in the lives of others and others to be ever present in ours. And it’s also nudged us to reveal more and more about ourselves. Like, you’re supposed to be transparent and vulnerable, sort of the ethos. What’s been the effect of that constant exposure to each other via our phones or computers? Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so social media rewards people for talking about themselves a lot. That’s how you get likes, that’s how you get retweets and reposts and stuff. And unlike in the physical world, where if you’re quiet but in a social setting, you’re still there, you’re still present. Online, if you go quiet, you disappear. So that’s another reason we’re kind of encouraged to constantly post things, express ourselves, put up pictures and stuff. And in fact, there are studies that show that if you compare people conversing online versus people conversing in person, online, people will tend to divulge four times as much information about themselves in a given period of time. So you see that very, very much. Now here we get back to another paradox like, you know, similar to more communication means less understanding. We wanna think that the more we learn about other people and the more we divulge about ourselves, the more we’ll like each other, we’ll understand each other, we’ll have empathy and stuff. Unfortunately, if you look at the actual research, something very, very different happens. That, yeah, there are certainly times when learning more about somebody makes you like them more, but it’s equally likely, if not slightly more likely, that learning more about someone will make you like them less. And there’s this phenomenon in social psychology pretty well documented, called dissimilarity cascades. Which shows that the more facts you learn or the more pictures you see or whatever of other people, over time, you begin to place more emphasis on their dissimilarities with you than on their similarities. And what we know from a raft of psychological research is that we tend to like people who are similar to us in some ways, and we tend to dislike people who are dissimilar. And so online, where people are constantly, you know, posting selfies or posting pictures of their vacations or talking about what they just did, or giving you their political opinions or whatever. There’s all these opportunities to begin to be alienated by those people. And so I think what we see is, again, kind of the opposite effect that we thought we’d see, which is that, you know, talking more with everybody and showing off and giving more information about ourselves would lead to more understanding and more friendship and more liking, it actually often has the opposite effect. And I think if you look closely at that, that psychological research, I think it explains a lot of the enmity and combativeness and insults and everything else that we see online. We’ve created a communication system that doesn’t bring us closer together, but often kind of emphasizes how we’re different and makes us think of each other as not only different, but in some cases, as enemies or people to be disliked. Brett McKay: So familiarity breeds contempt. Nicholas Carr: Unfortunately, there are times when familiarity breeds friendship and love and everything. But I do think that old saying, which is quite a sad saying, has been basically proven true through social media and through digital communication. Brett McKay: And I’m sure people have experienced this. Maybe they’ve got a co-worker at their office that at work they just kind of present their work self and they see the work self of the other person. It’s very collegial. And like, I get along with this guy. He does a good job at his work and he’s pleasant to be around. And then you might go home and let me look up this guy’s social media profile. And then you start seeing, oh my gosh, this guy, this is his political beliefs. And like, oh man, he likes that movie. That’s a terrible movie. And now when you go to the office the next day, you think, man, I don’t like this guy. And so your whole interaction with him, before, it was completely positive but now that you know more about him and how he’s different from you, it just makes things worse. Nicholas Carr: Yeah, there’s this other concept also quite sad in the research called environmental spoiling. And there’s research that shows that the closer you live to another person, the more likely you are to be friends, which is sort of obvious. But the research also shows that the closer you live to someone, the more likely you are to be enemies. And in fact, that maybe again, slightly more common. And the reason is, is because you’re exposed to their habits, to their beliefs and everything. And so there’s lots of opportunities for that other person to do something that irritates you. You know, leaving their garbage cans out after garbage day or letting their dog go to the bathroom on your lawn or whatever. And once that happens, once you see something that’s irritating, that tends to build on itself. It’s very hard to forget that. And it leads to this kind of animosity. And so online, where we’re exposed to people doing all… You know, sharing their thoughts, sharing pictures of themselves, talking through videos and stuff, there’s all sorts of opportunities to see things that are not only dissimilar to you, but that are actually irritating to you. And so it’s… Just as it’s a… The digital world is a very good setting for dissimilarity cascades. It’s also a very good setting for this phenomenon of environmental spoiling. Brett McKay: Okay, so our digital tools, the digital world encourages this vulnerability, this transparency, and of course the platforms like that because it gives them more data to sell ads. So I guess the takeaway there is maybe don’t share as much about yourself online. Leave a small digital blueprint. Give people less of a reason to not like you, potentially. Nicholas Carr: Right. And again, you know, there’s trade offs there because as I said, when you’re not sharing, when you’re not speaking up, you kind of disappear. And so you feel kind of out of the social loop. But I do think that that is the kind of lesson to be learned here. And it’s… You know, when I was growing up and I think for a lot of people, and even today, I’m sure, you know, your mom would tell you, you know, don’t talk about yourself so much. That turns out to be pretty good advice. We forget it as soon as we look at our phone or sit in front of our computer. But maybe we should go back to that as a kind of rule of thumb. Brett McKay: Yeah, I remember the old rule of thumb. Don’t talk about politics or religion. Like, you know, maybe… Nicholas Carr: Which is… Certainly not what happens online. Brett McKay: Right. That’s not what happens online. Well, here’s something I could use your help on. I’ve been trying to put my finger on this for a long time. So we’ve been talking about, you know, tech speak. It’s sort of oral, like speaking via digital tools. What is the introduction of online video? Particularly like, short form video. I feel like the introduction of this stuff has just exacerbated some of the problems we’ve talked about. And it also exacerbates kind of my contempt for people online, ’cause I mean, as soon as I see like the short form video of some head talking to me, I’m like, ugh, I don’t like this. And I can’t figure out why. Have you been able to think about this or am I just being a crank? Nicholas Carr: No, I think there’s something to that. And I think it comes back to, in some ways comes back to like seeing too much, gives you opportunities to find elements that are irritating. But I think it’s also because when people videotape them… Or videotape is no longer the right word, but I’ll say videotape themselves and post it online. They’re performing, they’re not acting naturally. They know that they’re on camera. They know that this is gonna become media content. And I think we have a tendency to become performers and to think of ourselves as kind of media content when we’re on video. I mean, I think it’s also true often when we’re writing, but certainly when we’re on video. And so there’s an irony that people talk all the time about, oh, you know, authenticity and relatability of people on YouTube or TikTok or whatever. And it turns out that often it’s exactly the opposite, that we convince ourselves that, oh, this person is talking about themselves, so they must be authentic and, oh, I can relate to what they’re saying. But actually, you know, the medium itself encourages a kind of inauthenticity because you are performing, you’re not talking to someone who’s there. You’re by necessity performing. And when you see that somebody is performing, you immediately kind of doubt their sincerity. You kind of feel like you’re being treated as an audience. And so I think there is this kind of strange social dynamic that happens when we see someone, you know, talking through a video that’s very different from what would happen if that person was talking to us in person. Brett McKay: One of the things I love watching, and I think it’s interesting to observe. I love watching clips from, say, the 1950s or 1960s of when regular people get interviewed by newscasters. Sort of the man on the street thing. And it’s interesting to watch how self conscious the people were. They didn’t… Like the… People then didn’t know how to act in front of a camera. And you can tell that they were trying to be kind of professional. And so they were very professional, prim and proper. Now, since we’ve had cameras in our lives, just it’s ubiquitous. I think we’ve all developed like, oh, here’s how I’m supposed to act when there’s a camera on me. And it’s just… It’s interesting. It goes back to the idea that our tools change how we think or how we talk. Nicholas Carr: Right. I think we know that we’re gonna be in competition with enormous amounts of other content. And so we tend to exaggerate what we say and exaggerate our gestures and kind of, in a way, become more clownish because we know that that’s the only way we’ll be able to grab attention with all this competition going on around us. So we’re very… In one way, very savvy in a way that people didn’t used to be about media and our own role in it. But it also, again, leads to kind of these kind of, I don’t know, we almost become caricatures of ourselves. Brett McKay: Yeah. Become cartoons. Nicholas Carr: Yeah, yeah. Brett McKay: Something else you talk about in the book is that throughout human history, we had different concepts or different ideas of ourselves. And what I mean by that is we had a different sense of ourself depending on the context. Right. There was the work self and there was the family self and there was church self. So you behaved and thought in a certain way when you’re at work compared with your family, then when you’re at church. And the Internet has pretty much eliminated those barriers. Like, it’s all there. Your work self, your church self, your family self. It’s all there. What have been the consequences of that you think? Nicholas Carr: Yeah, so. And this is something that, to go back to Charles Horton Cooley, where we started, he talks about this, that you have different selves for different audiences. And many, many writers, sociologists and other writers throughout the 20th century, you know, talked about this. And if you look at it from one way, you can think, oh, that’s an indication that we lack integrity, that we’re constantly changing how we present ourselves, depending if we’re with our family or with friends or with our work colleagues and stuff. But I take a different view. I think they’re all expressions of ourselves. But actually, you can look at it as this is our effort to accommodate ourselves to other people and other settings. So it’s not a loss of integrity when we go through this. It’s kind of a expansion of the orbit, the social orbit, that we’re in. And this was very much tied in the past to the fact that we socialized in our bodies. And what that meant is you could… When you went to school, say you were in a particular place at a particular time, and you were interacting with people in a particular way. And then you’d leave and you might go home, and there’d be a gap between those two events, and you’d go home and you’d be with your parents, and you’d talk in a different way, and you’d act in a different way. And so in this, defined our social lives, they very much took place in different places at different times, and there were gaps between them when you actually weren’t socializing. So you could, you know, get in touch with your own thoughts. You could follow your own train of thought. You could think about what just happened and kind of synthesize it into your experience. Those kind of spatial and temporal boundaries of our social lives have disappeared online. You know, everybody’s there all the time. You can use Snapchat to manage your audience. So it’s not like you’re talking to everybody all at once. But because we have all these social media platforms and group texts and other texts and emails going, there’s no longer the ability to distinguish among different social experiences and social events. And it all becomes a jumble, which becomes very disorienting and also, you know, breeds a lot of anxiety, I think. But even more so, we’ve lost those gaps between social events. Where there weren’t people around that we knew and were talking to and shaping ourselves to fit them. Those are all gone because if you have your phone, you can socialize all the time, even when you’re alone. And that’s what people do. There’s a writer from, I think, the 1980s or something called Joshua Meyerowitz who talked about the isolation of different social events and the gaps between them as providing this kind of psychological shock absorber that meant we weren’t overwhelmed by the need to socialize all the time with lots of different people and adapt ourselves to all these different people. But we could do it kind of in a segregated, deliberate way. And I think we’ve lost our shock absorber. And that’s one of the reasons that I think people often behave in kind of strange, antagonistic ways when they’re online, because they’ve lost the ability to kind of think about who they’re with at the moment, think about what the other people are thinking, shape their own behavior to that. We simply can’t do that anymore because everybody’s out there all the time. Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s made it harder to order ourselves or create a self. And because we’re not ordered, kind of act disorderedly. There’s no self, basically. Nicholas Carr: Right. Mark Zuckerberg once said when he was talking about Facebook that on Facebook, you can’t have multiple selves. You have to have just one self ’cause everybody’s seeing you at the same time. And he thought that was a great thing, that gave us all integrity. But I think it’s exactly the opposite, because shaping yourself to different social situations doesn’t mean you lack integrity. It means you have a consciousness of different people in different social situations, and you adapt to them, and that actually turns out to be a good thing. Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about a lot of the ill consequences of too much communication. So what do we do about that? Today all of our work lives and social lives are done via digital devices, it seems. And so opting out of that would basically mean you have to opt out of large swaths of life. So what can we do to sort of mitigate the contamination of the superbloom effect of online communication? Nicholas Carr: Well, it’s difficult, as all of us who have tried know, because society really has reshaped itself at this point to the Internet. It’s hard to do anything without pulling out your phone or being online in one way or another. So backing away, you know, not cutting yourself off, but even backing away a bit is gonna entail sacrifices. You know, people will resent you if you respond to their messages less quickly or if you comment on their Instagram posts less quickly or whatever. So I wanna start by stressing the fact that, you know, you can’t do this without sacrifices. But I do think the sacrifices in the long run are probably worth it because they’ll ultimately make your life richer and more fulfilling. So, you know, if I was gonna give advice or a way to think about this, I’d go back to something old and simple. Which is that you should always use the right tool for the job. You know, my father used to tell me that when I was trying to do something haphazardly and, you know, using a screwdriver when I should have used a wrench or whatever. You know, always use the right tool for the job. Because our computers and our phones and digital media can do everything for us. Or can be a tool for doing pretty much everything, particularly in our social lives. And it’s a very efficient tool. We’ve kind of come to the belief that, oh, it’s kind of the Swiss army knife or the Leatherman tool that we can use for everything in terms of gathering information, sharing our thoughts, communicating with others, building relationship groups. And I think it’s actually really, really bad. A really bad tool for a lot of that. I think it’s a bad tool for conversing with other people, particularly people who are close to us. I think it’s a bad tool for gathering information and gathering news, and certainly a bad tool for thinking deeply about things. So if we can step back and say, you know, what is this tool actually good for? And certainly it’s good for a lot of things. You know, I’m a big fan of computers, though I’m not a big fan of digital media. But also appreciate that, you know, it’s not a great tool for socializing. It’s actually better and more fulfilling for yourself and for the other person to sit down and write somebody a letter, something we almost never think about doing anymore than jotting down, you know, a sloppy text and sending it off, that is gonna be basically meaningless to that other person. Or it’s better to sit down and have a conversation without also glancing at your phone all the time. It’s gonna be more fulfilling. You know, it may even make sense to subscribe to a print newspaper or some print magazine so you can get them and you can sit down with them and actually go through them quietly and carefully without being bombarded by other things on the screen. So if we step back and kind of realize that, you know, our phones and digital media are good for some things, but they’re really bad for other things and we just use them for other things because it’s quick and efficient and easy, then I think we might be able as individuals at least, I’m not sure about as a society, as individuals at least make better decisions about how we live our day to day lives and kind of realize that, you know, we need to set the phone or the computer aside for lots of things we do, particularly of a social nature. Brett McKay: Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Nicholas Carr: Well, I have a website, nicholascarr.com and the book is called Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. And I also have a new substack called newcartographies.com where I fairly frequently post short essays, short articles. So any and all of those places, if you wanna learn more, are good places to go. Brett McKay: Yeah, I subscribe to newcartographies. I really enjoy it. So I encourage people to do that. Well, Nick Carr, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Nicholas Carr: Thanks Brett. It was a great pleasure to be back on the show. Brett McKay: My guest here is Nicholas Carr. He’s the author of the book Superbloom. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You find more information about his work at his website, nicholascarr.com also check out our show notes at aom.is/communication, 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 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. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you have heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that “that’s just the way things are.” My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again. Dan Heath is a bestselling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working . Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points — places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need “to go and see the work,” why meaningful change requires “restacking resources,” how short, focused “bursts” of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective, and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships, and family. Resources Related to the Podcast Dan’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #591 — Solve Problems Before They Become Problems AoM Article: You Need a Reset Day AoM Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck YouTube video: Spotify Engineering Culture Connect With Dan Heath Dan’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 Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people get stuck in their job or personal life, the common response is to either work harder or shrug and accept that that’s just the way things are. My guest today has a much better solution to getting moving and making progress again. Dan Heath is a best selling author whose latest book is Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working. Today on the show, Dan shares how to escape from ineffective systems and the inertia of continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done by pressing on leverage points, places where a little bit of effort yields disproportionate returns. Dan explains why you need to go and see the work, why meaningful change requires restacking resources, how short focused bursts of effort often accomplish more than prolonged campaigns, how sometimes being inefficient can actually make us more effective and more. Along the way, Dan shares plenty of stories and examples that illustrate how to implement these principles into your work, relationships and family. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/leverage. All right, Dan Heath, welcome back to the show. Dan Heath: Hey, thanks for having me back, Brett. Brett McKay: So last time we had you on, we were talking about your book, Upstream. This was right at the start of the pandemic. You got a new book out called Reset, which is all about how to solve problems that seem like are unsolvable. And you start out the book talking about how just a regular old trip through a Chick-fil-A drive-thru inspired you, basically inspired you to write this book. So what happened in that Chick-fil-A drive-thru? Yeah. Dan Heath: So let me take you back in time. It was, it was pandemic era. I had been sent out to fetch Chick-fil-A for the family. I’ve got two young girls and they eat about eight different foods and, and one of them is Chick-fil-A. So I log a lot of visits there. But this particular night, it was terrifying what I saw when I arrived because it was probably the longest line I’ve ever in my life seen at a drive-thru. I mean, a minimum of 50 cars, like spilling out onto the feeder road that approached the franchise. And oh, I was just… My soul was crushed because I hate long lines. And I started trying to make up lies to tell my wife or why I came back without nuggets and eventually put on my big boy pants, got in line and what happened next completely flipped my mindset because this line was just insanely operationally sophisticated. It just crept along steadily like one of those automatic car washes that you get pulled through. And by the time I finished, which took less than 15 minutes, I was totally captivated and I resolved to go and investigate this drive-thru later. And a couple of days after that, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about this drive-thru because the core mystery was we have this idea that in the business world, when one person’s better at something than somebody else, everybody else catches on and copies them and the advantage is eroded away. That’s competitive markets. And meanwhile, Chick-fil-A is doing the same thing that a dozen or more other national franchises are trying to do, but they consistently do it better for a long period of time. And why? Like, what is it that they’re so good at? And so that became kind of the founding question of this book is how do you run things better? And then we can get back to Chick-fil-A later and kind of geek out about the fast food. But as I got into the research and probably a year in, I realized it’s not so much how do you run things better that was appealing to me. It was more like, how do you get out of a bad equilibrium? Like, if you’re Arby’s and you don’t do majestic clockworks of drive-thrus and you aspire to that, how could you? How do you get out of a stuck place and start moving in a positive direction? And that’s when this book really took off. Brett McKay: How is this book a continuation of your previous work in Upstream? Dan Heath: So Upstream was about how do we get ahead of problems? How do we prevent problems before they happen? This book is more about, okay, you’re in a mediocre place. It’s not even an emergency. It’s just like, I don’t like where I am. I aspire to more, how do I get out of that rut? So they’re different in framing, but I’ll tell you one point that they have in common is a focus on leverage points. Leverage points being places where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so in Upstream, we were looking for leverage points like, where can you poke in a complex system to try to prevent problems? In this book, leverage points is actually one of the most important concepts because it’s to say, when you’re stuck, you can’t change everything at once. You’ve got to kind of place your bet in wise places. And so literally half the book is about where do you go looking to find these magical leverage points where a little bit goes a long way. Brett McKay: And we’re going to talk about some of those leverage points today, but kind of give us an idea of some of the problems that you encountered as you’re researching this book that people find themselves in or groups or organizations where it seems like, Man, this is a big problem. We can’t solve this. It’s always been this way. It’ll always be this way. What are some examples? Dan Heath: The very first story is about the Northwestern Memorial Hospital receiving area. So this is the part of the hospital that takes in all the packages coming into the hospital and gets them to their ultimate destination. And several years ago, they were in a situation where it was taking them an average of three days to get packages delivered within the hospital, which just blew my mind, right? A medicine or some surgical gloves might get across the country via FedEx or UPS or whatever. And then to get from the basement of the hospital to the third floor might take another three days. But here’s what’s interesting about this. This equilibrium had persisted for so long. It’s like there were a bunch of people in the receiving area, been working there five, 10, 20 years, even 30 years, and that was just the norm. They came to work, they worked a hard day. None of these people were lazy. None of these people were ignorant. They came to work, they did their job, they went home, and it took three days. And so after a while, you just kind of shrug your shoulders and say, well, that’s just what it takes. And that’s what I mean by being stuck. There’s a quote that has just stuck in my brain from this healthcare expert named Paul Batalden who said every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. And I think that is such a brilliant quote because it makes it obvious like if you’re in this receiving area, you’re not going to solve this by working a little harder, staying 20 minutes later, working more frantically during the day. This is a systemic problem. You have unwittingly designed a system that delivers packages in three days. And if you aspire to different and better results, you’ve got to start tinkering with the system. Brett McKay: I’m sure everyone who’s listening to this probably think of something like that in their own work where it’s like, Man, this thing is terrible, but we just kind of shrug our shoulders. That’s the way it is. And we also talk about this doesn’t just happen in businesses or in bureaucracies. It can actually… This whole getting stuck can happen in a relationship, a marriage, or a family. Dan Heath: Absolutely. And one of the examples I came across was from this couples therapist named Laura Heck. And I think this is a great symbol of stuckness. Just imagine her situation. So every day she looks at her calendar and it’s full of meetings with couples who are at the lowest ebb in their relationship. And there is so much that is out of your control as a therapist, right? I mean, essentially everything is out of your control. The history of the relationship, their current conflicts, their own childhoods, not to mention the fact that you might only have their attention for one hour out of the 168 hours every week. And so in a situation like that, your only hope is to look for a leverage point, some little thing that can have disproportionately positive consequences. So Laura Heck gave me this beautiful example of something that she says she does with her clients. She calls it sticky note appreciations. And the idea is that in the bathroom, she knows you’re going to brush your teeth twice a day. And so you put a Post it notepad right by your toothbrush holder. And while you’re brushing your teeth, you jot out some kind of compliment for your partner. Just something quick. You write it out while you’re brushing your teeth, you put it on the mirror for your partner to find. So later they come in the bathroom to brush their teeth and they see, Thanks for taking the time to talk with John about college. He really admires you and appreciates your calmness or whatever. And so let’s just think about this on a couple of levels. So the first level is just who doesn’t like to get a compliment in life, right? So it’s fun to come in the bathroom and see something nice about yourself on the mirror on a Post it note. But Laura Heck told me that the real significance of this is actually broader. She said, what I’m trying to train these couples to do is to see their partner in a new way. You know, that by the time they come to me, they’re so used to just seeing the negative, what they don’t like, what annoys them, what makes them angry. And I need them to take off those glasses and put on a new set of glasses where you’re scanning for the positive. And so that just blew my mind when I heard it, because I thought, what a brilliant way to use just a little bit of time, a little bit of effort to do something that has importance beyond that effort, because if you can rewire the way you’re seeing your partner, like maybe that’s the first ray of hope that you can get your relationship back to the way it was. Brett McKay: Right. It was a leverage point, right? Dan Heath: Precisely. Brett McKay: Little effort, but huge ROI. Let’s talk about some more of these leverage points that you discovered in the research of this book and helping people and groups get unstuck. One of them, the first one you talk about is the leverage point of go and see the work. What do you mean by that? ‘Cause I think a lot of people, if they’re in a system that’s stuck, they think, well, of course I know how the thing works. I’m in it every day. Why do I need to go and see the work? Dan Heath: So this is a phrase, go and see the work that I took from Nelson Repenning, he’s an MIT professor. And the idea is a lot of times we are dealing with our work at some kind of remove. Like if you’re a leader maybe you’re managing by state… Financial statements or reports or memos. If you’re a principal, you might stay in your home office. And over time we can kind of lose touch with the ground reality of our work. So I’ll give you an example from Repenning and some colleagues. They told the story of this corrugated box factory. And the owner of the factory was concerned because paper losses had been higher during production than competitors in the industry, which of course costed him money. And so he, inspired by Repenning’s imperative to go and see the work, he goes out and he just starts walking the halls in the factory and kind of following through production. He notices that they have a main corrugator machine, sort of like the most expensive piece of capital equipment in the factory that was stopped every day around lunchtime. And he was puzzled by that because the startup time and the wind down time ended up wasting some paper. And so he started asking some questions. It turns out the history was years prior there had been some instability in the power provided by the local utility. And so the manager at that time had kind of wisely started preemptively unplugging the corrugator machine at lunchtime, which was seemingly the time with the most unstable power. And the idea was, we’re going to preserve the lifespan of the machine because it’s not good for the machine to have this weird erratic power. Well, in the years since, the utility had long since fixed this problem, but it had become entrenched as a habit in the factory. Like people had long since forgotten the original intent of this. And it just became one of a hundred things that you have to do every day at the factory. It’s like you unlock the door doors, you come in, you flip on the lights, and at lunchtime, you shut down the corrugator machine. And that’s an example of the kind of thing that you see when you go and see the work. And Repenning, he says you might hear a story like that and think, Well, that’s just dumb. Of course, if you are doing dumb stuff, you can find it and stamp it out. But his quote stuck with me. He said, if you aren’t embarrassed by what you find when you go and see the work, you probably aren’t looking closely enough. Like, all of us probably have some equivalent to that corrugator machine story in our work or in our life. Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. So go and see the work. So if you’re… You have a problem, you’re like, what is going on here? Like, why is this even a problem? Going back to that idea, the results we get are due to the system that we have. You have to actually go and see, Okay, what is causing? Like, there’s something in this… The way things are organized currently that’s spitting out this system that. It might not be obvious, but if I get down there on the front lines and talk to people who are in the front lines, I can actually figure out, Oh, this is why they’re doing it this way. Maybe if we make this small change, we can solve the problem. Dan Heath: That’s right. I think this is a principle that really is most valuable when there’s some distance between you and the actual work product. Like in a relationship, it really doesn’t make sense. Like, how do I go and see the work with my wife? We’re in a relationship, we’re in it. But in the factory it’s easy to be the boss and stay in your boss’ office the whole day and kind of lose track of what’s going on on the factory floor. Or another example that I gave was from a vice principal who decided to shadow a 9th grader all day from when the 9th grader arrived at school to PE like, ate lunch with them in the cafeteria, did the assignments that he was doing sitting beside him in math class. And that’s something that’s uncommon, right? I mean, you might think, Well, how could a vice principal not know what’s going on at school? But that’s not quite fair. Because the stuff that gets to a vice principal’s desk is plenty to fill up their day. It’s discipline issues, it’s administrative issues, it’s teacher evaluations. And you could go years easily without ever sitting next to a student in class. It took an unnatural act to make that possible. But that one day of just shadowing the student kind of unlocked all these ideas and inspirations for action. Brett McKay: Well, going back to relationships, that’s one of the roles if therapists can play. You can add that distance. Maybe the therapist, in interacting with the couple can say, Oh, my gosh. You guys are doing this. You might not even know it. So if you want to see the work with your relationship, maybe go to a counselor or a therapist. Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s interesting, actually, that to sort of go and see the work, you have to bring in someone else to see it, because it’s almost like you’ve lost perspective from the inside. Brett McKay: Yeah. Another leverage point is consider the goal of the goal. What do you mean by that? Dan Heath: So we’re so used to setting goals in organizations. I mean, goals are sort of like the language of organizations, that goals can actually take on a life of their own, and we can think we’re succeeding even though we’re actually failing. Let me give you an example. I met this guy named Ryan Davidson who told me about his experience buying a truck. He bought a ram truck. He’d been saving up for it. So he buys the truck. He decides to take the truck camping its first weekend away. And sort of a couple days after he buys this truck, the survey shakedown begins, where people from the dealership just start hounding him to fill out a survey. Probably we’ve all had this experience in some domain or another. And not only are they trying to get him to fill out the survey, they’re kind of like pestering to give them really good scores. We would really appreciate your positive scores, underlined, bolded, on the survey. And so probably five different people from the dealership reach out to him multiple times over a period of two weeks and in multiple media, on the phone, via text message, via email. And so Ryan Davidson eventually realizes, like, I’m never going to be able to live a normal life until I fill out this survey. And so he takes the time, fills it out, and he says he gives them pretty much an A minus level rating. He was generally okay with the experience, but thought that some things could have been better. And he sends off the survey and clicks submit. Never hears from anyone again about the survey. After all the pestering, just the line goes dead. Except that his sales rep starts texting him, complaining about not having been given all 10 out of 10s on the survey. And so it’s just kind of this silly charade that’s taking place that, if you think about it, probably had a really good origin. Like, at some point, some of the leaders at Ram thought, Hey, we would like our customers, when they buy trucks from us, to have a good experience. Like, so far, so good. Okay, well, how are we going to know if we’re succeeding at that? Well, let’s give a survey after people buy a car. Let’s ask them some questions and see how they respond. Okay, that’s even better. Now we have a way of diagnosing whether we’re succeeding or not. Okay, so you start collecting the survey. Well, then you start to get uncomfortable because some of your dealerships aren’t getting very good scores. And so you think, Well, gosh, we gotta boost those scores. And so it becomes a goal to boost the scores. You start layering on incentives and potential punishments if the scores don’t improve. And all of a sudden, the survey, which was supposed to be a diagnostic, becomes its own target. In other words, my contention is the people at this dealership that Davidson went to actually didn’t care at all what the experience was like. All that they cared about was that he bubbled in tens on this survey that they sent. That was what they cared about because that was what their incentives were yoked to. And so it becomes like this kind of perversion. And that’s what I mean by the goal of the goal is we can’t be content in setting and chasing goals. We have to ask, what’s the goal of the goal? Like, in this dealership example, why is it important that we get good scores on these customer surveys? Well, because we actually care ultimately about whether people had a good experience with us, would tell their friends, would come back and so forth. Brett McKay: I think this can happen in groups, like churches. You see like a church. Maybe they want to start a program of some sort for fellowship or spiritual formation. But then the program becomes the focus, and there’s all this. It becomes a problem. It’s not implemented the right way. No one’s coming to the thing. There’s resentment that builds up because people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. And then you have to step back. It’s like, Wait, why are we doing this thing anyways? The original goal was maybe some fellowship enrich people’s lives. But here we are talking about just dumb Stuff for this dumb program. And so asking yourself… It’s actually Richard Rohr. He’s a monk. He’s a father. Richard Rohr. He has this phrase. He says to ask yourself, what are we really doing when we are doing what we are doing? Dan Heath: Ooh, that’s good. Brett McKay: Yeah. Dan Heath: Yeah, that’s very, very goal of the goal friendly. Brett McKay: Yeah. I think remembering or thinking about the goal of the goal can also keep you from goal lock. So you might figure out a better way to achieve your original aim doing something else. So, for example, let’s say you’re trying to make friends, but you’re finding that hosting dinner parties, it just stresses you out. All right, that’s fine. Maybe you could just have people over for dessert and games instead. There’s more than one way to skin a cat when you’re achieving your goals. Another leverage point is to focus on what’s working in a system or organization to find a leverage point. What does that look like? Dan Heath: This is the notion of studying bright spots, which I think is a really powerful idea. It’s actually an idea that my brother Chip and I wrote about in a previous book called Switch, and it’s kind of getting its second wind in this book. So the idea is very simple. It’s to say so often in life, our attention is grabbed by what’s not working. And if you think about employee engagement, for instance, is something a lot of businesses and organizations are thinking about. How do you keep your employees happy? How do you keep them around? And so you imagine you get a survey back, a pulse survey from your employees. And of course, every survey ever commissioned has different results. Some people are unhappy, some people are in the middle, Some people are happy. And your attention immediately gravitates towards the employees who are unhappy. And what studying bright spots says is, why don’t you spend some time trying to understand the other side of the spectrum. For the employees who are really psyched to come to work every day, why? What are they so jazzed about? What’s keeping them happy? What’s giving them a sense of purpose? Because if you can understand that, it gives you the hope of reproducing that for everyone. Could you boost everybody’s engagement by harvesting and kind of replicating the factors that are making your most satisfied employees that way? And that’s the spirit of studying bright spots is sometimes we can find leverage points by just understanding at a deeper level the things that we’re already doing that we’re succeeding at. Brett McKay: I was thinking about how we can apply this to our family life. My kids like a lot of siblings. They bicker a lot and it’s annoying. [0:22:11.8] ____ always like, yeah, just leave your sister alone. Leave your brother. But every now and then they have moments where they don’t. It’s just awesome. It’s almost like a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s like, wow, this is great. So I think finding the bright spots would be like, okay, what’s going on? When they’re just like super kind and nice to each other and not bickering, like, what happened? And how can we get more of that? Dan Heath: That is exactly the spirit. And in fact, this is actually kind of a methodology used in a branch of therapy called Solutions Focused Therapy. In traditional therapy, it’s very, very problem driven. Like, let’s get to the source of the problem, the root. And in Solutions Focused therapy, they basically don’t care about the problems. They want you to solve them, but they don’t want to kind of wallow in them. And so in the book, I shared this case from a therapist named John J. Murphy. He’s like a giant in the field. And he tells the story of this woman who comes. She’s been having a lot of behavioral issues with her daughter and she’s been diagnosed with ADHD. And there’s just a lot of tension. They’re reluctant to put her on medication. And so they end up talking about the morning, which seems to be like the crux of where things really can boil over sometimes. And this mother said sometimes I end up yelling and I feel terrible about myself. When I act out, it makes her act out. And so they start thinking about the bright spots. And so Murphy, the counselor is like, Well, when does this not happen? And the mom starts thinking, she says sometimes when I have a little more time in the morning and I could just have a cup of coffee and be in my own brain, it’s like it kind of steals me in a way where I can absorb more and I don’t immediately react. And then when I don’t react, my daughter doesn’t react. And so it’s almost becomes this kind of self reinforcing positive system. And so Murphy kind of praised it and he said, well, despite all the things that are going on, despite all the stresses in your life, you’ve already figured out a way to manage this. Well, do you think we could figure out a way to replicate your own success? And so the woman kind of thinks about it she realizes, Hey, the days when I wake up earlier, the days when I don’t stay up late with my husband and maybe I don’t have too many drinks. And so she goes home and after one therapy session, it’s like she kind of cracks this system where she just gets up 15 or 20 minutes early, has a little bit of me time, and that prepares her for the day. And I just love stories like that because it’s like the seeds of success were already there in her life and it just took someone to kind of point them out and say, even if you’re failing sometimes, even if you’re failing a lot of the time, you’re not always failing, you’re succeeding sometimes. And what explains your success and can you do more of it? Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, I want to talk about Chick-fil-A because like you, I’m always impressed every time I go through the drive-thru because it’s just so efficient. And use Chick-fil-A to talk about the leverage point of constraints. Tell us about that. Dan Heath: So constraints are the things that are holding you back, the bottlenecks, the limiting factors. And so when we’re looking for leverage points we want to find somewhere where a little bit of work goes a long way. Looking at a constraint can be really enlightening because if you can kind of whittle down the number one thing that’s holding you back, that can be magical. And to me, the Chick-fil-A drive-thru is a kind of brilliant example of this, because the guy that ran the drive-thru I talked about earlier, a guy named Tony Fernandez, is just a genius at managing constraints. This drive-thru I’m talking about can process 400 cars in an hour. I mean, that’s a car every nine seconds. Brett McKay: Wow. Dan Heath: Which is just like Olympic level fast food drive-thru. And he thinks very explicitly about the constraints. He says one of the first things we realized was that the menu board the thing where you drive up and you look at the menu, is often a constraint. And virtually all fast food places have one menu board and some of the busy ones have two with two lanes. He said, we just thought, why do we need a menu board? I mean, Chick-fil-A menu, it’s like there’s nuggets and fries. How hard is it? And so they just literally eliminated the menu board and they pushed employees into the parking lot with iPads to take your order at your window. And the beautiful thing about that is where before you were constrained with one path to ordering, or maybe two with the two menu board system, now they can have five people in the parking lot at the same time. And when they’re not busy, they can scale it back to one person in the parking lot. And so now you have eliminated the constraint of the ordering. But notice, and this is an important theme is you always have a constraint. It’s not like you just fix it and poof, it’s gone. No, what happens is when you eliminate one constraint, you’ve made the system better and the constraint hops somewhere else. So if you’ve got five people taking orders on iPads in the parking lot, like, orders are flooding into the kitchen, and then these poor people have to cook up massive batches of nuggets and fries. And so now the kitchen’s the bottleneck. And so you have to staff up in the kitchen and create better systems so they can keep up. Well, once they’re on par, then maybe the bottleneck pops to what they call meal assembly, which is the people that bag and box and pour your drinks and so forth. And so he just had a very disciplined approach to this fast food flow problem, which is to just chase one constraint at a time. And each time he eliminated one constraint, the system improved, and then it hopped to the next. And then he did it again and again and again. Brett McKay: So those are some leverage points. There’s other ones you talk about in the book. After leverage points, you recommend people start doing what’s called restacking resources. What do you mean by that? Dan Heath: Restacking resource just says leverage points is kind of about where do you aim? We’re trying to get unstuck. I’m saying you can’t fix everything at once. You got to aim. You got to find a place where a little bit goes a long way. Okay, now that you’ve done that, you’ve got to find some fuel. You’ve got to have a way to push on the leverage point. And so for that, you need resources. That’s what I mean by restacking resources. Like, a lot of times, especially in organizations, when people start talking about change, it’s like one more thing to add to the pile. It’s like we’re going to do everything we did yesterday and this new thing that the boss is excited about. But one of the themes in the book is that change is not about ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. So it’s like if something has become a priority, if we Want to push toward that new priority, we’ve got to give somewhere else. I mean, we’re constrained to what we have, probably. There’s not just like giant satchels of free cash in the supply cabinet that we can tap or there’s not an army of idle employees that we can bring to bear. We’ve got to figure out how to reconfigure what we have to push in that new direction. That’s what I mean by restack resources. Brett McKay: Gotcha. And the first way you recommend people restack resources to start improving things is to begin your action plan, or maybe the action plan on leveraging that leverage point with a burst. And you mentioned earlier, a lot of people, when they have a problem, one of their first instincts is just to work harder. If we just work harder, we’ll solve it. How is doing a burst, which you describe as a focused output of energy, different from the standard way of working hard? Dan Heath: That’s a great question. So I think the notion of a burst is not necessarily work harder, it’s like work denser. What I mean is, if you’ve got some new priority, if you can work on it for 30 focused hours on that priority in one week, my contention is that’s probably going to be the equivalent of 100 hours that you scattered and fragmented across six months. So it’s like you want to push hard in a concentrated way, in a collaborative way, all at once maybe leaving other things on the wayside to focus on the new priority. It’s almost like if you’ve ever pushed up a stuck window, like the amount of effort to get the window moving at all, it’s pretty dramatic. And then once it starts moving, it becomes a lot easier to keep it moving. That’s the idea of the burst. Brett McKay: And one thing it does, too. There’s a psychological impact, right? You actually start seeing some progress. You’re like, Oh, maybe this problem is actually solvable. So that initial burst creates sort of like a flywheel of motivation. Dan Heath: Well said. And it reminds me, I met this guy, Greg McLawsen, who talked about how sometimes actually being inefficient can make us more effective. He gave an example of. He was working on a gardening project for his wife. I think I shouldn’t call it a project. They were just trying to add some irrigation to their family garden or whatever. And he was put in charge of the run to Home Depot. And he had this great line. He said, The immutable law of the universe is that no project can ever be completed with one trip to Home Depot. It’s like, even if you go in search of one 60 watt light bulb, when you get home, inevitably you discover, Oh, actually, it was supposed to be a 59 watt light bulb. And you have to go back. And so this proves true for him. He ends up with the wrong splitter part for the irrigation system or whatever. And he’s an attorney. And so he said in his mind the efficient thing to do would be wait for the next trip to Home Depot, which would be in a week or a couple of weeks or whatever, and just add it to the list rather than make a special trip for this $5 part. And he was thinking in his mind it’s going to cost me $200 in billable hours and $6 in gas to go get this $5 part. Like, that’s crazy. But then he said. It’s not crazy, because the definition of success to his wife is, I can water the plants. And it doesn’t matter that we’re 90% there, absent one part, 100% is what matters. And so he got right back in his car, went to Home Depot, got the part, and worked to completion. And he said it may have been inefficient, but it was effective. And he said it made him realize that he was doing some similar things in his law firm, where in the guise of efficiency, maybe he would get a bunch of documents to 90%, but 90% doesn’t mean anything. You haven’t solved problems for clients. You haven’t been able to bill for it because it’s not done. And so he started trying to kind of reconceptualize his work with effectiveness as the goal instead of efficiency. And that’s your point about how this burst of effort can get us to completion. It’s like you want the burst to get the irrigation system done, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s efficient or not. What matters is, can you water the plants? Brett McKay: Yeah. And in this chapter, you talk about scrum. And in scrum, they use sprints, which is basically a burst. And what you’re doing with these bursts or these sprints is like you’re not working hard all the time. You do some planning, and then you schedule an intense amount of activity. It’s dense. Then you take another break, recalibrate, see what needs to be done, and then you start up again so you have a clear goal which you’re trying to achieve. And then you work hard for a few hours and then you’re done. That’s it. Dan Heath: And it’s an antidote to anybody who works in a large organization knows this problem of just how mind numbing it can be to get something changed because you’re working through meetings and then to align calendars, you can’t meet until two weeks from now. And then you start an email chain, and the email chain starts to spiral outward with more and more people on it. And then it’s like something that you all could have resolved if you’d been in the same room and just put your heads together and done the work. Not talked about it, but done the work for eight hours in the same room. Like all of a sudden it can take six months just because of asynchronous delays and so forth. And so I think that’s the power of a burst is it may be unnatural to try to clear your calendars and kind of get in the same room to work on the same problem, but boy, does it pay off down the road. Brett McKay: Another way to restock resources is to recycle waste. And I think a lot of people understand what waste is in a factory setting. So you gave that example of the box factory. They had a lot of waste there. So if you have a lot of leftover material making a widget, that’s widget, that’s waste. But let’s talk about how does waste appear in organizations not creating widgets or even in families? What does that look like? Dan Heath: So I want to share the kind of operational definition of waste I’m using in the book, which is taken from this guy named Taiichi Ono, who was one of the godfathers of the Toyota production system. So if you’ve ever intersected with people obsessed about operations, they all talk about the Toyota production system. Brett McKay: Six Sigma Black Belt. Dan Heath: Six Sigma. Yeah, exactly. So the definition, waste is any activity that doesn’t add value for the customer, which I think is a really interesting thing to try to wrap your brain around. Like that receiving area we’ve talked about a couple of times. Here’s a classic example. So nurses in the hospital would get frustrated. They ordered some medicine, hasn’t shown up. They would call the receiving area and there was a red phone in the receiving area. Somebody would have to pick up, deal with the nurse’s complaint. They’d have to go rushing around looking for the box, seeing if they had it, when was it going to be delivered. And so every one of those answered calls to the Red phone is waste. Even if the person handling the inquiry did it politely, even if they did it efficiently, it was waste because the nurse never wanted to have to call to check on the package. It did not add value for the customer. And when you start to think about it that way, you realize if you can change the way you work every time the nurse doesn’t have to call, that puts 15 minutes back in your pocket of the time you spent kind of noodling around looking for the package. So, anyway, I kind of got into the waste literature, and, yes, there is such a thing. And it made me start thinking about family life, and I mentioned my girls. And so every morning getting ready for school is like a thing. It’s just like a mother load of waste. All the things that we do and the pestering. And one kind of recurring source of pain was just shoes and socks. You’d be able to find one shoe. Where’s the other shoe? Oh it’s by the front door. And, okay, we got the shoes, but now wear socks. You got to go back upstairs and get the socks. And. And so my wife has this kind of stroke of genius. We have this giant drawer by the back door where we go out to walk to school. And she just piled all of their shoes, every pair and all of their socks into this drawer. And so that’s where they live, and they never get beyond that room. So, number one, we always know where they are. And number two, it had these kind of unanticipated benefits of, well, now they take their shoes and socks off by the back door, and so they don’t track dirt through the house. And I just had to smile at how with this kind of one idea, we’ve eliminated this whole source of nagging and fussing and rushing around the house. And now we can use our time like arguing about whether you can eat the brown spot on the waffle or not. So it’s been a real breakthrough for us. Brett McKay: Right. Your wife’s got a Six Sigma Black Belt in home management. Dan Heath: Exactly, exactly. Brett McKay: I love it. Dan Heath: By the way, I was remembering last time we talked, you had a great personal burst thing of the reset day. Brett McKay: Oh, the reset. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Dan Heath: If you haven’t talked about that in a while, you should share that with your listeners, because that’s a really, really good example. Brett McKay: Yeah, we wrote an article about that, and I’ll put it in the show notes. So a reset day is. It’s basically a day we set aside. We’re not working. The kids are at school, so they’re not in our business. And my wife and I will just get done all the life admin that’s been piling up. So paying bills, doing retirement stuff or estate planning, planning vacations. All that stuff that just kind of gets pushed back and back. So we’ll just dedicate a day and get all of it done. And then it feels great to be done with it. Dan Heath: That’s so good. I had a reader that talked about using a life crap month. I think yours is even better because it’s more punchy and focused, but it was exactly the kind of stuff you’re talking about. It’s like updating the wills and making sure the address on your life insurance policy is updated and all the stuff that’s just like pulling teeth day to day. And they said by the end of the month, it’s just like they felt like they were on cloud nine. They just felt like such effective adults having checked all these boxes that had gone unchecked for so long. Brett McKay: Yeah, no, I highly recommend it. Another thing you talk about is if you have a problem that seems intractable, look for ways you can do less, but you also have to do more at the same time. What do you mean by that? Dan Heath: So this is back to the idea that change is not ‘and’ it’s ‘instead of’. And I had this very provocative conversation with this guy who’s a consultant. His name is David Philippi for the consultancy Strategex. And they’re kind of obsessed with the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule. 80% of your revenue might come from 20% of your customers. But one of the methodologies they use really stuck with me. So here’s what they do. They go into a client’s financials, and they try to isolate each client and figure out how profitable they were by client, which would seem obvious. I mean, you would like to know how profitable your different clients are, but it’s no trivial thing, because even if you know, like, well, I sent this many parts to this client and the parts cost this much. But you also have to balance in things like how much relationship time does this client eat up? Are they a needy client? Are they an easy client? Do they eat up a lot of support time? And so you kind of go through the ledger, try to come up with profitability by client, and then they force rank the clients from best to worst in terms of profitability. And Philippi said that in virtually every case, when they’ve done this. What they find is that your very best clients are under coddled and your worst clients are over coddled. Here’s an example of what he meant by that. He said repeatedly, they have found that the on time delivery record. So he works with a lot of manufacturers that are like shipping stuff out. The on time delivery record was better for the worst clients than it was for the best. And that just seems like impossible. How could you ever treat your best clients that way? But he said, what happens is a lot of times the worst clients are the ones that are buying like little nickel and dime stuff. Maybe it’s just one part that you have to stick in a box and ship out. And so it’s easy, it’s quick. And if your shipping department is incentivized, for instance, on percentage of on time deliveries, well, you can just nail those like simple ones, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and look like a genius. You’ve got a 96% on time rate, but meanwhile the 4% might have been like your very best customers who had complicated assemblies that took some time and took some planning. And so he kind of flips the lens and says, look, your best clients need to have a perfect on time rate every time, no matter what it means for the rest of the folks. So all that’s been about profitability so far, but let me kind of flip the script here. Imagine that same idea applied to almost anything in your life. It might be how you’re spending your time across projects. It might be relationships. Think about all the relationships you have in your life and imagine that you kind of ranked them according to the value and preciousness that they have for you. And so obviously probably your family’s at the very top of the list. And then if you zoom all the way to the bottom, it’s going to be maybe old friendships that have grown increasingly toxic or commitments that you made to some volunteer organization that just kind of gone sideways and feels like a waste of time or whatever. But we all have a ranking. We all have people who are more and less precious to us. And if you take this kind of logic and you think aren’t I probably under-coddling the people most precious to me with all this time and energy I’m expending on the people at the bottom of the ranking? And wouldn’t it be smarter to kind of steal from the over-coddled people at the bottom to give me more wherewithal, more availability to the people I care most about? What was really seductive about that logic to me is just to remind listeners where we are. We’re thinking about when you’re trying to push in a new direction. Where do you get the fuel to push? And if you think about this kind of over-coddled, under-coddled logic, you realize that’s where you get the resources is you steal from the over-coddled and give to the under-coddled. If that makes sense. Brett McKay: That makes perfect sense. So if someone’s feeling overwhelmed in their life, it’s usually because they have too many commitments, I think. Yeah, ranking things can be really useful and then focus more time. So you’re going to do less with the people that aren’t as important to you. So you can do more with the people that are important to you or do… Dan Heath: That’s it. Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that. Dan Heath: Exactly. Brett McKay: A lot of times when organizations or groups get stuck, the typical approach to solve the problem is there’ll be like a sort of top down command and control type dictating. So there’s a manager that says, Oh, here’s the problem. And then they tell individual employees, here’s what you’re going to do to solve the problem. But you argue that handing things off directly to individuals in the group and just letting them come up with solutions can actually speed up solutions to the problem. How so? Dan Heath: This is a concept that I call let people drive. And the idea is if you’re looking for fuel to push in a new direction, one of the best sources of fuel is motivation. And one of the most evergreen sources of motivation is autonomy. Like letting people drive, giving people some reins to act. I mean, there’s basically no high performing team in the world that is micromanaged. Navy Seals, Green Berets, not micromanaged. Like you’ve got to loosen the reins. But this can be counterintuitive in organizations because when things aren’t going well, a lot of times our instinct, as you said, is to kind of clamp down. I took inspiration from… There’s a great video. You can find this on YouTube. It’s from a consultant named Henrik Kniberg. And he talks about how Spotify organizes itself and he distinguishes autonomy from alignment. And he said you might start by thinking that these are kind of opposite ideas. Autonomy is like I can do what I want and alignment means I’m doing what everybody else is doing. But he says at Spotify they’re not in opposition. If you think about a two by two matrix, low autonomy and low alignment is the bad one. That’s like, it’s an ineffective culture. It’s like a call center. Everybody’s on their own. They’re not really collaborating, but they’re also being heavily micromanaged. Where we really want to be is in the high autonomy, high alignment, square of the two by two, which means we know what the vision is. Like Kniberg in his video says, management says we need a way to get across the river. That’s the strategic priority. Figure it out. That’s the autonomy piece. So we’re aligned on vision, but we trust our employees to figure out the methodology. And I think that’s a really enlightened way to look at it. Autonomy doesn’t mean, like, everybody just gets to do what they want willy nilly. Autonomy means we trust people enough to kind of let them figure things out. Brett McKay: Yeah, so it’s about giving people maybe some guardrails. Like here’s what we don’t want you to do. We definitely don’t want you doing this. But anything within those guardrails is free game. You can do it if it gets the job done. Dan Heath: That’s it. That’s it. And I find myself making this mistake all the time as a parent. It’s like even little dumb stuff like teaching kids how to use knives and cut up their food at dinner, and it’s like a hundred times out of a hundred, you’re going to be better at that than them. You know what I mean? And so, if you’re in a hurry or whatever, it’s like, Oh, just let me just do it. Let me just cut up your steak or whatever. But that robs them of autonomy. And it also kind of dooms you to being in the same role forevermore. Every time that you take some task back from them is a time that they haven’t built any personal capacity. Brett McKay: Well, let’s workshop this. Maybe you and I can figure this out. One thing I’ve been always getting on with my kids about is just keeping things tidy. They just kind of dump things off everywhere in the house. And you’re like, Hey, why is this here? And typically I actually just. I throw stuff away. If I see it on the floor for longer than 12 hours, I’m like, oh, it must be trash. It’s on the floor. Dan Heath: I like that. Brett McKay: I picked that up from my dad and my kids hate it. It’s not a good habit. But what can we do? How can we use this idea of giving maybe our kids autonomy to help us get the house tidy. Dan Heath: I’ll tell you a story I remember from years and years and years ago. So this woman emailed my brother and I and said she was in exactly the situation you’re in. She had a kid, and it would never… He liked to play with trucks. He was probably, I don’t know, seven or eight years old, maybe younger, loved to play with trucks, did not like to clean up the trucks. And so it became a recurring source of tension. And then she said one day, I just kind of… I just realized motivation is the game here. It’s not about instruction. It’s about, I have to figure out a way for him to want to do this. And so she said, I took an old bookcase, I took all the books off of it, and then we painted parking stripes on it together. And then I let him assign a parking space to every one of his trucks. And so he had some autonomy. And it’s like, Well, this one’s going to go here, and this one’s the prime spot. So this is where my best truck’s going to go. And then she said she never again mentioned the idea of cleaning up his room or cleaning up his truck. She said, have you parked your trucks yet? And it was like part of the play. And I think that’s kind of brilliant jiu jitsu is figuring out where’s the motivation here? Where does their motivation align with mine? And can I figure out a way to thread that needle so it’s not just my order and their compliance? Brett McKay: Well, Dan, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Dan Heath: Well, I have a website at danheath.com that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the book or my podcast or anything else. Brett McKay: Yeah, you do have a podcast. What’s your podcast about? Dan Heath: The podcast is called What It’s Like To Be. And the conceit is in every episode, I talk to someone from a different profession. So I’ve talked recently to a Christmas tree farmer, an Olympic bobsledder, a London cabbie, Secret Service agent, and more. Brett McKay: Sounds awesome. Well, Dan Heath, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Dan Heath: Hey, thanks a million, Brett. Brett McKay: My guest today was Dan Heath. He’s the author of the book Reset. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, danheath.com also check out our shownotes at aom.is/leverage, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this top. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net and 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. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others — maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words, such as “um” and “like,” talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras: “Slow down”; “Think about what you want to say.” But my guest would say that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body. Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life . Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises — from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth to throwing a ball against a wall — that will fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: Becoming Well-Spoken — How to Minimize Your Uhs and Ums AoM Podcast #698: The Secrets of Public Speaking From History’s Greatest Orators AoM Podcast #732: Tips From a Top TED Talker on How to Be Heard Connect With Michael Chad Hoeppner GK Training Don’t Say Um website Michael on LinkedIn Michael 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. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others, maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words such as um and like, talk too fast or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras. Slow down, think about what you wanna say. But my guest would say, that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker, comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body. Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises, from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth, throwing a ball against a wall. That’ll fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/um. All right. Michael Chad Hoeppner, welcome to the show. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Thank you so much. Brett McKay: So you are a communication coach. You help people improve their communication delivery. So you help people speak more clearly, more confidently, and with presence. You coached Andrew Yang, when he ran for president to improve his delivery. You also coach executives. You teach on the subject. I think when a lot of people think about public speaking or even just speaking on a first date, they’re getting ready for a first date. They’re often thinking about what they’re gonna say, they’re thinking about the content. But why do you think people should focus on the delivery as well? Michael Chad Hoeppner: There’s a few reasons. The first is every study ever done that looks at what matters more in terms of the impression you make on other people, validates delivery as the thing. But that’s just the first answer. The second answer, which I think is a much better one, is that I’m not even interested in debating or trying to weigh one versus the other, content versus delivery. What I’m always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life, which is the following drill. Hold up your hands as though you’re looking through some imaginary binoculars. If you hold your hands up like you’re looking through binoculars, you will see that your left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand like the outer half of a capital D. So your left hand stands for content. That’s the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer half of a capital D, and that stands for delivery. And that’s everything besides the words. Now, if you put your hands together, you’ll see that they create this reinforcing loop. And what many people don’t know and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the context you just mentioned, including first dates. Not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example of course, is if you build the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in, and therefore have the fuel to have vocal variety in your voice. And also avoid saying um, because in that silence you can’t say um, not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority. But in that gap, you’re giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen. So this is something that people do not understand about delivery, and they ignore it at their peril. And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it. Brett McKay: I’ve experienced that in my own life. I know whenever I feel I’m the most fluid and the most articulate with my speaking, it feels like I’m saying better stuff compared to when I’m not. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Exactly. And that’s not an accident, by the way. We also get trapped where we think delivery is a bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets taught, typically in a really reductive way. I’ll give you an example. We get told to make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Why? What if your thought is longer than 8 seconds or longer than 12 seconds even. Or shorter than 8 seconds I should say. Any of those things. And we get this coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us. But that’s an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication or eye contact and gestural ease and freedom and posture and enunciation, they are outputs. They come from focusing on the other person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you’ve discovered when you’re kind of in that flow state is exactly right. Brett McKay: Speaking of common advice that people get when they think about delivery, a lot of it’s particularly bad. It’s not very helpful, like you said, you gave the example of the one just then. But also there’s other advice about, well just don’t say um, or be more confident or don’t do this. And a lot of it’s just about thought suppression. It’s about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, let’s break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery is not just not helpful, it’s usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first, they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it’s utterly unactionable. And then they get a suggestion which is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. And I’ll walk you through this step by step. Let’s do one that’s very common, which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now, the typical advice they get, first of all is thought suppression, which is don’t rush. Okay, well, as soon as you hear a don’t, the first thing your brain is obligated to do, is to fixate on whatever comes after the don’t. I titled this book, Don’t Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up, ’cause everyone wants to avoid saying um. But the challenge is that’s the very worst instruction you can give yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it’s a bit of a trick to get the reader picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it. Thought suppression is the pink elephant trick essentially, it’s built off distinction. When you give yourself a don’t, you’re obligating your brain to fixate on the don’t versus everything else in the known universe. So if someone says to you, don’t rush, you are obligated to think about rushing. And also, even more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first, then what comes second? General feedback, and the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time? Every word, in between words, in the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague. And then the third thing, is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like remember to breathe, but then you’re giving the person you’re coaching or suggesting this to, something else they have to remember in their jam packed brains, when in fact breathing is a totally physical thing. So these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong. And really the problem is this. Is it people who are already struggling then tend to blame themselves and they think, “Oh God, I’m such a failure because I couldn’t implement all this really smart coaching or advice I got.” And it wasn’t smart coaching, it wasn’t smart advice. And it’s not even their fault that they were not able to do it. Brett McKay: Going to this idea that speaking is a physical act, that’s one of the main points that you drive home throughout this book, is that we have to remember that speaking is a full bodied physical act. I think oftentimes we think of it as just a mental act. Why is remembering that speaking is a physical act the foundation of improving your delivery? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Everything I just explained about how feedback gets messed up can be remedied by what you’re asking. By a physical approach. And particularly for the listeners of your podcast, this metaphor, either as a metaphor or even just as a thing that people actually do, will really hit home, which is speaking is a sport. So guys out there who are listening, but anybody out there who is listening, if you like sports, speaking is that same thing. It is moving. It takes over a hundred muscles to do what you and I are doing right now, Brett, which is taking air into our bodies. Our diaphragm drops down, our lungs expand as they fill with air. Our ribs move to accommodate those inflating lungs. And then we exhale that air over our vocal cords and it picks up some sound there. And then that sound gets amplified and altered and altered with a miraculous act of coordination, which is enunciation. Even saying the word enunciation, you can feel how much your lips and your tongue and even your soft palate and jaw have to move to accomplish that. It is a physical activity. Now, hopefully that’s interesting just to hear, but here is the amazing liberation and the amazing benefit of this shift. Just like any other physical activity, like any other sport or dance or a discipline that is physical, you can build muscle memory and get a lot better at it very quickly and break habits that you think have condemned you to bad performance for the rest of your life. You can break them almost instantly. Brett McKay: Yeah. What you do, and we’re gonna talk about some of these drills. You provide drills for people to help improve their speaking. They’re all very physical. You’re using your whole body oftentimes in these drills. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a bit. Before we got on the interview, you and I were discussing the connection between public speaking delivery and manliness. And one of those connections has to do with the improvisational nature of speaking. Tell us about that. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Men, as a behavior that we are suggested to embrace in our lives. And I don’t think it’s just men. I think it’s a good behavior in general. But we’re often suggested to really embrace decisiveness in our life, make a decision, take a risk, things like that. Well, here’s the miraculous thing about speaking. Talking is just a series of decisions. It is literally a flowchart of words in which your brain does as miracle of choosing one word after another and putting them together in a system that can be meaningful and powerful and persuasive to others in your life. So embrace that decision making that you get to do all day long, every day, and don’t shy away from it. Brett McKay: I love it. I think improving your speaking can open up new vistas in your life, whether romantically, in your career, and just also friendships. And I think if you look at the history we’ve written a lot of about the history of masculinity and different cultures in time, public speaking in a lot of these cultures was a mark of manhood. It’s how you proved your manhood in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome and the Viking cultures, even your ability to tell a good yarn was a way you kind of showed yourself as a man. So maybe we can hearken into that today and revive that idea that speaking well is a manly thing. So let’s get into some of these practices. I thought this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your book because I’m a guy who makes his living speaking as a podcast host. I thought this was very useful. And what I loved about it, all your practices are very physical. And one practice I thought was really interesting is you have people play with LEGOs. So why are you having people play with LEGOs while they’re public speaking? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure. The LEGOs are a practice exercise. And the reason I suggest people do it is because it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things, like pause, like tolerate silence, like be concise, like structure their ideas, like remove filler. And the way it works is this. You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of LEGO blocks. But you don’t start just speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first LEGO block before you begin speaking. And then you share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this, the first sentence of your content. And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to the next thing, no, in silence, you place down that LEGO block and you live through that silence, pick up the next LEGO block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have, or the second sentence. Same thing at the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the LEGO block, but this time you click it in place with the previous, so that clicking action even takes a moment to complete, so it enforces some silence. Then you pick up the third one, still being silent. Once you have it in the air, then you can say your idea out loud. Third thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the LEGO block in place. And you keep doing this. And then you’ll probably run out of LEGOs. Maybe you use six or eight or 10 or whatever it might be. And if you have more that you want to say, you simply unstack them and continue. But what you’ll probably find when you try this exercise, is that you can actually complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner. And it’s a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we talked about. Brett McKay: So if you have a problem with rambling for example, this is a great drill to do to help you not ramble anymore? And I have this problem. Sometimes I’ll start a thought and I’ll start speaking it, and then I’m like, oh yeah, there’s another thought I wanna get to. And I just go into that and it just sounds like a mess. What’s interesting about this drill is not only is it gonna help improve your delivery, you’re not gonna sound like you’re rambling and jumping from thought to thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content, because you actually have to stop and think about what you’re gonna say before you click on the next LEGO. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say, that this drill, I invented this drill in 2010, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this drill is one of the foundational things that allowed me to have a thriving career in this field. I started teaching at Columbia Business School in 2016 and was giving feedback in presidential races soon after that. And that’s not to brag about my journey. I want the audience to hear this very clearly. That is to emphasize the power of this one single exercise. Because to your point, yes, it doesn’t just teach you better delivery skills, but it gives you an opportunity to actually think of the brilliant, smart, insightful stuff that you have to say and helps you say those things. Brett McKay: Okay, again, this is a drill. It’s not something you’re not gonna be playing with LEGOs while you’re giving your presentation or on your first date. Maybe you can do this before so you can get some practice. So, yeah, we’re not telling people to play with LEGOs. But you do say if you’re doing a zoom call, for example, you could have the LEGOs maybe beneath you and you can do it then ’cause no one can see your hands. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s a great clarification. Thank you for bringing it up. This metaphor should really hit home for people as well, which is, in sports, we understand this. There are practice exercises you do in practice to build a certain technique that you would never do in the game. Imagine a soccer player who had a TheraBand around their lower ankles to try to strengthen their legs in some way. Or supposedly Victor Wembanyama, the amazing center for the San Antonio spurs, would practice dribbling a basketball with gloves on. Or you’ve seen pictures of sprinters running with a parachute that they’re dragging behind their back. Now, none of those athletes would use those same things in the game. They’re essentially exercises to build some muscles. And that’s exactly what this LEGO exercise is. It’s a preparation, practice exercise to build these abilities. And once you practice it enough, what happens is you build muscle memory, and you can do them without the tools. But to your point, one of the gifts of remote communication is, yeah, you have this, what I call a digital cloak of invisibility. And so you can do some of the exercises in the book, even real time, when you’re on remote calls. Be versatile. And by that I mean, okay, maybe if the LEGO blocks are a little bit too loud on a zoom call, ’cause you hear some clicking, just substitute and use your hand instead. Place your hand gently down on the table or desk in front of you. And when you do that, your job is to actually pause for a moment and consider what is my next thought or my next idea. Brett McKay: So something that I struggle with and I’m pretty self conscious about as a podcast host, is being articulate. I sometimes have a hard time saying the right word or saying the word I want to say. So what I do is I say those filler words, um. I say like more than I’d like to. And the thing is, we edit a lot of those out. Before it goes live. There are other filler words that other people struggle with. Something I’ve noticed talking to people on the podcast, a lot of our guests will say sort of or kind of a lot, even when what they’re saying doesn’t need that sort of modifier and it actually doesn’t make sense. Someone will say, “Yeah, they’re sort of pregnant.” It’s like okay, well you can’t be sort of pregnant. You’re either pregnant or not. So this goes to the title of your book, Don’t Say Um. I know a lot of people, when they’re thinking about delivery, they want to be better about not saying um or like. So what can people start doing? What are some drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, so the title of the book is, Don’t Say Um. It’s a trick. The antidote to that is a chapter on linguistic precision. Now, by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said, choosing your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called finger walking. And I’ll talk you through it right now and then also talk about what filler is and how to think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger of either hand, and you as though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian, you walk your fingers across the table or desk in front of you. Walk your ideas one thought at a time. So when you’ve completed a thought, bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again. And what you’re trying to do here, is you don’t have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by word, you’re using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table. If you feel yourself saying um or a like or a kinda or a sorta or have another non-fluency of some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you’ve regained your focus and then you continue. Now if you say an um, it’s not a problem with your brain, it’s not a problem with your mouth even. It’s a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it’s super versatile. You can do this on remote calls, but no one knows you’re doing it. You and I could be doing it right now, every single word, if we wanted to. I’m not right now, but I certainly could, because this is audio only, and it helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I’ll give you another example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid, no one says, “There is kind of a, it’s kinda sort of like kind of a bus coming.” Because in that moment, we’re totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment, we choose words. So this exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words. Brett McKay: Yeah. What I love about this drill, I’ve been practicing it, is it gets you out of your head. Because the tendency that I have when I say I need to focus on not saying um, I do what you were talking about other the pink elephant. I said, don’t say um, don’t say um. And then I just end up. I’m thinking about saying um all the time. So I say um a ton. So what this drill does, it just gets you out of your head and into your body, and that will just lead to you being more fluid in your speaking. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, exactly. And filler language is a big topic. We could keep going about it if you want to. I don’t know, you want to dive deeper on filler? We got a lot we should get to, so we can also move on if you want. Brett McKay: Yeah. A little bit more. What is something else about filler that you think is important for people to understand? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, the first thing is folks, be nice to yourself out there. And the reason I say that is because, let’s break it down with some math for a moment. Let’s say you say um every five seconds, which probably strikes you as a lot. Um is a single syllable. It’s a single sound. Average rate of speech is something like this. I’m speaking very generally here, but it’s something like this. Let’s call it three words per second. Let’s call each word an average of two syllables. So in a single second, you’re saying about six syllables. So that means every five seconds, you’re saying about 30 syllables. I hope everyone stuck with me on that math. Now, let’s say you say one um every five seconds. That means one out of every 30 syllables is a filler sound. And I’m guessing if in other parts of your life, you had a habit that only affected 3% of a given thing, you wouldn’t be that hard on yourself about it. So they may not be as big of a deal as you think. That does not mean, it’s not worth trying to be better at becoming more linguistically precise and choosing your words. But be nice to yourself while you go on that journey. And as you’re going on that journey, I also invite you to broaden your idea of what filler language actually is. I’ll give you a couple criteria to think about it. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then this word is a filler word for you. Here’s the first question. Is it grammatically necessary? If the answer is no, let’s move on to the second one. Are you aware that you’re doing it? And if both of those answers are no, then that word is probably filler for you as well. Here’s a ridiculous example. I one time coached a client who used the word viscerally as filler. I swear, every couple sentences viscerally would appear, didn’t make any sense at all, didn’t fit grammatically, and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. So keep in mind, there may be a bunch of words that you’re overusing that are not necessary and that are crutches. Brett McKay: Going to that point of being nice to yourself. Something that I, maybe I’ll let people know. I’ve interviewed a lot of people on the podcast, over a thousand. And a lot of those people are in the media, they’re on radio, they have their own podcast, they’re on television. And even those individuals, they have a hard time with um and like, and well, and the like. So if even the pros have problems with it sometimes, it’s okay if you have problems, but we can make improvements to it. So yeah, don’t beat yourself up, if you do say um a lot. I think that’s useful ’cause I think beating yourself up just will cause the problem to grow even more. It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it worse. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, this is my exact point. Instead of feeling bad about the same behavior for now, years or decades even if there’s something that you feel bad about, stop feeling bad about it by actually doing something about it. So as opposed to obsessing about your ums, no, just practice the finger walking drill and practice it a bunch and pretty soon what will happen is you will make improvement. And that improvement all of a sudden makes you actually feel great, makes you have an appetite to improve further. And that’s the entire point about taking such a physical approach in the book. Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so another delivery issue I have. I’m gonna use this as in private, this podcast as some private coaching. But another delivery issue that I’ve been battling for a while is enunciation and speaking too fast. Sometimes I’m the micro machine guy. Do you remember the micro machine guy on the advertisements? Michael Chad Hoeppner: You’re talking my generational language right now. So yes, I do of course. Brett McKay: You talk bout how improving your enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some drills for that? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, well, you don’t have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of technical jargon or some multisyllabic phrase. Now notice that in order to enunciate that multisyllabic phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. I’ll give you a silly example actually, only silly ’cause it’s a single word. If I don’t give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could sound like I’m saying tide or tight, or type, as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that’s just a single syllable word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing time. But what about a multisyllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with multi syllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. If you were thinking of a sport, again in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something, it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your enunciation actually can slow you down. This is profoundly important to people, because part of why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean, words often sound like the thing that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if you don’t enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these. So the question becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the side benefit of slowing you down. If you are a very, very rapid speaker, how do you use or how do you practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you’re gonna read is things that I’ve invented. So lots and lots of drills that I’ve developed working with professionals. But the next one that I’m gonna tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me. I can take no credit for it. I will give a shout out to Andrew Wade. He was a voice and speech teacher I worked with at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. But he’s former head of the voice and speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. But even he doesn’t get the credit, because he learned it from someone who learned it from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that. So if that does not give it some historical cred and you don’t want to try it, I don’t know what will. Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. And if a toothbrush works, and if a pen, your pinky finger, a slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give, so you have a little cushion there. But people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking, okay? But you put the impediment in between your teeth just over to the side, so not right in front where it might block your tip of tongue sounds. Like T and D and N and L, T, D, N, L. Put it just to the side. And then you practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally clear, even with that impediment. And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged, and of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak. Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve done that before. I think it’s a very powerful tool. Another tool that actors have used for a long time are tongue twisters. Unique New York, unique New York. Is that something else you have clients do? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, back to the sports metaphor, folks this is not a wacky thing of like, “Oh, yeah, I saw Ron Burgundy and Anchorman do it. How silly that is.” No, people, if you accept this brave idea I’m putting forth that speaking is physical. It is a sport. Then you would never do a sport without warming up. You might pull a muscle, you might hurt yourself, or you just might not perform at your peak. Speaking is the same thing. So it stands to reason, if you are relying on the muscles of speech to perform well and accomplish whatever goal you have as a communicator, it stands to reason you should warm up. So those tongue twisters, those are a type of warmup, and there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll give you the funniest one, which this is not for the faint of heart, folks. Do not try this at home. You might get injured. Here we go. I am a pleasant mother pheasant plucker, I pluck pleasant mother pheasants. I’m the best pleasant mother pheasant plucker. Whoever plucked a pleasant mother pheasant. You can see why that has some pitfalls. Brett McKay: Yeah. Would you do that with the cork in your mouth too? Is that something you can do to increase the strenuosity of the drill? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. You all have seen Steph Curry of the Golden State warriors doing his pregame prep when he dribbles multiple balls and makes the job harder and harder and harder for himself. Yeah. Increase the level of difficulty because you are a communication athlete. And here’s another fun thing. If you have a smartphone or even a cell phone, I’m guessing many people listening to this do, that gives you camouflage to do tongue twisters and warm up anywhere in the world, anytime, and no one knows that you’re doing it. So memorize some of the tongue twisters you can find in the book or on our website and talk into your phone and just do these tongue twisters like you’re having a conversation with someone else. And the reason I say this, is because I wanna remove any excuse you have that would prevent you from embracing this life practice, because it’s a great one. Brett McKay: That’s a great one. That’s what I love about your book and your ideas, is that it gives you something to do. Oftentimes when you read public speaking books or how to improve your delivery, they don’t give you anything to do. So it’s just you read it and you’re like okay, well I’ll try to remember that next time. And we’ve got stuff to do. I love this. Let’s talk about vocal variety. That’s another thing people often think about when they’re presenting, like, “Am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety.” How should people think about vocal variety in their public speaking? Or should they not think too much about it? Michael Chad Hoeppner: They should think about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget it for the rest of their lives. And here’s a cool reason why. You know it, you know how to do it, and you know it in your bones. Because humans use vocal variety for some really important things, like communicating the meaning of what they’re saying, like communicating the emotion of what they’re saying, like framing things with some context or orientation, and also crucially, to surprise each other. We use vocal variety to keep people engaged. Monotone voices actually don’t use any novelty. When there’s novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won’t change, you can ignore it forever because it’s no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other. How do you improve it then? So here’s a quick system, and then you can forget it. Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn’t invent that at all. But I did invent this naming system you’re about to learn to make it alliterative and therefore, hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high and low. Pause is silence, and varied lengths of silence. Power is volume. So that’s loud and soft. Loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That’s our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend with a really nasal voice, what’s happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that, of course. What we’re aiming for here is more vocal variety. For the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when they’re nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind. Or to your point, the example of being on a date even, when we’re under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety, and we should instead be trying to expand it. For the most part. You can go too far, and we could talk about that if you want to, but that’s very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to expand it. And the cool thing is they’re very interlocked, so you honestly can expand any one of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a couple exercises to do that, if you want to know. Brett McKay: Yeah. What are some exercises that people can start doing today to improve their vocal variety? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s a fun one. It’s called silent storytelling. I want you to talk, but you don’t get to use any sound. So you have to basically mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot. Lots of facial expressions to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hand to gesture with freedom and ease because you don’t have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing a little bit. You’re not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You’re not acting things out, per se. You’re just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication, because you don’t get to use sound. So you’re lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for a few minutes. And then put sound back into the equation. But you’re not allowed to contract everything. Okay? Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big, your facial expressions just as big, your gestural ease and freedom just as expanded. And what happens, like magic, is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I’ll teach you a phrase I learned from Ralph Zito, who taught at the Juilliard School when I trained with him. And the phrase is your voice is your body. And I’ll say it differently. I’m gonna pound my chest for a second. You can hear this. Your voice is your body. And I’ll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling exercise does that. Brett McKay: I love that. That’s a great one. Okay, so we’ve talked about things we can do to improve our delivery with our voice. Enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let’s talk about eye contact. I know a lot of people when they’re speaking in front of a group or a large audience, they might be thinking, okay, “Where am I supposed to look?” Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we’re speaking to a group. And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you’re speaking to a whole bunch of people? Michael Chad Hoeppner: It’s essential to think about it, because the way we talk about eye contact, it’s a misnomer. In fact, I don’t even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like it’s something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it’s a possession or a trait even, but it’s not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is reaching your audience or not. That’s why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn’t speak English understand something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it’s crucial when you’re talking to large groups as well. And this is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is again, the reductive. Make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people, they say, well, that’s about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No. Look at individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your message is resonating. And look at different people around the room. Now, if it’s a huge audience, you don’t have to look at every single person. If it’s an audience of thousands, you will never be able to look at everybody. But if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience, what happens, because of how we’re put together as communication instruments, your communication will improve because of that eye contact. It will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to reach that person, you’re gonna gesture, you’re gonna enunciate more, you’re gonna use vocal variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people. Try to elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way. You may not get that. That’s okay. Even in the act of trying, you’ll still get some success. And then throw out all the garbage. 8-12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room. Look at people’s foreheads so you don’t get distracted. Scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise at all. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about, when they’re public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights? Where they’re like, “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures when you’re speaking? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s the hilarious thing, folks. There’s a good reason that you’re confused about that, because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, 10 don’ts about gestures. It’s like, don’t point at your audience, don’t make distracting hand gestures, don’t cross your arms, don’t fidget your fingers, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t jangle the coins in your pockets, don’t put your hands behind your back. That looks like you’re hiding something. It just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like well, okay, what the heck should I do with them? And all those don’ts, back to the idea of thought suppression and the title of the book of course, just makes people chronically self focused. Which is why you end up with these limbs hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you’re focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. For most people, that means moving your hands more than you might think. I am not a fan of the don’t make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said. But one of the most brutal is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, they tend to constrain everything else too. So their vocal variety vanishes, their face becomes totally stoic, and still oftentimes their enunciation even becomes less dynamic, and they just look like a more boring version of themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to do what they wanna do. To speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I’m not saying make just like general hand waving repetitive motions. I’ll give you a funny example. I one time was involved somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures, like keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay? So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again. Now, the idea of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good. But the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn’t actually unlock how people speak in real life. So instead, what I would suggest is there’s two exercises in the book that I list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again, how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness. And yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you’re talking about so that an audience watching with no sound could understand your message. And what happens, of course, is your hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you’ve done that a bit, let it go, put sound back into your speech, and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized. So that’s one. This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall, like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking whatever content you want to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now, this time, try to throw the ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the rebound. And then, talk while you do this. Now, it’s gonna be difficult ’cause your brain’s doing two things, catching the ball and talking. So it’ll take some coordination to get it down. But then what you’re gonna realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy. And then, hold the ball in your hand, don’t throw it anymore and continue to speak. But allow your hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their gestures way too much. The rare over talkers with their hands. It’s not that you’re over talking, it’s that you’re telling the same darn story over and over again. They’re just doing the same thing. So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of, don’t make distracting hand gestures or don’t talk with your hands. Instead, challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story. And those would be some tools for gestures. Brett McKay: I love that. So we’ve talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there’s a chance you’ll still get nervous when you’re speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when they do arise, when they’re in a public speaking situation? Or even it could be a first date situation. Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point, if you go to the book’s website, dontsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free. And when I call it Navigating Nerves, because that should be the goal. Not stopping, not preventing, not battling, navigating. And we’re gonna keep that chapter free, because whether or not people buy this book. I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self defeating cycle for a long, long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it Navigating Nerves, because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it’s back to this idea of thought suppression. So if you’re telling yourself, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. Or even putting some self judgment on there, like why are you always nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. You can hear the voice. All you’re doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up your feelings of failure about that. So step number one, you’re going to be nervous. And you might in fact be nervous for the rest of your life and they might even get worse. Why? Because you are going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life, your career and your life and your goals and everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons they’re learning on the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re gonna get better and better, which means you’ll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more nerve wracking to be at that new height. That’s good. It means that you care. It means that you’re invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good things, so stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you’ve reset them, your goal is not to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary. Just imagine your audience in their underwear, because now your brain has to multitask. Naked people. And what am I trying to say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, ah. Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on, that gives you a positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip of tongue, sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things. But put your focus on something physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get at putting your attention 100% on that thing. What happens, is the nerves begin to fade away, but not because you fought them, but because you’ve put your focus elsewhere and some are more productive. Brett McKay: Well Michael, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, for sure. Well, you can follow us on social if you’re a social fan, you can just search for GK Training and all the various socials you might want to. But more specifically for the book, the book’s website is, Don’t Say Um. Just the same title, dontsayum.com. And my company is GK Training. And the URL there is just gktraining.com and that’s where you can find all the warmups and tongue twisters and exercises I talked about earlier. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Chad Hoeppner, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Michael Chad Hoeppner: My pleasure too. Thank you. Brett McKay: My guest today was Michael Chad Hoeppner. He’s the author of the book, Don’t Say Um. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website dontsayum.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/um, where you 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 @artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called DYING BREED. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind each other to listen to the AOM podcast. But put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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I first read Man’s Search for Meaning by the neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl in high school, and I have re-read it several times since. It’s one of the books that’s had the biggest impact on my life, so it was a real treat to speak with Alexander Vesely, Frankl’s grandson, about his grandfather’s ideas and legacy. Today on the show, I talk to Alexander, who is a documentarian, and like his grandfather, a psychotherapist, about Frankl’s life, his development of logotherapy, a type of meaning-centered therapy, and how that approach to the psyche was tested during Frankl’s time in the concentration camps. We discuss why Frankl said that “everyone has their own Auschwitz,” how a lack of existential meaning can create depression, the three ways to actualize meaning in your life, whether meaning is something that is objective or subjective, the freedom we have to choose our attitude in all circumstances, including suffering, and more. Resources Related to the Podcast Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl The Doctor and the Soul by Viktor Frankl Viktor and I: The Life and Work of Viktor Frankl — Alexander’s documentary about his grandfather Living Logotherapy by Elisabeth Lukas and Heidi Schönfeld Logotherapy Online Academy Viktor Frankl Institute Connect With Alexander Vesely Alexander at the Viktor Frankl Institute Alexander on LinkedIn Alexander 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 Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. I first read ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by the neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher Viktor Frankl while I was in high school, and I’ve reread it several times since. It’s one of the books that’s had the biggest impact on my life. So it was a real treat to speak with Alexander Vesely, Frankl’s grandson, about his grandfather’s ideas and legacy. Today on the show, I talked to Alexander, who is a documentarian and like his grandfather, a psychotherapist, about Frankl’s life, his development of logotherapy, a type of meaning-centered therapy, and how that approach to the psyche was tested during Frankl’s time in the concentration camps. We discussed why Frankl said that everyone has their own Auschwitz, how a lack of existential meaning can create depression, the three ways to actualize meaning in your life, whether meaning is something that is objective or subjective, the freedom we have to choose our attitude in all circumstances, including suffering, and more. After the show is over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/frankl. All right. Alex Vesely, welcome to the show. Alex Vesely: Thank you for having me. Brett McKay: So you are the grandson of Viktor Frankl who created logotherapy. It’s a type of existential therapy that we’re going to talk about today. And I’m sure many of our listeners are familiar with Frankl and his book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. I remember when I read that book back in high school, it had a big impact on me. But for those who aren’t familiar with Viktor Frankl, can you give us a thumbnail biographical sketch of your grandfather? Alex Vesely: How much time do I have? He lived to be 92 years old, so a pretty long life and a very interesting life. But just to give you the gist, he was, when you asked him, “What do you do?” He would say, “I’m a doctor.” So that was his definition of himself. He didn’t even call himself a psychotherapist, because he grew up in the time when psychotherapy was not yet its own thing. So he was one of the pioneers of modern psychotherapy. And as many might know from the name Freud, a lot of psychotherapy started in Vienna, Austria, and that’s where he was born and raised as well. And he was actually for a while a student of Freud and then of one of Freud’s disciples, Alfred Adler. And ultimately, they had a falling out, and he decided this is not for me. I don’t think that this is really how things work and how human beings function and what motivates them and what makes them, you know, live healthy lives and want to live healthy lives. And so as a doctor, he looked at his patients and he observed what were the differences between patients that maybe had difficult fate to deal with and yet they were doing mentally and emotionally fine. And others who had comparably relatively easy lives, but they were overwhelmed and not healthy and needed a psychotherapist. So what was the difference? And he came to the conclusion that it was an element that it seems everybody else had overlooked. Everybody else in psychotherapy, that is, and that is the topic of meaning. He didn’t find that in any of his teacher’s teachings. And so he started his own therapy, his own form of psychotherapy and he called it logotherapy, which is a bit confusing ’cause you have to look it up in the dictionary. It’s an old Greek word, logos, which also means word. But in this case, the meaning that he chose is meaning. So it’s a meaning-centered therapy. And it was the first meaning-centered therapy. And that’s how he started. And then most people are familiar with his book, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, which is one of many books that he wrote. So he’s kind of always connected with that. But even he himself thought that wasn’t such an important book. Originally, he didn’t even put his name on it. But it was a personal account of his own hell that he had to go through, which was the Holocaust, ’cause he was Jewish. And that was not a good thing to be at the time in Austria in the 1930s and 1940s. And luckily, he survived, he survived several concentration camps by sheer luck first and foremost. But he could also observe in that situation, in the camps, the validity of his theories and see is there something to it. And when people are really in despair and the distress is meaning important, does that make a difference? And he found that yes, this is actually the decisive, or one of the most decisive factors other than luck, you know, and I mean you could stand in the wrong place and be killed for that, right? Or have physical weakness or catch a disease and you were dead. So but if you put all these factors in the equation, the one thing that also played the central role and actually had an effect on the emotional and even on the physical well-being, to some extent, was the awareness of some meaning that might be in the future, some meaningful task or meaning can come in the form of a beloved person, family, a partner. And for that or for who it’s worth surviving and going through another day and not giving up. So he published the book that he had to throw away when he entered Auschwitz, which is not Man’s Search for Meaning, of course, but the book was called ‘The Doctor and the Soul’, in which he put all his insights into how meaning relates to well-being. And that was lost. And one of the things that kept him going was his goal to rewrite that and to publish it and to make it available, his insights. And luckily, he lived to do that. And so that’s why we’re talking about him today. And we can talk about him today because he survived. Most of his family did not. So he lived to be 92, as I mentioned, so a long productive life. Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s an important point to make. A lot of people have the mistaken assumption that he developed logotherapy while in the concentration camp. But in fact, he developed it before and then he was able to basically test it. Test his theories in the concentration camps. And then after… Alex Vesely: Yeah. A trial by fire, so to speak. Brett McKay: Oh, for sure. And then after the concentration camps, he published ‘The Doctor and the Soul’ and then also just had a very illustrious career. He became a public intellectual. A lot of… He was on television shows, radio shows. People were really, at the time in the ’50s and ’60s, interested in his ideas. Alex Vesely: Well, I would say not just the ’60s and ’50s and ’60s, that continued on. And I think maybe that speaks to the validity of his insights, that they never went away, they were never mainstream. Like even when he was invited to speak, you know, Austrian television or American television, there was a lot of interest and he was a good speaker, so he had rhetorical skills too. And I think a lot of people came ’cause they said, “Oh, this is the guy, you know, who survived Auschwitz and what can we learn from him?” Which is valid, but it also kind of took away from all the work that’s so much more and that can be mined and has been mined, but never hit the mainstream. But interestingly, it also never went away. He always joked, you know, “I was never in fashion. So logotherapy was never in fashion. So it’s not going to be out of fashion anytime soon.” And that’s really true. People keep finding. And those who find it, who want to find it, they can find it. And those who are not interested in it, they don’t need to. It’s not a big business model. Brett McKay: What was Frankl like as a grandfather? Alex Vesely: Funny. Funny. Witty. Brett McKay: I think that would surprise people. Alex Vesely: Yeah. Brett McKay: Before our conversation, we talked about, you did a documentary about your grandfather. And I watched it, and that was the first time I actually saw video footage of your grandfather. My only connection to him was through his books. And I had imagined him because he’d gone through the Holocaust and because he was writing about meaning and existential vacuums, that he was going to be this very serious, somber kind of guy. But the thing that surprised me was how full of life and vibrant and funny he was. Alex Vesely: He was. He was. He had these deep thoughts, but he was also well grounded in the moment and in, you know, enjoying life and being able to see life from a different perspective. And I think that’s something you see in other people as well, who have been close to death and for some reason came back either by disease or by, you know, in his case, by chance. And they see life, they appreciate it more because they know it’s so precious and they know it’s short, and they know time is limited, and you never know. Row candidates, potential death row candidates. Right? We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. And so you can grow bitter over that and lament the fact that everything is fragile, everything can be taken away. But he didn’t. On the contrary, he said, “This makes it all the more precious, all the more worth living and making sure that you’re not missing out on all the things that are important.” And that can be, you know, writing. He knew he had work to do. He wanted to help people. That was his priority, really. But when it was time to make experiences or to be with the family, he would make time for that, and that would be the priority. So the full spectrum. And I think maybe that’s what gave him credibility, ’cause, you know, he would say, he once, I don’t know if you know that story, he was invited in the US. Early, that was, I think it was his first visit to the US, and he was speaking there, doing a workshop. And the host afterward approached him and told him, “Dr. Frankl, did you notice that people were a little bit standoffish, a little cold?” And he said, “Yeah, I did.” And he said, “Well, did you wonder why?” And he said, “Well, you know, all my colleagues here they’re psychoanalysts. And what I’m talking about is not exactly psychoanalysis. It’s pretty much in many ways the opposite. And so I can understand that they’re not too happy.” And the host said, “No, that’s not it.” “So what is it?” And he said, “You, Dr. Frankl have come back from a severe suffering. You’ve come back from that and it’s jealousy because you did that and you were able to do that.” So you know, if there was some inconsistency in the logic, he would not let anything like this just be said and move on. So he thought about that, and he came up with that phrase that only he could say, which was, “Everyone has their own Auschwitz.” And what he meant by that was, suffering is universal. The experience of suffering is universal. And I happen to experience it in one way, but in no way is that comparable or does it diminish the worst suffering, the worst experience of suffering that any other person has to endure or endures, chooses to endure. You know, if you’re talking to someone who’s severely schizophrenic, for example, that’s a nightmare. People are going through hell every day. And it wouldn’t be fair. You can’t say, you know, “Well, listen what I went through, right?” So you can well do that within your own experiences. And that’s what he did. He would say, “Well, you know, if I had a bad day, I would think back and say, you know, Viktor, pull yourself together. What would you have given for some, I don’t know, some dispute with a publisher 20, 30, 40 years ago when you were in the camps, when it was about survival?” And that is something you can do, but you cannot compare to other people’s suffering. And that’s something he understood and people understood. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ has this attraction that people often tell me they read it and they reread it because they find something in it that gives them hope and inspiration. And I think that’s that relatability of. He was talking about suffering. He wasn’t talking about his suffering. He was talking about the universal experience of suffering and how that is part of human life, of every human life. Life doesn’t come without a certain amount of suffering. And even if comparably, you would say, that’s an easy life or that’s a little problem, it is not for the person who’s confronted with that. Brett McKay: When did you first read your grandfather’s works, his books, yourself? Alex Vesely: Late. I was 19 and I was on my way to Toronto, Canada, for a logotherapy conference. And he couldn’t go anymore by himself because he had a heart issue that he had ever since he exited the camp. And he actually never told us. But the doctor said, “You shouldn’t fly anymore.” And so he said, “I’m not going to fly, but can you go and can your sister go and read a welcome message from me?” And we said, “Sure, it was great.” I was 19, going, flying to Toronto, and I thought, you know, “I really should know at least the book that everybody has read when I get there, because, yeah, I don’t want to be embarrassed. People tell me, ‘Oh, you know, this part or that part of the book.” So I read it on the plane. I read it in English though, my English was good enough. And you said before that you thought he would be such a somber and serious man. And I had that thought too when I first read ‘Man’s Search for a Meaning,’ I said, “How is that my grandfather?” I would think that that’s a person who’s really somber and battling with, you know, an inner darkness. And then I understood that the humor was actually what saved him. And that can be used as something. And actually logotherapy does tap into humor as a way to distance oneself from one’s own situation and one’s problem, at least a little bit. And that can have a healing effect. And I think, because he was so interested and focused on what’s happening around him and what is necessary, what needs to be done, that he was able to survive. And he even mentions that if you had this inner richness, it was easier to cope with the immense pressure. Brett McKay: So logotherapy, we’re going to get into the details of it here in a bit, but broadview, it’s just about finding meaning in your life. I think it’d be helpful to do some historical context. I thought it was really interesting in ‘The Doctor and the Soul’, where Frankl talks about the environment in which he created, not he created, but maybe discovered or brought to light logotherapy, he developed it in the shadow of some of the giants of early 20th century psychology. You mentioned a few of them: Freud, Jung, Adler, there was Skinner. You mentioned that he was a protege of Adler at one time. And he talks about one of the problems with these therapeutic approaches in the early 20th century was that they often devolved into something that he called psychologism. Alex Vesely: Yes, yes. Brett McKay: What did he mean by psychologism? Alex Vesely: Psychologism is a form, as he would put it, a form of reductionism. And that means something that shouldn’t be reduced or deducted from something else is being reduced to. And he said you always notice it when you hear the phrase “nothing but.” So for example, Freud would say, “There is no such thing as true love, the love between two human beings, but this is nothing but sex.” And you know, the sex drive or instinct. Brett McKay: Libido. Alex Vesely: Libido, exactly, exactly. Maybe, you know, you choose a certain partner because maybe you have some childhood memories and that kind of left an imprint on you, so you got your type or whatever, but there’s no such thing as love. There’s nothing but, so nothing but something else. Or if you think of behaviorism, right? Everything we do is nothing but behavior that somehow we learned that it’s good if we do it. Or you know, by maybe our parents gave us some candy or said, you know, “Good boy,” if we did something and bad behavior was punished. And so we are just basically animals. And all our behaviors, there’s nothing original about it, but it’s all kind of been put into our heads. It’s a program. It’s nothing but a program. And he would stand up against it. He would say, you know, “This is part of the truth.” He didn’t say it was nonsense. Obviously, we have drives and instincts and psychodynamic processes within us. But we are more than our psychodynamic processes and drives and instincts. We have them. But for example, we can also… We have the freedom to say yes or no to them. So I can, as a human being, always decide, “What am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with my quirks or my needs?” And animals have a harder time doing that, as far as we know, when they have a drive, when they need to eat or something, you know, they’ll kill the prey and eat it. There’s no choice here. But a human being can say, “I’m hungry and there’s some food, but for some reason I decide, you know, my body is hungry, and my instinct tells me, you should eat, otherwise you’re going to feel bad or even die. But I can say no to my drives, to my instincts, to my behavior that has been trained or imprinted or whatever.” And so we have that freedom. So freedom of will was a central pillar of logotherapy ever since 1926. Now, and that was not something that others would accept. So he was going against the established thinking and model of what it means to be human. Brett McKay: And there still is a bit of psychologism today of people who would say, “Oh, your temperament is just genetics and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Sorry. Or your environment, “The reason why you might be committing crimes is because, well, you grew up in poverty or abuse.” Alex Vesely: Exactly. Brett McKay: And your grandfather would say, “Well, you know, those things might be a factor in how we make our decisions or how we behave. They are conditions.” Alex Vesely: But we are free. Brett McKay: But yeah, in the end, we have our agency. That’s what makes us human. We can rise above that. And he saw that firsthand in the concentration camps. Alex Vesely: He did. He did. That was one of the major differences. Freud, who fortunately never had to experience a concentration camp from the inside, he theorized that when you take away from people the basic needs, when you deny them their basic needs, security, food, whatever, they will all act the same. They will all fall back to their instinctual behavior like animals. And they will basically kill each other for a loaf of bread. And already before the war, my grandfather said, “No. I don’t think that’s true. On the contrary, I think in those situations when the basic needs are not met, it brings to the forefront even more the true character that someone has, or I should say, decides to be, because they’re also people who have bad character traits and maybe have even had miserable lives and did a lot of damage, but they behave differently all of a sudden in the camps.” We always have the freedom to change as well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have wanted to be a psychotherapist, but he predicted something else. And it’s exactly what happened. And as he put it, he said in the camps, under that immense pressure, life and death situations, what emerged was on the one hand, the swine and on the other hand, the saints. So the very worst people allowing their, just as Freud predicted, just their instincts to take over and say, “Me, me, I need to survive and I’ll do anything in order to survive.” Which no judgment, and that’s understandable. But there were also those people who helped others till the end, or of course, the story of Maximilian Kolbe, for instance, who took somebody else’s place, who said he has a family. And he said, I don’t, so take me. And Nazis did. So who sacrificed his life for somebody else. Yeah. So that’s the whole spectrum of what it means to be human. Brett McKay: What do you think your grandfather would think of today’s mental wellness culture? Would you say that’s just psychologism for the social media age? Alex Vesely: Well, pretty much. I mean, there’s in some respects, it’s getting a little better. I mean, there’s talk about meaning now, which at the time, he was the only one really, nobody talked about meaning. And they would say, okay, if you talk about meaning, the meaning of life, you are welcome to speak at the Department of Religion, but this has nothing to do with psychotherapy. But ultimately, the problem with it is still that one of the other central ideas that he had, or observations that he made, better, is the self-transcendent nature of us humans. And what that means is, originally, primarily when we’re not indoctrinated or somehow battling with our own neurosis and quirks, if you like, primarily we are as human beings, always oriented beyond ourselves onto the world. That can be meaningful tasks to do, fix something that’s broken, do something that’s necessary, or other people, that’s love to encounter another person. There has to be no other purpose there. And to be there and to experience or be there for that person. So meaning comes in that form too. So it’s different from this idea that most other psychotherapies, I really don’t know any other who would not say that it’s ultimately about the ego, right? That basically you’re always taking a detour. You’re helping somebody else, you’re just trying to calm down your social conscience, your bad conscience or something. So again, some inner process, or even the people who talk about meaning, even people who call themselves logotherapists who say, oh, it’s meaning will make you feel better. You’re gonna be better off if you do something meaningful. But that’s true in a way, but it’s not the reason why you should do something meaningful. The reason why we do meaningful things, ideally, is in order for them to get done, because they’re important. If I do something out of love, if I save another person, I do it for that person, period. I don’t do it yet again to kind of instill some state within myself, that would actually be… And that would be pretty… Would you like to be rescued by someone who says, oh, I just did it for myself, so I feel better? It’s when we care about other people. And sure, there are selfish motives and we just had Christmas or maybe a lot of people gave some money to some charity, not for the noblest of reasons, right? But just for that very reason to say, okay, I did that. Well, then it’s still better they did it than if they didn’t do it. It’s still meaningful to support a good cause. So you can take that at face value. But my grandfather would say that’s not the essential, the most interesting aspect of humanity. It actually is not all the selfish ego balancing acts that we do. And he did too. And everybody does except for maybe a saint. But whenever we transcend ourselves and truly do something for the cause for it to be done, for that person to be helped, then this is what’s truly human. And what’s kind of the best in our nature, our ability to do that. And why not focus on that, or at least put it into the equation, which so many therapies do not. They will say, oh, well, it’s nothing but, right? It’s nothing but, you just wanted to do something good so you feel better about yourself. And that’s not true. And he said better to take something at face value, which is maybe not completely 100% pure altruism, rather than taking a deed that has been done for truly a good motive and explain it away and say, this was nothing but. Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One of the biggest problems your grandfather believed modern man had to face was a sense of meaninglessness. And he called it the existential vacuum. Alex Vesely: Yep. Brett McKay: What were the characteristics of a person stuck in an existential vacuum? Alex Vesely: Well, now we’re going deep into the practice of logotherapy. So it can come in different forms and ways and behaviors. Usually, people find meaning, and they’re oriented towards meaning by their very nature. So oftentimes it’s when there’s a lack of meaning, it’s sort of like oxygen. We don’t think about it while it’s there, but you take it away and there’s nothing other than we think about. It’s like, where’s the air? And it’s the same with meaning. And so oftentimes we’re confronted with people who struggle with the question of meaning when things get tough, and when there is this existential vacuum. He was the first therapist or doctor who said, just the absence of a meaningful perspective in life, of knowing that for some things you are good. You see the turnaround. It’s not what’s good for me, but what am I good for? What or who? If that is lacking, if there is a vacuum, that can over time in fact lead to depression, to a full-blown depression, which in no way looks different than any other depression, including genetic. Genetically caused. And today we know that there’s this mystery of some depressions not going away by whatever treatment is being applied. Now, why is that? Well, because it’s not happening on the level of the psychophysical. It’s not a question of change your lifestyle or take more time, sleep a little more. It’s not genetic where you say, which you can see. Well, usually when you make a diagnosis and people say, I had an uncle who killed himself, and there’s no apparent reason why someone is feeling depressed. It’s a good guess that that person has a… There’s a hereditary factor. But there are also people who are fine in all these, how do you say, departments, right? Everything is going well, and yet they feel miserable and their lives feel empty, and there is literally no reason for them to get up in the morning. And we all need that. That’s what really his work was. And what the work of a logotherapist is to help people find, again, something that is meaningful to fill that void. Because a void in life is never a good thing. So it can be depression, it can be small, it can be the typical Sunday neurosis, right? Or people who don’t know what to do with themselves when all the stores are closed or something happens where they’re taken out of their usual routine. And they hate that because this is a good… Routine is a good way to evade the question of is what I’m doing actually meaningful or not? ‘Cause we can keep ourselves busy, all kinds of excessive behavior, and even to some extent drug abuse. There’s nothing else going on in my life. Then the question of taking in some substance that will make me feel good, it’s not a question of why. It’s a question of why not. Nothing stands against that. Even if I risk my life or I risk my health, well, why not? What stands against that? And if you have a strong why, people who have a clear why, they are not so much in danger of filling their lives with a behavior that is meaningless. Because of course to take a substance that’s gonna ruin your health is gonna take you away from meaningful possibilities. But it can also be excessive behavior. Excessive shopping, excessive thrill seeking, right? FOMO. There was a comedian once in the ’50s who came up with this joke of a motorcycle rider who says, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’ll be there faster.” And he took this up as kind of the motto of this, I don’t see much meaning in my life. There’s nothing of substance, nothing of value. So in order to fill this inner void, this vacuum, I want to put in as many things as possible, experience a lot to kind of numb that, knowing that there’s really nothing of value. So that’s one of the ways it can express itself. But oftentimes, you know, you have to find that out. And people don’t necessarily go into psychotherapy and say, I’m suffering from an existential vacuum. In fact, most people don’t. Brett McKay: Yeah. And I think one thing he talks about too is boredom can be a common symptom of being stuck in this existential vacuum, like you mentioned the Sunday neurosis where you’ve had the busy week, and then finally it’s Sunday night, you really have nothing going on, and you’re lying in bed or just sitting on your couch thinking, I’ve got nothing going on in my life. And people have that itch to fill it with something that void. And as you said, there’s different ways people can do that. Drugs, it could be shopping, it could be trying to find ways to make more money. It could be scratching the sexual instinct. Alex Vesely: Yep. Brett McKay: Oh, the other thing too, you said the danger of the existential vacuum is that it can make people susceptible to conformism or totalitarianism as well. Alex Vesely: Yeah. If I don’t know where I’m going, what I stand for and what are the values and the meaningful tasks that I want to actualize, if this orientation is lacking, right? Then maybe I’m susceptible and become susceptible to, well, then I’ll just do what everybody else does, and that’s conformism, or I’ll just do what everybody else wants me to do. And that’s total totalitarianism. Brett McKay: Did he have any theories as to why people living in the west in the 20th and still happening today, the 21st century, are more prone to this existential vacuum? Alex Vesely: Yeah. It’s the price of freedom, and it’s also the price of, well, it can be the price for living in relatively safe and with a good standard of life. And he predicted that, again, in 1930s, where the standard of life where he was living at least was not very good. I mean, for most people you had the crash. So people were suffering, but they were saying, oh, as soon as we’ve solved that problem, as soon as the economy is back and up and running again, and people can afford to eat, and the people can afford maybe go on vacation from time to time, then they’re gonna be happy. And he predicted, well, no, this is not necessarily so. In fact, the existential crisis might even be reinforced once all these things that we supposedly need to live from are there. That still does not answer the question of, what do we live for? And that’s an important one. And in some ways, even more important than what we live from. What do we live for? And that’s a choice. Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing he said about the existential vacuum, or the existential void is the price of freedom that we have. He said this, he says, “Humans living in the modern world, we no longer have instinct to tell us what we have to do.” Right. We’re not like animals that just say, we have instinct, like, you gotta eat, you gotta have sex. We can rise above that. But he says, “The other problem is there’s no more tradition that tells us what we ought to do. So people don’t go to church anymore. They don’t believe in bigger philosophies or whatever. And as a result, they have nothing guiding their life. And so they’re more prone to fall into an existential vacuum.” Alex Vesely: And he witnessed that firsthand, because if you think of the history and the times that he grew up in with all the monarchy had just faded away and was a time where the trust in those institutions that were kind of handing down meaning for generations, they were falling away. And as young people like him would say, “Well, I don’t have to live by that”. Who says that this is the way that I should live? And he also said, “This is nothing bad.” It can turn bad if you don’t find anything. But in itself, freedom is wonderful. It’s great. And he would say, it’s not just a hallmark, but it’s a prerogative of youth to ask these questions and to not accept meaning being handed down by traditions or the family or… But to go out and say, I’m gonna find my own answers. I’m gonna take that challenge. And he would applaud that. And oftentimes, he would help people by telling them, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re actually very brave asking that question. You’re not just not sick.” Again, as Freud had said if somebody asks the question does my life have a meaning or not, they’re sick, they need therapy, they need psychoanalysis. And he said, “No, that’s actually a very honest sign of maturity. And it puts you in the same group with the biggest philosophers who ever walked the earth to ask a question. There’s some bravery about it.” And to say, “I’m gonna find my own answers”. It’s only when that process is taking so longer and longer and there’s nothing and comes to view. And that can happen sometimes that people get this what he called existential frustration, and then it can turn into people giving up on searching and saying, there is no meaning, I’m done with searching. And then you have those kind of neurotic reactions to this inner void, to this existential vacuum. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. But then you need to talk about these things. And you can’t just have a psychotherapist who says, “Well, take those pills and you’ll feel better.” You are working on a different level. Again, you’re taking an existential crisis, something that’s at the center of the human experience and reducing it to say, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable. So let’s turn off the discomfort.” It’s sort of like saying you’re in a house is burning, and your fire alarm is going off, “Oh, let’s just kill the fire alarm. It’s really loud. It’s really annoying.” But that won’t prevent the house from burning down. And no existential crisis. There’s no solution as to how am I going to live my life if I’m just taking, popping in pills to not feel any discomfort. So again, the form of reductionism that we still today so often meet, and how many psychiatrists take the time to actually have that conversation and find out is that a person who actually needs antidepressants, because there’s really, the problem is an imbalance, and there’s nothing wrong with their life, and they have a lot of meaning, then that exists. And then antidepressants are a blessing. But if you’re dealing with somebody who’s in existential crisis, you gotta find out and you’ve gotta work on a different level, you need to find answers there. Otherwise, you’re not helping the person. Actually, you’re making things worse because you’re kind of taking away their ability to… It’s a healthy discomfort because it keeps you going. And it’s a motivator to act and to say, “I gotta do something about my life.” Brett McKay: Yeah. That depression or boredom can be a smoke alarm. Alex Vesely: Exactly. There’s nothing… Boredom has its meaning because it’s telling you, hey, you’re missing out on some meaningful opportunities in your life that are waiting for you to be turned from possibilities into realities. And you’re not doing that. So it’s an alarm. Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk more about how we can find meaning. I think first we’ve been saying meaning a lot. Like, we gotta find live a meaningful life, do meaningful things. What did your grandfather mean exactly by meaning? Because I know he wrote this originally in German and there was translations done. I think you talked about this in a previous interview. Sometimes the translation from German to English, it doesn’t quite capture. Alex Vesely: Exactly. Brett McKay: The German word that he used initially. So when we say meaning, what are we talking about? Alex Vesely: Well, at some point he would say meaning and purpose, because those have a bit of different connotations in English. Yeah. But you’re right, there’s no ideal word. And so he said, I’m using the word meaning, and I’m giving a lot of examples so that anybody who reads about logotherapy might be able to understand what I mean when I say meaning. But yeah, it’s best to work with examples. So he said there are three ways you can actualize meaning in your life. Number one is kind of the obvious: Whenever you ask somebody what makes your life worth living, they would say, well, I do this and that with my life, right? This is my work. This is the work that I do. Or you talk to an artist, they’ll say, well my next painting that adds meaning to my life. So he called those the creative values, the things that we put into this world, the way we influence and change, and hopefully change for the better, the world through our actions, through our deeds. And then there’s another aspect that’s also still people would guess it, and that will be experiential values. So not just the things we put into this world, but the things we take out of this world and into our senses. The experiences of, you know, you name it. Of something that’s beautiful, of something that’s true. If you’re a scientist and experiencing, finding truths. Brett McKay: It could be nature. Alex Vesely: Yeah, exactly. Nature, or art, music. He always mentioned the example, “If you ask somebody who’s in the concert, listening to their favorite music, and you ask them, is life meaningful? They’ll say, Of course it is. Yeah, it’s beautiful. Can’t you hear?” So that’s meaningful too. If we’re having this conversation, and there would be, I don’t know, an aurora borealis, that’s in the news these days outside the window, and we wouldn’t even look. You know, this happens, what? Every once in a lifetime or so, we would miss out on something meaningful. And that is to experience. So life is about that too. But then he added a third factor. And that’s when life does not offer those possibilities to do much or to experience much. And usually that comes into play or that becomes noticeable when things are going bad, when things are not going well. Say you’re dealing with an incurable disease or you’ve lost somebody who’s near and dear to you. All the things that happen sooner or later in life. I mean, incurable disease, hopefully not. But I mean, it happens every day. And then he said, “There’s still a way to actualize meaning, to find meaning and to actualize it.” And when it comes to say, suffering, it’s the way in which we confront the suffering, the way in which we shoulder. We still have that freedom and freedom of choice. We still have possibilities there of how to deal with a predicament or a difficult situation. We can deal with it in a meaningless way or even say, “Okay, you know, one example that shows you that absurdity, the meaninglessness would be, say, if I get a bad diagnosis, that’s lethal, I’ll kill myself.” As if that would make any sense. So if you think of the ways you can deal… There are always ways that are more meaningful on how to deal with something and even if it’s limitations. Just incidentally, I met some… Caught up with some friends the other day and they’re older now and I heard the wife of my friend has been in bed for three years, can’t move, they don’t know what it is, but she’s losing the ability to move her body. And I thought, you know, that’s terrible. In what state is she going to be like? And visited her. They put up her bed in the living room and they surrounded her with beautiful pictures. She loves colors and she was the same person I knew. She was making us feel good. You know, people around her feel good and say, “You know, don’t worry, I’ve had a good life and I’m enjoying the things now I didn’t have time for back then.” So just that attitude. And my grandfather said, “This is the most difficult, this is the highest way, the highest value or way you can realize meaning is in a difficult situation.” Choose a way to shoulder that that is inspiring, that is in some way also, you know, creating something, putting something meaningful in this world, because it shows you’re okay. You know may be one day I’ll have a bad suffering some incurable disease. And I experienced that and said, “Oh, well, you can also shoulder it bravely like this, like she did, or you can just lament.” And I said, “Why are you not sad?” And she said, “Well, that wouldn’t make any difference. So I decided not to be.” It sounds so logical, but there are those examples of people who show us what is possible, what is humanly possible. And so that will be another way, how we deal with bad situations. And of course, goes without saying also deal with good situations. I mean, you can have a lot of opportunities and be healthy and be young and be good looking and be miserable and not see the possibilities that you have. Or you can be grateful and say, well, I’m glad that I have these possibilities, that I’m healthy, that I can do something with my life. I’m grateful for that. And that again, is a choice. So the way it’s always a mix. What we do, what we experience, and the attitude that we actualize. Brett McKay: It’s that last point about the attitude we take to suffering we can’t avoid. One of your grandfather’s most famous quotes is the one that says everything can be taken from a man but one thing; The last of the human freedoms: To choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Alex Vesely: Exactly, exactly. Brett McKay: So in the end, that suffering, it’s an opportunity to exercise your most human capacity, which is agency, deciding what you’re going to do with your life. Alex Vesely: Exactly. And he made it… He put up a mathematical formula. He said, “D equals S minus M.” Okay? So D equals S minus M. What does that mean? Despair equals suffering minus without meaning. Suffering does not automatically lead a person to be in a state of despair. The deciding factor, when push comes to shove, is meaning. And when you see some perspective of meaning, something that the way you can shape… He would say you shape your suffering in that you squeeze a little bit of meaning out of it. In that lies the possibility. And there’s no need to be in despair. And we learn that. And that’s something again, that he didn’t prescribe anything or demand it of people, not at all. But he would cite and quote these examples and talk about these and show people, you know, this is possible too. You know, maybe that can be an inspiring idea for your situation. He would be very clear. Would say that life never runs out of meaningful possibilities, never until your last breath. Even when you’re in bed and dying, there’s still things that can be done. There’s still time for forgiveness, for example. And even if you can’t change nothing else, [0:43:23.6] ____ you can still change yourself. And that’s a possibility we all have. What attitude do we adopt towards our past and the way we lived our lives? And in that, you can also grow and transform yourself on an existential level, which is why he was often speaking in jails and prisons. Brett McKay: When your grandfather talked about meaning, was it something subjective that you created for yourself, like a Nietzschean Übermensch, or was it something else? Alex Vesely: No. It’s a very good question. I’m glad you asked it, because it’s a very decisive no. If you think it logically to the end, there is good reasons why that would be dangerous, because it would basically, you could justify any kind of behavior by saying, well, for me, it’s meaningful, right? If your point of reference is saying, if it’s meaningful to you, then it makes it meaningful, then you end up in a moral dilemma very quickly ’cause you’d say, for Hitler it was meaningful to commit genocide. So what’s wrong with that? If that was meaningful for him? So no, he would say, meaning is there. It’s objectively in every situation. And to make that a little more understandable, he would quote an incident where somebody came up to him before a lecture and he said, “Dr. Frankl, I don’t have time to listen, so can you just quickly tell me what’s the meaning of life?” And you know, first he got a good laugh out of that, but then he used that. He said, “This would be like asking the best chess player in the world, what’s the best move?” And the answer to that would, of course be, “It depends on the situation, it depends on the game, it depends on where the figures are. But even more than that, it depends on the players. Who are they? What strategies do they use? Even how are they feeling this day? Are they on top of their game or not?” So but if you put all these factors into equation, or a supercomputer, you know, that supercomputer can say, “Okay. In this particular individual situation, this or that with a 99% certainty is the best move if you want to win the game.” So that’s the most meaningful move to make. So it’s always [0:45:32.5] ____ which means meaning relates to the person, to the individual, and to the specific situation. And then when you take as many variables into account as you can, you can say this or that is the best move, but it’s never that you decide it is the best move. If I wanted to win a chess game, I’d say, “Well, this feels meaningful to me. So I’ll decide that this is the most meaningful move.” Then you’re very likely going to win. So it has to be found. Meaning cannot be given, it cannot be prescribed. It can at best be described. He would say, but everyone has to find it on their own. Everyone is on their own terms. And I think there’s a kind of beauty to that too, because it really puts the logotherapist and the client on the same level. Because this is something we all do, consciously or not, is to decide in every moment, what’s the most meaningful move? What’s the most meaningful possibility in my life right here, right now, regarding, you know, me as an individual? Who I am. Do I have some knowledge that I can explain? Yeah. Okay, well, then it’s meaningful to do that. Is there somebody drowning in the river and I can’t swim? Well, it’s not meaningful to jump into the river. You know, two people are gonna drown, but maybe I can make a phone call. So what’s the most meaningful move? It depends on the person, on the individual, but it is at the same time tran-subjective, he would say. So it’s out there. It’s an objective quality that’s in the situation, inherent in every situation. And he would compare it to kind of the Gestalt ideas of Max Wertheimer and other thinkers, who spoke of the demand quality of a situation. What is the situation demanding of me right now? How am I going to respond? It’s not so much us who asks, you know, “This is what I want from life, and if I don’t get it, you know, I’ll throw a fit.” But what is life demanding of me? How am I going to respond? And I’m purposely saying respond and not react because if it was react again, there would be no freedom. But how do I respond? I can choose my response. And even if say, somebody does things to me that are meaningless or unjust, I don’t need to react to that. But I can choose a meaningful response which is going beyond my own needs and which, if it’s meaningful, everybody benefits, even the other person involved. Brett McKay: Yeah. That’s something your grandfather talks about a lot and repeats in a lot of his books, is when people are feeling that existential angst, vacuum, void, instead of asking, well, what’s the meaning of life? He said, “That’s the wrong question to ask. You need to ask yourself, what’s life asking of me right now?” Your grandfather developed a few techniques in logotherapy to help people put logotherapy into practice. One of them is encapsulated in a quote that I’m gonna be honest with you, when I first read it 25 years ago, I had a hard time understanding it. I still have a hard time understanding it. There are times when I read it and I think, oh, I get it. And then I read it again, like, oh, I don’t actually, I don’t get that. So here’s the quote. And I’m hoping you can help me finally understand what he meant by it. The quote is, “Live as if you’re living already for the second time. And as if you had acted the first time, as wrongly as you’re about to act now.” What does that mean? Alex Vesely: That’s an interesting one. Well, I think the answer is really much simpler than you think it is. Basically, what he was talking about is, as I just mentioned, every situation in life is unique. Right? This moment that we’re experiencing right now is never going to happen again. We’re two individuals, who knows? Tomorrow we might not, you know, one of us might not be around anymore. Things happen. Life doesn’t always give us the same opportunities the next day than it does today in this moment. So everything is transient, everything is… All these possibilities that we are faced with, they’re fleeting and they can be gone the next moment, the next instant. And so the choices we make, whether to pick something that’s at least relatively meaningful or aiming for the best, or not even trying is an important one. That’s not just something that we should put aside. It’s important because it’s ultimately, this is what makes our life, right? Our decisions, what we decided to put into this world. And so I think it was pointing out that importance of every moment being unique. And maybe sometimes we kind of go on autopilot and just react in the very sense of the word and don’t notice that actually meaning is already somewhere else, that it’s jumped to a different place and not the routine, not the thing we usually do. And we have to be mindful of that and be open and look at the whole situation and say, “Okay. Well, just because I have always done something like this, or maybe just because it feels like this now, maybe I’ll give it a second thought. Maybe what I’m about to do is wrong.” And once you’ve done something wrong, you regret it. Once you put something into reality, you cannot take it out of reality. It’s there forever. And it’s like a document of your life and what you have done and what your existence meant in this universe forever. And it’s hard sometimes if we think of the things we did wrong… And of course, this is human nature. We always mess up and make wrong decisions. That’s just part of being human, of course. But to strive at least, and to say, well, maybe this is already something that I’m doing which is not the most meaningful. Maybe I should rethink that before I have to go back and, well, live with the responsibility of what I’ve done without the freedom to change it. Brett McKay: Okay. That makes sense. So as you were talking, I was thinking about something I do on autopilot that I’m not happy about. And I wish I could do different or wanna do different. You know, getting grumpy with my kids when they do something frustrating. So I have to think about, okay, this is how I usually do it. If this happens again, I don’t have to do it that way. There’s another way I could do it. Alex Vesely: Right… Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. Alex Vesely: What it would be like if I already had done it. Brett McKay: Yeah. Alex Vesely: I would regret it. So why not choose to not even put it into existence in the first place? Brett McKay: Okay. I like that. Okay. Thank you. I finally understand it. It’s been 25 years, or probably more. I know a lot of people, because it’s a new year, there’s listeners who are hoping to improve themselves, maybe live a life with more meaning. They wanna be better humans. Are there any daily or weekly practices that you’ve come across or maybe you’ve developed, ’cause you’re also a licensed psychotherapist, that people can do to keep their eye on finding meaning in their lives even when things aren’t going their way? Alex Vesely: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s a good question. I mean, it’s actually really good. A lot of times, a lot of the problems could be prevented. And logotherapy has a lot to offer, not just for people who already some crises is in their lives, but even before that, to kind of check, am I on the right path? Or is this maybe not such a good or stable path that I’m on, or meaningful path? Ultimately, that’s what it’s about. And so one of the things… There are a couple of exercises, a lot of exercises were developed by Elisabeth Lucas. My grandfather was very impatient. He didn’t take much time to develop, you know, meditations and things like that. But Elisabeth Lucas did, and there are a lot of resources that you can find in her books. You know, one of the things that’s part of an exercise is to think, to imagine if your life was over tonight at midnight. What would be the things that… Well, first of all, that you would say, I’m glad this or that happened. I’m glad I had this experience. I’m glad I had this encounter. I’m glad I was able to, I don’t know, do this in my life, to achieve something. But then the second question is, what are the things that I would really regret knowing that my life is going to end in a couple of hours that I wish I would have had more time to do, to finish, to start, to turn into reality from a possibility, and what would be really heartbreaking and I would not feel good about leaving that undone or unexperienced. And think about that and then open your eyes again and take a look at what that is. And you’ll be aware that probably you’re not going to die at midnight. Maybe, but hopefully not. But if there is something that comes to mind that you really would regret not having done, go do it. Don’t waste your time. Because possibilities can be gone the next moment, if there is something meaningful that you’re postponing for whatever reason ’cause it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, ’cause it’s a sacrifice, because I don’t know, maybe you’ve forgotten about it. You know, life, things happen and things come in between us and what’s really important. Remember that and then go out and do it while you can. Brett McKay: I love it. Well, Alex, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work? Alex Vesely: Well, there is the Logotherapy Online Academy that is now offering training in English for the first time, which I’m doing together with Dr. Heidi Schönfeld. Logotherapy-online.com you can find it there. And there’s also the Viktor Frankl Institute of America where you can do an online course which is sort of a short and snappy overview, a basic introduction to logotherapy. And you can do that on your own from home. And it doesn’t take much effort. Brett McKay: Well, Alex Vesely, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure. Alex Vesely: It’s been a pleasure for me. Thank you. Brett McKay: My guest today is Alexander Vesely. He’s the grandson of Viktor Frankl and also a documentarian who did a documentary about Viktor Frankl. You can find more information about his work at the website viktorfranklinstitute.org, also check out our show notes at aom.is/frankl 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. And also check out our new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can find more information at dyingbreed.net. Till next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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Think about your habits, the things you do automatically without much thought — from brushing your teeth in the morning to scrolling social media before bed. There’s a lot going on with these behaviors. On one level, they’re just routines and actions wired into our brains through repetition. But there’s also more to it than that. Our habits shape who we are, influence our health and happiness, and determine much of our success in life. There’s a reason changing habits is one of the most powerful ways to transform ourselves. Today on the show, Dr. Gina Cleo will help us understand the science of habit formation and how we can harness it to build better behaviors. Gina is a researcher with a PhD in habit change and the author of The Habit Revolution: Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Powerful Habit Change . Gina and I discuss the three elements of the habit loop and how to hack them to develop good habits and break bad ones. Along the way, we talk about why micro-habits are so effective for creating lasting change, the differences between men and women when it comes to forming habits, how long it really takes for a habit to stick, and much more. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: Unlocking the Science of Habits — How to Hack the Habit Loop AoM Podcast #470: A Proven System for Building and Breaking Habits AoM Podcast #581: The Tiny Habits That Change Everything AoM Article: Disenchant Your Bad Habits Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff Connect With Gina Cleo Gina’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 Transcript Brett McKay: Hey, this is Brett. Before we get to today’s show, I have an announcement. When the Art of Manliness podcast started in 2009, we offered listeners one episode per week. Later, we expanded to two episodes weekly. Starting this year in 2025, we’ll be returning to publishing just one episode a week. There are two big reasons we decided to do this. First, we want to continue to be highly selective in choosing guest. We’ve always been highly selective in choosing guests to have on the show, looking for people with interesting, unique, edifying and useful ideas who are able to express those ideas articulately. The interviews almost always center on author and their book and while there are endless so-so books and guest out there, we’re not looking for so-so, we’re looking for great. Now, with over a thousand books read and a thousand episodes recorded, we’ve hosted some of the best thinkers multiple times, covered hundreds of subjects multiple times, and already highlighted many, many of the best books out there. Subsequently, it’s become harder and harder to maintain our standard of guest selection, to find topics we haven’t already done and done well, and to book folks who have something fresh and worthwhile to say. We’ve never wanted to find ourselves in a position where we have to book someone we only think is so-so simply to fulfill a contractually obligated slot on the calendar. Moving to one episode a week ensures that we can continue to maintain our standards of selection and only offer our listeners episodes that are truly valuable. Each week, there’ll be an episode that is definitely worth listening to. The trend these days, of course, is for podcasts to add more and more episodes and even spinoff shows in order to maximize downloads and thus revenue. But quality has always mattered more to us than earnings. The second reason we’re moving to one episode a week is that allows to spend more time on our first love, writing. This shift isn’t just about doing less, it’s about making room for something that both Kate and I have had the itch to do more of in the past few years. Deep, thoughtful writing. Before the AOM podcast was a twice a week show, we were able to write longer form articles, which we really enjoyed. We haven’t had much time for that since, and we miss it. We’ll be using the time that opens up for moving to one podcast episode a week to write articles for a new substack we’re starting, Dying Breed. To learn more about why we’re starting a new newsletter and what we’re hoping to do with Dying Breed, visit aom.is/dyingbreed or you can subscribe to the newsletter directly by going to dyingbreed.net. So again, we’re moving to one episode of the podcast each week. It’s gonna be the same format, same quality guest you’ve come to expect from the Art of Manliness podcast. Look for new episodes to drop on Tuesdays and go check out dyingbreed.net to see what we’re doing over there. Thank you for your continued support all these years. We’re looking forward to many more episodes of the podcast in the coming years. Now on to today’s show. Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Think about your habits, the things you do automatically without much thought, from brushing your teeth in the morning to scrolling social media before bed. There’s a lot going on with these behaviors. On one level, they’re just routines and actions wired into our brains through repetition. There’s also more to it than that. Our habits shape who we are, influence our health and happiness and determine much of our success in life. There’s a reason changing habits is one of the most powerful ways to transform ourselves. Today on the show, Dr. Gina Cleo will help us understand the science of habit formation and how we can harness it to build better behaviors. Gina’s a researcher with a PhD in habit change and the author of ‘The Habit Revolution: Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain For Powerful Habit Change.’ Gina and I discussed the three elements of the habit loop, how to hack them to develop good habits and break bad ones. Along the way, we talk about why micro habits are so effective for creating lasting change, the differences between men and women when it comes to forming habits, how long it really takes for habit to stick and much more. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/habit. All right, Dr. Gina Cleo, welcome to the show. Dr. Gina Cleo: Thank you so much for having me, Brett. Brett McKay: You have a PhD in habit change and you got a book out called ‘The Habit Revolution: Simple Steps to Rewire Your Brain for Powerful Habit Change.’ It’s a new year, so I imagine a lot of people are thinking about good habits they want to start, maybe some bad habits they want to break. Let’s start off with your background a bit. You know the old saying, research is me search. So was there something that led you to dedicate your academic career to researching habits? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yes, of course there was. My journey into habit research was deeply personal. I started my career as a dietitian, and I was really interested in health and wellness my whole life. But I really struggled to maintain my own healthy habits, whether it was exercising consistently or even eating well. I would finish a day in my clinic and I’d be eating a packet of biscuits on my way home and really trying not to do that, but struggling so much with my own, I guess, healthy behaviors and consistency. So I became really fascinated with the brain and neuroscience and why we do the things we do and what motivates us as human beings and how to actually create consistency in our behavior. And initially, I just thought I was a terrible dietitian, but when I looked at the research I found that actually 95% of people who set out to achieve a goal don’t achieve it. So that’s where this idea of learning about habits, which is the only proven method to achieving long-term success came about. Brett McKay: So I think a lot of us, I think most people have a lay understanding of what a habit is, but how do researchers like you define a habit? Like how is it different from any other behavior? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so a habit is a behavior that’s repeated regularly in the same context and it’s become automatic. Habits are generally triggered rather than being consciously intentional. So behaviors, unlike habits, they happen consciously, intentionally. But with habits, once habits are established, they don’t require much mental effort. They happen automatically subconsciously. You don’t have to deliberate over your habits, it’s just something that happens without much mental effort. Habits are the things that we do automatically. Behaviors are other things we do consciously or deliberately. Brett McKay: Okay. So just to recap there, the characteristics of a habit, there’s repetition, there’s a high degree of automaticity, you don’t have to think about it and then there’s a trigger of some sort that will kick it. Kickstart the habit. Dr. Gina Cleo: That’s right. Brett McKay: Okay. What’s the dividing line between a habit and say an addiction? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, The line between habits and addictions can blur, but a crucial difference is how much control we have over them and their impact on our life. Habits can be neutral, they can be negative or they can be positive. And although it’s not always easy, we can absolutely change any habit that we have in our life. Addictions on the other hand are usually negative and harmful to our life and they’re compulsive, they’re driven by neurological dependence. Addictions essentially hijack our brain’s reward system, and it makes us feel like we can’t live a happy life without having that substance or the behavior that we’re addicted to. Brett McKay: Okay. So you know, you have an addiction if it disrupts your life. Like if you can’t work, you can’t do daily functions, you have an addiction. I think it’s important to differentiate or really be specific about what an addiction is. I think we throw that word around a little bit too easy, like, oh, I’m addicted to cookies. Well maybe, but probably not. You just have the habit of like you eating cookies on the way home from work. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s not sort of disrupting your life to a significant amount. You can control it with enough intention and effort and consistency. You absolutely can. And that’s what separates the habit from the addiction. Brett McKay: So you walk through the research or the science of how we form habits and you talk about there’s three stages of habit formation. So what are those three stages of forming a habit? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so the habit formation framework essentially outlines the three stages are initiation, training, and maintenance. So we initiate a new behavior, we train ourselves in that behavior through repeating it, and then we maintain that new behavior through consistency. So essentially this is how we achieve goals. We decide on a goal that we want to achieve, we take action towards that goal. So we do the things that we need to do to achieve it, and then we continue to do that. So we maintain those behaviors so that we can achieve that outcome theoretically, of course. Brett McKay: And I think you make an important point in the book is that you remind people that all habits at some point began as an intentional act. And you said it’s an important thing to understand in forming and breaking habits. Why is that? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, you know our habits tell a story about our life. I’m a really big believer of that because once upon a time our habits were intentional actions. They are the things that we once chose to do and it could be in an attempt to maybe achieve a goal or suppress an uncomfortable emotion or reach some kind of desired outcome, whether it’s convenience or productivity or wellbeing. And I think it’s really important to know that because it helps us to identify, I guess, the chapters of our choices and our priorities, like why we are doing the things that we are doing. And I think once we understand our intentions for starting that behavior, we can then reshape it. We can fulfill those desires in potentially a healthier way if that’s something that we want to do. Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s a great reminder. You have some control over this. Like you’re not a slave to your habits. You can manipulate them if you want. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, that’s right. And I think there’s also a bit of self-compassion that can come into play. Say that you’re doing something, let’s say you’re coming home and you’re having a drink of alcohol every night and that’s not something that you want to keep doing. But if you were to look back and think, okay, when did this start? What was going on in my life? What was my intentional reason for starting this? You might see that it became a habit because you were trying to reduce stress or you were conforming to social norms or there’s all these reasons why we do things. And I think once we understand that we can have that self-compassion go, okay, I was just really stressed at that time, that’s why I was doing this. It was an act of self-soothing, potentially not the best way to self-soothe and reduce my stress, but that’s where it came from. And I can now reduce stress in a healthier and a healthier way. Brett McKay: You also talk about the habit loop. I’m sure a lot of our listeners are familiar with this idea, but for those who aren’t, what is the habit loop? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so the habit loop is essentially the three ingredients that are found in every habit, both good habits and otherwise. And they are a cue, a routine, and a reward. So the cue, that’s that trigger that we talked about, it’s the reason why we do the habit. And that cue could be the time of day, it could be the location that you’re in. It could be what you’ve just done beforehand. It could be how you’re feeling emotionally or the people that you are around. So all of our habits are cued by one of these five things. And then there’s the routine, that’s the second ingredient. And the routine is the habit itself. And then there’s the reward. And the reward is the reason why you keep doing this habit. If the reward wasn’t positive, it wouldn’t create this positive feedback loop for you to keep repeating the habit. So as an example, let’s say that you come home and the first thing you do when you get home is you eat a cookie. And the very first time you do that, a mental link is created between getting home and eating a cookie. So there’s an actual physical neural pathway that’s created in the brain. So getting home is the trigger and eating a cookie becomes the routine and the reward that you get is probably the taste of the cookies. It’s the little energy hit that you get or the dopamine. Now, the more you repeat that, getting home, eating a cookie, getting home, eating a cookie, the stronger this link becomes in your brain until eventually just the thought of getting home prompts you to want to eat a cookie and trying to do anything else becomes really hard because your brain’s like, well, when I get home, I eat a cookie and this is what I do. And that’s how our habits are formed. And that’s essentially the habit loop. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about cues and you also called them triggers because this is a really important idea and you devote a lot of time to this. You mentioned that there are five types of triggers. Can you summarize those again for us? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so experiments have shown that almost all our habits fit into one of five categories, and it could be more than one at a time. So the first one is time, for example, like waking up or midday. The second one is location. So it could be like the kitchen or the bedroom. The third one is preceding event or action. So what you’ve just done beforehand could be something like brushing your teeth or getting home from work. Number four is emotional state. This could be like stress, loneliness, happiness. And then finally your social situation, like meeting friends, the people that you’re around or your colleagues. So our habits are going to be triggered by one or more of these five triggers. Brett McKay: All right, so common triggers, time, location. We got preceding event, action, emotional state, and social situation. Another one I’ve heard of that’s rare, I’ve heard this with some people who are recovering from drug addiction, we’re going from habit to addiction, but they’re kind of similar smell, like, I guess, there’s certain drugs that you make that use bleach, I believe. And some people when they smell bleach, they get a sudden urge for a fix. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, that makes so much sense because smell is like the quickest way into our memories and like just a whiff of a familiar smell can trigger a memory from childhood. And I think that probably falls into that emotional state. It creates an emotion within us that makes us crave that thing, like the drug or whatever it is that we are craving. That’s really interesting though. Brett McKay: Okay, so we’ve covered the three basic parts of the habit loop. There’s cue, routine, and reward. And these components are part of both bad habits and good habits. And we can tinker with them in different ways to either form a good habit or break a bad habit. And let’s talk about forming good habits first. First off, what types of behaviors are we more likely to find success with as far as turning them into habits? Dr. Gina Cleo: The complexity of the behavior is going to play a really big role in whether something becomes a habit or not. So more complex behaviors take a lot longer to develop compared with simple behaviors. So one of the latest studies showed that they had two groups of people. One group, they asked to wash their hands every day. And the other group, they asked to go to the gym every day. And the hand washers took only two weeks to develop that habit, whereas the gym goers took seven months to develop the habit. And that’s because going to the gym is a lot more of a complex behavior compared with washing your hands. Washing your hands is something that you can do at any time. There’s mostly a sink around. It doesn’t take a whole lot of motivation. It takes two minutes to do compared with going to the gym, that requires motivation, getting changed, getting in your car. And so simple behaviors are much more likely to become habitual. Now, you as a person, you need to want to do the habit. It’s really hard to develop a habit from something that you don’t care much about. You don’t value a lot, you don’t see as going to benefit your life or other people’s lives. It’s really hard to develop that into a habit because there’s no intrinsic motivation. There’s no reason for you to want to keep pushing and making it automatic. Brett McKay: You have a chapter going to this idea of keeping it simple, of using micro habits to build larger, maybe more complex habits. Walk us through that idea of micro habits. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so micro habits is a term that I’ve created, which essentially they’re just tiny, manageable behaviors that serve as the building blocks for larger habits. And they’re really powerful because they’re achievable and they minimize resistance. So for example, doing one pushup a day or drinking a glass of water after waking up can be the start of a larger habit. Their simplicity builds consistency, which is a key to long-term success. So a couple of examples I give in the book is, if your goal is healthy eating, it’s much easier to have a goal of eating a piece of fruit every day compared with trying to overhaul your entire diet. Or if your goal is to do more exercise, it’s much easier to have a goal of walking for 15 minutes a day than to try to run a marathon, meditating, start with just two minutes. A lot of times the very first step is the hardest to everything. The first gym session, the first healthy meal, like the first everything is the hardest. And I’m a big believer that if we can reduce the barriers to entry, if we can make that first step easy and enticing and rewarding, that we’re much more likely to do it. And then we can build on that. Brett McKay: Okay, so when you’re trading your habits, start off simple, keep it small. I know BJ Fogg with his tiny habits, one thing he talks about if like flossing your teeth is a habit you want to start, he says, just start off flossing just one tooth. Like you don’t have to floss all your teeth, just do one tooth. And then gradually over time add more teeth. But you don’t have to do it all at once because you’re probably not gonna be successful with that. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah. And what you might find is when you floss one tooth, you’re like, oh, I may as well do the rest. Like, I’ve already pulled the floss out and I’m here doing it. I always say to people, create the habit of getting to the gym rather than creating the habit of exercising. If you create the habit of getting to the gym, the rest is going to happen. You’re not gonna get to the gym and be like, okay, I’m done. I’m gonna go home now. You are very likely to go in and do a workout, even if it’s a small workout. But it’s better than nothing at all. Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about in the book that you’ve had days where you didn’t feel like working, actually you were tired, but you still got up and you went to the gym, and then you drove home. Dr. Gina Cleo: Oh yeah, I have done that. That’s right, that’s why at this time, I was really sick actually, and I was just starting at a new gym, it was a power lifting gym, I don’t power lift anymore, just like you Brett, we are both recovering power lifters, and I wanted to continue the momentum of getting up and going to the gym at the specific time because I had a coach and it was sort of a schedule with it, and this one morning I was really sick and I was like, no, I’m still gonna get up, I’m gonna get dressed, drive to the gym and I’m gonna come straight home. And the really cool thing is, once I got better after a week or two, I didn’t have to restart my habit of getting to the gym ’cause I was already in it. Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve done that throughout my lifting career, call it that. I’ll have days where I still do this just to maintain the habit of exercise, that’s the most important habit to me, it’s not… My PRs aren’t that important to me, but just maintaining that habit of regular exercise, so I’ll have days where I don’t have time to do a full workout that I have planned, so I’ll just get what I can get done in 15 minutes. That might mean I just do a single set of every exercise and that’s it, or if I’m just feeling beat up and tired and I’m like, I really don’t wanna lift today, I’ll go for a walk instead at my regular workout time, I’m just trying to remind my mind and my body is like at this time you’re gonna move your body in an intentional way, and so once I feel better, I have more time, it’s not a problem to keep doing the regular programming. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, it’s so powerful to do that because that’s exactly what your doing, you’re reinforcing those neural pathways that at this time I move my body, so yeah, that’s awesome. And that will really solidify the habit moving forward even more. Brett McKay: So with behavior of the routine, keep it simple, that’s gonna be your best bet in creating a habit, let’s talk about triggers, you talk about different ways we can super charge our triggers, so make them more powerful. So if we’re wanting to design a positive habit, what are some things we can do with those common triggers to make them even more powerful, so what are those ways where you can super charge a trigger? Dr. Gina Cleo: So you want triggers to be really specific, so instead of, for example, saying after dinner, you might say, when I’m finished eating, because after dinner can be any time from the time you finish dinner until the next day, whereas after finishing eating is much more specific, so the other one is being salient, so making your triggers really obvious, so you could say something like, when I make a coffee, for example, in the morning and having that really clearly that’s obviously what you’re doing. Another one with triggers is something that you wanted to be consistent, something that you encounter regularly, consistently, inevitably would be really good. So that you know is going to happen. Like the time of day that’s going to really super charge your triggers compared to saying like at Christmas, I’m gonna do this because that doesn’t happen a lot. It only happens once a year. Brett McKay: Okay, then you also recommend finding triggers that are automatic. What does that look like? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so something automatic could be like, when I’m finished my breakfast or when my alarm goes off in the morning, I’m going to do this, so they’re automatic, they don’t require you to put in a whole lot of effort. It’s just something that you know is going to happen. Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about rewards a bit. Is there anything we can do with the reward aspect of the habit loop to help form good habits? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, one of the best rewards is our emotional rewards, it’s just the feeling of satisfaction, of accomplishment, of being proud of yourself, a lot of times people will say things like, if you’ve done a workout, then go buy yourself a new outfit, and that, she doesn’t work because we need the reward instantly, we need to feel that satisfaction, this sense of accomplishment straight away for the habit loop to become reinforced. And so let’s say you’ve done a workout when you really didn’t feel like doing it or you’re creating a new habit of working out, once you get to the gym, take a moment to celebrate your decision to do that, celebrate the fact that you’re there, and it’s just a silent moment to yourself, when you’re just like, I’m proud of you, well done for being here, and that’s going to be such a powerful reward. The other thing that you can do, which I highly recommend, is using a habit tracker, so every time you perform the habit that you had intended to do, you just give yourself a little tick for doing that habit, and like with children, we give them a gold star for doing their chores, and they feel really good for doing that and they’re motivated to wanna do it again. We don’t grow out of that reward learning as adults, so when we give ourselves a tick on a habit tracker, it sends dopamine through our brain and that feels good and rewarding and pleasurable, and that tells our brain, it’s like, hey, that felt really good. We should totally do this again, and it reinforces the habit. Brett McKay: I think it’s a good point. I’ve tried rewarding myself with physical things like, oh, if I do this thing, but yeah, it doesn’t work, because you can only reward yourself once with, say you wanna buy yourself a new pair of shoes, like lifting shoes, but what’s your reward gonna be all the other times you’d complete at the habit loop, each time you do your workout because there’s just too much of a delay between the behavior and the reward? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, exactly, right. And just except that the reward might be endorphins from working out, it could be dopamine, and it could be a hit of serotonin, but just sit and notice those moments. I actually think buying the lifting shoes, getting the new outfit for working out should be done before you work out because that’s gonna motivate you to go rather than trying to do it afterwards. Brett McKay: So let’s put all we’ve talked about together and how we can form an action plan for creating new positive habits. We’ve been talking about working out, let’s talk about something else. I know a lot of people maybe they wanna read more instead of scrolling more on social media at night time, so walk us through an example of say someone wants to read more, what can they do using this idea, things we’ve talked about of the habit loop, the habit formation process to become a regular nightly reader? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yes, so start really small, find the book that you wanna read and maybe set out just to read one page, if you’re new to reading, I would also say if your phone is around, it’s really hard to put that battle, the head-to-head battle between the phone and the book, because most likely your phone will win, it gives you way more dopamine, there is a lot more stimulation in a phone compared with a black and white book, so I would put your phone somewhere where you can’t reach it from bed, I charge my phone in my en suite or in the lounge room even, and then have your book there and ready. So start small, set that micro-goal, like reading one page and set the trigger, so you might say, when I get in bed in the evenings, I’m going to read one page, and then once you’ve done that, check it off on your habit tracker, and that’s… You’ve created the habit loop, so that’s gonna be you celebrating your win, which is the reward, and it’s just in all about consistency, so focus on consistency over intensity, and then gradually build. So once one page becomes natural and easy and something you don’t have to remind yourself to do, then you can start with two pages and then gradually building from there. Brett McKay: Okay. Simple enough. So it’s simple, it might not be easy to put in place, I think the hard part is just that training part of doing it over and over and over again, night after night without fail, ’cause that’s what you got to do if you wanna create that habit. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, that’s right. But I think when you have in the front of your mind why you’re doing this, why it’s valuable to you, why it’s important to you, then the motivation to keep going, it becomes easier to access. Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Do we know how long it takes to form a new habit, like how long do we have to do this training process of reading a page every night before it just becomes a habit. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, there’s a really wide range. Which I hate saying, I hate saying it depends, but it does depend. Most people have heard that it takes 21 days to 28 days to create a new habit. And that is absolutely false. There’s no evidence to prove that at all. The research shows that can take anywhere from two weeks to up to a year to create a new habit with an average time, very rough average being about 66 days or 10 weeks, but again, those simple habits are going to develop much quicker, the stronger your intention, the quicker the habit will develop as well. Brett McKay: Yeah, that 21 day thing, I’m sure people have heard that one, the funny thing about that, that came from a book written by a plastic surgeon, I think like in the 1960s called Psycho-Cybernetics, it was kind of like a self-improvement book, but I think you mentioned the 21-day habit thing in that book. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so he was a facial reconstruction surgeon, and he found that when his patients would look in the mirror after they’ve had facial reconstruction, it took three to four weeks for them not to get a shock when they looked at their face, their new face. So he was like, okay, it must take 21 days for neuroplasticity, which is changes in the brain. That means it takes 21 days to change a habit. But really, it is such a loose connection and it’s been debunked by science ever since then. Brett McKay: So you mentioned some factors that can influence how long it takes for a habit to form, one of them is the intention you’re putting in to the habit formation. Any other factors that might contribute to how long or how short a habit takes to form? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, so another factor and a really common one is stress, so the more stressed we are, the less we are likely to create a new habit, prefrontal cortex or our logical brain isn’t as active, we’re more likely to fall into unwanted habits because it’s really hard to find the motivation and I guess the oomph to want to create new healthy habits. So stress is going to be a factor, how habitual you are as a person, also plays a role. I’m not naturally a very habitual person, which is quite ironic for a habit researcher. I prefer spontaneity, flexibility, no two days are the same in my life, and so it takes me a little bit longer potentially to create new habits, but I can break old habits quite easily, compared with my husband who is very habitual, like the man can easily eat the same thing every single day and doesn’t bother him at all. He can create new habits a lot quicker, but struggles to break old habits as quickly as I do. The other thing is consistency. How consistent are you with performing your new habit, the more you do it, the more habitual that’s gonna be come and the quicker it’s going to develop into a habit. So making sure that your environment is conducive and supportive to your new habit that you’re encountering the trigger as often as possible, and that you’re doing the habit every time you encounter the trigger. Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of some people are just more habitual than others, I’ve seen that in my own life, I’m a very habitual person, I eat the same thing pretty much breakfast, lunch, and then dinner’s whatever we have as a family, but I’ve been eating the same thing for the past seven years, and it’s funny, my dad is like that too, he’s been eating Special K and drinking Folgers coffee probably for 40 years and… Dr. Gina Cleo: Wow. Brett McKay: And I picked that up from him. You highlight some research, this is speculative, it’s burgeoning, that men and women might differ in their habit formation. How do they differ? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, men and women are motivated and triggered by different things. For example, men are more triggered by external or environmental cues like images or matching other people’s behavior, whereas women tend to be more triggered by internal or emotional cues, like how stressed they are, how much responsibility they have in their families and how much capacity they have to create new habits, so it is speculative, research is still emerging, but we are definitely seeing that there is a difference. In my own practice, anecdotally, I found that men develop habits a lot quicker than women, and I think because there is less of those emotional fluctuations that trigger behavior compared with women, men can be a lot more militant, I think, if I was to be over-generalizing in my comment, compared with women who are a little bit more fluid generally from their day-to-day life. Brett McKay: We talked about how do you form a good habit. You also talked about sometimes even good habits can be detrimental, how so? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, there’s a theory called habituation, where we’re too habitual, your good habits can become rigid, making us sort less adaptable in new situations, for example, a really strict workout routine might cause anxiety if it’s disrupted, whereas balance comes from allowing flexibility and thinking of habits as tools rather than rules, and then may be periodically re-assessing whether a habit is actually serving your current goals and then adapting it accordingly. I just came back from holiday, and while we were away, we were in the Philippines for a couple of weeks, and then I went to Thailand, and our time in the Philippines, there was a power outage in the entire island. We had no power, so there was no running water, no electricity, no fans, no air con, nothing. And for the 10 days that we were there, it was really challenging to wanna work out because it was so hot and super humid, and the gym that we’d signed up to had also closed because it was just like there’s no lights, there was nothing. And so we had to just adapt, we went surfing and walking, went on little hikes and yeah, it wasn’t what we planned and scheduled, but we did what we can with the resources that we had, and I think if we’re too rigid, then our good habits can become detrimental, ’cause that creates anxiety, so that flexibility point is really important for our well being. Brett McKay: Yeah, you see that with exercise, you kinda talked about that. Both you and I, we had moments in our programming or training where we couldn’t do the full workout that we had program. If you’re really rigid with that and you’re like, well, if I can’t do the full workout, then I just shouldn’t do anything at all, but if you have a little bit of flexibility with that, it’s, okay, what’s the bigger goal I’m trying to accomplish here? Okay, exercise. Well, I can do something else besides three sets of five on deadlift, squat, and bench, and I’ll be okay. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, absolutely, and I see this all or nothing mentality so much, especially with our diet, if I can’t eat perfectly, then I’m just gonna blow out and I’ll eat all the cake and all the ice cream, and all the things, and it’s actually so much better to be flexible in your approach and enjoy everything in moderation and then just keep living your life that way instead of having this all or nothing mentality, which just doesn’t work long term. Brett McKay: Let’s talk about breaking bad habits, so how can we use these knowledge of habits to break bad habits we don’t want? Dr. Gina Cleo: When you think of the habit loop as key routine reward, every single habit is triggered by something, so if we can disrupt that key routine reward loop, then we can break a habit, so there’s two ways that we can do that, we can either replace the old habit with a new habit that we wanna do, or if it’s possible, we can try to avoid that trigger all together. So often, the one thing that we get wrong when we’re trying to change our behaviors, we focus so much on trying to break the habit, we will say, okay, I’m gonna stop drinking or I’m gonna stop eating cookies, like those things are dead to me, and then we get home, and the first thing that we do is we go and eat a cookie, grab a bottle of alcohol. And the reason is that as soon as our brain encounters the trigger for the habit that we have, it’s already started firing the necessary neural pathways to take the next action, that key routine reward, that habit loop happens in the split second. And we’re not even aware that it’s happening, and so it’s really hard for us to encounter a trigger and then try to stop doing the habit, it’s so much easier to understand what the trigger is, pre-empt the trigger. So you might say, when I get home today, I’m really gonna feel like having some alcohol, but this is what I’m gonna do instead, and you can preempt the craving and try to interject with a new behavior or change your environment or create barriers to make those unwanted habits harder to do. And it is so much more empowering and much easier to break habits that way than trying to do it the other way. It’s much easier to reverse engineer the process. So if, for example, driving past a fast food chain triggers you to go in there and order a Big Mac combo, then if it’s possible to drive a different way, do that, and that’s going to break that habit of eating fast food, if you can’t change the trigger, if driving a different way isn’t a possibility, then it’s important to pre-empt it. You would say, okay, when I drive past this fast food chain, I’m gonna be tempted to go inside, but this is what I’m gonna do instead, and you might pack something, you might order something smaller or whatever it is, and it’s really just about creating barriers for the habits that you wanna break and having really strong intentions, the stronger our intention, the weaker habits become. Brett McKay: You also talk about, we can do things with the reward aspect to break bad habits. What are some things we can do to manipulate the reward to break a bad habit? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, I remember a story I wrote in the book about, I guess, our perception of certain rewards, let’s say you smoke, for example, and you really love how the cigarette makes you feel, you love the nicotine hit that you get, the dopamine hit and it feels awesome. And so your mind is telling you, I really love this habit, so you’ve got this big reward value from it. What they did in a study recently actually, is they got smokers to mindfully smoke, so they got them to have a cigarette and then describe exactly what it tasted like, what it felt like afterwards, and the descriptions that they gave were things like, oh, this tastes like ash, like tar, you’re on a tarmac at an airport and it just tastes disgusting. And once their reward value, like the perception of the reward of that cigarette reduced, every single one of the study [0:37:35.7] ____ stopped smoking, and it’s because they no longer felt like it was a rewarding experience. The reward they thought they got from it wasn’t actually there once they bought mindfulness into it. And it’s a really interesting diet. I think it’s called the Yuck Diet, it’s not a technical term, certainly not a scientific term, but some guy invented it where essentially, he started thinking of things like spaghetti is like worms, and chocolate is like mud, and cheese is like mucus, and once he started to think of food like that, and not that I’m condoning that because I think all food is acceptable, but for him, he had a real, I guess, he was sort of out of control with some of these foods, but once he started to see those foods as less valuable, less rewarding, less enticing, he no longer craved them and was able to eat them with a lot more control, and he lost a bunch of weight, and it was a really cool story, but the reward that you place on something is going to impact directly how much you crave that thing, so just we can change our perspective on things. I think it can be one of the most empowering things we can do with breaking our unwanted habits. Brett McKay: Yeah. Judson Brewer, we’ve had him on the podcast. He talks about this, he calls it disenchanting bad habits. So, yeah, whenever you experience that reward from, it could be food or I think, he does like smoking cessation, you work to disenchant the reward. And I’ve actually used this idea to quit looking at Instagram ’cause you’re bored and so you’re pulled into just opening up the app and just scrolling through. But every time you do like, you’re like, man, there’s nothing here. Like, why am I wasting my time with this? And you almost feel a little bit of disgust. And so to disenchant the habit, you really have to lean into that feeling and really focus and think about the fact that there’s nothing interesting here and you wouldn’t have missed anything if you hadn’t checked it. So let’s use kind of a practical example to walk people through how to break a bad habit, what we’ve been talking about. I know a lot of people in January, they take part in something that’s called dry January, which is you don’t drink alcohol during January. So how could we use these things we’ve talked about in breaking bad habits to be successful at dry January? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, again, looking at the habit loop, it’s like what are the triggers? And try to change your environment as much as possible. So first thing, don’t have alcohol in your house. Maybe stock your house filled with non-alcoholic alternatives instead. I worked with someone who would come home and the first thing that she did was she’d pour a glass of wine. And that was like her habit. Not coming home isn’t an option. She’s got to go home every day. And so what we did is we moved all the wine bottles into a really hard to reach shelf in the garage where she needed to get a stepladder to access it. We moved all her wine glasses to a different cupboard and then we put all her tea mugs where the wine glasses were. So the first couple of days she came home, she opened the cupboard where the wine glasses used to be only to find all these tea mugs. And that’s what was triggering her memory, that she’s actually here to change this wine drinking habit. And so then she’d make herself a tea and she felt the reward and the satisfaction of doing something that was healthier for her body. So think of ways that you can create barriers for drinking. Definitely tell your friends so that you’ve got that accountability and that they’re not tempting you where you’re in social events that require alcohol and keep that habit tracker. So every day you successfully go without drinking alcohol. Make sure you give yourself a tick. Be proud of yourself for another day down. Brett McKay: I love it. You devote a lot of time in the book to motivation. How do psychologists define motivation? Dr. Gina Cleo: Psychologists define motivation as the reason that we initiate, choose, or persist in specific actions in specific circumstances. So simply put, motivation is the reason that we act in a particular way. Brett McKay: What’s the interplay between motivation and habit formation? Like why did you spend so much time talking about motivation in a book about habits? Dr. Gina Cleo: I think from whenever we are looking at changing our behavior, I think one of the biggest things that people say is, I just don’t have motivation. I don’t have it in me. It’s almost like we are waiting for motivation to come, but it’s such a myth because action is a prerequisite to motivation. Motivation comes as a result of action. Like how often do you absolutely not feel like doing something and you take the first step anyway, and then you are in it, like you are motivated to do it, and you complete the task and you actually feel quite good about it. I definitely have that with things like decluttering something or I’m unpacking my suitcase right now. I’m like, oh, I just don’t feel like doing it. But as soon as I get started, the rest flows and it becomes so much easier. Motivation kickstarts habit formation. We have to feel motivated the very beginning of creating a new habit. But once that habit has a bit of momentum and automaticity, then consistency is what sustains it. We no longer need motivation for our habits. It’s like no matter how tired, stressed, fatigued you are, you’ll always put your seatbelt on in the car because it’s something that you do habitually. You don’t need to be motivated to do it. And that’s a real power of habits. But we do need motivation just at the very start when we’re creating a new habit. Brett McKay: So you mentioned, okay, just do the thing and the motivation will follow. Any other things we can do to take control of our motivation so we’re more likely to achieve our habit goals, especially for those habits that seem harder to make or break? Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah, break those ones down. Definitely make it a lot more enticing for yourself. Like find ways for you to want to do it. Say like you get to listen to your favorite music as you are doing the task, or you get to do it with a friend or… The other thing to do is really see progress. Like make sure that you are measuring progress if you can, even if your progress is just seeing how often you are doing the thing, because motivation grows as you see progress. So build that momentum nice and early, but just focus on yeah, starting small and know that the motivation will come, like trust that it’ll come. Brett McKay: Something’s gonna happen. And in this habit formation journey is you’re gonna have setbacks, you’re doing great, then you have a day where you don’t do the thing and then a day turns into two and then you’re just like, ah, I failed again at starting a habit or you’re trying to break a habit and you have a setback. What do you recommend people do to deal with setbacks and their habit goals? Dr. Gina Cleo: I think the first thing to know is that setbacks are a part of the process. It’s not if you have a setback, it’s when you have a setback, no matter how disciplined or motivated you are, it’s part of the process. And the most successful people in the world also have setbacks. And what differentiates them from the people that go and fall off the wagon entirely is the successful people will get up and they’ll do so quickly after a setback. And rather than seeing those setbacks as failures, they view them as data. It’s like, what triggered this lapse? How can I adjust moving forward? Do I need to change my cue or my trigger? Do I need to change the intensity of this habit? Really focus on your next action rather than dwelling on the setback. And the most important thing is going to be self-compassion. People who are kind to themselves after a setback are so much more likely to bounce back quickly and like to allow themselves to make errors and make mistakes and just jump back on the horse and keep going. Brett McKay: Yeah. That self-compassion component, I found that it’s really important in any behavior change or goal pursuit that you have. I think we, a lot of us have this idea that, well, you got to really beat yourself up and you got to be a drill sergeant. And so if you fail, you got to just really flagellate in order to get back on the horse. And the research actually says that actually doesn’t work. It’s better just to be a little kinder to yourself. Dr. Gina Cleo: Yeah. And I know, and it sounds counterproductive and counterintuitive, but you’re right, that is exactly what the research shows over and over again. We’re so much more, are going to be much more successful if we can practice self-compassion than self-criticism. Brett McKay: And I think the problem is people have this, I think especially men have the wrong idea of what self-compassion looks like. They kind of think it looks soft and weak. But it’s not the way I think of self-compassion, you’ve had a coach, I have a barbell coach, like they show compassion to me. It’s not like they’re like, oh Brett, it’s okay. You’re gonna be fine. He’ll be really upfront with me saying, Hey, yeah, that was tough. You didn’t make it. That’s okay though. Get back to your workout the next time and it’ll be fine. It’s not like you’re not treating yourself like a little kid who needs their booboo kissed. You’re just not beating yourself up. Dr. Gina Cleo: Exactly. Right. Yeah. And it is and it’s so powerful. And there’s a really awesome book by Dr. Kristen Neff called ‘Self-Compassion.’ And I recommend everyone read it. It’s a real game changer in… For any person who struggles in this space ’cause I don’t think it comes naturally for us to practice self-compassion. I think there are a lot of misconceptions around it, especially with men like you mentioned, Brett. So I think it’s something that we can all practice and do a little bit better in that space. It really is a powerful tool. Brett McKay: Well, Gina, is there anything else we haven’t talked about on habits that you think are, it’d be really useful for people to hear about in order to be more successful with their habit goals this year? Dr. Gina Cleo: I think we’ve covered so much, but one thing I’d add is that you are not stuck with your brain. No matter how old you are, no matter how long you’ve been doing the habit, no matter how stuck you feel, all of our brains by virtue of neuroplasticity are able to be rewired. You can rewire your brain. All you need is consistency, determination, persistence, and the right tools. So just know that you absolutely can change any habit that you have. Brett McKay: Well, Gina, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Dr. Gina Cleo: Thanks Brett. I’ve loved chatting to you. Well, you can find my book and my work on my website along with free resources, like I’ve got a free Habit Change Masterclass, there’s free Habit Tracker’s on there. You can also access my online courses and follow on social media for tips on rewiring your brain and all the links are at drginacleo.com. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Gina Cleo, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Dr. Gina Cleo: Thanks Brett. Love chatting with you. Brett McKay: My guest today was Gina Cleo. She’s the author of the book, ‘The Habit Revolution.’ It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about our work at our website, drginacleo.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/habit 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 think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give a read 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 will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding to not only Listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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Note: This is a rebroadcast. 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 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 Sponsors Click here to see a full list of our podcast sponsors. Read the Transcript! If you appreciate the full text transcript, please consider donating to AoM . It will help cover the costs of transcription and allow others to enjoy it as well. Thank you! 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. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you’re inundated with each day. Sometimes you read them, and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you’ll revisit them later. If you’re the sender of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope the recipient has the first response, that, instead of deep-sixing your message, they take the time to engage and take action on it. How do you increase the odds of that happening? Rather than just guessing at the answer, Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World . Today on the show, Todd explains the four-stage process people use in deciding whether to engage with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these factors not only comes down to the style of your writing, but its overall design. Todd offers tips to improve both areas, so that you can effectively capture people’s attention. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Podcast #971: The 5 Factors for Crafting Simple (Read: Effective!) Messages AoM Podcast #666: The Power of Brevity in a Noisy World AoM Podcast #580: Why People Do (Or Don’t) Listen to You Connect With Todd Rogers Todd on X Todd’s faculty page Writing for Busy Readers 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 Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Think of all the texts, emails, and social media posts you’re inundated with each day. Sometimes you read them and sometimes you swipe them away, telling yourself, perhaps not so honestly, that you’ll revisit them later. If you’re the sender of such missives and memos or the creator of content, you hope the recipient has the first response. That instead of deep six-ing your message, they take the time to engage and take action on it. How do you increase the odds of that happening? Rather than just guessing at the answer? Todd Rogers has done empirical experiments to discover it. Todd is a behavioral scientist, professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the author of Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World. Today on the show, Todd explains the four stage process people use in deciding whether to engage with your writing, whether in a personal or business context, and how influencing these factors not only comes down to the style of your writing, but its overall design. Todd offers tips to improve both areas so that you can effectively capture people’s attention. At the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/busyreaders. All right. Todd Rogers, welcome to the show. Todd Rogers: Thanks for having me. Brett McKay: So you are a professor of public policy and you recently co-authored a book about how to write for busy readers. What’s the connection between researching and writing about public policy and writing for harried people living in the TikTok age? Todd Rogers: I’ve never been asked to actually defend why this is public policy. I guess it starts with I spent a decade working on how do we communicate to busy voters trying to mobilize voters to participate in elections, and then a decade working on how do we communicate with busy families from schools to get kids to go to school and kids to do better. And then five or six years before Jessica and I wrote this book, working with leaders across industries on how do we communicate to our employees, stakeholders, customers, constituents, and yeah, so I guess the common thread is across all these categories, across every domain of life, we are communicating to busy people. And if we wanna be effective at doing it, we have to understand that our readers are busy and we should write in a way that makes it easy for them. Brett McKay: Yeah. With public policy, you’re trying to get people to do things, but in order for them to do the thing that you want them to do, you have to communicate that to them? Todd Rogers: Yeah. I describe it as stage zero of every intervention we deliver. Is do we capture people’s attention long enough to deliver whatever we’re trying to communicate? So yeah. So if we are trying to have people sign up for a program or, you know, comply with the law or show up to court on a specific court date, we need to make sure we are communicating to them effectively. Brett McKay: So you start off the book defining what effective communication is, what effective writing is, and you’ve developed this definition based on research as well as your own experience as a reader and writer. So what makes writing effective? Todd Rogers: I think we probably start with the reader. So it’s funny, we talk about writing as if we are teaching writers, but the entire question of effectiveness is, do we succeed in communicating some thought from our head into the head of a reader? And so when we talk about this work, we’re like, okay, imagine you own a radical different take on writing. It’s not enough to have everything in there and then shift the responsibility to the reader. Imagine if it was always your fault if the reader did not read what you gave them. If it was always your fault, and so it’s your responsibility to make sure they read it and you don’t control their lives. All you control is what you put in front of them. Then just, it takes a whole new orientation. Effective writing is writing that we succeed in delivering the key content into someone else’s head at their leisure. Brett McKay: And then at the beginning, I loved how you applied the things you write about in this book, in your book, and you lay out these sort of bullet points of what you found to be effective writing. Things like effective writing has a well-defined purpose. There’s a reason why you’re doing it, like, you know, and the reader can pick that up right away. It says, effective writing helps the writer as well as the reader. How does effective writing help the writer as well as the reader? Todd Rogers: Writing often helps us clarify our own thinking, and I think we conflate that with the other use of writing, which is getting an idea from me to you. And they are two totally different functions. And often we write our first draft and then at the end it was clear what we think that the highest order goal is. But that’s actually stage one. Stage two is then we need to actually make it as easy for the reader as possible to get it. The way it makes it easier for the writer. Writing effectively helps writers because one, it helps us achieve our goals, which is Jessica and my objective with this book, helping writers be more effective in achieving their goals. But it also, and we’ve all experienced this, the haranguing and harassment of people who haven’t read or responded to what we sent them, ineffective writing becomes a huge burden on the writer because people aren’t showing up, people aren’t responding, people are asking you questions. So writing effectively helps writers because it saves us all the follow up and all the hassle that we are experiencing as a part of hassling other people to respond to us. It saves you from that irritation. Brett McKay: Yeah. Another point you make, effective writing is not the same as beautiful writing. Flesh that out for us. Todd Rogers: We are all taught how to write well. K through 12, K through college, we are taught these ideals of what good writing looks like, what beautiful sentences are, and using advanced vocabulary to be more precise. And I think that’s a critical stage on the road to becoming an effective person. But there’s a totally different project, which is not meeting some ideal, but actually communicating in the world to people who are not paid to read your writing and people who are most of the time trying to move on as quickly as possible. Like their goal is to hit delete or hit next as quickly as possible, often without even knowing what your point was. And so it’s like effective writing is writing for those people, not for people who are paid to give you feedback on your writing. Brett McKay: Or it’s not for a novel for example. Like you might use some flowery language in a novel ’cause that’s what you’re trying to… You’re trying to do something. It’s basically beautiful writing and effective writing have two different goals. Todd Rogers: Totally, yeah. A novel’s just a different function. We think of effective writing as being about professional practical writing where you’re texting a friend or you’re writing a web content or you’re writing an email to a coworker. All of it is like, it is not, you know, we’re not trying to layer in a third level of meaning with close reading about what adjective we used. We’re actually just trying to practically communicate something. Brett McKay: Right. So effective writing is about getting stuff done, and you guys aren’t arguing in this book that we need to, you know, do sort of like an Orwellian news speak where all of our writing becomes effective writing. There’s still a place for New Yorker articles, there’s still a place for Tolstoy in writing like that. It’s just that you’re focused on how can we write so people get stuff done. That’s the focus. Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like that. I mean, we probably could have incorporated that into the title. Yeah. There is a place for all that stuff, although that is a totally different function. It is leisure. You read the New Yorker Tolstoy because you are reading it recreationally to entertain yourself. And that is different than working your way through your text messages or your inbox. Brett McKay: As a guy who’s on public policy, what have the consequences been of ineffective writing? Like real world consequences? Todd Rogers: You could go across any domain for… It could be ineffective. Let’s say you’re a government and you’re communicating to the people who are delinquent in taxes, you’re mailing them and they’re not reading it. There’s all these studies on people are released from arrest and they’re given court summons. And if it is written in a way that is easy to read, they’re way more likely to actually show up to court and not have bench warrants issued for their arrest or signage in your public park asking you to pick up your dog’s poop written in pretty incomprehensible ways. Personally, like I have started two organizations. One is the Hub in Washington DC of using behavioral science and behavior change on public political communications and effective political communications, whether it’s Get Out the Vote or Fundraising or Volunteer Recruitment or Persuasion. Another is a company that works with K12 school districts in communicating to families effectively, gets kids to go to school or not. And so writing in a way that makes it hard to understand, or just writing the way we sometimes do can undermine these important goals that organizations, campaigns, schools, companies have, which is trying to achieve some goal that is good for both the person who’s reading and the goal of the writer. Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m sure everyone’s seen examples of the bad consequences of ineffective writing at their own work. You know, the company sends out a memo trying to get you to do something, but it’s written in this convoluted way or there’s just too much going on in the memo that there’s hardly any compliance at all. Todd Rogers: Yeah. There’s, I mean, there’s some great examples. So there’s like a sign, there is a center for plain language. It is an organization that gives an award every year called the WTF Award for just the worst signage that has been created that year. WTF means words that failed, obviously, and the sign, a real sign, getting people to pick up their dog’s poop was persons shall remove all excrement from pets. I am certain that that was an ineffective sign and that 90% of people didn’t read it and understand that the goal was to scoop your pet’s poop. So yeah, it’s comically bad, but it’s clear. I mean, I’m sure the lawyers understood it. Brett McKay: Yeah. So before you start writing, the thing you say we need to do first is get inside your reader’s head. What do people need to understand about readers today so they understand like how a reader decides whether or not they’re gonna read something, whether they’re gonna read it all the way through, et cetera. Todd Rogers: I think the TLDR of the whole thing, the too long didn’t read of the whole book or of this entire project that we’re doing is everyone is skimming everything, right? No one is spending as much time reading as we are writing and thinking about it. And so we need to write in a way that accommodates the reality that everyone’s skimming. So you get inside their head and know that they’re super busy and they have a long list of things to do and a lot of things they’d rather do than read whatever you’re sending them. And that includes text messages. We’ve run these experiments where even text messages, writing them so they’re easier to read makes people more likely to understand and respond to them. So if you’re gonna get in the reader’s head, it all starts with everyone’s busy and everyone’s skimming. And rarely do people care as much about what we’re writing as we do. Brett McKay: And I love this too. You lay out a four stage process that readers go through when they’re deciding whether they’re going to engage with a piece of text, and this is whether it’s an email, a text, a Slack message, a social media post. The first part is you have to decide whether you’re gonna engage with it at all. So you just look at the thing and you kind of skim it and you’re like, well, am I even going to dig deeper into this? Second is, if you decide to engage, you must decide when to engage. Like what does that mean? Like sometimes you don’t read it right away? Todd Rogers: Yeah, it’s a combination of the first and second. The second and third, which is the first most is the… I think the most important and kind of the most subtle, but everyone will relate to, which is if you have a long thing in front of you and a short thing in front of you, which are you gonna do first? Almost everyone is gonna do the short easy thing first. And so you look at it, it’s a wall of words and we call that deterrence. You are just deterred from reading it at all. And that’s like, I think that everyone should relate to. You open something, even a text message like, I can’t deal with that right now. Or you go to a webpage and it’s a long wall of words. The second and third are basically like, okay, so do I engage with it now or later? And whenever I engage with it, how deeply do I read it? And I assume we actually have lots of evidence. What happens is the more difficult it is to read, the more you just sort of dart around, bounce around, see if you get the gist and eventually give up and move on. So those are the one through three. And the fourth one is deciding whether to respond or not, if you’re asking for some kind of response. And the easier the response, the more likely people are to do it. Just like the shorter the message, someone’s more likely to read that than a long one. If it looks like it’s gonna require a lot of research or it’s unclear what the question is, all these things make it just less likely people will deal with it at all, but definitely less likely they’ll deal with it now. Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about what we can do as writers to increase the odds that someone will want to engage with whatever we’re throwing at them. They’ll want to maybe act on it faster, sooner rather than later. And, you know, engage with all of it and as well as, you know, respond, get more of response so we can get stuff done. And you and your co-author lay out six principles that writers can use to make sure that their writing is effective. The first principle, and you just kind of referred to it just a minute ago, less is more. So how does more often get in the way of your readers engaging with your text? Todd Rogers: This is my favorite. I don’t wanna speak for Jessica on this. I love this. Less is more. You could probably go back to there’s a quote that every clever person who’s ever been alive has been credited with this quote, which is, I would’ve written you a shorter letter if I’d had more time. And what I love about that is it is worthy of apology. I have wronged you by giving you this longer than it needed to be text. And second, it takes more time to write less. Both of those are sort of central to this less is more idea. And the idea is, and we’ve run randomized experiments, lots of them, where the more sentences you add, the more ideas you add, just the longer it is, the less likely people are to read and understand and respond. Whether it’s soliciting a response, getting people to fill out a survey, getting people to… We worked with the, I don’t know if we named the party, but one of the big political parties, Democrat or Republican on a big fundraising email with 700,000 donors and arbitrarily deleted every other sentence. So it didn’t even make sense anymore. So we cut it in half by making it incoherent and still increased donations. We’ve done lots of versions of this, but the idea is just you need to know there’s a trade off. The more you add, the less likely someone is to read, understand, and respond. And the optimal length in content is not nothing or one sentence. It’s just a trade off. You just need to know, the more you add, the less effective it’ll be. But you gotta make those trade-offs. Brett McKay: Yeah. So you lay out some rules to apply this less is more. First one, use fewer words. And I mean, if you went to college or even high school, they taught, you know, this whole elements of style, just eliminate, and that was one of the rules. Eliminate needless words. You know, have everyone seen these wordy phrases for the reason that instead of saying that, just say, because you know. Todd Rogers: Right. In order to. Brett McKay: Yeah. Todd Rogers: Just say to. Brett McKay: Just to. Whether or not, well, just weather. Todd Rogers: Yeah, exactly. Brett McKay: Personal opinion. Well, there’s only one type of opinion. I mean, so just things like that can go a long way. But I love this idea. Rule number two, to include fewer ideas. So we’re talking about, maybe it’s a memo or an email you’re trying to write. Oftentimes you wanna try to cram as many things as you can in that piece of text. But what your research shows is like the fewer, the better. The fewer ideas you have in your email or memo, the more likely people are going to read what you wrote. Todd Rogers: Yeah. And that’s hard. I mean, it’s hard for people because it requires judgment and prioritizing. Like what’s the most important thing I’m saying here? And it would be good for you to know this, but it’s not necessary. And so there’s trade offs all the way, like there are workarounds, like if it’s a webpage, you could have a link to the more content, or if it’s an email, you could have it below the sign off or as an attachment. Or if it’s a report, it could be an appendix. You can keep the detail, but you just need the core thing to be the core thing. And what we have is all this experimental evidence showing that when you dilute it with more content, you just are less likely to achieve your goal. And it just requires judgements and trade-offs the whole way. Brett McKay: Yeah. You gave this great example. This was like a text. Could be a text to get together with some friends for dinner. The original one is, I’m looking forward to our 6:30 dinner tonight. Let’s eat at Tina’s Italian restaurant at 651 Ocean Drive. Their breadsticks are awesome. I haven’t had their lasagna, but I’m ready. It’s supposed to be tasty. Let’s meet at my place 15 minutes early and we’ll walk from there. Sam and Joy, are gonna join us for dinner too. Man, if I got that text, I’d be like, oh, geez, I’m gonna just have to look at this later. But you know, you could have just said, Hey, we’re having dinner, it’s at 6:15, meet at my place. That’s all you needed. Todd Rogers: Right. And there is information in the rest of it. It’s just you got… And if you’re aware that there’s a trade off, then you have to treat it differently. Since writing the book, I’ve worked with a guy who’s in the CIA on who writes intelligence assessments in this group, in this intelligence group, and there’s 70 pages and that’s the norm. And he was like, well, how do I write less? Because if I write 35 pages, they’re gonna think I didn’t do my job. ‘Cause the norm is the norm. The norm is 70 pages. And so I actually love that because the answer is you can’t. Like, you have to write for your audience and what your audience expects, it has to look like what your audience expects. I mean, Jessica and I wrote a 207 page book where one of the principles is write less. The book, expect the book to look like a book. And so you have an audience that has norms and expectations, it has to look like what they expect, but then within those constraints, the easier you make it for them, the better. And so with a text message, I don’t think anyone cares whether you are interested in the breadsticks or not. They’re just like, when do I show up and who’s gonna be there? Brett McKay: Right. Okay. Let’s move on to the second principle. Make reading easy. How do we typically make reading more difficult for our audience? Todd Rogers: We write in grammatically correct, complicated ways. And so whether it is a long sentence or using unfamiliar, uncommon words, or writing in a like grammatically complicated way, it just makes it more cognitively taxing. So like a different way of thinking about all this in length and also writing style is just how do you make it less cognitively effortful? The easier it is, the more likely people will be to do it. So even if they’re gonna work their way through it, it’s just unkind to write in a way that taxes them and burdens them. We ran one experiment with Vice President Harris when she was the Attorney General of California, where, and I mean, I don’t know, the listeners are not, I hope no one is writing like this, but the California State Legislature required that schools send families letters when their kids are late or absent. And it starts with California Education Code, section 48260 provides that a pupil, child, subject to compulsory, I mean, it’s not even written for humans, and it’s like being sent to hundreds of thousands of families so the idea is we just add a round of editing where we just ask how do I make it just easier to pull the key info out? Even if we are correct, complete, and grammatically accurate, we just make it easier. Brett McKay: Yeah, so you apply some rules. Use shorten common words, so there’s that whole quote. I think it was Mark Twain. Don’t use a $5 word when a 50-cent word will do. So instead of saying acquiesce, you can just say agree. You know, you don’t have to get fancy. You can save the $50 words for your New Yorker article you’re writing for yourself. Todd Rogers: Yeah, for yourself, exactly. Brett McKay: Yeah, rule two, just use straightforward sentences. So this is, you’re not gonna do clauses and using semicolons and et cetera. Like, just really straightforward. Like, you can just glance at it, you know exactly what it says. Yeah, and then rule three, write shorter sentences. So, you know, just gotta edit, edit, edit, edit until you can get it down. You start writing like Hemingway, basically. Todd Rogers: Yeah, that’s the idea, but no simpler than it needs to be. Right, like as simple as it can be, but no simpler. Brett McKay: Yeah, so you give an example of a hard to read complex sentence and then editing it so it’s easier to read. Here’s the hard to read version. Often crafted from insidiously complicated language designed to abstract contentious details, ballot measures are propagated as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states in Washington, DC. So yeah, grammatically correct, but that was hard to read. Here’s the edited version. Ballot measures are used as a tool of direct democracy in 24 states and Washington, DC. They’re often written with deceptively complex language designed to hide controversial details. So yeah, that was a lot easier to read. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, second principle again, make reading easy. So we’re just gonna use fewer words, write shorter sentences and make sure your sentences aren’t hard to read with those parentheticals and semicolons and references back to things you said in a previous clause. Third principle is design for easy navigation. Now, I’m sure a lot of people are listening to this. They probably learned in high school or in college, you know, some ideas or some rules about being concise with your writing. We’ve all probably read elements of style and that’s one of the rules. But I don’t remember being taught this. Well, actually I was taught this in law school, but I wasn’t taught this in undergrad or high school is thinking about the design of your writing so that it’s easy to read. So what does that look like? How can we lay out our writing so that it’s easier to navigate? Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like this one. This is, I like all of them equally, but I like this and less is more the most. But the idea is it’s not even about writing, but realizing that people are gonna look at it and decide, do I read or not? Remember that stage of deterrence. Or once they’re reading, they’re just gonna dart around and see if they can get something out of it before they give up. And one metaphor or at least framework we use for thinking about it is that people may allocate like a fixed budget of time to reading your thing. And so then the question is just how do you make it easier for them to get what you want them to get out of it in that budget? And so that could be like adding headings. So it’s easy to know the structure. And when we actually do eye tracking, you see people jump around and read the headings first when they’re moving fast. Sometimes they just go first line, second line, but that’s when they’re anticipating reading the whole thing. But often they’ll just dart around and figure out what’s in here. And we’ve actually run experiments where when you add headings in newsletters, you double the likelihood that people will read past the second paragraph and use anything in it past the second paragraph. The other one that people really like, and I really like, and I don’t know if you’re a veteran or how many of your listeners are veterans, but I work with a lot of active duty people in different branches of the military. One thing that they have in the US, started in the US Army and it spread across the militaries around the world is a thing called BLUF, bottom line up front, B-L-U-F, BLUF, bottom line up front. And it is a rule in the US Army, a rule that anything written to anybody, the first line has to be the bottom line. So there’s no long introduction, an enlisted person writing to a general, bottom line is the first line. And it makes it so much easier for readers and writers to know where’s the key info, where do I put the key info, where do I find the key info? But it especially helps people who are lower status, like an enlisted person writing to a general might have to say in the absence of that rule, like we ran into each other in Kandahar, you may not remember me, we chatted in the mess, I went to rival high school, we laughed about how the Philadelphia Eagles are gonna win the SuperBowl this year. But I wanna ask you for a meeting. And so instead of the whole throat clearing, which would decrease the likelihood we get read at all, now they have this rule that doesn’t work everywhere, but having this rule in that environment and with that organization makes it just easier for everybody. And so another way to design for navigation is to have this kind of structure. So it’s easy to pull the key info out and jump around, but also when possible, make the bottom line super easy to pull out. Brett McKay: Okay, so yeah, when you write an email, for example, just right at the very top, don’t you have to do the throat clearing stuff, just like here’s what this email is about. Todd Rogers: Maybe, but it doesn’t work every, like it just depends on the expectations and norms, ’cause that can come off as too aggressive. I don’t do that. I still have a hope you’re well or good talking to you the other day. And I usually add that back. Like I’ll write my like all business part and then I’ll add some humanity to it because I don’t wanna come off as too aggressive. And so, but like within organizations, when we talk like the next step that Jessica and I are thinking and working on is like, so okay, so you’ve become more effective as a communicator. How do we get your team to be more effective? And it starts with just being intentional and explicit. Let’s just have a conversation. How do we write so we can all be on the same page instead of just letting these norms evolve without intention or guidance? Let’s be intentional about it. How do we write? Like the US Army decided BLUF so we can all be on the same page. Brett McKay: Okay, I really like using headings. Like that’s something I learned in law school. When you write a memo, you break things up in headings so that the partner that you wrote the memo for can just glance at it and get to the information they might be particularly interested in. Another thing for easy navigation, add bullet points. Like using bullet points can help out a lot, especially if you’ve got more than two ideas or two requests in your communication. Todd Rogers: Yeah, there’s a subtle one on the bullet points too where, which I think you were pointing to, is that if the bullet is kind of long, a skimmer still has to read the bullet to figure out what it’s about. And so one of the things that we have found is putting a title to the bullet, which may seem counter to fewer words. We’re just saying add a three-word title, which is extra words, makes it easier for a skimmer to know whether they should bother engaging with this bullet or whether they are free to move on. And so it’s a subtle thing, but the goal is just making it as easy for your reader to move on and get the key info that you want them to get. And then when we start talking about design, you can see that you want it to be aesthetically good-looking and consistent. And so you want the headings and titles to always look the same and things like that. Brett McKay: Yeah, another rule you can apply for easy navigation, order your ideas by priority. That’s kind of that BLUF thing, maybe. But if you have more than one idea, like put the stuff that you care about the most right at the top, because the person’s gonna read that far and then they’re gonna start jumping around a lot after that point. Todd Rogers: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And if they are gonna jump around, you wanna make it easy for them to jump around, which is why, like you said, you like to space it out with bullets or things, just making it visually easier. Brett McKay: And then another rule, consider using visuals. Like don’t be afraid to put pictures in your communication. If that picture or visual can convey the message, what you’re trying to convey more efficiently. Todd Rogers: Yeah, a colleague of mine and friend and mentor, Nancy Gibbs used to be the editor of Time Magazine. And I was really surprised to hear her say that a common feedback she would give to her reporters was does this have to be words? And I like, ’cause she’s a word person. And she said that that was a common challenge for writers, is like, is there an easier way to show this? Like, can it be a diagram instead of a full paragraph or two? Brett McKay: And so the thing about designing for easy navigation, that takes time on your part as the writer. So it’s easy just to just crank out just a big block of text, maybe put a few paragraphs here and there. But thinking about headings, thinking about what could be bolded, thinking about the BLUF, that’s gonna take a bit more time than just cranking that thing out in just one fell swoop. You have to really be thoughtful about this. But the payoff is in the end. You invest that time upfront, so you save yourself some time and frustration on the back end. Todd Rogers: Right, and if it’s really important for you, you wanna make it easy for the reader because you will be more effective. It’s also this kindness that I also think it’s kind of a subtle implication of all of it, is that it’s just nicer to your reader to make it easy in that way. Brett McKay: All right, so the fourth principle is use enough formatting but no more. So I think one thing people do to help ensure that certain ideas stand out, they’ll use things like bold or underlines or all caps in a text message. How do people mess up formatting though when they’re trying to get their points across to the reader? Todd Rogers: This has been the bigger surprise of writing this book for me. The biggest surprise has been people being really excited because they say, this has been a fight my entire career. And I have been saying, we need to write in a way that makes it easier. And people are like, this is just your taste and just your preference and has been dismissed. And now we bring to it all these randomized experiments and a lot of evidence from different ways of research. And it’s now actually a question of like scientific effectiveness. The other surprise has been when people email me, one, there’s a lot of anxiety I think that I’m gonna be judgmental and anyone who’s gonna email me, you do not have to worry. It turns out writing, reading and communicating are all hard. But the second thing is when I started saying use enough highlighting, but no more, it leads to people using different font colors, underline, bold, highlight, italics, all in the same thing. It was only eight sentences and there are six different kinds of stylistic formatting variants in the message. And the irony is that that actually is worse than nothing because it makes it harder for the reader to figure out what you think as the writer is the most important thing. Because if you only format, let’s say you bold one sentence, it is unambiguous to the reader. The writer thinks this is really important. But if you do lots of different things, the six of the eight sentences, I have no idea as a reader what you think is most important and what any of the formatting even means. So use enough formatting. In surveys and experiments, we’ve seen that people jump to bold, underline and highlighted text. They jump to that and they think the writer is saying to them this is the most important content, get this. So it’s incredibly effective. It also licenses readers to not read anything else because they’ve gotten the key info and everyone’s goal is to move on. So you’ve got to use it carefully because it gets people to read that and also crowds out reading anything else. But then we use lots of kinds of formatting. It just confuses readers about what any of it means. Brett McKay: Okay, so bolding, underlining, highlighting, it’s effective in getting the reader to think here’s what the writer thinks is important and to put their focus on that if that’s what you wanna do. And you see that a lot in online writing. Any formatting things that you see in online writing that aren’t effective? Todd Rogers: I don’t like how links all get font color change and underlined because you actually, there is eye tracking research showing that people jump to that. And often the link is not the key info. The link is just the link. And so there’s this tension, there’s this norm. Everyone knows that’s what a link is, but it also kind of undermines the speed of consuming whatever we’re writing for people. And so actually the trade-off for me on that is like we wanna minimize the number of words that are linked if you can while still accurately describing whatever the link is. That’s sort of a small point, but one that aesthetically I don’t think we have a good solution to yet. Brett McKay: All right, so use formatting, but don’t go crazy with it. You don’t have to use all the formatting options. Just pick one or two and then stick with that. And again, it’s gonna, the formatting use is gonna vary by context. Maybe in your organization you have a rule or a norm that you use in regards to formatting in order to show that this is important. So just follow that. The fifth principle is tell readers why they should care. But this is all about making sure that the reader actually engages with your content. So what can we do to show the reader like you should care about this and engage with this more than just a cursory glance? Todd Rogers: Yeah, the way we thought about this is the obvious way to get a reader to read something is to write about something they care about. But we take it as given. The writer has the thing they wanna write about and the thing they’re trying to communicate. And it doesn’t really matter from the writer’s objectives whether this is the most interesting thing in the world for the reader, right? So we take as a given, you have your goal, your goal as a writer. Within that set of ideas or content, all we’re saying is you may as well emphasize the part of the things you’re going to say that they may value the most. So we report this experiment with Rock the Vote, which is like a voter registration organization that tries to target young people. And they were sending an email out to potential volunteers saying, will you volunteer to work at concerts to register concert goers to vote? And in one condition, the subject line was volunteer with Rock the Vote. And in the other condition, it was attend concerts for free. Maybe it was like volunteer and attend concerts for free. And so the subject line there is like drawing attention. The content is the same, exactly the same. You’re gonna volunteer at a concert and you’re gonna register voters. But we may as well emphasize the thing that people will value out of that set. And so they ended up four X more effective, four times more effective, by just making the subject line focus within the set of ideas they’re gonna say in the message on the thing they think the recipient might care the most about. So that principle is just emphasize what the reader might care about within the bounds of what you’re already gonna say. We’re not saying you need to say something different. We’re just saying you may as well focus on the thing they may care about. Brett McKay: Yeah, and then put that up front. Like don’t bury the lead on that. Don’t wait till the very end. Say, hey, this is why, you know, start off this like in the subject line. Here’s why you should care about this. And then put all the other information after that. And then another rule that you have for that for tell the readers why they should care is emphasize which readers should care. This is important ’cause sometimes you send out a message and it’s only going to a certain segment of the population. And if you make it too broad, you might end up causing the group of people you’re trying to communicate to just to ignore it completely. Todd Rogers: Yeah, at minimum, it’s kind to your reader to let them loose. This is not for you, you’re free to go. But also in the intermediate term, as you communicate more, if you let people go when it’s not relevant to them, they’re gonna be more likely to attend when it is relevant to them. Brett McKay: Yeah, you gave the example, like let’s say you have a grocery store and there’s been a recall on a product for safety. You know, the grocery store might put up a sign, notice important product safety recall information. Well, you know, if someone sees that and it’s like, well, I don’t know, maybe is it the product that I bought? I don’t, who knows, maybe I’ll just ignore this. And then you said, if you wanna have a reader’s perspective, the top line of that notice should say, if you bought soup XYZ in June, it has been recalled. And so like, oh, immediately the person seeing that, it’s like, well, did I buy that soup in June or not? And then they can make that decision whether they need to engage with it or not. Todd Rogers: Right, well, Brett, also, I applaud you for getting, these are deep tracks in the book. You read it closely. Brett McKay: I read the book. Todd Rogers: Nice, yeah. Brett McKay: And you make it easy to read. So it made me wanna keep reading it. Todd Rogers: Yeah, we wrote it so it was skimmable. For anyone listening, it is easy to skim. But if you want the details on any topic, you can dive deep in it. Brett McKay: You can dive deep. So the sixth principle is make responding easy. Not all communications require response, but a lot of the communications that we put out there to get stuff done, they require responses. So what can we do to make responding easier? Todd Rogers: I know that there are other, that your listeners and you follow other behavioral scientists, like behavioral economists or social psychologists who work on behavior change, which is basically what my research has been on for the last 25 years. And all of that is this, which is the takeaway is, if you want someone to do something, we should make it easy for them. And so whether that means reducing the number of steps required to take the action or providing checklists or pre-populating forms, or even like, here’s something completely basic that we’ve all had, which is let’s schedule a meeting. There are four of us on an email thread. These six times work for me, which worked for you? And then if you reply in a paragraph, well, I can do the first time, but I’d have to move a couple meetings. The second time’s better for me, but the third doesn’t work. And the fourth could work if nothing else works. Like the amount of effort required to decipher which of the times you’re proposing actually work is, you know, you’re adding 35, 40 seconds to the next person to figure it out. If we actually wanted everyone to respond, you say, of those times… These two work for me. Brett McKay: Period. Todd Rogers: Nobody cares whether it means you have to move a meeting. So the idea is if it’s important to you that someone get back to you you wanna make it as easy as possible. If it’s important for us we wanna make it easy for them. I’ll often ask students imagine you have a task that will take five minutes and a task that will take 30 seconds. Both of them are on your to-do list and you plan to do both eventually. Which are you gonna do first. Almost everybody’s gonna do the 30-second task first. And so the idea is you just wanna make it easy. As easy as possible. Brett McKay: Right. And so that means maybe you have to do some decision structuring for the person. Like here I need you to make this decision. Just this one decision. And then after that you can maybe follow up if you need to make other decisions but just pick one thing you want them to respond to. Todd Rogers: Yeah. In the less is more there’s fewer requests. If you ask someone to do two things you are less likely to get them to do any one of them than if you ask them to do just one. The idea is we’ve got to prioritize. We have our goals and we need to write in a way that makes it easy for the reader to help us achieve our goals. And that means simplifying the request. Like you’re saying if I asked you what do you think versus I’m going to submit this. Agree or disagree? Yes or no? Do you sign off? They end up being… It’s much easier to say yes agree submit than an open-ended what do I think? And so it’s just my prediction and some of the evidence is… All the evidence is consistent with. People are more likely to respond and more likely to respond sooner when it’s a yes no question than open-ended. Brett McKay: Yeah. Another rule you have in this make responding easy is organizing key information that’s needed to take action. So let’s say you make a request for something at your work or something but then in order for the reader to answer that they have to start trolling through all this information or kind of doing this scavenger hunt to even start putting together a response. Well, if that’s the case they’re gonna drag their feet on that or they’re gonna take a long time. Instead if there’s an answer you need right away provide the reader with as much information as possible that they need in that communication so they can give you the response you need. Okay. So those are the six principles and I think if people had those in mind as they wrote they’d get a lot more done with their writing. At the end of the book beyond these six principles you talk about some other ideas that you’ve seen in your research and your own personal experience when it comes to communicating and getting people to respond to your writing and getting stuff done with writing. And one topic you talk about is frequency of communicating. This is something I struggle with when it comes to communication in my business or in organizations that I belong to ’cause I worry about communicating too much. ‘Cause I don’t wanna bug people. But something I’ve noticed is that when I do communicate more I get more responses. I get more people showing up for things or doing things. So what’s the research say? How often should I hit people with the same information so that it’s effective? Todd Rogers: There is not a single answer for this just like there’s not a single stable answer for when should you communicate because the equilibrium changes. If the answer is Thursday at 3:00 PM everyone is gonna communicate on Thursday at 3:00 PM making yours less effective and then the equilibrium moves around it’s an unstable equilibrium. Similarly for frequency of communication I think there isn’t a good answer but my first pass at it is if you think that your reader wants your communication and values it like your newsletter? If you think that they really want it then you wanna be consistent so they know when to expect it and have it look the same so they can recognize quickly what it is. In the intermediate term if we communicate all the time we will decrease people’s likelihood that they associate us with something they should read and they will start to view us as a pest and they will unsubscribe. And so I know there are a lot of organizations that have big lists. The balance that we’re always talking about is you can increase donation for example by sending more messages you also increase unsubscribes and so what’s the two, three-year horizon consequence is you may end up being worse off for having gotten more donations in this week by sending more messages. But in the intermediate horizon you’re worse off. There isn’t a great answer. I don’t know. Do you have thoughts on this? It sounds like you wrestle with it. Brett McKay: I wrestle with it. No. So it sounds like it’s the killing the goose that lays the golden egg problem. Todd Rogers: Right. Yeah exactly. Brett McKay: Right. You can extract a lot of value by doing a lot of frequency in the short term but in the long term you end up killing the thing that provides you value. So when it comes to let’s say you belong to I don’t know a sports league or I don’t know a church congregation there’s an event coming up. That’s the thing where I’ve found that more frequent communication helps up to a point. You can’t just do one and expect to get a response ’cause people might just miss that first email or they read it and then they forgot about it and then the event comes up two weeks later and they’re like I didn’t know about it. It’s like well I sent you that email. So I think something like that I need one email maybe two weeks out and then maybe a week out you send a reminder and then two days before you send a final reminder that could work. I mean, if you did a reminder every single day people are just gonna tune you out. Todd Rogers: I think there’s consistency in that too Brett where it’s like I’m on a board where they send materials out a week in advance and then they send them the night before again. And so I know two weeks in advance I don’t need to deal with this ’cause I know it’s coming back right before. And so if they stopped doing that and they just did it occasionally I think I and the other members would all be less prepared because we’ve come to expect that oh this is just the forewarning before the real one. I think consistency is probably key there. People start to associate you with that pattern. Brett McKay: Yeah. But I also think yeah frequency can be a tool to help a harried reader because people are just getting inundated with stuff and they’re gonna miss things. This can even happen with your friends with text messages, right? You send a friend a text and you don’t hear back from them and you think oh man they hate me. They don’t like me anymore. So now they… If their text inbox is anything like yours it’s just getting inundated with two-factor authentications, reminders about their kid’s doctor’s appointment. So maybe the friendly thing to do would be, Hey, follow up two days later if they haven’t gotten back to you because they needed that. So I think with frequency yeah there’s a balance but I think maybe don’t be afraid of nudging more than you think ’cause you’re probably not actually nudging ’cause the people probably didn’t see your initial message anyways. Todd Rogers: Yeah, I like that. I also think when you talk about a friend or a coworker with whom you communicate a lot I do think the answer, and this is probably the answer for most questions is to communicate better and to actually have a discussion about it. And this is something that we stumbled into. Well, there isn’t a universal rule for this. Some people will view you pinging them again as like yeah man I read it. I got you. Stop harassing me. Others will be like Thank you. And so a different way if this is someone you communicate with a lot is to just ask. Would it be useful if I send follow-ups or not? I actually have all sorts of people that they have incredibly varied preferences and for people I communicate with a lot. I actually have started to learn what they are because I ask. Brett McKay: I’m curious are there any AI tools that you’re seeing out there that are helping writers write more effectively? Todd Rogers: Are you setting me up for… Did I show you mine? Brett McKay: No. Todd Rogers: Or is that… Brett McKay: No. Todd Rogers: So early on we trained GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 and then now GPT-4o the OpenAI’s latest LLM on the… With your listeners in the show notes I hope we’ll share the checklist. There’s a one-page checklist for how to write for busy readers and we trained the large language model on these principles and then we fed it what’s called Few-Shot Learning just three pre-post examples of emails an original and an edited. Original edited original edited. It’s incredible at editing emails so that they are skimmable and it now has hundreds of thousands of uses and I get emails all the time from people saying that they put any important message through it to just get suggestions. So it’s on our website. I’ll share it with you. It’s writingforbusyreaders.com but it’s very cool. The large language models you could think of as they learn inductively they consume all the way we’ve ever written and then they infer rules and predictions. This is much more deductive top down. We’re like look there are these six principles. We should edit through the lens of these principles because this is actually what the science suggests people are more likely to read and respond to and it learns those and then it can revise in accordance with and we shouldn’t use words like in accordance. We shouldn’t use… It writes in ways that are consistent with that. So writingforbusyreaders.com but I love it. We’re trying to get it internalized by the other big large language model especially the ones who work in email clients. Brett McKay: Well, Todd this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book? So I guess that one website? Todd Rogers: Writingforbusyreaders.com writingforbusyreaders.com and the Too long didn’t read of this whole thing. If you made it to the end and you don’t know the big takeaway. The big takeaway is we should add a round of editing to everything we write where we ask ourselves how do I make it easier for the reader? How do I make it easier for the reader? Because the easier it is for the reader the more effective we are at achieving our goals and it’s just kinder. Brett McKay: I love it. Well Todd Rogers thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Todd Rogers: Thanks Brett. Brett McKay: My guest today’s Todd Rogers. He’s the author of the book Writing for Busy Readers. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website writingforbusyreaders.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/busyreaders where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d 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 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 to listen to AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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1 Podcast #1,048: The Swiss Army Knife of Fitness — How to Get Lean, Strong, and Flexible With Kettlebells Alone
What if there was one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest, Pat Flynn, would say you can find all those benefits in the old-school kettlebell. Pat, who’s the author of Strong ON!: 101 Minimalist Kettlebell Workouts to Blast Fat, Build Muscle, and Boost Flexibility―in 20 Minutes or Less , calls kettlebells the Swiss Army knife of workout tools and the minimalist’s ultimate secret fitness weapon. Today on the show, we unpack why Pat’s such an advocate for bells, but before we get there, we first take a dive into his background in philosophy and why beginning a workout program takes faith. We then talk about how to use kettlebells to get an all-around fit physique, including the three kettlebell weights that make for an ideal starter set, the two best exercises for building muscle, the pyramid-shaped program that can facilitate body recomposition, how to incorporate progressive overload into kettlebell training, which kettlebell exercise Coach Dan John considers “the fat-burning athlete builder,” the “300 Swings Challenge” that will help you take a Bruce Lee approach to fitness, and much more. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: Become Strong Like Bull — The Kettlebell Workout AoM Article: How to Perform 4 Kettlebell Exercises — An Illustrated Guide AoM Podcast #295 — Kettlebells and the Psychology of Training AoM Article: Strength, Power, Conditioning — How to Master the Kettlebell Swing Connect With Pat Flynn Strong ON! website Kettlebell Quickies YouTube Channel Pat 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 Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. What if there’s one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest Pat Flynn would say, you can find all those benefits in the old school kettlebell. Pat, who’s the author of ‘Strong ON!: 101 Minimalist Kettlebell Workouts to Blast Fat, Build Muscle, and Boost Flexibility In 20 Minutes or Less’, calls kettlebells the Swiss Army Knife of workout tools and the minimalist ultimate secret fitness weapon. Today in the show, we unpack why Pat’s such an advocate for bells. But before we get there, we first take a dive into his background in philosophy and why beginning a workout program takes faith. We then talk about how to use kettlebells to get an all around fit physique, including the three kettlebell weights that make for an ideal starter set, the two best exercises for building muscle, the pyramid shape program that can facilitate body recomposition. How to incorporate progressive overloading kettlebell training, which kettlebell exercise coach Dan John considers the fat burning athlete builder. The 300 swings challenge that will help you take a Bruce Lee approach to fitness and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/kettlebell. All right. Pat Flynn, welcome to the show. Pat Flynn: Brett, it is a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me on. Brett McKay: So you are an entrepreneur, you’re a philosopher. You got your master’s in philosophy. Hopefully we can talk about that. But you’re also probably most well known for your work in fitness. You’re a fitness coach expert. You’ve written a lot about kettlebells in particular. We’re gonna talk about that today and promoting sort of a general all around approach to fitness. But let’s start with your story a little bit. In your books that you’ve written, you talk about how your interest in fitness began with an embarrassing wet t-shirt contest in middle school. How did a wet t-shirt contest in middle school get you down the path to where you’re coaching people how to do kettlebells? Pat Flynn: Yeah. Thanks for helping me to relive this wonderful moment, Brett. I appreciate it. And [laughter] Yeah. So I had some typical middle school type of friends, right? We were in a little rock band. Nobody has heard of us. Trust me on that. And I was an overweight kid growing up. I was not athletic. I was your typical ’90s kid, right? So just a whole bunch of microwavable food and video games and all… Brett McKay: Dunkaroos. Pat Flynn: Stuff. Dunkaroo. Oh, man. Brett McKay: Dunkaroos. Pat Flynn: You do miss it though. You know, it’s like, it’s hard not to be nostalgic about that poison. But yeah, so I grew up on all that, had something of a weight problem. I was always kind of the chunky guy among our friends, and I never really liked it. It always bothered me. I had friends, so this isn’t like a super traumatic story or anything like that, but it was a problem. And it all sort of came to, yeah, a climax when we decided in the middle of band practice to just have a wet t-shirt contest among the guys, right? [laughter] And I scored a solid victory on that and it was super depressing. I was like, I have to do something about this. You know, I have a long line of obesity in my family, especially on mom’s side. And it was pretty clear to me that if I didn’t stage an intervention, probably now, I was going to go down a path I particularly did not want to go on. And like most people who set out on a fitness journey, I was super confused. You know, my mom had all sorts of books on diet and exercise and they all said different things. So I spun in circles for probably about a year or two just trying to figure things out, having a little bit of success, but mostly frustration. Until eventually I stumbled into a martial arts studio, a Taekwondo studio. I didn’t wanna go to the weight room in my high school because that’s where a lot of my friends were. And I just didn’t feel like hearing the things that they would say [laughter] if they saw me walk in. So I tried martial arts out, fell absolutely in love with it, had a phenomenal coach who was really into physical culture. And the value of a good coach can not be… It’s the most valuable thing in the world, right? Because if you get set on a good path early on by somebody who knows what they’re talking about and can hold you accountable, I mean, that changed my life. So that’s the story in a nutshell. Kettlebells came in a little bit later, more in college, but they were related to martial arts. In fact, my Taekwondo coach as I was competing in college, introduced me to kettlebells just as a way to increase my training efficiency. And yeah, it was love at first kettlebell swing. Brett McKay: Did you do anything like experiment with CrossFit or bodybuilding or power lifting in between when you started with the Taekwondo and then moving to kettlebells? Pat Flynn: Yeah. I was doing your traditional bodybuilding sort of bro split for a while. I amazingly missed a lot of the CrossFit scene. ‘Cause when CrossFit was becoming very popular, that was when I was really getting into kettlebells. So there were elements and certain aspects of my training that certainly were influenced by what was going on in the CrossFit scene. But no, I never got fully wrapped up into that. I sort of went just from your traditional, let’s do a bro split with lots of traditional cardio and a treadmill, which is fine. I really don’t have anything like seriously against that. And it was pretty effective for me. But I was looking to increase efficiency and try to find something that as a busy college kid would be a bit more directly applicable to what I was interested in, which was competing in Taekwondo. Brett McKay: So you’re not only a fitness coach, I mentioned this earlier, you have your master’s degree in philosophy. Is there a particular branch of philosophy that you’re interested in and have been studying? Pat Flynn: Yeah. So I’m actually, I’m doing the PhD right now. And where I focus is in philosophy of religion, which is a weird name for a branch of philosophy, ’cause it’s not a bunch of religious people doing philosophy. It’s really a form of systematic philosophy or what’s sometimes called worldview construction. So it’s philosophers who try to establish like big picture theories of everything. Like how do we make sense of the broad scale phenomena of the world? Things like causation and change and time and all that fun stuff. And is there a fundamental aspect to the world? So totally unrelated to fitness, at least initially. But one of the things that goes into my area of study is the question of the good life of ethics and meta ethics. And there are definitely some links to fitness there. So I occasionally have my worlds collide, but most of the time I’m kind of just, yeah, doing two separate things. Brett McKay: Yeah. In your work, in the books you’ve written, you talk about Aristotle a lot. And then consequently Aquinas, ’cause Aquinas picked up on Aristotle and tried to make a connection between Greek philosophy and the religious life. Talk about it. Let’s talk about Aristotelianism ’cause I’m a big fan of a Aristotle. How has Aristotelianism ethics, you can even say maybe metaphysics, how has it influenced your approach to fitness? Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. Great question. It’s a big one. We could spend a whole episode on it. You mentioned Aquinas. He’s actually a guy I specialize in. I focus on a lot of his metaphysical thought. And he, of course, as you said, Brett, is building on and developing an Aristotelian account of the world. Sort of a blend of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. But Aristotle specifically thinks about ethics along the following lines: He’s often called a virtue ethicist or a natural law theorist. So Aristotle thinks that there is such a thing as a human nature. And so you have a human nature, I have a human nature. And this nature is determined to a particular end. And we can either reach that particular end, and if we do, we are like a flourishing instance of human nature. Like we’re most excellent to use Bill and Ted language, or we can fail to reach that particular end. And so what is human nature? Well, it’s something like rational animality. So we’re supposed to use our rationality to discern all the sorts of things that are really good for us. ‘Cause there’s lots of things that are really good for us that cause us to flourish as the kinds of things that we are. And of course, part of how this is done, is through the development or attainment of certain virtues. And virtues are really just perfections of our powers. And you have some kind of big virtues. They’re sometimes called cardinal virtues. Things like temperance, fortitude, justice. These are like the hinge virtues. Prudence is the other big one. And the way this relates to fitness is along… I think actually pretty obvious lines, right? I think it’s empirically obvious that it is good for us to pursue certain activities that cause us to be healthy to try and achieve that sort of ideal interplay of the organs and bodily systems. So that’s just important for just general physical health. And Aristotle is big on that. He thinks that we’re matter, soul composite. So he thinks that we have an immaterial soul, but he’s still very much committed to us being material beings as well. So how he thinks about the good life very much concerns our physical embodiment, if you will. But exercise and diet can also be good ways just to practice certain virtues, right? And we can think of the two cardinal virtues of temperance and fortitude. So I mean, like, fortitude is the gym and temperance is diet. [laughter] It’s kind of as simple as that, right? Fortitude is doing the things that are tough because we know that they’re good for us. And having that sort of practical grit, that’s what fortitude is about, doing the hard things that are important and temperance is being able to resist certain things that we know we should resist at certain times because they’re not particularly good for us. They do not cause us to flourish. And of course, various forms of dietary control and fasting fall right into that very neatly. I mean, there’s a good reason that fasting has always been used as a sort of moral and spiritual discipline. It’s because it very much is a way to help to develop yourself along these sort of Aristotelian lines. If that makes sense. Brett McKay: That makes perfect sense. So part of living a good life is as Aristotle said you have to have a physically healthy body. He talks about it explicitly in his Nicomachean ethics. And I like the idea that fitness can be a way to develop these virtues like you mentioned, in my experience, the most visceral thing that has taught me virtue, these excellence in like temperance, prudence, practical wisdom has been my weight trainings. You just… You experience it in your body. And I’ve noticed that whenever I try to convey this stuff to young people that I mentor, I’m always going to like weightlifting or sports analogies. ‘Cause for some reason, I just think it lands more when you make that body connection. Pat Flynn: They click, it clicks especially for a lot of young men, I found, and I’ve certainly had a similar experience, Brett, like certain perennial truths just kind of like became obvious for me in the weight room, but also with respect to certain vices too. So you gotta be careful, for Aristotle, the virtue is the golden mean between two extremes of an excess and deficiency. And you can see people who get into fitness, but they sort of obsess over it and they develop certain vices because they don’t have it properly ordered in relation to the other goods of their life. And again, that’s sort of a failure of prudence. So while fitness can be a fantastic opportunity to acquire certain virtues, you have to be intentional about it. Of course, what kind of goes into the mix of a lot of moral decision making for Aristotle is not just outcomes, but intentions. What is the intention you bring behind it? So I always encourage people focus on that, make sure you’re going into this with the right sort of intention. Because if you go in with just various sort of narcissistic and ego comparative sorts of intentions, yeah, you might get stronger and more muscular, but you could be giving yourself some sort of greater mental and and spiritual problems down the line, if that makes sense. Brett McKay: Yeah. For Aristotle and the virtue ethic tradition, the results or consequences are not only important, but the intentions behind the action that resulted in that consequence are also just as important. Pat Flynn: Yep. 100%. Brett McKay: Yeah. So you’re someone who was baptized Catholic. You became atheist, then found your way back into the church, and now you’re getting your PhD in the philosophy of religion. So have you seen a connection between pursuing excellence and fitness, not only with philosophy, but also with faith? Pat Flynn: Yeah. So I’m sort of the cliche story of the guy that first got into philosophy and it brought me very far away from faith and religion. And then the further I went philosophically, especially asking questions about like, fundamentality, these questions that I’m interested in and are relevant to philosophy of religion, it brought me back and at least it brought me back to a philosophical understanding of God. And once you have that, it sort of opens you up to the possibility of greater religious and spiritual ideas, which I eventually investigated and it came to hold rather firmly. So yeah, I think faith is a form of trust. It’s a virtue. It’s actually a theological virtue. In the tradition, Aquinas talks about faith as a theological virtue, which is, for him a true virtue even higher than the cardinal virtues. What’s the connection to fitness? Well, in most forms of Christianity anyways, they sort of baptize Aristotelianism. So they kind of like take Aristotle and they just move him a little bit further along and they’re essentially like Aristotle, you got a lot, right? But there’s just a few things that you’re missing. The ultimate end of the human being is not a natural end. It’s a supernatural end. And it is to know what is most true, truth itself, and to love what is most good, goodness itself. And ultimately they maintain that to be God, the God of classical theism specifically. Right? But God is, as Aquinas would talk about it, he has this kind of like very philosophical, somewhat spooky, but I think ultimately correct view of God, that God just is subsistent existence or pure being and pure goodness itself. That when we acquire certain virtues and we move along in the spiritual life, we’re actually participating in God. We’re sort of increasing ourselves along these relevant dimensions where we become more perfect and we participate in the good. He’s got this sort of Neoplatonic aspect in his otherwise Aristotelian philosophy. And of course this is ultimately meant to orient us, orient our will to our supernatural end, which is the beatific vision. So traditional Christianity is Aristotelianism plus is the way I like to talk about it. So you can just… The faith can take everything that we already said about Aristotle and then integrate it into a larger perspective where our ultimate good is fundamentally relational. It’s relating to our creator in a particular way. But to have that right sort of relation, you need faith. It is a theological virtue that makes that possible. And also eventually you need to have perfection and moral perfection. So it integrates or links up in a much higher, I think more extravagant and I think ultimately more beautiful way too. But it’s certainly not contrary in any sense, if that makes sense. Brett McKay: So, okay. It sounds like where Aristotelianism says be fit, be healthy to achieve human flourishing or excellence, your faith says to take that, to keep that, but then also point it to the divine, which is that big metaphysical perspective. But do we see faith in fitness on a more day-to-day basis? Like in the gym? Pat Flynn: Yeah. Well, I mean, for me, just speaking personally, Brett, I mean, when I converted, when I became Christian, it totally changed my intentions of what am I working out for? I mean, look, I think I had all the wrong sorts of intentions starting out. I mean, originally, my fitness motivation was very negative. I just wanted to get away from being teased and made fun of. But then it became, like once I started getting results and I thought I started looking good, it became very narcissistic, right? It kinda became obsessive, ego comparative. So I don’t think I was doing it for particularly good reasons. A lot of the actions could stay the same. So this relates to what we were talking about before, but the reasons I am doing those actions, those started to fundamentally change. So I started thinking about, okay, well how can fitness be used to strengthen the relationships I have with other people, to help other people, to be an inspiration to my kids, to make sure that I’m around for my kids, that I can teach them the virtues, that I can help them practice the faith in certain unique and important ways. So I’m not sure if this is totally answering your question, but the answer is, it changed everything, right? At least for me, it completely reoriented. Not all the things I do, I still did a lot of the same things, but the reasons for which I did them. Brett McKay: Something I’ve seen, if we use like Paul’s definition of faith from the Hebrews, right? It’s like a substance of things hoped for, but not seen. Right? Pat Flynn: But not seen, yeah. Brett McKay: I think kind of playing it back to fitness, starting a fitness journey requires some faith, right? You might cognitively know like, oh, if I do these things, I will get in shape. But for a lot of people, they don’t believe it. I’ve seen people when they first start their fitness journey… Pat Flynn: Yeah, great point. Brett McKay: They’re just like, I don’t think this is gonna work. Like, I’m doing the thing and it’s not working the way I wanted. But for the people that it ends up working for, they have to like kind of have faith. They have to have faith in the process. Like faith is trust, right? They have to trust their coach. Like if you just keep doing the stuff, it’ll work out. Then you kinda have to use faith as sort of an animating force in your action until you see the fruits of it and then you just know. Pat Flynn: And then you don’t need faith anymore. Right? That’s the idea in heaven. Like that virtue drops away ’cause you don’t need it. That’s a great example, Brett, I think it’s totally true, is that faith at the end of the day is an act of the will, right? Like, you’re not gonna have this certainty in many areas of life, but what do you have? Well, you have the grounds for reasonable affirmation, oftentimes just testimony. But look, we have to take a lot of testimony on faith and reasonably affirm it all the time. There’s so many things that we know or we think we know, only because other people have told us. Right? And presumably reliable people. So you mentioned the coach. That’s right. You might not believe it in a sense that you have complete certainty that this is gonna turn out the way that you want, but you make in a particular act of the will to commit yourself to this way of living. And you commit yourself to the process. And then over time, eventually, right. Hopefully, you don’t even need that faith anymore because you’ve seen the fruits, you’ve been through it. Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So let’s get into kettlebells specifically, in your new book, Strong ON! You make the case for how kettlebells can help you get strong, get lean, can even help you increase mobility all in just 20 minutes a day. So that’s some great copy there. But I think it’s true though, ’cause you yourself, you’ve seen the fruit spear out in your own physique. And something you’ve talked about for a long time, is that you argue for being a fitness generalist over a fitness specialist. And you know, when you’re a fitness generalist, you’re not trying to be the strongest in the world. You’re not trying to have a professional bodybuilder physique. You just wanna be physically skilled in a variety of areas. So you’re lean, you’re mobile, you’re strong, you’re flexible. So you’re prioritizing general all around health. So why are you such a big advocate for kettlebells and how do kettlebells fit into your generalist fitness philosophy? Pat Flynn: Yeah. I think the kettlebell is something like the Swiss Army Knife of functional fitness. And again, trying to set the right expectations. It’s not the best tool for every particular job, but it’s good to great at pretty much all the jobs, right? Like if you wanna build strength, awesome, kettlebells can do that. You wanna put on muscle, great, no problem. You can definitely do that with kettlebells. You wanna improve your mobility, flexibility, check. You want to improve your endurance and metabolic conditioning. I think they actually are probably a killer app for that. They’re definitely one of the best tools for that. So it’s really the sort of family man’s or family woman’s solution. I sometimes call them the minimalist ultimate secret fitness weapon. So for the generalist, I think they’re an easy and obvious choice, especially if you’re, I guess like me a little bit and you know, you kind of like just workout efficiency. You’ve got lots of things going on. I know you do too, Brett, so you might be a little bit time crunched. Can’t spend hours a day in the gym like you could back in college. I think they’re worth giving a solid look at for sure. Brett McKay: And what’s nice too, they’re affordable, they don’t take up much space. Another nice benefit. They’re portable. You could take them with you on a road trip and keep continuing your training. You mentioned the limitations. They’re not great for everything. What do you think are the limitations of kettlebells? Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. Like anything, every tool has certain limits. Some of these limits just concern exercise selection, right? So if we’re looking at the fundamental movements, they’re kind of limited with overhead pulling, no big deal, you know, throw in pull-ups, that’s a good way to kind of balance that out. You also don’t get a whole lot of work for the, you know, feet, ankles and calves. No big deal. Throw in some jump rope and running, you can fill that gap pretty easy. So like anything else, you know, they’re not absolutely perfect. I don’t think the kettlebell is the end all be all. I just think they’re really darn good, right? Especially if you’re into this whole generalist thing. Brett McKay: And maybe we should… Like, for those who aren’t familiar with the kettlebell, I mean we’re assuming people know what a kettlebell is, but a kettlebell, it just looks like a cannonball with a handle on it. Pat Flynn: Yes. Right. Yeah. It’s a cannonball with a handle. They became like really popular. I don’t know, Brett, like what, 15 years ago? Something like that. And Pavel, Tsatsouline, Dan John, who’s a great friend of mine who’s been on your show before, started bringing them into the mainstream. And you know, a lot of people thought, “Hey, this is probably just gonna be a fad. It’ll go away in a few years.” But it really hasn’t been. Now you walk into most gyms and they have pretty decent kettlebell collections. They are a very traditional form of weightlifting. The style and method of how they’re used of course has varied over time. But I think that they are just a tremendous tool for just putting good basic principles of strength and conditioning into practice for busy people. Brett McKay: So for those who wanna give kettlebell training a try, what size kettlebells do you recommend people get to start off with? Pat Flynn: Yeah, good question. I get this one a lot. So let’s assume that you maybe have some sort of general fitness background. You know, you don’t have to be a professional athlete or anything like that, but you’ve lifted weights before. Then for men, I generally recommend getting a set, if you can, of three different kettlebells. Something like a 16 kilogram, a 24 kilogram and a 32 kilogram, kettlebell people are weird. We still go by kilograms, right? Brett McKay: Well, sometimes they use poods. Isn’t that one of the… Pat Flynn: Yeah, poods, the old pood, right? Yeah. Yeah. Brett McKay: The Russian, yeah. Pat Flynn: So yeah, it’s just this weird traditional thing. But that’s a good set. If that seems a little bit too heavy, then just shift down, you know, to I would say like a 12 kilogram, a 16 kilogram and a 24 kilogram. And between those different weights, you’ll have sufficient intensity for upper body exercises, lower body exercises, like goblet squats and stuff like that. The explosive movements like swings, the grinds like military presses. So you’ll be able to sufficiently challenge yourself if you have that range. For women, same idea, just shifting again a little bit down, I find that something like a 6 or an 8 kilogram, you know, a 12 kilogram and a 16 or 20 kilogram is a good solid starting set. Brett McKay: And you want sets of these different three sizes. Is that the idea? Pat Flynn: Yeah. So you could just have just those three. You could double up if you want. Because double kettlebell exercises are sort of that next step and they’re really effective, especially if you wanna get more serious with the kind of limit strength and hypertrophy training. I don’t demand it or require it starting out. And the cool thing with kettlebells is you can use… I mean, you can do this with any piece of equipment, right? But with kettlebells you can use two kettlebells of different sizes. You can have one size heavier kettlebell in your right arm for presses a bit lighter in your left, just switch sides every set. It works great. Brett McKay: Oh, another one of the benefit of kettlebells that you were talking about as we were talking about it that came to my mind was kettlebell training’s fun. It’s different like because you’re swinging, it’s not like a barbell where you’re just going up and down. Kettlebells, you can kind of move in different planes. Pat Flynn: Yeah. Part of the reason I fell in love with it, it just felt like punk rock exercise, it’s very unconventional. I was into that sort of thing, you know, I was a teenager when I first found them, you know, it’s grungy. I started training with them in a real grungy martial arts gym. It just felt different. It was more dynamic. With kettlebells, I’m sure we’ll talk about this at some point. You can do complexes very seamlessly of just transitioning between different exercises. You know, taxing multiple muscle groups and energy systems simultaneously. Just felt like a cool way to train as a want-to-be martial artist. It felt like, yeah, this is the way I should be training. It was fun. It was engaging in a way that other forms of lifting, which I was perfectly happy to do, they just didn’t grip me in the same way. Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve had those moments with my training where I get kind… I do the bro split. I’m doing like hypertrophy stuff… Pat Flynn: Rock on. Brett McKay: Curls, whatever. For the most part I enjoy it. But just periods I’m like, ah, geez, I don’t wanna do this today. And I’ll do a little kettlebell stuff ’cause it just feels nice. It feels fun. It freshens things up. Pat Flynn: And they’re certainly compatible, right? Like you could do the bro split bodybuilding, you know, three, four days a week. And then if you just wanna keep up on your conditioning or add a little bit of MetCon, which certainly can serve a purpose, you could just throw in a few kettlebell complexes one to two days per week. So kettlebells don’t have to replace your current program for people who are interested. You could find a way that they could supplement or compliment what you’re already doing. Brett McKay: For sure. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so we got our kettlebells, these little cannonballs with handles on them. What do we do with them? What are the basic kettlebell movements? Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. So I cover six or seven in my book, something along those lines. And for the single kettlebell exercises, there are a few that I always recommend that people focus on first. Obviously, there’s the kettlebell swing. Many of your gentle listeners have probably seen this before. Dan John calls it the fat burning athlete builder. It’s an aggressive hip hinge. It’s a power movement. If people are unfamiliar with these exercises, just type my name and kettlebell into YouTube and you’ll find many tutorials on all of these. So the kettlebell swing is great. That’s your foundational kettlebell exercise. A good compliment to that is the goblet squat, also goes back to our friend Dan John. He actually invented the goblet squat as legend has it? Yeah. Awesome thing just to remind your hips how they’re supposed to work. Just good way to even just kind of teach people the fundamental mechanics of a squat. We have for the upper body, military press, again, classic exercise, super effective. Then getting a little bit more advanced we have kettlebell cleans, which helps to get the kettlebell in what’s called the rack position, where you initiate and finish lots of other exercises like the military press. And the clean is cool because it helps teach you not just force production and reduction like the swing, but also force redirection. It’s an important athletic quality. And then we had the kettlebell snatch, which is similar to a clean except for the kettlebell now winds up overhead. So really a big stroke of an exercise, phenomenal for just total body conditioning and endurance and grip strength. And then the kinda weird exercise that people either really love or really hate when it comes to kettlebell training is the Turkish Get-Up and this essentially has seven steps to it, depending on how you analyze it. And it really is just getting up and off the ground while holding weight overhead. Really great for strength obviously, but stability and mobility as well, especially for the hips, knees, and shoulders. Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the Turkish Get-Up. It works your brain. ‘Cause you have to think about it a lot. If you haven’t done it in a while, you think, okay, how do I have to move myself so this weight doesn’t crash down on my face and I can get up into a standing position. So I think it’s a good one for like fighting aging. Pat Flynn: It is, and I think it’s a great conditioning tool too. A lot of people use it just to lift a bunch of weight because you’re using, you know, the stanchion of your skeleton. So it is a good strength move. But two things about the get-up. One is when people are learning it, I teach it in the book actually from reverse. Start standing, go to the ground and get back up. That’s a bit more intuitive way to learn the steps. You still gotta pay attention to the steps, but it’s a little less clumsy than starting from the ground. So that’s called the reverse get-up. I think that’s a good teaching tool. And then the cool thing about the get-up is, it’s also just a great warmup and mobility exercise. So as you’re learning the move, just do like five to 10 minutes of get-ups, you know, in the morning or before your workout with either zero weight or very lightweight just to get those steps down and feel really confident with them, it’ll serve as a great functional warmup for your workout and teach you the pattern that you know, pretty quickly, you can start to throw some serious weight around if you want to. Brett McKay: So in the book you get very specific with programming, but just kind of high level, how do you program kettlebells to hit different goals? So maybe you wanna get stronger, say you wanna get bigger muscles hypertrophy or like you just wanna get better conditioning. How do you program with the kettlebell? Pat Flynn: Yeah. Awesome. Let’s take a few examples. So, I always like to tell people, I say this in the book, like, kettlebells aren’t like some magic tool that work fundamentally different than anything else. Like, the principles of strength or the principles of muscle or the principles of fat loss just are what those principles are. I just wanna show you how to implement those principles with kettlebells. So for example, if we wanna build muscle, this is a good one to start with. You know, there are certain principles that go into that equation, and one is a principle related to volume. So how much you sort of lift throughout the week. And generally if you wanna build muscle, you kind of need at least around 10 big sets per major muscle group or movement pattern per week. You know, and you can kind of divide that up how you want. You might have, you know, one day it sets a three another day sets a three and another day sets a four, right? Something like that. So that’s one of the principles for building muscle, muscle takes for those who are trying to be minimalists, it’s important to understand that muscle takes the most amount of work. It’s just the most demanding in terms of time. And there’s no way around it. You can just be more or less efficient with your efforts. The other key for muscle is intensity. So it’s not just enough to lift a lot with respect to volume. You also need to be lifting pretty hard and heavy. So you want to be working, you know, close to technical failure for many if not all of those sets. And technical failure is not absolute failure. Absolute failure is where the weight doesn’t move anymore at all. Technical failure is where you notice some sort of serious, obvious, qualitative decrease in your reps. So, you know, say you’re doing pushups and your shoulders start really flaring out or you lose the neutral spine and it just looks like things are falling apart. That’s the idea of technical failure. And it usually comes right before or is even simultaneous with absolute failure depending on the exercise. So you really wanna push that. And those are kind of the two principles for building muscle that aren’t nutrition. There’s nutrition principles as well. So with kettlebells, what does that look like? Well, there’s two exercises that are really great for hypertrophy training with kettlebells: One is the double kettlebell clean and press. So you’ll get a lower body hinge there, but for the upper body traps, shoulders and upper packs and triceps, this is a really good muscle builder. Easy to get a good amount of… Not easy ’cause it’s a hard lift, right? But it’s well suited for a higher volume type of training. And the other one is a kettlebell front squat. Again, another very large compound exercise, high degree of neuromuscular facilitation, classic muscle builder. So you could be pretty minimalist in your approach with kettlebells where you could just kind of take just a few exercises. Those two maybe add some pull-ups or rows and some sort of hinge, whether it’s a single leg deadlift or even if you just wanted to throw in a barbell for fun, just a barbell deadlift. And then just try and hit the sorts of volume and intensity that we just talked about, Brett. And that would be one way that you can put the kettlebell to use for a particular goal. And I have a program, you know, like that, not just in my book, but also online. If people look up, it’s called the Prometheus Protocol. It uses double clean, impressive front squat to build muscle with kettlebells if people are interested in that. Brett McKay: How about kettlebells for let’s say metabolic conditioning? Pat Flynn: Yeah, good. So a lot of people use metabolic conditioning ’cause they’re interested in body recomposition. So they hear that metabolic conditioning or metabolic resistance training is really good for that. And that’s true, right? Because this tends to burn a lot of calories, it increases that metabolic afterburn or epoch exercise, post oxygen consumption. Helps you to kind of burn more calories automatically rather than just manually. The thing I advise with this is that, you know, treat metabolic conditioning like the bourbon to the sauce of a good training program, a little bit goes a long way. People can tend to really overdo this is, and I think that’s one of the lessons we’ve learned from CrossFit. Is that you can really push metabolic conditioning to an extent that it can become, it’s just horrible overkill, right? So if people are interested in body recomposition, I actually recommend a pyramid style program. And by pyramid, I’m asking people to imagine like the old food pyramid, which has been, I guess resigned in disgrace. But it’s a good illustration for exercise where at the bottom of the pyramid you have a form of exercise that you do every day. And that’s something like brisk walking. So that obviously doesn’t require kettlebells at all, but it can also be a lot of mobility work, which you can do with kettlebells, you know, light Turkish Get-Ups, windmills. This is the form of exercise that should not be that demanding. You should be able to hold a conversation, you’re just moving at a relatively low level. It’s healthy, it’s good for your heart, burns calories, right? Try and do that every day, 30 to 60 minutes. In the middle of the pyramid, you have your basic strength and hypertrophy training, two to four days per week. Nothing fancy here. Use Dan John’s formula. You know, pick five big lifts, do three sets of six to 12 reps and, you know, push the intensity. And for kettlebells you can use military presses, front squats, goblet squats, kettlebell swings, double cleans, single arm rows, tons to pick from there, which all are super useful. And then the metabolic conditioning, Brett, comes in at the top, it’s the top of the pyramid, the kind of dessert area. I like bourbon to the sauce of the program. And really, I think here, honestly just like one to two, maybe three days per week of 10 to 20-ish minute sessions because we’re doing just really high intensity kettlebell complexes. And this is where we string together different exercises, you know, things like swings, cleans, snatches, push presses, lunges, perform them back to back with little to no rest in between. To again, keep the system working as a whole, you know, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, but switching through various muscle groups. So not anyone is reaching failure. And that’s what gives you that kind of awesome afterburn effect and improves your metabolic efficiency. So that’s a long answer, but I always like to situate metabolic conditioning within a wider program. I don’t usually have a program that it’s like, it’s just MetCon. I actually don’t think that’s the most efficient or effective way to go for most goals. Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, MetCon is, you’re gonna use the kettlebell to get really out of breath and sweaty. Pat Flynn: Yeah. It’s the love to hate type of exercise. Yeah, right. For sure. Brett McKay: Yeah. So, you know, a key driver in getting stronger, increasing muscle mass is progressive overload, which is you increase reps or you increase intensity. You know, with barbell training it’s pretty easy to add intensity or add weight. So you can add five pounds to the bar, 10 pounds, 15. Pat Flynn: Yep. Brett McKay: Kettlebell, you just have the kettlebell. How do you make things harder with kettlebells when you don’t have that sort of incremental increase ability? Pat Flynn: Smart. It’s tougher with kettlebells. You have to get more creative. But I think it’s a good exercise ’cause it forces you to think more about other variables and how to be creative. So you’re right, to get stronger, you need to use progressive overload. You need to push the intensity, you need to put certain demands on your body that essentially says, “Hey, you better get stronger or you’re gonna like snap in half.” And your body eventually responds to that. So there’s a couple like kind of tricks, right? So let’s just take the military press. This is a good example and a commonplace where people get stuck. So military press is where you just press one or two kettlebells overhead and say you’re like at a 24 kilogram, but the next size kettlebell is a 28 kilogram. That’s actually a pretty significant leap. Especially if you feel like the 24 is already pretty heavy. So what can you do here? There’s a couple different strategies. One of course is just to find kettlebell sizes in between. And fortunately kettlebells are so popular these days, you can find smaller increments, but that requires a bit more financial investment. Some people might wanna make that or not, but that option is available. I don’t typically use it, but it’s there now, whereas it wasn’t there like 15 years ago. So that’s nice. What you can do of course, is throughout your programming is you can just wave the other variables, right? So, okay, maybe you’re pressing the 24 for eight reps, but you can’t press the 28 for eight reps, but maybe you can press it for three to five. Okay. Well, then you have one day in your programming where you’re just working with that 28 at the lower rep range to begin getting the type of stimulus that you need to eventually move it to the higher rep ranges. So just working within other variables is a smart way to do that as well. In fact, for pressing, just to give people a more concrete plan, if you wanna get your pressing up, I recommend having three days per week. One day where you just go really, really heavy, like one to three reps, maybe five reps, the heaviest bell you can handle, you’re fighting for every one of those reps. It’s intense. Then you have another day of moderate intensity of volume. So you know, you’ll go one or two bell sizes down, maybe working between eight to 12 reps, many, many sets, right? And then you have a third day of speed and power. So this is where you might do push presses and jerks to work the other end of the force velocity spectrum. ‘Cause you can get stronger not just by lifting more weight, but by lifting the same weight with more speed. And with that approach, I think you’ll find that you’ll be able to make some pretty impressive leaps in your overall strength without needing those small increments, the micro loading. And you can really apply that to virtually any other lift as well. One more trick for the press is there’s exercise variations, right? So maybe you can’t strict press a certain bell, but what you could do if you wanna get to that next size heavier kettlebell is you could long push press it. And a long push press is where you take a deep squat with the kettlebell in the rack and then you slowly come out of the squat using just the least amount of momentum that you need to get the kettlebell overhead. So it serves as a sort of functional overload press. And then you slowly through the eccentric, the downward portion of the movement, lower the kettlebell down. And that stimulus, that overload stimulus will help you to get stronger to the point where you’ll eventually be able to strict press it. So those are a couple different strategies that I explore in my book and elsewhere of how you can get around this. Yeah. A little bit of an annoying issue of not being able to microload with kettlebells. Brett McKay: Something you’re famous for is your 300 Swings Challenge. So it’s 300 swings… It’s every day for 30 days, right? Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s right. It sounds kind of crazy, but it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. Brett McKay: Yeah. What led you to develop this protocol? Pat Flynn: Yeah, boy. So like 11 or 12 years ago, I used to write for a fitness site that has since gone somewhat, I think, out of business. And we were kind of brainstorming an idea for a fitness challenge. And I don’t know about you, Brett, but like way back when, when that movie 300 came out, I was like one of those kind of younger-ish dudes who was like, “Oh man, this guy’s looks so awesome.” And like anything 300 was like the thing. I mean, there’s like all sorts of 300 workouts that were going on and stuff like that. And most of them were just almost complete nonsense. So as I kind of like got older, I always thought there was something cool. It’s about like, yeah, a 300 challenge, right? People would like that sort of thing. So… But how can we make it like useful and reasonable and difficult but also purposeful and to ensure that people aren’t gonna like get totally burnt out or injured. And that’s where he came up with the 300 swings per day kettlebell challenge. And the kettlebell swing as Dan John calls it the fat burning athlete builder. It’s such a bang for buck exercise. You know it builds your conditioning, it builds your power, it builds what people call kettle booty, your glutes, strengthens the low back, strengthens the hamstrings, burns a mountain of calories. There’s a reason people love the kettlebell swing. It’s just such an awesome exercise. And it generally lends itself well to a higher frequency approach as long as you’re smarter about it. So I put together the 300 Swings Kettlebell Challenge to accomplish two things: One to help improve people’s general conditioning and power with kettlebell swings and also give them an opportunity to take a Bruce Lee approach to exercise. You know Bruce Lee is like, “Hey don’t throw a thousand kicks, throw one kick a thousand times.” And the idea there is you focus really with a ton of intention, there’s that word again, on all the nuances of a particular technique with every repetition in order to master it. And I think people would do well to approach exercise with that mindset where we’re not just trying to lift heavy load, but we’re trying to move with beauty, with elegance, with precision to have real bodily control. And I think the kettlebell swing is an awesome athletic movement that is worth just trying to make it look good and elegant. And when you have 300 reps a day to practice it, you can do that. All right. It’s a good amount of practice. Brett McKay: Yeah. Pavel says strength is a skill. You have to practice the skill of strength. Pat Flynn: Yeah, it’s so true. It’s like anything else. It’s technique and how you organize your practice. But I always tell people, you know, look, if you’re starting out, you don’t necessarily wanna start with 300 swings every single day, you can stagger it, you know, build up the volume gradually. And also when I run these challenges and in the book, we’re not doing the swings exactly the same way every day. Sometimes we’re going very light. Sometimes we’re spreading the swings out throughout the day. We use ladders, we use EMOMs, we use different swing variations. So there’s some intentional variety. So it’s pretty intentional and I think pretty well thought out that it serves a useful purpose without just being like some crazy over the top fitness challenge. Brett McKay: When you do the 300 swings challenge, is this like what you’re doing for your training that day? Or are you doing that in addition to your regular training? Pat Flynn: Yeah, it could be either. So I think it does function as a nice standalone and I have some options for people to just fill some gaps, you know, to put in some goblet squats and presses to make sure they’re not just training hinges. But I think it also is manageable enough that you can staple it to an already existing program. Of course, it always depends, like what is that program? How demanding is it? 300 swings a day isn’t particularly easy, but it’s reasonable enough that it can definitely be conjoined to an existing program. Brett McKay: So we talked about how you can use kettlebells to get stronger, build muscle, increase your metabolic conditioning. You’ve mentioned you can use kettlebells to improve mobility like the Turkish Get-Up. Any other ways you can use a kettlebell to improve your mobility? Pat Flynn: Yeah. The kettlebell windmill is great. That’s something I recommend people incorporate into their routine as soon as possible. And the windmill is nice ’cause with kettlebells, it’s not really a side bend, which you sometimes see in yoga. Really, what the windmill is, is a combination of hip hinging and thoracic rotation. And this is just a phenomenal exercise to sort of cure what ails modern America, right? So I mean we have the vulture posture and we’re constantly over a computer and we’re just in this slumped position all the time. So the windmill is just a really, really great way to open the hips, to loosen the posterior chain, the tight hamstrings, the shoulders and the upper back. So in terms of bang for buck mobility exercises, that’s way up there. People might also wanna check out kettlebell halos. And in fact, I think the goblet squat itself. Brett McKay: Oh yeah. Pat Flynn: It’s just such a good exercise for loosening the hips, knees, and ankles. And what you can do is you can just sit in the bottom of the goblet squat with a light kettlebell and use your elbows to pry your knees out side to side, find space in your hips and just spend time there. It’s super simple. You could just do it throughout the day just to break up those sticky hip joints, you know, from all those hours of sitting. So a few exercises really go a long way with kettlebells on that front. Brett McKay: Another way I’ve used kettlebells for mobility is I’ll do this stretch. It’s for the hamstrings, where I’ll prop a foot up on a bench. And then I’ll have the kettlebell in my hands. And I’ll just kind of lower it down as far as I can go. Does that make sense? I’m I making sense here. Pat Flynn: Yeah. You’re teaching me something new. This sounds really great. Continue, I wanna hear the rest of it. Brett McKay: Yeah. And then you’re kind of doing this deep… You feel it a lot in your hamstring and in your butt, your glute, of that leg that’s propped up. And I’ll just hold it down there. ‘Cause the weight kind of helps you go down a little bit further and further. And then you can pull it back up. And then… So that’s another one that I would use for it. Pat Flynn: What you point out there, Brett, is something that I think is seriously under appreciated is that you can and should use weights for your mobility and flexibility training. Weighted exercises are really effective for improving mobility and flexibility, assuming that you’re judicious in how much weight you apply and you’re not going too crazy right out of the gate. Brett McKay: Yeah. Another thing I like about the kettlebell is that you can use it for specific training, but then you can also use it for movement snacks throughout the day. I have a kettlebell in one of the rooms in my house. And sometimes I’ll just walk by it and do a couple swings, nothing intense, but it’s kind of a movement snack, get the blood going, kind of invigorate myself. I’ll also do carries with it. So the other day I was… I did a… What’s it’s… A waiter carry. So I lifted up the kettlebell with one arm, fully extended like I’m a waiter carrying a tray. And I just kind of walked around my house like a weirdo. Pat Flynn: But it’s your house. That’s what you’re allowed to do. Right, yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah, it felt good. So yeah, carry exercises I think are another benefit of kettlebells. Pat Flynn: Yeah, totally agree. And the idea of movement snacks is something that I’ve talked about for a while. I certainly didn’t invent them I’m just a fan of them like you are. And the idea is hey kettlebells are kind of cool insofar as you can just leave them, you know throughout your house and the challenge is like anytime you go by that kettlebell, do something with it. Maybe you pick it up and move it to the other room where you’re going, maybe the kettlebell follows you around your house all day long. In fact, that’s what they used to torture us with in the old school kettlebell sets. Throughout the whole weekend, you had to bring your kettlebell everywhere, to the bathroom if you went to the bathroom, you had to do it. So you could do that in the house. It’s a little weird, but let me tell you, it adds up, and whenever you get to a new room, you could do a set of swings or squats or mobility exercise. And the idea here is that, look, exercise and movement is cumulative. We can totally break free of the mindset that we have to do all of our exercise in this condensed period of time at a gym. No. It adds up, it’s all valuable. So little bits here and there go a long way for sure. Brett McKay: The other benefit of kettlebells, we mentioned it earlier, you can take them on the road if you do a road trip. My wife and I have done that. But I’ve also seen, have you seen these on the market, sort of like bags that you can fill up with water if you’re at a hotel room, have you seen these? Pat Flynn: No, I have not. Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s something else. They are on the market now, you can buy these bags. They have handles on them, and somehow you fill them up with water, and if you fill them up all the way, it gives you a certain amount of weight. Pat Flynn: And it functions as a kettlebell without having to… Brett McKay: It functions as a kettlebell, yeah. Pat Flynn: That’s really cool. I have to check that out. Brett McKay: So you could fly with it. Pat Flynn: Yeah. So, yeah. It’s better than trying to convince them to let you take it as a carry-on, which I have tried before, unsuccessfully, so. Brett McKay: Made you check that. One thing you talk about too, in all your work, is, oh, let’s say someone gets started, and it’s always easy to start something, but you always reach this point where you’re gonna hit a plateau and progress slows down or maybe it stalls. And that’s when people start losing faith, like we talked about earlier. Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s right. Brett McKay: Do you have any advice for people for where you stay motivated when that progress slows and they feel like, oh, this is not working anymore? Pat Flynn: Yeah, yeah, really good. So I actually have a few things to say about this. And I think this is really important, doesn’t get talked about enough. So first thing is, right expectations, always. And I always tell people that plateaus are part of the process, right? There is no process of self-improvement without plateaus. And success, especially if you’ve been at something for a while, it never just kind of slopes up in this beautiful ascent like you want, right? It’s more like a very uneven, weird looking flight of stairs, right? You just kind of make these kind of weird leaps at almost random times where it’s like you jump up and you have this huge leap of progress and then you kind of plateau for a while. Then you have a small leap and you plateau for a while. Then you have another medium leap and you plateau. And then it’s just this jagged thing. That’s just what it looks like in lifting. I can certainly tell people that’s what it’s like when it comes to being a musician. That’s certainly my life of playing guitar, right? Huge plateaus where I don’t think I’ll get past it. And then suddenly I wake up one day and I got the lick or something like that. So one is expectations. Getting people to understand that plateaus are not setbacks, they are just part of the process. And it’s okay, you can chill. In terms for maintaining motivation, I think there’s two important things to talk about with respect to motivation, starting out and ongoing. You know, people say, how do I get motivated for something? And I think that’s not the best way to think about it because motivation, at least starting out for a lot of people, isn’t intrinsic enough. And so we can make a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. What people want is intrinsic motivation. This is the idea of self-reliance, where you’re just able to do the hard things day in and day out because you just have the grit, you have the fortitude, you have the habit, right? You’ve developed the habit. But very, very few people are intrinsically motivated starting out going into a discipline. So what do you do? What do you need there? Well, you need extrinsic motivation. And this maps my own fitness journey. I was not super intrinsically motivated starting out. I would frequently give up when I started working out, I would quit the diets, I started like three days in until I went to that martial arts studio and found external structures to support me. I had coaches that held me accountable. I got skin in the game. I publicly pronounced my goals, right? I had people guiding me, encouraging me. And then what happens is with these external structures of support, coaches being the big one or just wider communities of people that will encourage you and hold you accountable, what happens is you then, after trusting in the process and seeing the results, and there’s good studies on this, Brett, it’s once people see the results after having already trusted that they then begin to develop intrinsic motivation. So the motivation comes after the discipline. It’s kind of this paradox, this chicken and the egg thing. And the way you solve it, is you just stop focusing on intrinsic motivation and look wherever you need for extrinsic motivation, having those structures in place to get started and to keep you going when things get tough until you’ve seen enough of the results that you then do develop that sort of self-reliance or inner drive that those external structures can eventually drop away. Brett McKay: That’s awesome, I love it. Well, Pat, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Pat Flynn: Yeah, thank you so much. Well, the primary website is strongon.com, so just the name of the book. You can find me on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel called Kettlebell Quickies, a new YouTube channel of mine. I have a couple, but that’s the newest, and Kettlebell Quickies, is where I share just time crunched kettlebell workouts and training ideas for busy people who wanna be fitness generalists. And I’m on the usual social media places as well if you just kind of search around for, well, I don’t wanna just say Pat Flynn because there’s a couple other Pat Flynns out there and I’m only one of them. So if you type my name in with kettlebells, you’ll be able to find me. Brett McKay: Awesome. Well, Pat Flynn, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Pat Flynn: Thank you, Brett. It’s been a joy. Brett McKay: My guest today is Pat Flynn. He’s the author of the book Strong ON. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website strongon.com. That’s S-T-R-O-N-G-O-N.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/kettlebells, where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of The AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can 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 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, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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