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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Bill Burgess
• Sunday Firesides: Quit Acting in Bad Faith
• AoM Podcast #849: Live Life in Crescendo

Connect With Rick Burgess

• The Man Church

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.

He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties.

How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?

Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle. We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter
• AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership
• AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
• The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves.
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Fox Conner
• The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx

Connect With Michel Paradis

• Michel on LinkedIn
• Michel’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Download this episode.

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent. But it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette.

Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette, and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the “no elbows on the table” mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette
• AoM Podcast #422: Men & Manners — Tipping, Emojis, and Much More
• AoM Article: The Importance of Good Manners
• AoM Article: How to Acquire Good Manners
• AoM Article: A Man’s Guide to Dining Etiquette and Proper Table Manners
• AoM Article: How to Make Introductions Like a Gentleman
• AoM Article: How to Make Small Talk
• AoM’s Complete Guide to Giving a Great Handshake

Connect With William Hanson

• William’s website
• William on TikTok
• William on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The British just seem like a classier bunch. Part of it is that winning accent, but it’s also because English culture has long been steeped in the tradition of learning and practicing etiquette. Here to share some of the essentials of modern etiquette that are important no matter which side of the pond you live on is William Hanson, a British etiquette expert and the author of Just Good Manners. William shares the difference between manners and etiquette and why young people are especially interested in both. He then takes us through how to introduce yourself and others, the history behind the no elbows on the table mantra, the rules of small talk, some overlooked guidelines for table manners, how to enter a conversational circle at a party, considerations for elevator etiquette, and much more. Whether you’re dining at a fancy restaurant or just want to navigate social situations with more confidence, William’s insights will help you present yourself with the panache of a proper English gentleman. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @AoM.is/etiquette. All right, William Hanson, welcome to the show.

William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professional etiquette teacher. How did you become an etiquette teacher?

William Hanson: Well, it wasn’t something I necessarily sort of woke up one day and thought, right, that’s it, I’m going to become an etiquette teacher. It wasn’t a profession I was even aware really existed. As a child growing up, I wanted to either be the Archbishop of Canterbury, for whatever reason, or a spy or a newsreader. That’s the trajectory I was heading in, I had decided. But then my grandmother gave me this book of etiquette for Christmas when I was 12. And sort of after a few sort of, have I read any of it type questions, I thought, well, I bet I just better read a bit and then I can tell her I’ve read it. And it was actually very interesting and very funny and I bought more books on the subject. And then when I was 16, 17 at my school, they came up to me and said, oh, we’re looking for someone to teach the younger years how to set a table. Do you think you could do that? And I said, well, when do you want me to do it? And they said, oh, Tuesday afternoons. And I said, oh, instead of playing sport? They said, yes. So I didn’t need to be asked twice, really. And that’s how the teaching side of things started.

Brett McKay: And so you got a new book out called Just Good Manners, where you take Americans and just anybody through the ins and outs of British etiquette. And we’re gonna dig into that because I think it’s applicable to whatever country you live in. But I thought it was really interesting, you talk about the history of etiquette education in the United Kingdom. Can you tell us a bit about that? Because I didn’t know about this.

William Hanson: Yes, I think Britain has always, or England even, we should say before it sort of became Britain, has always sort of led the way in education, in manners and etiquette and civility. Swiss finishing schools as well were very popular and they basically did the same thing, but they just had the mountains skiing. That’s what they could offer that we in Britain couldn’t. But even going back to the Dickensian England, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but men would sort of go on what was called the grand tour around Europe just before they settled down. And whilst that was happening, the ladies were being finished and you would have sort of characters like Dickens portrays one in Little Dorrit called Mrs. General, who is there sort of taking these group of sisters under her wing, finishing them and telling them sort of how to behave and what was expected of them. So this sort of education has always existed, certainly in the last sort of 300 years or so.

Brett McKay: And you’re the director of one of like the last English etiquette schools, correct?

William Hanson: Yes, so sort of at the height of the 20th century, which is when these finishing schools, we still had presentation at court, which is when young girls would curtsy in front of the king and queen, as it were, before they were sort of eligible to be married, completely outdated practice and one that Queen Elizabeth sort of quite quickly when she ascended the throne knocked on the head because she thought it was ridiculous. But you had finishing the schools such as Winkfield Place or Lucy Clayton. And Lucy Clayton actually in 2001 sort of regenerated into the English Manor, which is the company I’m now very pleased to run and own.

Brett McKay: So at the beginning of the book, you make a distinction between manners and etiquette. And I’ve seen this distinction before, but what do you think is the difference between etiquette and manners?

William Hanson: I would say manners are sort of the top line fundamental requirement for being a human being wherever you are in the world to treat people with civility, charm, grace, decorum, respect. How we do that is by using a set of rules. Most of the time, the etiquette is correct. Sometimes it isn’t. We actually have to break the rule of etiquette. But etiquette is, it can change from country to country and what is considered polite in one country can be very different and actually impolite in another. So you use the set of rules according to your environment.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and a lot of people, when I see them make this distinction between manners and etiquette, manners is just sort of how you comport yourself with other people to make sure things go smoothly, etiquette of the specific rules. They often say, well, manners are more important than etiquette. And you make the case, well, maybe not.

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say I think it is impossible to be a well-mannered person without knowing something about etiquette. You don’t necessarily need to know that a dinner napkin at its largest is 26 inches. For example, I think you will be able to get through life without knowing that pearl of wisdom. But I would say following the rules of etiquette makes you a more well-mannered person. You can be a well-mannered person without knowing etiquette, but I think you can be an even more well-mannered person if you use the two. I think they work together.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree with that. Because I think what etiquette does, it gives you something concrete to do. Because oftentimes people just don’t know what to do in certain situations. Like, I don’t know, what am I supposed to do? Well, here, follow these rules. You can be well-mannered by following these simple rules.

William Hanson: Exactly. As a child, I don’t know about you, Brett, but as a child, I liked to know what was expected of me. Because as a child, of course, we’re all petrified, or most children are petrified of being told off or grounded or whatever the form of punishment is. And so we sort of want to know when we go to this person’s house, what are we doing? What are we expected? How am I meant to behave at schools? For example, we were given parameters and boundaries. And that’s sort of all it is, really, in adult life. I think adults thrive with parameters and boundaries and knowing what is expected of them. Because we all want to get it right. And we’ve bizarrely got to a point in life where so many people will say, oh, I don’t need etiquette. Who knows etiquette anymore? And actually what they’re doing, rather badly, is masking the fact that they don’t know the rules themselves. And so they are sort of saying it doesn’t matter because actually they don’t know and they don’t want to admit their sort of blissful ignorance.

Brett McKay: And something I’ve noticed, and I think you’ve noticed this as well with your career, because I think you’re really popular on TikTok, I feel like a lot of young people crave that knowledge of etiquette because they want to know how to act in the world with other people in a way that’s well-mannered and smooth.

William Hanson: Yes, absolutely. I think there are so many sort of ways now for people to be sort of, rightly so in some instances, called out or flagged down for bad behavior. And so younger generations who have grown up knowing that actually they can’t really be an awful human being and get away with it, are more conscious of it. One of my biggest demographics on my social media videos is Gen Z. And actually when the Gen Z people come and sort of say hi to me in the street, if they pass me, whether it’s in London or New York or wherever, they’re so nice and so polite and cautious about coming up to me. Whereas some millennial followers that I have, and I am a millennial myself, will sort of charge up to me and almost demand immediately without sort of being conscious that I may not be working, I might be out in a social capacity and demand that I do a photograph with them. I don’t mind doing a photograph, but sort of ask me nicely. So Gen Z get a bit of a bad rap, but actually from what I’ve seen, I think it’s quite good that they’re interested in how to behave and just sort of being aware of how their actions affect other people, which is really all it is.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig in to some of the rules of etiquette that you highlight in your book that can help us guide our social interactions. I think a lot of etiquette is primarily about interacting with other people

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: And making those interactions as smooth and as comfortable and as pleasant as possible. Let’s start off with introductions. What’s the best way to introduce yourself?

William Hanson: Well, I think when I was writing Just Good Manners, this was one of the things that I found sort of faintly interesting was that in the etiquette books, the Emily Post original edition from the 1920s, for example, there is nothing about introducing yourself because it used to be the etiquette that it was incredibly taboo to introduce yourself, but there was lots of advice about introducing other people. Whereas now etiquette books, Just Good Manners aside, will have information about how to introduce yourself, but nothing about introducing other people. And certainly a lot of Brits or people that spent too much time in Britain and sort of picked up some bad British habits, when they go to introduce themselves to someone, whether it’s on the street or at a cocktail party or whatever, apologize for introducing themselves. Maybe that’s because we in Britain are programmed to know that it’s not really good form historically to introduce yourself, although absolutely fine now, but they’ll say, oh, sorry to interrupt, or, oh, sorry to come up to you today. And actually, well, I don’t know anything about you, but I have just, I do now know that you’ve just interrupted me and that you’re apologizing. So already I’ve noticed that you’re apologizing and you’re interrupting me, whereas I may not have noticed actually. So just, I think something positive and upbeat. Hello, my name’s William. Very lovely to meet you, for example, is all you need to do. And say your name clearly as well. It is so important to say your name that so few people actually bother to say their names when they’re introducing themselves, which is extraordinary behavior because otherwise I don’t know what to call you.

Brett McKay: Okay, so be positive, be upbeat, don’t apologize, say your name clearly. You mentioned people don’t know how to introduce other people. And I’ve noticed that as well. Whenever I’m interacting with individuals and let’s say they’re with their spouse or you’re going over to a friend’s house and their grandmother’s there, no one knows how to introduce people to other people. So I end up usually just having to introduce myself. So what is the proper protocol on making introductions?

William Hanson: So it can get quite complicated. And actually, when I started teaching etiquette 18 years ago, this was the bit that I would in class dread coming to teach because it can be quite wordy. But what you don’t need to do is you don’t need to say both parties’ names twice. So if you’ve got Bill and Ben, for example, you don’t need to say, Bill, this is Ben. Ben, this is Bill. You don’t need to reverse it. And the example I would give you is to sort of show you why that is wrong, is if you take the head of state in any country. In Britain, it would be the king, the president in America. Let’s take the president, for example, whoever that president is. If I said, Mr. President, may I introduce Bill, that is fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. I put the president first. I’m giving him the respect as head of state. But if I then switch it, Bill, this is the president, that second time I have elevated Bill and relegated the president, which in a diplomatic context is completely the wrong thing to do. So you only need to say the most important person’s name first. How you define who that most important person is, is up to you. And it depends on context. In a professional setting, the CEO of the company is probably going to be more important than the intern. A client to a company is going to be more important than the CEO. Socially, you probably now would go on age rather than looking at gender. So Granny being 85 is going to be sort of elevated above Annie, who’s 18.

Brett McKay: Okay, that makes sense. And then you also talk about whenever you make an introduction to add some context to the introduction.

William Hanson: Yes. None of us really like making small talk if we’re completely honest. I mean, small talk with complete strangers for some is absolute purgatory. So you can make life easy for the two people that you are introducing by saying, Bill, this is Ben. Ben’s just flown in from Sydney. And Bill, I believe, didn’t your mother used to live in Australia? If you can find a link, that’s perfect because then they do have common ground. But if not, you just say, Ben just flew in from Sydney, leave it at that. And then hopefully one of them goes, oh gosh, I’ve always wanted to go. And just says something. But if you just say the names and do the introduction, people just stare at each other like, great, you’ve introduced me, but who are you?

Brett McKay: We typically shake hands when meeting someone new. This is the art of manliness. We got to talk about the etiquette on handshaking.

William Hanson: Yes. I mean, handshaking, which of course it slightly went out of fashion during the pandemic, but is thankfully now back. It’s probably the only physical contact you will have with most people. And I think, and I don’t know about you, Brett, you can tell so much about someone by the quality of the handshake. Do you judge someone?

Brett McKay: Of course. If I get the limp fish, it’s an immediate like, yeah, yeah I don’t know, yeah, yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. It’s an ick to use a modern parlance. Already in the first couple of seconds whilst we’re judging a new person, I’ve met them and it’s a limp fish handshake, as you say. And it’s unpleasant. Similarly, if it’s a bone crusher, you think, wow, why are they having to overcompensate and come across as overly assertive? So the handshake is so important. And I, again, in the book, when I was writing, I thought, well, actually maybe, maybe I’m being a bit harsh on people that have bad handshakes because I can remember, I think my parents telling me how to shake a hand age five, maybe, roughly around age five. But then no parent, I mean, maybe there are parents out there that sort of are the exceptions that prove the rule. No parent then revisits that handshaking lesson when their child is now 15. And actually the strength of their handshake is going to be very different for what they were doing when they were five. You’re sort of told what to do and then nobody revises it. And actually having a good handshake is often half the battle, particularly in business.

Brett McKay: No, I agree. Handshake is important. Something I’ve taught my kids. And I like a good firm handshake for men and women alike. I’m an equal opportunist when it comes to that sort of thing.

William Hanson: Oh, absolutely. And I would, again, one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing writing the book is sort of tracking where the changes have come in and what these changes are. And again, if you read the original Emily Post or books published in the 1920s, ladies didn’t massively shake hands. The hostess might’ve shook hands with guests, but other than that, ladies didn’t do it. Now, anyone of any gender, business or professional, everybody shakes hands. Everyone should take off their right glove if they’re wearing gloves. It’s flesh to flesh. Obviously, if you’re in absolute minus 40 degrees Celsius temperatures, fine, you can keep your glove on. There are always sort of caveats to it. But yes, a handshake is pretty equal.

Brett McKay: So this is related introductions, but this has happened to me a few times. It’s whenever you encounter someone you’ve met before, but you can’t remember their name. You’re not really acquaintances, but you know of each other. How do you make those, what we call reintroductions to each other?

William Hanson: Yes, I think a lot of people sort of can get quite offended that the other person hasn’t remembered you. But actually, you know, sometimes we’re the most memorable and interesting person in our own lives because we’re there, we’re the only person that is sort of the world expert on ourselves. But other people may not necessarily remember you like you remember them. So just say your name quickly. Hello, so lovely to see you again. It’s William, of course. What have you been up to since I saw you at Brett’s, for example? Just help them out rather than sort of expect them to remember every detail about you. Obviously, if they can remember everything about you, that’s fantastic. Actually, a really simple trick I often do in restaurants or hotels I go to a lot, I just write down the staff’s name in a note in my phone. And so when I’m going back in, I can remember that, you know, Grant is the tall waiter with the ear piercing. And so when I go in again, I can say, oh, hello, Grant, how are you? And generally, you find you get a thousand times better service when you actually bother to learn their names. It also helps, I think, trains your brain to remember people’s names better as well.

Brett McKay: I like that. That’s a classy move. I’m going to start doing that. What happens if you forget someone’s name? Any tips on navigating that?

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, apologize and move on quite quickly. So, Brett, if I called you Ben, for example, and you say, oh, no, it’s Brett, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Brett, I’d probably say, using your correct name and then move on. But again, it’s quite a British thing to make that into a drama and to over-apologize. Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. Oh, that happens all the time. And the more of an issue I make it, the more of an issue it becomes. So just say sorry, say the correct name, make a mental note not to get it wrong again, and move on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s something I’ve learned after reading your book. British people like to apologize, very apologetic.

William Hanson: We do. I mean, look, hey, it’s better to over-apologize than not apologize at all.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: But it can go the other way as well.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about small talk. Any etiquette to small talk? Are there topics that are taboo that you definitely don’t want to go there?

William Hanson: Yeah, I would say this is something that has not changed very recently. Sex, money, politics, health, and religion still remain for small talk. And this is conversation with people you do not know well. I’m not saying when you’re talking to very good friends. But with strangers, avoid sex, money, politics, health, or religion to begin with because you just don’t know what people’s opinions are, what makes them engage, what disengages them, what offends them. And it’s so much better to sort of play it safe. And some cultures just don’t get small talk. The Germans absolutely don’t get it. The Dutch sort of get it but aren’t particularly good at it. But think about small talk as the slip road onto a major highway. If you didn’t have that slip road and you were joining the conversational highway going at 70 miles an hour, you would crash. And so you need that slip road to just sort of build your speed up into a slightly more interesting conversation. That is the point of small talk. I’m not pretending it is fascinating, but it is needed in order to have a proper conversation with someone.

Brett McKay: Okay, for our American listeners, a slip road in England is what we call an on-ramp over here. And that’s the metaphor I always use for small talk. Some people say they hate small talk and they just want to jump to the big talk. But you’ve got to take the on-ramp of small talk to get up to speed into that deeper conversation. So what are your go-to topics for small talk?

William Hanson: I mean, look, in Britain, we’re obsessed with talking about the weather. I was being interviewed yesterday. It was a British journalist. We spent five minutes talking about the weather at the start of the interview. But in Britain, our weather, we often can have three or four seasons in a day. If you’re in gorgeous California or you’re in the Middle East where the weather is sort of fairly consistent, the weather’s not going to be spoken about. But beyond the weather, I just talk about the environment that you are in there and then. You’re trying to find a shared experience or something in common with that person. And if you have nothing else in common, you don’t sort of have lots of hobbies in common, what you do have is the room you’re in. Gosh, what a beautiful ceiling. Aren’t the band fantastic? Something upbeat and positive is what we want. Talk about the canapes. How do you know the host? That’s safe and better small talk than, gosh, well, it’s a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?

Brett McKay: In America, we’re obsessed with work.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So often work is a topic of small talk. What do you do? In Britain, apparently, that’s frowned upon to talk about work in small talk.

William Hanson: Yeah, well, I’ll be honest, your American tendencies are sort of creeping in. And I think particularly younger generations are slightly more work-focused and find it less taboo. But people really shouldn’t be defined by their jobs. I mean, I do speak as someone who’s an etiquette coach. I’ve got a slight vested interest in this and pushing my own personal agenda. But if I go to a party this evening, I’m going in my social capacity. Whether I’m a dentist, a tax lawyer, or an etiquette coach, it’s got no bearing on whether my friend has invited me to that party. And as much as I love my job, I mean, I have no other talent, so I don’t know what else I’d do, I don’t want to talk about it all the time, actually. There’s more to me than my job. And so certainly to begin with, and again, when you say to people you’re an etiquette coach, people sort of either freeze or start panicking. I’d quite like to talk about something else, thank you very much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, or if you ask someone about their job, they hate their job.

William Hanson: Oh, and then you’ll say, oh, God, I don’t really care, really. Especially if you meet someone, yeah, and they start moaning about their job, and you think, well, I was just asking it to be polite. I don’t really need a whole rundown.

Brett McKay: What do you do when you’re engaging in small talk and let’s say the conversation starts going into some of those taboo topics you mentioned earlier? Any way to navigate that deftly?

William Hanson: Well, I mean, hopefully, most of your conversation is listening and being able to pick up on what you’re being given back. And if you’re asking a question, especially if you think it’s controversial and you’re not getting much back from the other person, it is probably time to move on. But often it’s other people witnessing or listening into the conversation that will have to step in and could see the car crash, to use another driving analogy, about to happen. And so, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but it works, is just stepping in and going, well, what lovely weather we’re having today and saying it very pointedly. I’ve only ever had to do it once at a dinner I was hosting. And that should be a clue to the people that had started to get a bit heated, but also to the other guests. We need to move this on. Everyone needs to step in and help me here.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party, a mingling event, and you’re going there by yourself. You don’t know anyone and there’s already established little circles of conversation going on. How do you enter a conversational group with class and smoothly?

William Hanson: This is hard to explain on an audio podcast, but generally you want to, first of all, before you actually move in, make sure there are what we call an open body language group. And usually that means there’s a great big gap for you that you can go and stand in. If there’s no gap, don’t try and approach them because they’ve sort of subconsciously or consciously closed that gap off. And so you’re not going to get much success. But really, basically, if you know somebody in that group, much easier, you just make eye contact with them and hope they bring you in. But if you don’t know anyone in that group, it’s as shallow, basically, I hate to say it, it’s as shallow as picking the one that looks like you. So that could be you’re tall and blonde, they’re tall and blonde. It’s a group of women and one man, you look at the male, for example, or man in a tie, man in a tie, just anything that you will have most success joining a group if you basically pick the person who looks most like you, smile at them, make a really nice positive signal. If you get a smile back, you step forward and do your approach and would say, oh, hello, may I join? My name is William. Again, don’t say sorry to interrupt. If you don’t get a smile back and they sort of look away or close the gap, you just move on and try and find someone else.

Brett McKay: That tip of looking for people that look like you, you talk about in the book, you go into a party where the invitation had ambiguous instructions on dress code and it was either black tie or 1970s apparel.

William Hanson: Yes.

Brett McKay: So you’re the etiquette guy. You went black tie. Of course you’re gonna go black tie. But there was only three other guys that went black tie. You guys just ended up talking to each other the entire night.

William Hanson: We did, because again, it’s shallow. When people don’t know many other people, they don’t take risks. If you’ve got a group of mice, you’ve got a group of cats. Okay, the cats might want to play with the mice, but the mice don’t want to play with the cats. And it’s the same. So I didn’t know there were two dress codes. I was someone’s guest. I was going on secondhand information without having seen the invitation. I always ask to see the invitation now after that drama. But yes, there were, you know, in a room full of 100 people, there were three of us in black tie, tuxedo. And it was quite boring after a while because no one else wanted to talk to us. And it’s sort of playground stuff, but it does happen.

Brett McKay: I’m sure a lot of people have had this happen to them when they’re at a party and they start talking to someone and this someone does not want to let go of you. But you want to go talk to other people. How do you politely break away from someone who’s talking your ear off?

William Hanson: Well, ideally you want to introduce them to someone else and pair them off. It’s not great to leave someone standing on their own. If they’ve said something objectionable or you absolutely have to go because you’re going to miss your flight or something, then fair enough. But try to pair them off with someone else. Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however? And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go, Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking and off you go. So that’s what you ideally want to do. But if there is no one, you’re going to have to leave them standing on their own, but you can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like, well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to, but maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser. Shake hands and off we go.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So I think we’ve handled introductions, we’ve handled small talk. Let’s talk about table manners. Let’s start with this question. Why do the British have what seems like such complicated and fastidious rules of table etiquette?

William Hanson: Well, I would say, I mean, thankfully, it’s not the case anymore in Britain. We have such a wide and varied cuisine. But historically, our food was always a bit rubbish. And I think a lot of these rules might have been developed just to sort of slow down eating it. You didn’t want to rush it because it wasn’t very tasty. And so we came up with these sort of rules to have very small mouthfuls and small portions. And we had a lot of alcohol with our food, different alcohol for each course. And also, you know, in Britain, we like a rule, we like structure. And I think British dining is the most complicated compared to European, which is a different thing from British dining, we should say. And that’s not a Brexit thing. It’s always been that way in sort of etiquette land. We’ve always had British and then European dining and then American dining. But we do like to overcomplicate things sometimes.

Brett McKay: And you recommend that people learn British etiquette because that’ll basically cover your bases.

William Hanson: Yeah, and that’s something I picked up from my great friend and colleague, Myka Meier, who’s the leading expert in America in etiquette. And she teaches British dining as the sort of the gold standard, because if you can do the top standard, you can easily do the bottom standard, whatever that one is. I guess it’s like driving. I mean, I know it varies now, but if you learn to drive on a stick, you can drive an automatic. But if you learn just on an automatic, you can’t drive on a stick. And so it’s probably best to learn the hardest one. And then you’re covered for all bases.

Brett McKay: So I think most of us growing up heard the rule, no elbows on the table. And you talk about the history of why we have that rule. So what is the history of the rule, no elbows on the table?

William Hanson: Yes, and this is what people seem to forget, particularly with etiquette and dining etiquette, is that we have not just come up with these rules to annoy people. There is a rich history behind all of our cultures. And the no elbows on the table one goes back to sort of medieval Britain and Europe, where the tables were not secure tables like we’re fortunate to eat from today. They were created from benches and sheets of wood twice a day when people were eating two meals a day back then, not three. And if you put your elbows on the table, because of the way the food would be laid out down the center of the table well balanced, if you put your elbows on the table, the table would tip and it would not be secure. And so thus it became the etiquette to not put your elbows on the table because you didn’t want the food dropping onto the floor. I would say now we as humans, we’re sort of so ingrained knowing all our ancestors have learned not to do that. We sort of subconsciously or consciously know it as well. And so something we still follow, even though our tables are by and large secure.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it also doesn’t look good when you’re at a nice dinner to have your elbows on the table.

William Hanson: No. It’s horrid. I mean, it’s actually very difficult to eat with your elbows on the table. I challenge anyone to do it nicely. Maybe at the end of a dinner when you’re sort of chatting over a cup of tea or coffee with your host, maybe having a little bit of a chocolate or something, I can sort of see that it’s okay in that instance, especially if your host is doing it. But formally, whilst there’s proper food on the table in the middle, then no elbows off.

Brett McKay: When you’re a guest at a dinner, when should you start eating?

William Hanson: So once the host has started, basically, is the rule. If there’s a guest of honor, you would wait until the guest of honor has started. But generally on most meals that we have, there isn’t a guest of honor. And so once the host starts, and they should be served last, then you may pick up your cutlery and begin.

Brett McKay: I think everyone knows that when you’re out to eat, you don’t start eating your dish until everyone has been served. But if it’s like an informal dinner at your home with friends and family, do you need to wait until everyone’s gotten their food to start eating? I mean, is that the rule?

William Hanson: Oh, yes, yes. Everyone’s got to have food in front of them and be ready to go. And they’re not still waiting for potatoes or sprouts or anything like that. You wait until everyone’s got it. And that’s when the host then picks up their cutlery as a signal, we may now begin.

Brett McKay: If you’re a host of a dinner, how should you pace your own eating?

William Hanson: Yes, you want to sort of identify the slowest eater around the table. And obviously for family dinners, you can probably work out who that is quite quickly because you dine with them quite a lot. Growing up in my household, if my parents were hosting, it was always granny. Granny would do a lot of talking, but not a lot of eating. And so my father was always sort of there dissecting a singular garden pea or something because that’s all he had got on his plate whilst granny started, whilst still taught and did less eating. But host starts first, but host finishes last. And that’s a huge discipline. And the idea is that you don’t leave one person still eating with the rest of the table staring at them. So the host sort of picks who’s the slowest, follows them so that they can match pace. And so they are included and are not feeling like they’re holding things up, even though let’s be honest, they might be.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk dinner place settings. This is how you got your start as an etiquette teacher. First thing you did was teach how to do dinner place settings. I’m sure if you’ve been to a fancy dinner, you see just this layout and you’re like, oh my gosh, which fork am I supposed to use? Which one’s the bread plate? There’s that whole advice that was in the Titanic, start from the outside and work your way in with the silverware. Does that really do the trick or are there nuances to that?

William Hanson: That does generally do the trick. I mean, all of these dining etiquette rules only work if a table has been set nicely. But working on the proviso the table is set nicely and correctly, that one generally works. However, in American dining etiquette there is what’s called the American informal play setting where a teaspoon, used for dessert, will actually precede the dinner knife. American etiquette books often will show both the standard play setting with outside in and then this American informal and the outside in rule does not work at all because it’s sort of zigzagging all over the shop. So I’m very against the American informal one because I don’t think it helps people and the whole point of etiquette is it’s meant to sort of help people whereas this is one exception too many and also nobody that I have spoken to and please if you’re listening to this and you know where that rule came from please tell me because my colleagues and I, even the American ones, just can’t work it out. Who came up with that? What was the logic behind that? I think with any rule if you can’t find the logic behind it it’s probably time to ditch it.

Brett McKay: What’s the etiquette of napkins? Apparently you’re a big napkin aficionado.

William Hanson: Yes, I’ve got an unhealthy amount of napkins for a grown man of my age but I love a good quality napkin. I’ve yet to get to the stage in life where I take my own napkin to a restaurant but I’m sure it’ll happen at some point because in Britain, I don’t know what it’s like in America as much but in Britain some places are obsessed with paper napkins and I’m just not convinced. I don’t think it doesn’t need to be paper because it’s bad for the environment so a perfectly serviceable linen napkin that can be reused is I think a bit better but yes, napkins on the lap, not round the neck. Historically you had different types of napkin for different types of meals. The larger the meal, the larger the napkin. Today it’s very unlikely unless you’re me that you have different sizes of napkin which is fine just as long as it’s sort of clean and ironed that’s all I ask.

Brett McKay: Should you put your napkin in your lap as soon as you sit down?

William Hanson: Not the second you sit down unless food is sort of hovering behind you ready to be placed down.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: I would sort of within the first minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Is when you can do it. You don’t want to look too keen.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your napkin if you need to leave the table for the restroom for example?

William Hanson: Then it would go on the chair and again some people get sort of when I say this sometimes in class people will recoil because they’re like oh well the chair is so dirty. Well if the chair’s got arms put it on the arm of the chair never put it on the back of the chair because then we can see it but actually if you’re worried that the chair is that dirty what sort of establishments are you dining in? So just rethink where you’re going. So yes seat of chair or arm of chair and then on the table when you’re leaving but you’re not coming back.

Brett McKay: Okay that’s what you do with it when you’re done you put it on the table?

William Hanson: Yes

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: Absolutely I’m not coming back goodbye thanks so much and really everyone should do that at the same time as well.

Brett McKay: What do you do with your silverware when you’re done?

William Hanson: So it depends if you’re eating what is in America called continental style which is not a term we have over here but if you’re eating continental style or you’re eating zigzag style continental style again many American etiquette coaches advocate for that knife in right hand fork in left hand you would sort of place them in a triangle on the plate when you’re resting with the bridge of the fork going over the knife almost creating like a pizza wedge shape in front of you and that is just to show I’m paused I’m just going to take a sip of my drink I’m chatting to my neighbour I’m pacing myself whereas when you’re finished they would go together and you know different countries have slightly different angles in Britain we do 6:30 if you imagine the cutlery is the hands of a clock with Americans it’s generally 5:25 some Europeans it’s 4:20 some it’s 3:15 I don’t really care as long as they’ve gone together that’s all the wait staff are looking for they’re not going to look at your cutlery and go well they’ve done it in the Dutch way and we’re here in California so we’re not going to clear that plate they’re not looking for that as long as it is together that’s what they want to know.

Brett McKay: Let’s go back to handling utensils how to hold them so you mentioned the two styles the continental style and the zigzag style so the continental style is when you got your knife in your right hand your fork in your left hand and you got the tongs or the face of the fork pointed down right?

William Hanson: Yeah and they work together and in Britain or continental style we let go of both of them when we’re resting but other than that we have got one in each hand they’re almost extensions of our hands whereas in zigzag style you might cut one or two pieces up with the knife place the knife down on the upper edge of the plate turn the fork over into the dominant hand stab and eat and then transfer it back pick up the knife cut another bit set the knife down transfer the fork I mean that’s an aerobic exercise Brett.

Brett McKay: Yeah no I don’t like the zigzag style I like where you just use the utensils as extensions of your hands for the duration of the dinner.

William Hanson: I think it’s a lot easier but some people insist it isn’t but you know to each their own as long as the food’s going in their mouth and not all over the shop.

Brett McKay: The other benefit of it too is it allows you to take up less space because your elbows are tucked in you can keep your elbows tucked in you don’t have your elbows all jutting out and bugging the other person.

William Hanson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah. And that’s key as well, because some dining tables you’re really tightly packed. Now in American dining, you prefer round tables, and actually at state banquets at the White House used to be straight edge tables like we have in Britain a lot more, but Jacqueline Kennedy switched them over to round tables, and that seems to be how it’s stayed at a state level at the White House. And the beauty of a round table, other than being more sociable, is that you are less restricted and you aren’t immediately sitting next to somebody where you could elbow them. But on a big, grand, straight edge table, you do have to be very conscious of where your elbows are going.

Brett McKay: Let’s say you’re at a dinner where you’re being served family style, so all the dishes are on the table and you’ve got to pass them around to make sure everyone gets serving. What are the rules of passing dishes?

William Hanson: So I have to be honest, Britain is the only country that makes things difficult and passes things in the opposite direction to every other country. In Britain, we pass things around to the left, so clockwise around the table, whereas in America, in India, in the Middle East, in Africa, every other country, Europe, the plates or the dishes go counterclockwise to the right. That said, I would say most Brits don’t know that rule. I’m just telling you from an etiquette profession rule, that’s the rule. I think as long as you are offering the people each side of you, no one really cares whether it goes to the left or to the right.

Brett McKay: That is interesting. You talk about in Britain, it’s kind of faux pas, maybe it used to be, not so much anymore, but to ask someone to pass you a dish, like directly, hey, can you pass me the potatoes?

William Hanson: Oh, no, that’s a slap in the face in Britain, traditionally, because you’re sort of saying, look, William, if you had said that to me, the subtext to that is, William, you have not seen that I’m sitting here surrounded by no potatoes. You have failed, because again, good manners are about other people. And so we’ve developed this very passive-aggressive way in Britain, and we sort of say it now as a bit of a joke, but I can assure you it does work in practice. If you had, and I know you wouldn’t, Brett, but let’s, for sake of argument, say that you didn’t pass me the potatoes, I would say, Brett, would you like any potatoes? And you might say, no, thank you, William, but would you like some potatoes? Oh, yes, I think that I would, actually. And then they get passed.

Brett McKay: When I read that, it reminded me, I think the Dowager did that a few times in Downton Abbey.

William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay: Or I just imagine the Dowager’s just saying some sort of passive-aggressive thing like that.

William Hanson: Well, exactly. And I think someone asked me a few weeks ago, do you think passive aggression is a good thing? And I think, you know, it’s better than active aggression.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s right. There’s also etiquette on passing the salt and pepper. What’s the rules of passing salt and pepper?

 William Hanson: Yes, so salt and pepper travel together is the mnemonic that we teach children, but it works beautifully for adults as well. They are a marriage couple, in effect, and you don’t want to split them up. So if someone says, please, could you pass the salt? You would pass both the salt and the pepper together in one hand if they’ll fit in one hand, but two hands is fine. And I think that goes back to necessity. When salt and pepper pots used to be teeny tiny, they weren’t great big mills or grinders like we have now. They were much smaller, and so you didn’t sort of want to split them up because then you might not find them.

Brett McKay: Tell us about salt cellars. I never heard of these things until I read about them in your book.

William Hanson: Yeah, salt cellars are sort of small little dishes. So I guess a lot of salt. What does your salt and pepper look like in your house?

Brett McKay: They’re just shakers that we just… Yeah.

William Hanson: Yeah, which is sort of the more contemporary style. But going back to the Downton or even pre-Downton era, salt was served in a little, it would often be a silver little pot, but with an inlay of blue glass, because if you put salt directly on silver, it will erode the silver and it doesn’t taste then very good and it doesn’t do the silver much good either. So you’d have this sort of blue little glass inlay that sat in there, and that’s where the salt was. And a tiny little silver spoon that you would spoon out granules of salt and put it in a neat little pile on the edge of your plate. And you would sort of add a couple of granules then using the tip of your knife. Sounds terribly complicated onto whatever was loaded up on the fork.

Brett McKay: Are they still used today?

William Hanson: I would say this one is being slightly relaxed. Most restaurants you go to now, you don’t get salt cellars. I would say salt cellars now, you would see it in a very grand private house, if at all.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But most restaurants, it’s the salt shaker with one hole in it. Pepper has several holes and you can apply it more or less wherever, but try and taste the food first.

Brett McKay: All right, but for listeners, they ever have a dinner at a manor, they know what to do when they see a salt cellar.

William Hanson: They do know what to do, exactly.

Brett McKay: Any other rules that a guest at a dinner party or maybe even an extended stay in someone’s home should follow to show proper hospitality, proper manners?

William Hanson: Yes, I mean, I think it obviously depends on context and whether you know them well or not. But, you know, particularly I get so many, I do a podcast as well, and so many letters we get in about, oh, I had my family to stay. They stayed with us for an entire week and they didn’t once offer to cook or they didn’t take us out for a dinner to say thank you. Yes, it’s an awful lot of work having someone stay in your house for anything over one night. And even that can be quite tricky. So if you are going to stay, don’t assume that your hosts will be entertaining you all three meals of every day either and the stuff in between. But do offer to take them out, to say thank you, to give them a night off cooking. I mean, that’s, I don’t know about you, most hosts don’t want other people cooking in their own kitchen.

Brett McKay: No, I wouldn’t like that.

William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.

Brett McKay: Yeah

William Hanson: But please, let’s order takeout or let’s go out for a nice meal in a restaurant. It’s on us. Just something to acknowledge the effort that they’re going to. Take a nice gift, write them a decent length thank you letter afterwards.

Brett McKay: What’s a good gift to bring as a guest? What’s your go-to? Because I think a lot of people say like wine or maybe that’s not a good one.

William Hanson: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good one if you know that they like Italian Merlot, for example. If you know that that’s their favorite wine, take them a couple of bottles and it should be a couple of bottles if you’re staying for several nights. It might even be a case of wine if you’re staying for a week plus. But if you don’t quite know what they drink, or indeed if they drink, and more and more people aren’t drinking now, particularly with the younger generations, alcohol is probably not the best thing. So chocolates, I mean, the practice of post-desk gifts goes back to Chicago in the ’30s and chocolates were the absolute sort of that was all that was acceptable. Most people like chocolates or can quite easily re-gift them if they don’t. But ideally you want to take something personal and personalized to them.

Brett McKay: You know, when I heard, and I would like if I got this, which is like a nice bottle of olive oil, because I use olive oil a lot.

William Hanson: Do you know, olive oil is becoming such a popular gift over here as well in London. And it’s great. I mean, a good quality.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

William Hanson: Particularly if it’s Italian olive oil. I mean, over here it might be easier to get that than with you. Yeah, it’s a nice novel thing. Doesn’t matter if you drink. I don’t think many people are allergic to oil. So it ticks a lot of boxes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and it often comes in a nice bottle that presents well too. So I like that. Let’s talk about elevators. Is there an etiquette for elevators?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. If you’re in a really old building in Chicago or New York or London, the elevator is probably going to be a little bit tighter than in a great big new build somewhere in Los Angeles. And so the senior person, whether that’s the senior in the business or a lady or granny, whoever would go into the elevator first. The person who gets out of the elevator first when it arrives at the floor is the person closest to the elevator doors. And that’s the person who got in last. It winds me up in hotels where they’re taking you to your room and you turn up at floor seven and they put their hand in front of the lift doors and you sort of have to edge past them because they want you to go first. But that’s all very well, but I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve not been to this hotel before. So actually I want the hotelier to get out of the lift, put their hand across the lift doors from the other side of the lift and point me in the right direction, much more courteous than sort of awkwardly edging past them.

Brett McKay: Is small talk appropriate in an elevator or should you just keep to yourself?

William Hanson: I was having a heated debate about this only a few hours ago. No, in Britain, it’s so taboo to speak in an elevator. I’m going to film a social media video, I think, that just sort of has a group of us saying nothing in an elevator. And then I’ll just say at the end, we’re British, we don’t talk in elevators or lifts as we call them over here. But look, if you and I got in an elevator and we knew each other and there was no one else, you can absolutely speak. But with everyone else, Brits are so private with their conversation and thoughts, we couldn’t possibly have someone else over here what we’re thinking or saying. So there is normally this very awkward silence in an elevator.

Brett McKay: Well, I prefer the silence too. I’m a big fan of that.

William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So the British are famous for queuing, standing in line. Any etiquette for line standing?

William Hanson: Yes I mean just sort of, it’s so democratic it’s first come first served. It’s so straightfoward we get very irritated when someone tries to jump the queue. And so etiquette rule number one is, if you don’t mind the rules, don’t play the game, basically. So if you don’t want to queue don’t queue and I think you are all going to be shocked down in flames in Britain, if you sort of try to jump the queue. And I would say that is actually the commonalities between Britain and America, I mean, I think we are all sort of the Olympic gold medalist of queuing in Britain, but I would say you’re probably the silver medalist in America. Whereat it doesn’t even get bronze is the Europeans. And actually when you go to Disney in Paris oversee the American concept as British I’ve been to a lot of the Disneys the American ones are great, because everyone follows the queuing standing in line pressure call, but in Euro Disney or Disney Paris as it’s now called yeah it’s a little bit of a freeforall and it’s quite stressful.

Brett McKay: How do you handle line jumpers? Lets say someone tries to break that sacred social order, should you call them out?

William Hanson: Oh, yes. No we would and I think we would sort of call them out probably giving then the benefit of the doubt to begin with. We might say something like, oh actually the back of the queue is just here. For example because it might be an innocent mistake, if they then go “No, no I’m gonna join it from here” then well that’s a war crime.

Brett McKay: Is it proper to save places in line? Can you do that?

William Hanson: If its not a busy queue you could perhaps do it for maybe like a minute.

Brett McKay: Okay.

William Hanson: But I would be very careful even don’t so I would probably not advice that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. It has to be done in moderation [0:48:16.9] ____. Well, William, this has been a great conversation and we only scratched the surface of what’s in this book. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

William Hanson: Yes, the book is out now, Just Good Manners, published by Gallery at Simon & Schuster. It’s available in all formats. There’s an audio book. So if you’re not sick of my voice after this interview, there’s more of it on audio book, e-book and hardback in all good bookshops.

Brett McKay: And any other place on the internet where they can learn about you?

William Hanson: Oh yes, there’s my Instagram @williamhanson, TikTok @williamhansonetiquette or my website, williamhanson.com.

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

William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of the medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out?

For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress towards your ultimate goals.

Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like “moving horizons,” creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how understanding your unique attributes will help you understand how you react to uncertainty and how teams can implement “dynamic subordination” to adapt in rapidly changing environments.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Rich’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — #738: The Character Traits That Drive Optimal Performance
• AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty
• AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times
• The Physiological Sigh

Connect With Rich Diviney

• The Attributes website
• Rich on LinkedIn
• Rich on IG

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of that medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out? For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress toward your ultimate goals. Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book, Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like moving horizons, creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how teams can tackle uncertainty by implementing dynamic subordination to adapt in rapidly changing environments. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty. Rich Diviney, welcome back to the show.

Rich Diviney: Well, thanks for having me, Brett. It’s good to be back.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, The Attributes. I know it was a big hit with our listeners. You’ve got a new book out called Masters of Uncertainty. Is this book a continuation of your thinking in The Attributes?

Rich Diviney: It’s not a continuation. It’s actually the overarching idea. This is the book actually I’ve wanted to write for years and years and years. And as you know, because you’ve read them, I know we’ll get into The Attributes as simply one aspect of understanding oneself in uncertainty, challenge, and stress. And so in a move that was kind of unconsciously genius, I guess, I decided to write The Attributes book first, which was fantastic because The Attributes is such a big topic and it laid a nice foundation for people to understand them, for us to build our assessment tool, and so on and so forth. But understanding how we operate and perform in uncertainty is really where I’ve always had my passion and what it takes to do that, both neurologically, physiologically, and of course, what we need to know about ourselves. And so The Master of Uncertainty is really kind of the overarching idea that I’ve been exploring for a long time. Attributes was a piece and I just happened to write that Attributes book first.

Brett McKay: Yeah, maybe Masters of Uncertainty is the prequel.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, prequel. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So why have you been so passionate about uncertainty and thinking and writing about it? What’s your background with it?

Rich Diviney: Well, uncertainty on its own really is defined as that which cannot be relied upon or known. You’re just in an unknown, unreliable situation or environment. Now, what we have to understand is that there are different forms of uncertainty. You can have uncertainty with curiosity. That’s every kid on Christmas Eve. There’s uncertainty there, but there’s no fear. It’s excitement that comes from that. What we’re talking about and what I specifically focus on is this idea of uncertainty plus anxiety, which equals fear. So it’s the uncertainty that elicits fear because that’s really where most people focus on when it comes to defining their performance or interrogating the performance or when they fail in performing. And so obviously in the SEAL teams and any spec operations unit, especially in combat, you are very well versed in managing and moving through things that are pretty dangerous and scary and have that uncertainty element in it. So in doing that throughout a career in the SEAL teams, I really began to wonder, okay, what is it we do? How do we do it? I began to kind of explore the neuroscience when I linked up with, who’s now a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman.

This was seven years ago, seven or eight years ago, so it was before his enormously successful and awesome podcast. But we began to, he has his fear lab at Stanford, and we began to kind of explore this together. And I began to realize, or I guess we began to realize together that you could talk about the neuroscience and you could talk about the techniques that guys like us use, and you could fuse those together in a meaningful way that allowed other people, anybody, to really understand that this is actually quite human and we all have the capacity to do this.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you mentioned you are a SEAL. That’s your background, Navy SEAL. How did uncertainty show up during your career as a SEAL? Because I imagine that every time you went on a mission, even if you had done a lot of planning, there was still an element of uncertainty to it.

Rich Diviney: 100%. And I would even say uncertainty shows up in SEAL training. I mean, the day one, I mean, SEAL training BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, is designed to throw you into uncertainty and challenge and stress, all of it, because it’s designed to take you down to zero physiologically and physically and even mentally, and then ask, okay, what else do you got? What else can you do? And can you, in fact, problem solve when things are very, very serious and the stakes are very, very high? And so you start in SEAL training. The guys who show up to SEAL training and make it through were all folks who somehow got good at this prior to getting to the beaches of BUDS. You have to have some level of competency even to make it through the first day, first week, first two weeks of BUDS. But what happens is you hyper develop these techniques, these tools, these skills, if you will, and then you find yourself utilizing them in almost every aspect of SEAL life, whether it’s training, jumping out of airplanes at 20,000 feet, whether it’s in combat, in gunfights, whether it’s scuba diving in dark harbors every one of those environments comes with it, a sense of you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. And so this is why you become masters of the craft.

Brett McKay: What do you think is a common misconception civilians have about how Navy SEALs deal with uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: Well, I think one common misconception is they think that Navy SEALs are fearless, and Navy SEALs are absolutely not fearless. In fact, fearlessness in of itself is a very, very dangerous thing. I was told by a really wonderful officer when I was a younger junior officer, he said, Rich, beware the fearless leader, because that guy is going to get you killed. And so fear is a natural human thing. It’s a human being’s risk assessment tool, and it tells us, hey, pay attention. This is risky. This might kill you. This might hurt you. This might harm you. So Navy SEALs, we experience fear just like anybody else. However, we have the capacity, the tools, and the practice in moving through that very deftly, so it doesn’t sideline us. We use the fear in a very meaningful way by risk assessing properly and planning properly. But then after that, we understand that, hey, things are just going to happen, and we know how to move through it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you used the example of the Osama bin Laden raid. This was something that was planned for months. They even built a replica of the compound he was in to practice.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: But whenever the actual mission was underway, things just went completely cattywampus. Helicopter went down, and so they had to adapt, and they still were able to get the mission done.

Rich Diviney: They were, yeah. And just a quick correction there. The mission actually hadn’t been rehearsed or planned for too long. I mean, the decision was made by the president when they got the intel, and so the team had about, I think, three weeks, three or four weeks.

Brett McKay: Oh, wow.

Rich Diviney: Yeah. But in that three or four weeks, they rehearsed ad nauseum and memorized and got prepared for every single detail they could possibly anticipate. And yeah, like you said, as soon as they hit the target, the plans changed. Uncertainty struck, and the plans changed. So it’s a classic example of the idea that, and again, we can talk about planning. I do not besmirch planning at all. I think proper planning is good. What we don’t want to do is get caught up in the paralysis by analysis or paralysis through analysis, where we’re trying to plan every single thing. Because A, it’s not going to let us move, and B, it’s a real energy drag. So we have to get ourselves into a position where we plan a couple things. Hey, this might happen, this might happen. And then after that, if anything else happens, we’ll figure it out along the way.

Brett McKay: At the start of the book, you write this. I thought it really caught my attention. Most people fall short of realizing their potential primarily because our culture promotes a misleading belief that life is predictable. How does believing life is predictable set someone up for failure, falling short of their potential?

Rich Diviney: Well, we are lucky enough to live in a society and live in a time, most of us, I guess, where the environment is structured around us so that or such that we can rely on predictability. I mean, people don’t have to worry about getting killed by the saber-toothed tiger anymore or finding their food or else they’re going to starve or finding proper shelter and so on and so forth. However, what we do have to understand is that even though that is the case, even though life is designed nowadays around predictability, uncertainty is always going to happen. It’s always going to be present. The combination of not knowing and the combination of anxiety is going to bubble up that fear response in us. And to assume that things are going to go as planned is a bad assumption because you’re not going to prepare yourself when things inevitably do not go as planned. So I think that’s one factor. The other factor is that we are, as a species, designed to step outside of our comfort zone. I mean, this is in fact why we have gone from cave dweller to space explorer because the human being, the human species were designed to keep exploring, keep discovering, step outside of those boundaries.

And so understanding how we can do that more effectively not only prepares us for that uncertainty, challenge, and stress that hits us without warning, but it also allows us to take deliberate steps, choose deliberate times to step outside of our comfort zone and explore and grow. That’s where growth and evolution happens. And I think that’s a really powerful aspect of unlocking potential of every human being.

Brett McKay: All right, let’s talk about some of the tactics people can use to get a better handle on uncertainty in their work or their life. I’m sure a lot of our listeners, most of them probably aren’t Navy SEALs, but they’re dealing with uncertainty. We’re living in a work environment where artificial intelligence is upending a lot of industries. If you’re a parent, your kids can come home with problems you got to deal with that you’ve never dealt with before. So a lot of uncertainty. One tactic you talk about is moving horizons. And this is where you progress through uncertainty toward your ultimate goal by repeatedly setting and then reaching for one immediate horizon at a time. And you do this by clearly defining a duration, pathway, and outcome or DPO for each step along the way. Tell us more about moving horizons and DPO.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, moving horizons is a tool that taps into our own, every human being’s neurology. And the neuroscience behind that is that when we are in any environment, our brain is trying to figure out that environment. And it’s doing so along basically three major factors. There’s obviously other things in there. But the three primary factors it’s trying to figure out are duration, how long this thing’s going to last, pathway, what’s my route in, out, or through, and then outcome, what’s the end state of this. And what we have to understand is when we are in absence of one or more of those aspects of those three things, we find ourselves in uncertainty and anxiety and we start to feel oftentimes the fear response. An example would be illness. So say you and I got strep throat. Strep throat is a known disease that we know people don’t really die from and there’s a known antibiotic to treat strep throat. So in the case of strep throat, we are knowledgeable about pathway, the antibiotic, and we’re knowledgeable about outcome, which is we’ll get better. What we don’t know, what is unknown is duration. Because some people respond to antibiotics differently than others.

You might get better tomorrow. It might take me three days. So our anxiety, stress, uncertainty level is mild. Now say we get the flu. The flu is also a known disease that most people, at least in today’s society, don’t die from. However, there’s no known antibiotic or medicine you can take for the flu. And the recovery for the flu is variable. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for someone to recover from the flu. So in the case of the flu, we know the outcome. We will get better, but we are absent duration and pathway. So our anxiety, stress level is moderate. Now imagine a virus shows up and we’ve never seen it before. There’s no known cure or vaccine. There are some people dying, there are some people not dying, and it’s spreading around the globe and we don’t know how long we’re going to be in this thing. Obviously, this sounds familiar to most of your listeners because this is 2020 in a nutshell, right? And in that case, we were absent all three. We were absent duration, pathway, and outcome. And our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty level was high. So all moving horizons does is it gives someone the ability to, inside of any environment, basically buy down uncertainty by creating a duration and pathway and outcome.

You create what was previously unknown and you do that by, in whatever environment, you’re in asking yourself, what do I know and what can I control in this moment? And you pick something to focus on, a horizon. And once doing so, you’ve created a duration, pathway, outcome. So I’ll give you a quick example of SEAL training. So in SEAL training, you run around with big, heavy boats on your head all the time for hours and hours. And I remember doing this, it was three in the morning or something. We were on the beach and we were running next to a sand berm. And of course, I was miserable, everybody else was miserable. And I remember saying to myself, you know what? I’m just going to focus on getting to the end of this sand berm. And what I realized, well, I didn’t realize at the moment, but what I did at that moment is I picked a horizon. And by picking a horizon, I created a duration, pathway, outcome. Duration, from now until end of sand berm. Pathway, from here to end of sand berm. And then outcome, end of sand berm.

By doing so, I also neurologically created myself a small goal and then a reward at the accomplishment of that goal, which is a dopamine reward. And that allowed me then to, once I hit that accomplishment, to come back out, ask the question again, okay, what do I know, what can I control? Pick another horizon and then do it again. And you can do this cycle over and over and over again through any uncertainty, challenges, and stress until basically one of three things happens. Either you move through the challenge, you’re done. You accomplish the goal, or you gain enough certainty in your environment so that you no longer have any uncertainty in your environment. So the moving horizon strategy, by the way, is the reason why it’s such a powerful strategy, a powerful tool, is because every single human being has done this at some point in their lives, right? So I’m not telling anybody anything new. They’ve done this. They’ve chunked their environment in a way that allowed them to step through whatever they were trying to step through. All we know now is by articulating it and understanding it, you can in fact do it more often. You can practice it and become very, very good at it so that you do it without thinking, which is where masters of uncertainty lie.

Brett McKay: As you were speaking, an example that came to mind where you could use this, is unemployment. Let’s say you lose your job, you get laid off. You can use moving horizons to work through that. I think the uncertainty with job loss is typically duration. How long am I going to be unemployed? The pathway, it’s like, okay, I got to start networking, submitting resumes, things like that. The outcome is obviously I have a job. So the duration thing could be the tricky part. But yeah, you can just keep setting smaller goals for pathways until you accomplish your goal of getting a job.

Rich Diviney: It’s a wonderful example. I would say the initial loss of employment immediately creates an absence of all three. How long am I going to be unemployed? What’s my route? What’s my pathway to get a new job? And then how long, am I going to be able to get a new job? So you’re immediately absent of all three of those. You’re correct. So in those cases, in that case, someone needs to say, okay, what do I know? What can I control? And create a horizon and therefore create a DPO. So it could be, you know what? Okay, I have a buddy. My buddy can link me up with a recruiter. That’s my first horizon. I’m going to call my buddy and see if he can link me up with a recruiter. You’ve created your first horizon. You’ve created your first DPO. You do that. Then whatever that result is, you create your next one. Then you create your next one. But it is very much about working the problem in the moment and focusing only on that which you can control in the moment. One thing you will never, ever see Navy SEALs do is worry about stuff they can’t control in the moment. If they don’t have any control of it in the moment, we’re not going to worry about it. It’s useless.

It’s a waste of energy. And this goes for everything from SEAL training to legitimate gunfights in Iraq or Afghanistan. When you’re in a gunfight in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s so much going on, but you’re in the moment. You’re saying, what do I know? What can I control? What is my thing that I can actually take focus on and control in this moment? And you start moving through that. And slowly, certainty builds, hopefully, and you move through that. But I think unemployment is a wonderful example, and you can see exactly why these strategies are not only reserved for Navy SEALs or super performers. They’re very human.

Brett McKay: Yeah, another example I thought of was waiting for medical test results. So you might know you’re getting results back in three days. So what you do is you set a horizon and you just say, okay, I’m going to research the different possibilities of what I might have and what that might mean. That’s my horizon. And then when I reach that horizon, I’m going to ask myself again, all right, what do I know and what can I control? And maybe set another horizon where I then research specialists who might be able to help me and then just concentrate on that horizon. And that can give you a sense of control. It gives you something to do. And I don’t think not everyone might want to do that because some people just don’t want to worry about things before they’re concrete. And maybe they’re just going to say I’m just going to focus on keeping up my health by making sure I do one of my workouts every day for the next three days. That’s the only thing I control, and that’s the only thing I know has a benefit. Related to moving horizons and creating manageable horizons is creating meaningful horizons. What do you mean by that?

Rich Diviney: So the meaningful horizons describes what the size horizon needs to be. That’s always the next question. Okay, how do I know, like, what should I focus on? Or what’s the best size horizon? And so what we have to understand to understand the answer to that question is dopamine as a neurotransmitter, which is a very powerful chemical. It was for years and years regarded only as a reward chemical, but it’s much, much more than just a reward chemical. It’s actually a motivation chemical. It kind of gets us up and moving. It tells us, keep going. This is good. Keep doing this. Dopamine is what gets us up out of the bed in the morning. They’ve done experiments in the lab with rats where one group of rats is given, well, I guess a whole group of rats is given a device where they tap a lever and a tasty pellet comes out of that thing. And so, of course, every rat will just sit by that thing and just hit the lever, hit the lever and get a pellet. Then they took half of that group and removed the dopamine from that group. And all they needed to do was put those rats who had no dopamine basically a rat’s length away from that lever, and those rats wouldn’t even move to get that pellet.

So what this means is that, and dopamine works in our system, is that when we create a horizon, we are giving ourselves a motivation through dopamine, and we have an amount of dopamine that’s allowing us to keep going. If we create a horizon that’s too far away, that’s too big, we will run out of dopamine along the way, and we will quit. All quitting is is just you run out of dopamine. That’s what it is. So if I’m in a situation, and maybe I’m on that beach in Helwig, and I say, you know what? I’m running with this boat. I’m just going to make it to the end of the week. That’s way too big in that moment. The other side of that is if you pick a horizon that’s too close and too easy, you won’t get enough of a dopamine reward to feel it and be motivated to pick another horizon. And so that would be maybe I’m just going to count three steps. That might be too small, whatever that is. But as you can tell, these are very subjective to the person, and they’re subjective to the intensity of the environment.

The more intense the environment, the shorter the horizon is likely going to have to be. But we can and must modulate this size, these meaningful horizons, as we move through, and it has to be subjective to our own experience.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s walk through an example of doing this. Let’s say someone wants to start a business. They have a 9:00 to 5:00 job. They’ve got a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, starting their own business. What would setting meaningful horizons look like for that?

Rich Diviney: So let’s just work through at least a basic level of subjectivity here, right? So imagine the person has already started some businesses before and is looking to start a new business get out of what they’re doing, looking to start a new one. Their first horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to call my buddy who’s a VC, pitch him an idea, and see if I can get some funding going, okay? Because that’s the first thing. Or their horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to start something up. I’m going to talk to my friends, start something up, and we’re going to see if we can put together something in the next three or four months. That might be the horizon for someone who’s done it before. Someone who’s never done it before and is literally deciding to quit their job and do it, their first horizon might be, I’m going to go to the library and start learning about how to build a business, how to create a business. I’m going to call somebody to ask some questions to do that.

A really good way to describe this, so in the book I talk about a guy I met who was an ultra runner. And when I met him, I said, how’d you get into ultra running? And he said you won’t believe this, but I used to be 400 pounds or so.

Brett McKay: Wow.

Rich Diviney: And I was like, oh no, I was like, my gosh. I mean, tell me that story. He’s like, well I was so heavy and I was so overweight and unhealthy. And I decided one day, I’ve had enough, and I’m going to start running. I’m going to set a goal to run a marathon. And I said, so what’d you do? He’s like, well, the first thing I did is I decided I was going to go home and I was going to order running shoes. So that’s what he did. And then when the running shoes showed up, he said, okay, tomorrow morning when I get up, I’m going to get up and put on the running shoes. He did that. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his front door. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his mailbox and then so on and so forth until he was running a marathon six, eight months, 10 months later, I can’t remember. So the example for him was putting on his shoes and walking to the front door was a meaningful horizon.

Now, I try to run a couple times a week when I’m home and not traveling. I like doing it. If I have to take two or three months off and I haven’t run in two or three months and I decide I’m going to start running again, putting on my shoes and walking to the mailbox is not going to be enough of a horizon for me. It’s not going to be meaningful enough for me because it’s too short. And so we have to understand that this subjectivity matters and we have to begin to modulate our own horizons. You can do this in the moment too. I mean, you can actually in the moment pick something and as you’re moving towards it to decide, oh, wait, that’s way too far and pick something shorter. Or you accomplish this like, actually, that wasn’t far enough. I need to pick a longer one. So it’s not, you don’t have to get it perfect every time, but it must be subjective in whatever endeavor you’re doing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like a skill that you develop on how to measure that. Reminds me of in weight training or even in running, you have this RPE, rate of perceived effort.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And it’s auto-regulation and it takes a while for you to figure out like what’s a 10 for you, like what’s really, really hard and what’s a four. When you first start off, I think you typically underestimate because you’re not fully aware of what your body can do. But then, yeah, once you get the hang of it, you’re able to be like, you know what? My goal is to go for an eight and today this effort feels like an eight. But on another day, an eight could be less or more just depending on what’s going on…

Rich Diviney: 100%. I’m so glad. I went for a run this morning and I was traveling all day yesterday, so I didn’t eat a lot all day yesterday. And so when I went for the run this morning, I started and I just felt completely depleted. And I was like, oh my God, I was slower than I usually am. And so perfect example that you just gave, because my eight today was markedly slower than my eights when I’m properly nourished. So yeah, you’re 100% right.

Brett McKay: Okay, so creating meaningful horizons is about making sure the horizon you set is challenging enough or just like has enough to it to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you give up and quit. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re thinking of moving somewhere different from where you’re at right now, and you’re not sure about the move. Like you don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not.

I think it takes about two years to really feel settled into a place and be able to feel like you click with it. But telling yourself you’re definitely at the state for two years, that can feel pretty psychologically daunting. And I think you can tell if you’ve got potential with the place in a year. So you set a horizon for one year. You say, I’m gonna do all I can to dig into this place for one year. And at the end of the year, I’ll evaluate if it’s working and whether I wanna stay. So that could be a motivating, meaningful horizon. Another idea you have on sort of modulating and taking control of your dopamine system to stay motivated is this piece of advice that I thought was interesting. It was counterintuitive. It was keep your eyes off the prize. How does that actually help with long-term motivation?

Rich Diviney: Well, this feeds into the meaningful horizon concept. So in other words, we have to have an objective, right? We have to have something we’re moving towards, whether it’s run a marathon, whether it’s make it through SEAL training, whether it’s start a business, okay? That’s the objective that has to be present. However, we know, just because we just talked about it, is that that’s too big, that’s too far away. That’s too much of, that’s the whole elephant. And you need to break the elephant into one bite at a time. So when you are in this process of moving horizons, as you move through these challenges, especially during uncertainty, to keep focusing on the big goal, the big picture is too much, it’s too far away, it’s too much to handle. So keep your eyes off the prize is simply a reminder that, hey, it’s there, it’s driving you, it’s important, but take it down to the chunk and focus on that chunk. Don’t worry about the big goal right now, focus on the chunk. This is what keeping your eyes off the prize means. And it’s important because if you focus on that big thing too much, then you’ll lose focus on your horizon shifting and you will eventually, it’ll be too long and you might give up along the way or quit.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we’ve talked about some psychological tactics you can do to reframe things in your head whenever you face uncertainty, how to manage it, how to navigate it. You have another section in the book where you talk about actual tactics, like physiological tactics you can do to calm down the arousal system that kicks in whenever we’re afraid, whenever we’re dealing with uncertainty. And this is important because you need to be calm in order to be in the right mental space to choose an appropriate next horizon. And that can be challenging when uncertainty is just thrown right in front of you, right in the moment, like something’s wrong in the moment and you don’t know what’s going on, how’s it gonna affect you, what do you need to do, and you’re just stressed out. So what are some tools people can use to reduce the arousal they feel whenever they’re stressed out in uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, there’s many, although the most powerful, fastest ones that have kind of been discovered have to do with our visual system and our respiratory system. And that’s because our visual system and respiratory system are directly connected to our central nervous system, which is what we talk about, sympathetic, parasympathetic systems when we’re in stress, challenge, uncertainty. And so what’s happening, like you just described, when we have uncertainty, challenge, stress, fear, all that stuff, our anxiety goes up, our autonomic arousal, our sympathetic system starts to climb. So let’s talk about the positives and negatives of this, right? As our autonomic arousal climbs, we’re in sympathetic response, our frontal lobe, the decision-making part of our brain begins to recede, and our limbic brain, our emotional kind of unconscious brain, our lizard brain begins to come to the fore. Now in the extreme cases we encounter what’s called autonomic overload or amygdala hijack which is when the frontal lobe the decision-making part of our brain has receded completely and our lizard brain has taken over and we are acting without thinking okay now this comes in very handy for things like jumping out of the way of a moving train or running from a bear.

Okay but it doesn’t come in handy for 99% of the other things that happen to us in life when we can actually really use some conscious and intelligent decision-making going on and so what we have to understand is physiologically we can bring that frontal lobe back online by decreasing our autonomic arousal. We can do this visually or through breath now like a visual tool that I talk about in the book is open gaze you know when we’re stressed and focused what happens is our gaze begins to focus in very tightly on whatever the threat is that’s why we sometimes get tunnel vision during these phases so what they found is if you go into open gaze and open gaze is simply the technique of just if you’re staring out or even if you’re staring at something you just soften your gaze you’re no longer staring at it anymore you’re just kind of noticing all of your peripheries you’re just taking it all in this is very easy to do with horizons and things like that but they’ve proven that this type of open gaze begins to shift your physiology from sympathetic to parasympathetic and brings down your autonomic arousal.

There are respiratory tools as well I’m not going to go into all of them but when we talk about breath when we get stressed and anxious what happens is our breathing changes it becomes quicker shorter, we’re not taking in as much oxygen we’re taking in a lot of carbon dioxide and so another technique that I lay out is this technique called the physiological sigh where basically you take a full deep breath in, you top it off and then you slowly breathe out and what’s happening there is you’re blowing out the carbon dioxide from your system which is de-stressing you which is taking your autonomic arousal down. And so this is taking your autonomic arousal down it’s shifting our physiology and most importantly allowing our brains our frontal lobes to get back online in such a manner that we can start to ask questions about our environment. And of course the first question we want to ask is what do I know? What can I control? What’s a horizon I can focus on? And so there are physiological ways what’s happening there is when we think about uncertainty plus anxiety equals fear the way we buy down anxiety is through those techniques those physiological techniques.

You can buy that down the way we buy down uncertainty is through the process of moving horizons but as you buy down both of them the fear starts to dissipate.

Brett McKay: Gotcha okay so an example of this let’s say you run a business and you have a website that takes orders the website crashes that can I mean that’s happened to me with some of the stuff that I’ve run. It can just stress you the crap out. Especially when you’re having a lot of high traffic and like this is really important that the site be running and I’ve, whenever that happened I just like freak out, oh my gosh. I would have been better first to just do some of those practices maybe open up my gaze do the sighing.

Rich Diviney: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And then that calms things down and then I start doing the moving horizon thing.

Rich Diviney: Yeah although I will say I mean the cool thing about this is even choosing in the moment to do like say five physiological sighs that’s a horizon right there. You’ve just picked a horizon you’ve picked something to focus on you do that and you come back out and you say what can you do again. So you can use even these tools even these breathing tools as many horizons. Sometimes the environment’s so intense that your only horizon is I’m gonna take ten breaths that’s what I’m gonna do. And after that I’m gonna see what’s going on. So yeah it’s a great example and all this meshes in a very very meaningful way.

Brett McKay: Okay in the next section of your book so the first section is all about calming yourself down when that fear starts hijacking your limbic system and then figuring out ways to reduce the uncertainty in that specific situation. The second part of your book you talk about identity. And you return to your framework of attributes which you talked about in your first book in this part. How can knowing what your attributes are help you navigate uncertainty in life? Maybe we start like what are attributes for those who haven’t read that first book.

Rich Diviney: Well yeah so this part of the book just described so I say the first part of the book describes those things that are not unique to us as human beings. In other words all of us have this. All of us have the capacity to move horizons and this is how our brain works ubiquitously throughout the human species. The second part of the book focuses on those unique things that we bring into an uncertain situation. This is when we get into those things about us that are different from everybody else. So the first one is attributes and this idea these qualities that we have patience situational awareness, compartmentalization, perseverance, okay. And where we fall on those qualities like we talked about in the last conversation attributes we all have all of the attributes. We have all of these qualities the difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So adaptability for example if I’m about a level six on adaptability which means when the environment changes around the outside of my control it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. Someone else might be a level three which means the same thing happens to them it’s difficult for them to go with flow and there’s friction there.

They’re still adaptable because all human beings are but if we were to line up these attributes on a wall like dimmer switches all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. And it starts to speak to our own unique performance not only in everyday life but especially during stress challenge and uncertainty. Because in stress challenge uncertainty we are literally running on our attributes. Because all that other stuff you know personality on that stuff goes out the window when the you-know-what hits the fan. So understanding our unique attribute fingerprint or footprint is very valuable in understanding how we’re going to show up in uncertainty. And that’s why it’s so important in this process.

Brett McKay: Gotcha and where can people go to learn like what their attributes are, is there like a website that you have?

Rich Diviney: Yeah. Our website theattributes.com we have it all there. And we have an assessment tool there that you can take and you can figure out where you stand on all 41 attributes and it gives you a readout and gives you some information on how and why you behave the way you do. And so yeah, check it out at theattributes.com.

Brett McKay: Well let’s say you take the thing and you realize, oh man, I suck at adaptability, how should you prepare yourself for times of uncertainty?

Rich Diviney: So first of all, knowledge in this case is power, right? Because if I know I’m low on adaptability, then automatically when the environment starts to change, uncertainty starts to come into the fray. And because the environment’s changing, I immediately can say to myself, oh, wait, this feels bad because I know I’m low on adaptability. And just that conscious thought, by the way, is bringing your frontal lobe back online, or at least keeping your frontal lobe engaged in the process because you’re having a conscious thought. But I would say in those environments, if you know you’re lower on adaptability, you can say, okay, well, when the environment shifts, so say you’re traveling, okay, and you have a couple connections and you’re at the airport and you’re told the flight’s delayed and it’s going to affect your connections down the line. It’s also going to affect the engagement that you were supposed to be at. So you’re not going to get there in time anymore, so on and so forth. Now you are in an environment of uncertainty and it’s because the environment’s changing rapidly. And so the same process applies. You just begin to pick horizons that are meaningful for you.

In the case of low adaptability, just know that it’s going to feel uncomfortable and more stressful and more uncertain because you’re low on it. When I’m traveling, because I do so all the time and the plans start to shift around me, the environment starts to shift around me, I’m pretty high on adaptability. So the difference between me and someone who’s low on it is not that we don’t DPO the situation or shift horizons through that situation. The difference is I just feel less stressed about it. I feel less uncertain about it. So just understand that the attributes we’re a little bit lower on, we’re going to feel more uncertainty, challenge, and stress when those things are exercised due to the environment versus other ones. But the opposite is true. If you’re high on stuff, the attributes you’re high on, when the environment goes uncertainty and the environment requires whatever that attribute is and you happen to be high on it, you’re going to feel less uncertainty and challenge and stress. But that’s one way to look at it is that these uncertain environments that are asking for the attributes we’re lower on, those are likely the ones that are going to cause us more work.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I imagine too, if you’re high in adaptability, if you don’t have enough uncertainty, then you get bored. And that can be a problem too.

Rich Diviney: Yeah. Any of these attributes to their extremes, too high, too low can be bad. Right. But we also understand that any of these attributes, whether you’re high or low is not a bad thing or a good thing. These are completely nonjudgmental. In fact, there are advantages to being high adaptability. There are disadvantages to being high adaptability. And there’s advantages of being low adaptability and disadvantages. So in the normal spectrum of these things, there’s always pros and cons. But at the extremes in any of these attributes, it certainly gets to be a bad thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think knowing your attributes can help you design better horizons. So if I’m low on, say, perseverance, that’s one of your attributes. If I’m low on that, I can’t just set long, vague goals. I’ve got to make my horizons shorter, more defined, more frequent, so I don’t run out of gas halfway through. The same thing goes with compartmentalization. That’s another one of those attributes you talk about. So if you struggle with that, you probably struggle to block out noise, stay focused when things get chaotic. So if that’s your problem, then your DPO might need to be even more simple. And so basically, your weaker attributes don’t mean you’re doomed under uncertainty, but they do mean you need to tailor your horizon strategy to how you’re wired. And that just makes the whole system work better. And you also talk about the role that identity plays in motivation and staying the course during times of stress and uncertainty. Talk to us about that.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, identity has always been fascinating to me because it’s always been something on my mind. And it’s because I’ve witnessed and certainly researched and seen examples of people acting in ways that are confusing to them when they look back at it. So take the sports fan who beats the crap out of another sports fan and then is suddenly in front of the judge and like, I don’t know what I was doing. I was out of my mind. They’re confused as to why they even acted that way. And one of the reasons is because our performance, our behavior sits and relies upon the identities that we collect along the way. So we are, as human beings, a collection, a collage of different I ams. They can be everything from benign to very, very important, very powerful. I went to this high school. I am this type of sports player. I am a Navy SEAL. I am a husband, father. I’m a Metallica fan, whatever that is. Okay, we have a collection of these things. And each one of these I ams, each one of these identities comes with it, some conditions, some rules, some behaviors that describe how you act in that identity.

And we align to those. That’s why we chose those identities in the first place. What we have to understand is in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we are always going to behave towards the identity that we align to, that we prioritize in that moment. And this can be an advantage. It also can be a disadvantage. So the example would be as a Navy SEAL, that’s a very powerful identity. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, that was the priority identity that I was aligning towards, as were my teammates. However, sometimes the target would change, and we’d suddenly have to put on our husband, father hats because maybe we have to deal with some civilians or kids. This is an example where a fluidity in your identities can actually be very beneficial. Now take this sports fan. I mean, say you’re a fan of whatever ex-sports team, and you find yourself in an argument with a fan of another ex-sports team. And if you continue down that track, depending on the sports teams, you and I could probably comment on some that are worse than others, but if you continue that track, you may find yourself in a physical altercation because that identity is driving you. Or you could calm yourself and ask yourself, okay, I’m also a husband and father.

I’m a professional business person, and so getting into a fight in the street right now is probably not good for that identity, and you can shift. So all this to say is understanding that identities really are very powerful in the way they drive behavior, especially during uncertainty, challenge, and stress, to start to get a handle on those identities we carry, and we all carry a lot of them, we really do. Again, some are really important and powerful, some are fairly benign, but there are a lot of them. Get a handle on what they are and begin to use them in a more effective, proactive way, because you can begin to shift into identities that actually more appropriately fit whatever situation. You’ll often find, if you do the diligence, you might find some identities that don’t matter to you anymore. They’re like, oh, actually, I’m not that anymore. I can discard that one. And then we also find ourselves in situations where we’re building new identities. Entrepreneurs do this. I did this coming out of the Navy. The Navy SEAL identity, very powerful, but once I’m not a SEAL, I’m not a SEAL, and so I put that on the shelf, obviously in a position of honor and respect.

However, now I’m going to build a new identity, and that is author, entrepreneur. And that’s another way to actually actualize this stuff, is to have an understanding and move and flow in a positive way towards whatever you’re looking at.

Brett McKay: All right, so we’ve been talking about how to deal with uncertainty as an individual. So the DPO, moving horizons, using those tactics to calm yourself down, knowing how you typically navigate uncertainty by knowing your attributes, having that identity to help you stay grounded and motivated when things get hard. Let’s talk about teams, how to navigate uncertainty as a team. And you introduced this key principle that you got from the SEALs called dynamic subordination. What is that?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, dynamic subordination is simply, if you were to think about how this looks on a chart, it’s not the pyramid task work structure, which we all know, the leader sits on top and barks orders. It’s not the flat line where everybody’s in this together, we don’t know actually who’s in charge. And it’s not even the upside-down pyramid where the leader’s at the bottom in service to everybody, because the burden is not supposed to sit only on one person. And so what it really is is a blob, it’s an amoeba. And the position of leadership in that amoeba can be anywhere at any time. It’s wherever it needs to be in the moment. And so dynamic subordination is an idea that the team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who’s closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead, and everybody follows and supports. And then the environment shifts, and someone else steps up and takes lead. And so this is how all the highest-performing teams operate. Listen, I was an officer in the SEAL teams.

 I went on hundreds of combat missions, and I was in charge of every single one. It did not mean I was always being supported. In fact, most of the time was the opposite. I was supporting other people, whether it was my snipers or breachers or whatever, or assaulters. Sometimes the environment shifted, and they were in support of me. But it was all based on the environment and what was needed in the moment. So it’s a very important concept that tells us that our role on a team has nothing to do with our hierarchy or rank. It has everything to do with what we are there to contribute to the team. And this is how the highest-performing teams operate. And this is the key to operating in uncertainty challenges and stress, because uncertainty by its very nature is we don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know what angle things are coming at. So we need to adjust and focus on whatever we can in the moment, and that might be at any angle.

Brett McKay: And just to be clear, I want to, kind of touch on this, there’s still a leader whenever you have dynamic subordination, correct? Like someone who’s responsible.

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I understand the question, but what we have to do is I can’t answer it if I use the colloquial definition that we all think of as leader. A leader is a behavior. Being in charge is a position. There’s two very different and distinct things. And we don’t get to self-designate, by the way. We don’t get to call ourselves leaders. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny, all right? People decide whether or not you are someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. And I remember being in situations in the military at least a couple times where I’d look at a person in a hierarchical position above me, and I would say, I would not follow that person anywhere. Meanwhile, there’d be someone over to my right or left who had no hierarchical position whatsoever. I’d be like, I would follow that person to hell and back. It’s because of the way we behave. And so leadership is defined as someone who others choose to follow based on behavior, which means everybody on a team can be a leader in the moment. Now, if you’re talking about the person who’s in a position of being in charge, who is responsible for the team holistically, now you’re talking about someone whose leadership role should be to create a dynamically subordinating environment.

That’s the whole role of the leader in terms of the person who’s in charge. You need to create that environment because if you don’t, you’re not going to create a team that can in fact deal with uncertainty, challenge, and stress. So yeah, every team is going to have a hierarchical nature to it. That’s the nature of a team. But the role of the person in the highest position of hierarchy is to create a dynamically subordinating team. It’s not to have the big office, big desk, get the big paycheck, and be deferred to on everything. It’s to create a dynamic subordinating team that actually moves fast, moves efficiently. And I always kind of told my junior officers when I was talking to them, you have to get used to what I call the irony of leadership. And that is if you do your job correctly, you eventually work yourself out of a job. You create a team that can run without you and in many cases run faster than you, outrun you. That should be the goal of every true leader because every true leader should aspire to that. You want to make your team so good, so much better that eventually, oh man, they’re so good, I got to withdraw.

They’re moving way too fast than I could ever move. And it’s because of the things I’ve allowed and helped them do.

Brett McKay: So let’s say you’re in a position of authority. How do you develop that environment where dynamic subordination exists? I’m sure there’s a lot to it, but one or two things that people can do.

Rich Diviney: Well, I mean, first of all, you empower an environment of trust. Trust is the foundational element. And trust is all about behaviors as well. You can’t make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to choose to trust you. So as a leader of a team or a hierarchical position, the highest hierarchical position in a team, you must be behaving in ways that promote that environment of trust, making people cared for. You listen to them. You practice empathy. You’re consistent. You’re competent. You tell the truth. You’re accountable. These are all behaviors that will allow for others to look at you and say, ooh, this is someone I trust. By the way, the behaviors that define great leaders are almost synonymous with the behaviors that define trust. So they’re very, very similar. So we have to build that environment by doing, by modeling the behavior we want to see more of and then rewarding the behavior we want to see more of in terms of trust. Now, part of that trust, part of that trust building is that as the person in charge, you need to give opportunities for the people on the team to extend themselves, go outside their comfort zone.

To actually step up and be in charge, to take those positions, even if they might fail because we learn a lot from failure. But when they fail, that’s really important because if you have their back when they fail, they will learn rapidly, they feel that trust and that safety, and they’ll be ready to do it again and do it the right time this time. So we have to, as people in charge, really take responsibility and accountability for creating that environment, both through the way we act, through the way we reward, and through the way we allow our teammates and those in our span of care to really extend themselves and, of course, have their back when they do it.

Brett McKay: Besides developing that trust, another thing you talk about that’s important to have this dynamic subordination take root in a group is really being intentional about the culture in a team. How can a person who’s in a position of authority, not a leader, a person in a position of authority, help develop that kind of culture?

Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, a culture is kind of, I mean, very close to the identity of a team. Whatever that culture is, is close to the identity of the team. And those things can be intertwined. In other words, what are the behaviors that this team expresses because we’re part of that team? That’s what the culture really is. And so why we have to be very cognizant of this is because culture in any group of people is going to emerge regardless of whether or not the leader has anything to say about it or not. Whether you’re deliberate about it or whether you’re not deliberate about it, some sort of culture, some sort of identity will emerge. And if we are not deliberate about it, then we might not like what we see that emerges. And so the challenge is to be deliberate about the culture, be deliberate about whatever identity you’re creating for that team. Include the team in that process, of course, because it’s not just you as the person in charge. But what are those things that define us as a team from an identity standpoint and a culture standpoint? The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts do this well.

The Marines do this well. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have a creed, and their creed is really just a list of rules that define their behavior. That’s what it is. That’s the culture. And you talk to any Girl Scout around the world, they are all aligned on that very same rule list of things, that culture. So we can do the same thing in organizations. We just have to be deliberate about it. But rest assured, if you’re not deliberate about it, it’s going to emerge whether you like it or not, and you may not like it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about once you establish that culture, you have to start being picky about who you let in to the group to make sure that they match up with the culture.

Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, and this is a lot of the work we do with organizations and teams around attributes. Every culture, every identity is going to have a set of attributes that are prioritized. And I say set, it’s probably one or two or three top things that are prioritized. And so what we have to do as people who are bringing new folks onto a team is make sure that the people we’re bringing on are aligned with that from an attribute sense and from a value sense, from an identity sense, all those things, so that they come in and they’re like, okay, this person actually fits, they’re a culture fit. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what the culture is. So you got to start there.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think in times of uncertainty, it really does help to know what you’re about. Well, Rich, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, the best place is theattributes.com, like I said. So it’s theattributes.com. So there’s a the in front of the attributes. And there you can find both books. You can find the assessment tool, you can find everything we do for businesses and organizations and teams, kind of a one-stop shop. And of course, the books are also, you can find them on Amazon as well. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn under Rich Diviney, but theattributes.com is the best place.

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

Rich Diviney: Thank you, brother. Great to be back.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Rich Diviney. He’s the author of the book, Masters of Uncertainty. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, theattributes.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes.

Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free, all-volunteer men’s leadership organization that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide.

In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the “wish dream” of idealized community, and why expecting perfection kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader and how to measure success when building a community of men.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• F3
• AoM Podcast #324: How Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith Are the Cure for Sad Clown Syndrome
• Q Source: The F3 Manual of Virtuous Leadership by David “Dredd” Redding 
• AoM article on phronesis/practical wisdom
• Dying Breed article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s vision of community

Connect With Frank Schwartz

• Frank on LinkedIn
• Frank on X

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. Community is one of life’s most valuable but increasingly scarce resources. While we hear about a supposed epidemic of male loneliness, many men still resist joining groups or struggle to maintain involvement after initial enthusiasm wanes. Today on the show, Frank Schwartz will help us understand the barriers to building male community, and how to overcome them. Frank is the CEO of F3, a free all volunteer men’s leadership organization, that uses workouts to bring men together and supports hundreds of decentralized chapters worldwide. In the first half of our conversation, Frank explains the psychology behind men’s hesitation to join groups, how to navigate the wish stream of idealized community, and why expecting perfection, kills participation. We then discuss what makes leadership in a decentralized group different from traditional hierarchies, the importance of embracing messiness, and why allowing men to make their own decisions creates stronger leaders than giving them a rulebook to follow. We end our conversation with Frank’s perspective on cultivating patience as a leader, and how to measure success when building a community of men. After the show’s over, check out our shownotes at aom.is/mensgroups.

Frank Schwartz, welcome to the show.

Frank Schwartz: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay: So you are, is it the CEO or president of F3?

Frank Schwartz: This is a very good question. And up until a couple of years ago, I could have said president, but now CEO. We kind of eliminated the president position. And the thing about F3 is, and guys who are familiar know, but those who aren’t, everything’s kind of very made up. So we have sort of different names for what we do that are a little bit kind of inside baseball. And so, yes, CEO on paper, but the official title within F3 is Nantan.

Brett McKay: Okay.

Frank Schwartz: Which is an Apache word kind of meaning cultural and spiritual leader.

Brett McKay: All right. So you’re the CEO of F3. We’ve had the guys who started F3 on the podcast. This was back in 2017, episode number 324. And we’ll link to that in show notes. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is F3?

Frank Schwartz: So F3, it’s a free men’s leadership group that uses workouts to trick you into coming out so we can teach you about leadership. That’s really what it is. But essentially it is to men’s workout group. Our stated mission is to plant, to grow and to serve small workout groups for men, in order to invigorate male community leadership. The founders, as you mentioned, Dave Redding, Tim Whitmire, Dredd and OBT, affectionately known within F3, kind of looked around and said, “Hey, we see a lot of guys at church and other civic organizations and at work, and whatever. A lot of guys just standing around with their hands in their pockets, and nobody doing anything about the world around them. And influencing their community, and there’s just not a lot of leading happening.” And Dave with his special forces background said, “Hey, the place I learned the most about leadership, and the way I think we could spread leadership throughout our communities and in our world, is via training, physical training.” It’s a great place, pretty low risk to do that. And that wasn’t the intention when it started, which again, you’d probably go back and listen and hear it, but when the intention when it started, but it is kind of where it ended up.

So the short answer to that very long answer I gave is, it’s a place where men can come into community with one another and get physically fit and learn leadership.

Brett McKay: And again, it’s all free, man. You can go to their website and you can find, there’s like chapters all over the world at this point. How many chapters are there at this point?

Frank Schwartz: Ooh, I should have had that much more readily available on the tip of my tongue. I think it’s about 450, maybe just shy of 450.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, typically the workouts are early in the morning before work, and it’s a bootcamp style workout, calisthenics, things like that?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, typically body weight, although some places, there’s kettlebells or sandbags and some of that kind of stuff that guys use. But yeah, typically, if you sort of shot at the middle of the curve on an F3 workout, it’s gonna happen about 5:15, 5:30, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little later, and it’s gonna be a lot of body weight and calisthenic type, some running, pushups, sit-ups, pull-ups, and then really get a lot of whatever we can find.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So you do the workout, and then there’s also a fellowship aspect to it, a leadership aspect to this. Tell us more about that leadership component, because again, the workout is the hook. That’s like the Trojan horse for that other stuff.

Frank Schwartz: Right, yeah. It’s just the way we sneakily trick you into coming, ’cause you go, hey, free workout, and a guy goes, aha, I could try that. What’s the problem? So the three Fs are fitness, fellowship, and faith. And really, we don’t have a program per se, but again, if you were to kind of shoot at the middle and go, “Well, what’s typical?” Guys get together early in the morning, and work out together. It’s a pretty strenuous, pretty vigorous workout, generally speaking. And then we get together for what we call a cafeteria afterward. You hang out, you make friends, and you get deeper in fellowship with one another, because, and you know this probably as well or better than most anyone, community is really where we’re gonna save the country, where we’re gonna do our best work, is in community with one another. So we put men in community with one another. And then what happens inevitably, once you do that, is guys start looking at their lives and go, “Well, now that I’ve got these things more or less squared away, I’ve lost some weight, I’ve got some friends. Well, now what? What am I supposed to do now?”

And they start looking outside themselves. Now that they are more settled, they start looking outside themselves and saying, “Well, what can I do for others?” And that’s the big question of faith. What is it that exists outside yourself, and how can you live in such a way that you can kind of wear yourself out in the service of that thing?” So we don’t make any kind of determination about, well, a guy ought to believe in Jesus Christ or a guy ought to believe in Buddha or a guy ought to believe in whatever. We just say, you’ve got to believe in something bigger than yourself in order to be a virtuous leader. And that’s what we do. And so, a lot of times in those meetings after workouts, guys will study. They might study certain kinds of books or whatever. We have a book that Dave wrote, Dredd wrote, called “The QSource” And it sort of outlines our overall leadership philosophy and framework. And so, guys will study that together, and we’ll discuss that together. We’ve got podcasts about it and all kinds of stuff. So I wouldn’t say there’s like a super formal program, but we do have what we call stuff worth trying.

And so, you kind of get in there, and you’re like, “Oh, hey, I don’t know if this will work for you or not, but here’s the framework, and maybe try it, until you find something better.” But that’s the idea, is to create leaders amongst men, and to take those things that we learn in what we call the gloom, which is that those pre-dawn hours when your family’s sleeping and work hasn’t started calling yet, those things that we learn there and take them home, take them to the community so we can be better people.

Brett McKay: And the leadership structure of F3 is unique. It’s decentralized. Tell us more about that, how that works.

Frank Schwartz: Absolutely. And this is conceptually, I think Dave and Tim early on were like, we can’t lead everywhere. We can’t be everywhere. And if really what we’re called to do is to create leaders, then we’re gonna have to hand off the power here as time goes on. And so, the idea is that, if you start making rules, then you have to make more rules to enforce those rules, and it kind of becomes this big spiraling thing. And then pretty soon, you’ve got 5,000-page bills getting introduced into Congress, right? So we live by a mission, a credo, and five core principles. And the idea is, that every man has been born and put on this earth to be a leader. That is his job. That is what he has been created to do. And so, what we try and do is help guys to recapture that. We want men to lean into that part of themselves, and to figure out how to not just lead a workout well or to even manage something well, but to truly influence others for good, in every place that they’re in.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so, it’s all volunteer?

Frank Schwartz: I feel like I didn’t answer the question very well.

Brett McKay: No.

Frank Schwartz: Right. So to decentralize it, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: So since every man is a leader, we say, okay, then I can’t be in charge of where you are. Because Brett, you’re in where? Tulsa, right?

Brett McKay: Correct.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. So I don’t know what’s happening in Tulsa. I can’t tell you what to do in Tulsa. I don’t have any idea of what the right thing to do will be where you are. So I have to teach you how to lead, and give you the power and the empowerment, I guess really, to say, hey, you make those decisions. I think that honestly, not to put too fine a point on it, but that’s been one of the best things I learned for myself from F3 is that, I don’t need permission to be a man. I don’t need permission to be a leader. I think that’s something that I think men and maybe people in general, kind of crave in our world anymore. We want someone else to tell us what to do. I don’t know whether it’s because we just don’t wanna make the decision, or because we want it to be their fault if it doesn’t go well or something. [laughter] I don’t know. But we don’t seem to wanna take the personal responsibility. And F3 teaches us that there isn’t anybody else responsible but you.

Brett McKay: And you’re the CEO, but again, this is volunteer. You’re not paid to be the CEO?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no.

Brett McKay: This is all voluntary?

Frank Schwartz: No salary here.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, tell us about your experience with F3. When did you join and why did you join?

Frank Schwartz: So I joined in late 2014. And the reason I joined is because I was overweight, and I had sleep apnea, I had high blood pressure. I had high cholesterol. And my doctor was like, “Hey, guess what? You’re a stroke waiting to happen.” So I’ve got to get you healthy somehow. We want you to live for your young kids. And I’ll send you the picture. You’ll love it. But essentially, I was like, I got to get in shape somehow. So I started going to the gym, but I kept hearing about this F3 thing. Kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it, kept hearing about it. And finally, I was like, fine, I’ll just go. And so, I showed up one Saturday, and I was hooked. I was absolutely hooked. There was just something very magical about the fact that it’s always outdoors no matter what. It was freezing cold. Like horrifyingly cold, ’cause it was November when I went out for my first one on a Saturday. And there was just something invigorating about like, we’re outside in the elements. And then at the end of every F3 workout, we have something called a COT, or a Circle of Trust.

And it’s a place for men to kind of lay down their burdens next to their brothers, where we can pick it up together. The old saying, a burden shared is half a burden, a joy shared is twice the joy, something along those lines. And so, it’s a place where you can kind of lay down your burden and say, hey, help. And I’ve heard everything in those things. But there was something about that end piece, laying my hand on another guy, ’cause you get in kind of a big circle and you kind of huddle up and then feeling that energy from other men, who were in the same spot I was trying to figure this out together. It was just magical. It was magical. So I kind of jumped all in, both feet and ended up finding myself in just weird coincidental places. [chuckle] If you’re a believer in coincidence, then it was coincidental. For me, it was providential. And I just would find myself bumping into the right kind of people, and just volunteering and jumping in to say, yeah, no, I can help with that or whatever it might be around sort of the F3 universe.

And then pretty soon, became really good friends with Dredd, Dave Redding, and we kind of figured out how we’re gonna do this together. So, there was a guy he handed it off to, and then that guy, stepped down and handed it off to me. And that’s the way it’ll always go forever. And I think, kind of to touch on both things, how I got involved and why I got involved is, A, how it was almost by accident, and how I became the leader of this whole deal, I think also was almost, again, coincidence or however you wanna look at it, but almost by accident. Where I just sort of right place, right time. And I think God put me where he wanted me to be. But I think that the nice thing or maybe the nice thing, but the beautiful thing about this is that, I will serve for a period of time, and then I will have accomplished what I need to, and I’ll hand it off to somebody else.

And so, to kind of harken back to the how do you decentralize this thing is, first thing you have is a mission. Second thing you have is no ego. I can’t lead, the mission must lead. The mission must take us to the next level. The mission must take us where we wanna go. I’ll help make decisions along the way, to support that mission or to move us forward toward that mission. But ultimately, that’s how we decentralize it. Is we only commit ourselves to these very few things. We don’t try and run an organization. We try and keep a mission in men’s hearts, and they’ll run the organization. They’ll figure it out where they are. You guys will figure it out there in Tulsa.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, like how, your life has obviously changed because of your involvement with F3, but how have you seen other men’s lives change during your involvement with F3?

Frank Schwartz: Sure. There’s easy ways, obvious ways, guys lose weight, they get a little more fit, they start looking better in the mirror, their health gets better, their mindset gets better. That’s the easy stuff. We have seen things in F3 where, look, and one of our core principles is that it’s open to all men, no matter what. So number one is it’s always free, as you mentioned. Number two is that it’s open to all men. And when we say all men, we absolutely mean it, Brett. And so, we have convicted felons working out next to billionaires in the same workout. You’d never know. You’d never know. And so, the way that this changes men or the things that it does, is it turns a light on in their hearts again, because it doesn’t matter what your lifestyle has been or will be. It doesn’t matter where you’ve been, where you came from. What matters is that you’re a man. When you are a man, you have this need inside you. You have this desire inside you. And the world has a tendency to try and figure out a way to quiet that spark down.

To get that drive tamped down so that we can control you, and we can make sure that you become non-dangerous to the things that we’re trying to do. So F3 kind of wakes you up. And so, we hear stories of guys who beat alcoholism. We’ve saved marriages, and guys attribute it to F3. And people who have been steeped in addiction, who have come out of it because they say, “Hey, being around you guys has made me realize I got to do better in my life.” And turn their lives around. So it’s almost innumerable. The number of stories that we could tell, that are out there in guys that in a very acute way, “I changed my life today.” That’s almost innumerable. Probably in some ways, for every single guy, however many there are, we estimate something like 75,000, 80,000 guys. So there’s 80,000 different stories that we could tell of how it impacted a man’s life and made his life better.

Brett McKay: That’s awesome. So I wanted to bring you on the podcast today to talk about leading groups, like leading men’s groups or even just forming a group of guys who, you’re trying to get some friends going. So I know a lot of our listeners, that’s something that they’ve been trying to do. They struggle with, and they run into these issues and they just feel like it’s impossible. So I wanna tap into your expertise with your experience, establishing the culture in F3 of where guys get together. And you also have other leadership experience as well. And maybe you can find some insights from F3, that we can apply to other domains of our lives ’cause I think you can. So the first question is, you hear a lot about the male loneliness crisis. Men today, they seem incredibly lonely. They’re looking for friends. But at the same time, men, they seem resistant to joining a community group or even getting things going with another guy just to hang out. What do you think is going on there? What’s the tension going on there? What do you think’s behind that?

Frank Schwartz: I tell you, here’s what I think, and I could be wrong, but I think that the hesitancy on the part of men to do this kind of thing is, well, a number of things. One is fear. Terrifying. He’s afraid to fail. He’s afraid to fail, and he’s afraid to have people criticize him. He’s afraid to say, “I’m making a stand, because that’s not an easy thing to do.” And I think guys are afraid of that. And I don’t blame them. It ain’t fun, to have other people be like, you suck. So I think there’s some of that. I think there’s some fear and some trepidation around doing that kind of thing. But I think also, it’s kind of like we were alluding to before, the thing that I think keeps guys from doing this, is they really believe that there’s some right way to do it that they’ve been just kept out of the loop. They just don’t get to know what that right way is. And other people seem to be doing it just fine, but gosh, why won’t anyone write the book so I can just follow the program?

Well, the problem is there’s no program. And if you believe there’s a program, that just means you’re following somebody else’s dream. You’re following somebody else’s way of doing it. And so, I think that to some degree, it’s like, why won’t a guy do this? Well, ’cause he thinks there’s a right way to do it, and he’s afraid to fail. I think that’s a lot of it. And I think guys get lonely because they have been convinced that somehow that that’s what they are, and that that’s the epidemic. And so, we just believe it. We’re like, well, I guess we’re lonely. If they say so, I guess we’re lonely. They’re the ones doing the research. Or maybe sometimes I think too, they’re like, I’m afraid of putting myself out there. I don’t really wanna get hurt. I don’t really wanna whatever. I don’t wanna lead. I don’t wanna have to take on all that responsibility and all that kind of stuff. But I also think, that one of the things that keeps a guy from feeling that connection or wanting that or whatever it might be, or to start a group like this is, he just thinks that, again, since he thinks there’s some way to do it right, that he shouldn’t start until he knows that exact way. When the fact of the matter is, and again, this probably as well or better than anyone, is you won’t know until you get out there and start.

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: You just got to start. You just got to do something. And I think the momentum will help carry you, but this alleged epidemic of loneliness, and I do think it exists. I think that people do feel lonely. I think it gets solved by doing things, by being out there and being with people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think you hear people talk about a lot like, oh, well, we no longer have any third places anymore to go to, et cetera. And it’s like, well, you can make a third place, like find a park and do a workout. Nothing’s stopping you from doing that.

Frank Schwartz: Nothing, it’s funny. And not that you and I frequent Starbucks as a whole lot necessarily, but I love that the new CEO brought mugs back.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if he has the intention of turning it back into more of a gathering place or a third place or whatever you wanna call it. I don’t know. But nothing says, get out of here, like a paper cup with a sleeve, that they shove at the end of a counter and they just yell your name. They don’t want you to stay. They want you to get out. They got to turn tables, man, ’cause they got money to make. ‘Cause they got investors and shareholders to answer to. And so, you don’t have to wait for Starbucks to create a third place for you, although I do see it starting to trend more maybe back that way. You don’t have to wait for church. And you and I both know, theoretically, that should be a great third place to do that. It doesn’t end up that way sometimes. And so, sometimes you just have to take matters into your own hands. I was telling somebody this morning, actually, men look around people, look around a lot and go, somebody ought to do something about that.

The thing that we teach and that we talk about a ton in F3 for sure is, hey, if you think that thought, the instant you think that thought, the next thought ought to be looking in the mirror and going, wait, I just remembered, I’m that somebody.

Brett McKay: Yeah, totally agree. It’s that whole Tocquevillian ethos, Alexis de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, talked about, when he came to America, he noticed how Americans at the time, if there was like a tree in the middle of a road, they would just form a group together and solve it. They wouldn’t wait around. He said, well, in Europe, they would like, wait, okay, who are we supposed to go to to get this thing?

Frank Schwartz: Which government agency is gonna fix this? Yeah.

Brett McKay: And I feel like we’ve kind of lost that. We’ve kind of become like Europeans in the 19th century that Tocqueville was criticizing.

Frank Schwartz: I think you’re right. I think you’re right. And I think that’s why I’m so grateful that, well, I say I found F3, but I think F3 found me, to a large degree. And I think that’s the way it always goes. If you want something good in your life, you’ll either find this or it’ll find you. But that’s been the best thing is it’s like, guys no longer, guys that I hang out with anyway, we don’t sit around going, somebody ought to do that. It’s done before anybody had the thought of whether or not it should get done. ‘Cause we knew it should get done.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something I’ve seen in different organizations, whether it’s like a sort of informal group of individuals, just guys trying to get together to do a workout together, a poker night once a month, or even more structured organizations like at a church group, you’ll see this phenomenon, you’ll get it going and then you’ll have guys who enthusiastically show up once or twice, and then they just vanish. You’re like, man, what happened? What’s going on? So what do you think is going on there? Is it a failure of unmet expectations or something else going on?

Frank Schwartz: I think it’s a similar problem. You know what January 19th is? I think it’s the 19th.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s like Quitter’s Day or whatever?

Frank Schwartz: Quitter’s Day, right. [laughter] Exactly. So I think some of it’s that. Everybody starts with great intentions, but boy, when the rubber meets the road and it starts to get hard, I don’t wanna show up for that. Someone’s supposed to… I’m supposed to be entertained, Brett. My phone taught me that. I’m supposed to be a consumer. The commercials, my YouTube pre-rolls taught me that. I’m supposed to just eat and drink and be merry. I’m not supposed to go do stuff. I’m not supposed to be something. And so, I think guys show up, and it happens in F3, as you might imagine. Some guys come out and they blaze out, and I always get nervous. The guys who are just a little too enthusiastic, and I want to be like, eh, you’re gonna need to save some for the fifth lap here, biggin’. You need to pump the brakes just a little bit because consistency, is gonna beat energy every time.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Forever and ever, amen. Right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Simon Sinek talks about the infinite game. I don’t know if you read that one, but it’s a fantastic book. And essentially, he kind of says, most of us run around with this sort of finite mindset that there’s winners and there’s losers. And there are in sports, in places where there is a definite ending, a finite time period or whatever it might be, but there’s no winning in life. It is not a race. It never has been a race. It’s a journey that we’re all on together, theoretically. Or we should be. And I think it’s part of our culture where it’s like, well, I showed up to the gym three times, I’m not in shape. I can’t figure this out, I quit. And you go, well, no, you have to show up for months and years. And then you have to stay at it. There’s no arrival. Again, it’s this finite mindset of, well, I thought after three times it was gonna be perfect for me. And you go, well, the only way it was gonna get perfect for you brother, is if you stood up and made it perfect for you.

You have to do it. You have to be the one responsible. You have to be the one involved. And so, even if you showed up to church or to the poker night or whatever, and after a couple of times you were like, this was great, maybe something didn’t go your way and you’re like, well, screw that. I’m supposed to have everything I want all the time. Man, what a finite mindset. You’re just, you’re setting yourself up for failure. But if you recognize that everything you do has purpose, because it’s part of this long and infinite journey toward your ultimate self-actualization or whatever term you wanna put on it, but for you to become what it is that you were meant to become, if you recognize that, and you can kind of, I hate the term, but lean into that. Man, your life becomes infinitely better because you realize you’re playing a long game. You’re playing a very different game than other people are playing. And that’s what I think is the great thing about F3, and really Art of Manliness and a lot of the things that are out there, that we’re doing is because it isn’t a finite thing.

Everything that you see and encounter is a tool to help you on this journey, and to make you a better person as you go. And I think people forget that, and they think, well, I didn’t win after the third time, so I don’t wanna do that. I wanna go where I feel good and happy and get my dopamine hit all the time.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, I’ve seen that in my experience with different groups, whether it’s a church or even just friend groups, or we even see this on The Strenuous Life within our geographic groups. I think some guys, they go into these, like, oh man, here’s a group of guys doing things. I want to be part of this community. And then I think they have what’s called, my wife, she wrote this great series on our Substack, Dying Breed, about Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s ideas on how to live in a spiritual community. And Bonhoeffer talked about one problem he sees, is that a lot of people have, he calls it the wish dream of community, this idealized version of what it should be. And then once they actually encounter the reality of it, it doesn’t meet that. And they’re like, this sucks. It’s not as great. I’m not getting what I thought I’d get out of this. I’m out of here. And I’ve seen that in so many groups, where people, I think they have too high expectations or they have this overly idealized version, it’s gonna be like a Norman Rockwell painting.

Everyone’s just in the barber shop, singing, playing the banjo, and it’s this community. And community can be that, but it’s also, you have to deal with just annoying people. You have to deal with friction. And it’s like, I tell people, if you want community, you have to want all of it. You have to want the good stuff and also the frustrating parts of it as well.

Frank Schwartz: Oh man. Preach as they would say.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: Because that’s exactly it. We’ve been taught to think, and I don’t know, maybe this existed before and we just didn’t know, because it wasn’t as prevalent and it wasn’t in our face like it is now with social media. But certainly, social media has made it so that we look around and I look around and we go, well, but they’re in Italy again. We think that only the good parts get to exist and if there’s bad parts it’s because we did something wrong or the thing is wrong or whatever because the lie is that everything is, it’s utopia all the time. But the messy is what teaches you the things you need to know, so that you can refine and make it better as you go. So when you show up to the whatever it is or if you start the whatever it is, and I can’t tell you, and you probably did the same thing before AOM or Strenuous Life or any of those things came along too. I’ve started, I don’t even know how many things that have just gone out either in a nice blaze of glory failure or a slow whimper into the death in the corner failure.

I’ve started all kinds of groups. I’ve tried all kinds of crazy things to try and get done what I wanna get done or to bring people together or whatever it might be. And then I just look and go, well, it’s kind of that Thomas Edison idea. I didn’t invent a light bulb. I invented 10,000 ways to not make a light bulb. [laughter] I didn’t discover the light bulb or whatever it was. And I feel similarly. I didn’t discover how to lead a men’s group. I discovered lots of ways to do it wrong. And then, I’ve tried to practice on the other end how to maybe not do it so wrong this time.

Brett McKay: No, that makes sense. Yeah, it’s continual learning, Kaizen, or whatever you wanna call it.

Frank Schwartz: Sure.

Brett McKay: Talking about your experiences forming communities, can it be intentionally engineered or does it have to be random or serendipity or is it a mixture of both?

Frank Schwartz: I’m gonna say, yeah, it’s probably a mixture of both to some degree. I don’t like the word engineered, just because I think it implies that there is something that you can build. I want my bridges engineered, ’cause I don’t want them to break. We don’t want a lot of failure when it comes to bridges. So I don’t mind failure when it comes to people, because that’s life. That’s just part of how we do it. So I think intentionally engineered, maybe not engineered, but does it have to be intentional? Boy, I tell you what, it better be. It better be. ‘Cause it can’t be complete chaos and just hope for the best. I think just like any good leader or any good leadership model, you’ve got to have a mission in mind. You’ve got to have an end state in mind. Where are we headed? What is it that we’re trying to accomplish here? And not just tasks, but what, again, going back to Cynic, what he might say is a just cause. What is that thing that is much bigger than all of us that we’re trying to get to?

And if we have a good sense of what that is, then we can be intentional toward that. And then what you have to do, I think is you have to allow for the chaos around you. So you be intentional about the things that are supposed to be controlled, which is adherence to mission maybe, or enforcing standards when it comes to like, hey, you’re not living the core principles or whatever. But that’s more of an arm around a guy and telling him in a one-on-one kind of thing. But then I think you have to allow for the chaos around you and the serendipitous accidents or whatever you wanna call them. And it’s actually a good example, in a way, to harken back to the early days and kind of the founding of F3. And I don’t remember, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to the original podcast that you were talking about from ’15 or ’17, whatever it was. But the guy, the group that this sort of broke off from, was a guy who wanted to control things.

He was capping the membership. He was the one leading every time, stuff like that. But what was recognized was, if I let go of control, and if I let go of the leadership and if I simply teach others to lead, rather than try and be the leader all the time and if I adapt to the circumstances that are in front of me and incorporate them, then I’ll come out with a better product. If it had only gone the way that Dave and Tim and even myself, if I was only willing to accept the things that I think are good ideas, we’d die. We’d die. I have some good ideas every once in a while, but that’s why the other thing I would people who are starting groups, don’t do it by yourself. Don’t do it by yourself. You can be the person that has most of the vision or you might be the good organizer or whatever, but by golly, you better find some people who have some complementary skill sets and mindsets and bring them in, and you’ve got to influence them and love them into buying into the dream and the mission of what you’re trying to get done.

‘Cause, there’s no way I could do this thing by myself. So I embrace the chaos, because either A, I’ll get stronger as a man or a leader, or B, I’ll learn some stuff that will actually make the group much stronger. There might be ideas that it’s like, oh, well that actually is a whole different direction we might take things that we hadn’t thought of before. If it was up to me or if it was just up to my vision or our initial thoughts, it would be engineered to failure.

Brett McKay: That makes sense. It makes total sense. I’m curious if you’ve seen this problem in groups or in F3, ’cause I’ve seen it in groups that I’ve belonged to. Everyone joins a group for different reasons. You think they’re all joining for the same reason, but oftentimes they’re not. I’m sure for F3, it’s the same thing. Some guys, they just want the workout. Others are there for the friends. Others are there for the leadership training. I’ve seen this in other groups where I belong to, where you think, oh, you’re here for this thing, and then you see them getting really persnickety about another issue. It’s like, oh, actually you’re not here for that thing. And then it causes all this conflict. So how do you balance competing ends in a group?

Frank Schwartz: Well, I often say if it was easy, we wouldn’t need leaders. You got to recognize that any time you do one thing, you’re gonna get dynamically more of it, and dynamically less of something else. And so, there is always this eternal tension in leadership of figuring out all the different competing factors. So one thing I would say is, yes, everyone joins a group for their own reason, but they stay typically for a very similar reason. And I think ultimately for a successful group, I think they have to stay for the mission. If they’re dedicated to the mission, if they see those things and if they’ve experienced something in that group where they go, no, no, but I understand what we’re really trying to get done here, then you can look past a lot of the other stuff. Dave introduced me to something he called the Augustinian Code, although apparently it’s dubious as to whether or not St. Augustine actually said it. And that is in essentials, we will have unity. In non-essentials, we will have liberty. But in all things, we will have charity. And so, I think you have a desire and a dedication and a focus on a mission, and then a guy joins for whatever reason he joins for.

But I think he stays because he says, no, I understand that there’s stuff that is greater than me, these things that are bigger than me. Those are things that I serve. I take myself out of it. And then he stays because he wants the same thing we want, which is, in our case, to help build leaders and to unlock men’s hearts and minds so that they can be maximally effective in their areas of influence, whatever that might be. So I think that’s the answer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the key there is just communicate the mission constantly. And…

Frank Schwartz: That’s all I do.

0:32:36.2 Brett McKay: Yeah, and if you think you’ve communicated it enough, you probably haven’t. So in a traditional leadership setting, say like a company or even a church, there’s typically a clear hierarchy, like president, vice presidents, et cetera. F3 doesn’t have that in these groups. So what does leadership look like in a decentralized volunteer community like F3? ‘Cause I’m sure, there’s lessons we can take from F3 to any other voluntary group that you might belong to.

Frank Schwartz: Well, that is our hope. In fact, we would like you to take it to the non-voluntary groups that you belong to as well. ‘Cause I think there’s things that we can teach about leadership that are definitely applicable in every area of life, even those that are non-voluntary. But to your point, I think the number one thing to remember is, you said, what is decentralized leadership? It looks messy. That’s what it looks like. [laughter] To have no leader, set person that you’re like, well, he just told me, I guess I have to do it, is messy. And it’s funny because this is something that came up early on in my sort of serving at a national level in F3 was, one of the guys got really frustrated and he was like, “What are the men thinking? Why can’t they just do the thing that I want them to do? What are they thinking?” And I had to say, I was like, well, I think they think that they’re free to lead. [laughter] I think this is your fault. You taught them, that they’re leaders and then when they do the thing, they’re trying to lead, you get mad at them.

So it’s kind of funny. But I think that we want you to recognize in a decentralized situation, that every person ultimately is responsible for the outcome of their own lives. And so, if they’re leading a workout that day, yeah, they might be responsible for the individual outcome of that workout. And they may have sort of positions or kind of different areas of responsibility or something within a region or group of F3 or whatever. I have a different job, I guess, technically, than maybe some others. But ultimately, it isn’t that one job is more important than another. It’s understanding that A, if I called the guys in Tulsa and said, hey, you’re gonna do this for your workout tomorrow. When they stopped laughing, we could probably have a discussion about it. Right?

Brett McKay: Right.

Frank Schwartz: I can’t tell anyone what to do. I wouldn’t even pretend to. I wouldn’t attempt it, because number one, it’s not my job. Number two, they understand now, that they’re the ones with the responsibility. And coming from me, it would be comical, because they ask me questions all the time. Guys ask questions like, well, how old should a kid be before we let him come to an F3 workout? Man, you’re looking for a rule and I get that and I understand why you want it. But ultimately, you have to make that decision. You’re the one responsible. And I know that frustrates you, but that’s just the way that it is. I can’t tell you what to do. So my job is not to tell you what to do. My job is to stand and to help you discover the right answer that you already know or that you have in your heart. Or what is the answer that aligns most with the mission that we theoretically all believe in? That kind of a thing. And so, I think it looks messy, but it also looks like just a lot of love, a lot of influence. I don’t remember how many times I’ve not answered a question to a guy, but suddenly at the end of our conversation, he seems to know what to do.

Brett McKay: No, I’ve had that experience too with The Strenuous Life.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, right.

Brett McKay: I’ll get questions from guys like, well, does this count for this requirement? Or if I do this, will it count? Or how about if I do this for our group? Is that okay? And we have this guiding principle in The Strenuous Life. I’m sure Strenuous Life listeners know what I’m about to say. Phronesis, which comes from the Greek, ancient Greeks, and it’s basically practical wisdom. It’s like knowing what the right thing to do for the right reason, the right time, for the right purpose. And I just tell people, use your phronesis, man. Use your brain. You’ve got it. I trust you. You can make that decision.

Frank Schwartz: It’s in there.

Brett McKay: And a lot of guys, they get frustrated with that, ’cause they just wanna be told exactly what to do. I’m like, I’m not gonna do that. I want you to develop this capacity to make decisions and use your judgment.

Frank Schwartz: Yeah. I think that fundamentally, and this is something that I think is so critical to leadership of any kind, certainly of any small group, and very, very certainly of any sort of volunteer-type organization, like what we’re doing out here. It’s a different one when you got a boss and a boss can just tell you what to do or they can threaten you to get fired or whatever. That’s not leadership. That’s just management. And so, if you’re gonna be in real leadership, I think another thing that we forget amongst the many, is that this is a love endeavor. This is a love endeavor. And our world has taught us that, if I love you, that I will kind of plow the road ahead of you and you never have to worry about anything. I will accept you exactly as you are, and I will let you do whatever you want because that’s love. But it’s not, it’s permissiveness. And permissiveness actually is it’s own kind of sin in my estimation. And so, I think that what you’re talking about there, that’s real love.

Real love is loving you enough to let you fail. It’s loving you enough to let you figure it out and struggle through it and make your own decision. Dude, if I could just tell my kids exactly what to do, and have them do it, my life would be infinitely easier. Infinitely easier. It is messy and horrifying, that I send them on their way and I’m like, and they come to me and they’re like, dad, what should I do? And I look at them and I go, you’ve been taught how to make decisions. I think you should do that. They don’t love that. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: As you might imagine. But that’s how I answer the things to the guys in F3 too. They’re like, well, what should we do? I think you should employ those tactics and those techniques that you’ve learned along the way on how to make decisions, and you should do that. Because I can’t tell you and I should not tell you. In fact, I love you too much to tell you. You have to know for yourself. If I tell you, it’s what I think, if it goes wrong, then it’s my fault, if it goes right, then it was my success somehow, and I love you too much. You get to do this. This is your deal.

Brett McKay: How should leaders of small groups of men, whether it’s a church or you got a book club or whatever, how should they define success?

Frank Schwartz: That’s a good question. Every group is gonna have it’s own definition, I’m sure. And so, I would say, success looks like adherence to whatever that mission is. So for me, how about this? How about I answer it this way? For F3, here’s what I think success looks like. And guys all over the country and even our board sometimes and certainly from outside organizations, look and they’re like, well, how are you measuring success? And I’m like, well, that’s a good question. It sounds like you probably have an opinion about that. Why don’t you tell me what you think? And they’re like, well, growth numbers. Like how many men are in F3? You should be tracking that. You should know. And I’m like, okay, but what if every guy in F3 is an idiot? But we have 500,000 of them, but they’re idiots. And they’re like, oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Exactly. So that can’t be it. Okay, well, what if we have only 10 guys that are in it, but they’re really dedicated to the mission? Is that success? Again, I go, well maybe. I don’t know. Here’s what I know.

For me, success looks like, I wore myself out, my personal success. I wore myself out in the service of the mission. And I think success across the organization, for us anyway, is largely anecdotal. It’s the stories I hear about men saying, I recaptured my life. My wife and I get along now. We snatched our marriage from the jaws of divorce. Or it looks like I quit drugs and alcohol. Or I lost 100 pounds or whatever it is. The individual results of “success” I think you’re gonna have as many, as there are individual guys. So I think success for us, is knowing that we did the best we could to adhere to the mission and serve the thing that is greater than us. That’s the best I can answer on that one.

Brett McKay: Something I’ve had to struggle with as a leader of different groups I belong to, is cultivating the patience that’s often required to lead whenever it seems like things are just going slower than you want. Have you had that struggle as well? And if so, what have you done to overcome it?

Frank Schwartz: Yeah, no, I struggle from a condition known as perpetual dissatisfaction. [laughter]

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Frank Schwartz: I don’t know if you’ve said something similar, but no, patience is not my jam. I tend to move fast. I decide things fast. I live fast. In fact, a guy, CEO of a very large fitness company just yesterday was like, “You have an intensity issue.” And I was like, do I? That’s interesting coming from you, but okay. So I recognize that that’s my bias. I say that to say, I have tons of biases, Brett. And I’m always gonna be slightly dissatisfied. I’m always gonna think that it’s not moving fast enough. I’m always gonna be unhappy with the result of something. I’m happy with a lot of results too. Don’t get the impression that I walk around sad all the time going like, why can’t everything be wonderful? It’s not that at all. But I know that I have biases. So the advice that I would give to someone starting a thing or who’s looking to lead in any way, the way to cultivate that patience, is to segment your life a little bit. So exhibit patience where in those environments where it’s appropriate. And then by golly, get yourself a mentor and get yourself a small group.

In F3, we call them shield locks. You lock shields with two, three other guys. And those are the guys that hear the best and the worst and the hardest and the whatever. And I unload it to those guys and they get to hear it. And then they get to tell me that my head is in my rear end, or they get to tell me where I might be choosing poorly or where I might be choosing well. So, okay, it’s not moving as fast as I want. Fine. Too bad. It’s moving as fast as it can. It’s moving as fast as it’s supposed to. The analogy I give a lot of times to guys, is I go, all right, ’cause I’ll say it in their marriage. Something went wrong in their marriage, and they’re struggling. And then, they’re trying to make good on it, but they can’t seem to get their wife to forgive them and to move forward or whatever. And I said, well, here’s the thing.

You think of it like a seed that you put in the ground, and you can put all the nutrients you want in that soil and you can cover it up at the perfect depth, and you can measure the pH and the moisture content and you can make this thing just as optimal, the perfect amount of sunshine, keep the temperature, whatever it is. But that seed, is gonna sprout above the edge of that soil, when it is darn good and ready. And the only thing you can do, is to consistently try and create a perfect environment or as optimal an environment as you possibly can. That’s your job as the leader in the group or in the organization or whatever it might be. That’s your job, is to consistently try and create optimal conditions so that when growth is ready to happen, it happens. So again, we get our minds caught in this finite game of, well, but I didn’t get this done by X date. And so, it must be not going well, or it must be a failure or any number of things. And I just say, no man, again, I think you’re just, you’re playing the wrong game as a leader, particularly of a volunteer organization.

But I think as a leader in general, it only serves us to remember, that this is an infinite game, that goes on forever and ever and ever. And so, patience is all you have. Time is all you have. You can’t control any of the other factors. I can do what I can to maintain an optimal environment. And then when that seed is ready, it’ll come up.

Brett McKay: Well, Frank, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about F3?

Frank Schwartz: Just go outside and whether you hear some crazy guys in a parking lot somewhere barking in cadence, then you’ll know. That’s where we, no, I’m just kidding. Yeah, go to f3nation.com. There’s a place like if you’ve never heard of F3 before, and you think to yourself, man, that sounds like a thing I might wanna try. Go to f3nation.com. You’ll see a link in there up at the top that says locations. I think it’s under new or get started or something, I don’t remember now. But you find the map, find the locations, find one near you. And men, just show up. Just show up. And then we’ll help you through the rest. Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. We’ll guide you. We’ll get you moving. But yeah, go someplace. Just find one near you, and show up. And you can read all about us on the website there.

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

Frank Schwartz: Brett, I appreciate the time, my friend. Take care.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Frank Schwartz. He’s the CEO of F3. You can find more information about F3 at f3nation.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/mensgroups. We find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way.

My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity.

Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project, and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why “happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy,” the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Gretchen’s books
• Gretchen’s “What’s the next new habit that will make you happier?” quiz
• AoM Article: The Self-Deception Destroying Maxims of Francois de La Rochefoucauld
• AoM Article: Nietzsche’s 66 Best Aphorisms
• AoM Article: Just Go to Sleep
• Sunday Firesides: Life Is for Living

Connect With Gretchen Rubin

• Gretchen’s website
• Gretchen on IG
• Gretchen on FB
• Gretchen on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Figuring out the pitfalls and best practices of adulthood can be tricky. It’s helpful to have some pearls of wisdom to guide you along the way. My guest today has spent decades collecting these kinds of helpful truths and has crafted her own guiding mantras of maturity. Gretchen Rubin is the author of numerous bestselling books, including The Happiness Project and her latest, Secrets of Adulthood. Today on the show, Gretchen shares how she came to write hundreds of aphorisms on how to navigate life, and we dig into some of my favorites of these concise, sage sayings. Amongst many topics, we discuss why happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy, the best strategy for changing ourselves, a very useful heuristic for making decisions, why you should wear a favorite sweater more often, and even why big top tables at restaurants are one of my pet peeves. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood.

 Gretchen Rubin, welcome to the show.

Gretchen Rubin: I’m so happy to be talking to you.

Brett McKay: No, likewise. So we were talking before we got on, we go way back.

Gretchen Rubin: We go way back.

Brett McKay: Way back. So both you and I started off as bloggers. We still blog. Do they still call it blogging?

Gretchen Rubin: I call it my site. I’m posting on my site.

Brett McKay: That’s what I say, because I feel kind of silly when I say I’m a blogger.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, that feels very retro.

Brett McKay: So yeah, you have The Happiness Project. That was what you started off with, got the art of manliness. We were part of this community of other self-development writers back in 2008. So yeah, you’ve been writing about personal development for almost, it’s been almost 20 years now or over 20 years. As you look back on your career, what would you say is the connecting thread through everything you’ve written and put out there?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, if I had to say what my subject is, I would say my subject is human nature. And in fact, before I started writing about sort of happiness and good habits, I wrote a book called Power Money Fame Sex, A User’s Guide, which is my first book. Then I wrote kind of a short unconventional biography of Winston Churchill and one of John F. Kennedy. And to me, I think to a lot of people, those books seem very different from the books that I’ve written sort of in the last while. But to me, they’re all about human nature. So you learn about human nature by studying Winston Churchill because he’s just this gigantic figure. So I think that is my subject. Like, who are we? How do we understand ourselves better? How do we change if we want to change? How do we understand other people?

Brett McKay: And then, yeah, you started The Happiness Project, started off as a blog, turned into books. It’s kind of become this media empire. And there you’re just trying to explore, it seems like, what does it mean to live a flourishing human life?

Gretchen Rubin: Exactly. Like, can you make yourself happier? And if so, how? That’s my question, yes.

Brett McKay: When you say happiness, how do you define happiness?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, I started out my career in law, as did you, Brett. And maybe you also have happy memories of spending an entire semester arguing about the definition of contract. And happiness is an even more elusive concept to define. There are something like 15 or 17 academic definitions of happiness. And I think that for the layperson, it’s just, it can be whatever you want. Joy, peace, bliss, satisfaction, well-being, whatever you conceive of as being happiness for you. Because I think that it’s more useful to think about being happier. Whatever that means for you, what can you do with your conscious thoughts and actions starting tomorrow, without a lot of time, energy, or money to move yourself in the right direction? So next week, next month, next year, can we make our lives happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? And I think that’s much clearer to understand. Like, is this going to make me happier? It’s much easier to answer for the average person than like, can I achieve happiness? Because when I think about that, I’m like, what does that even mean? It feels so abstract that it’s hard to grasp even what that would look like.

Brett McKay: Well, something you’ve done recently, you come out with a new book called Secrets of Adulthood, where you’ve put together a collection of aphorisms that you’ve developed to help people make sense of this topsy-turvy, complex world we live in. And at the beginning of the book, Secrets of Adulthood, you talk about your lifelong love of aphorisms. You’ve been collecting them since you were eight years old. What draws you to the aphoristic style?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, first, let me say what an aphorism is, because I think a lot of people don’t know. That’s why I didn’t use the word aphorism in the title or subtitle of the book. So an aphorism is a short, usually a sentence or two, insight observation about human nature that’s meant to be sort of a general observation. And it’s attributed to a particular person. Maybe it’s Mark Twain, maybe it’s Oscar Wilde, maybe it’s Warren Buffett, maybe it’s Montaigne. And then that way it’s different from a proverb. So a proverb is folk wisdom. These are ideas, you know, reminders, things that have been kicking around for centuries. Like you can’t push a rope or sailors fear fire more than water or you’re only as happy as your least happy child. These are pieces of folk wisdom. But an aphorism, we know who said it. And I’m very drawn to aphorisms because, well, first of all, they’re short. And I love, I think there’s so much power in keeping things brief and really having to crystallize ideas to distill them down into like just a sentence or two. That’s very creatively challenging. And it’s also intellectually challenging because to write that way, you really have to be able to think that way. And that’s hard.

 And then I think that they’re just, they have more power in the mind because we can grasp them. So for the last while, I have been really pushing myself when I have a big idea to see if I can express it in an aphorism.

Brett McKay: Are there any famous historical aphorists that you like?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, I do love Oscar Wilde. If you read something like The Portrait of Dorian Gray, it’s like reading Hamlet. You recognize so many lines because so many of them are so famous. One of my hopes with writing this book is to bring back into the spotlight one of my favorite aphorists who is a 19th century Austrian aphorist named Marie Von Ebner-Eschenbach, who’s amazing. Like one of my favorites of hers is, you can fall so fast, you think you’re flying. Which I’m like, whoa, that’s powerful. And then there are people who, like I mentioned Warren Buffett. He can invest and he can also really write. There are many really funny, thoughtful aphorisms in his letters to shareholders. So I’m looking for them all the time. And so those are some of my favorites. Oh, Andy Warhol. I don’t even really like his art, but he said these extremely unpredictable, thoughtful aphorisms that just keep your mind warm.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, he’s come up with like, you know, everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. He’s extremely famous for that. And then he has like, my favorite kind of atmosphere today is the airport atmosphere. And I’m like, I know exactly what you mean by that. Or I can’t remember how he said it exactly, but he said something like the most old fashioned thing that people do is get pregnant. And I completely understand that. It does feel so old fashioned to like actually get pregnant. I’m also like volcanoes. Haven’t we all kind of outgrown volcanoes? That seems like kind of an ancient Rome thing. Are they still happening? Every time there’s a volcano, I’m like, huh, I thought these things were sort of out of date. I don’t know. But again, it’s like, what do I even mean by that? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. But Andy Warhol helps me have these odd thoughts. So that’s one of the reasons that I love his writing so much.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a few aphorists that I enjoy. Nietzsche, he had some killer aphorisms. I think his writing style, his best writing style is his aphorisms. I also like Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the French author.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, he’s great. He’s amazing.

Brett McKay: He’s kind of like cynical, which is interesting.

Gretchen Rubin: The aphorism is a very judgmental form. When you’re writing them, you find that you… I see why he is so cynical. It’s a form that invites you to write that way. Okay, so what are some of your favorites?

Brett McKay: Well, here’s some I brought up. We did an article highlighting some of his maxims. Here’s one. Fortunate people rarely correct their faults. They always think they are right while fortune is favoring their evil conduct.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, is that so true?

Brett McKay: That’s true. That happens.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s so true. Yes.

Brett McKay: Another one. This one’s really cynical. No one deserves to be praised for kindness if he does not have the strength to be bad. Every other form of kindness must often merely be laziness or lack of willpower.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, that is cynical.

Brett McKay: It is, but I kind of think there’s some truth to it. I mean, for being good to mean anything, you have to have the capability to do otherwise.

Gretchen Rubin: Wait, if you give me a second, I can read some of my favorites, hang on, from my collection of his, hang on, let’s see. Those who apply themselves too much to small things ordinarily become incapable of great ones. Well, here is one that I really think is true. However dazzling an action may be, it should not pass for great when it is not the result of a great design. And I think that’s very true. Like sometimes people do things accidentally. You don’t really get credit for that because you didn’t do it on purpose.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that reminds me of Machiavelli, where he talks about the difference between virtue and fortune. So sometimes we confuse the two.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes.

Brett McKay: Another aphorist that I like, G.K. Chesterton is another one.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I love Chesterton. I’m so glad you mentioned him because I feel like he’s kind of fallen out of the spotlight. And I love the writing of G.K. Chesterton.

Brett McKay: Yeah, he does this thing where he kind of inverts the sentence.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes.

Brett McKay: And so he comes up with these little witty sayings about life. So in this book, Secrets of Adulthood, you developed your own aphorisms. Did you find that challenging? And if so, what was hard about it?

Gretchen Rubin: Well, it is very challenging because first you have to have a thought. And I don’t know about you, but I find it very hard to have thoughts. And then you have to really distill the thought into a succinct form and to aim for elegance. Because, you know, we’re talking about La Rochefoucauld, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde. You know, they express their ideas very beautifully. There’s, as you say, there’s often inversion. There’s often paradox. Often with an aphorism, there are things to kind of increase the writerly elegance of them. So that’s very challenging. So I have been working on these for years. Certainly I’ve been collecting them forever from other people. And then I started writing them myself and collecting them myself. And, you know, this is not the kind of book that I could have sat down and written in like, you know, just like done it. Because they had to come to me in moments. And some of them arise out of my previous books, like The Happiness Project or Better Than Before. Like the aphorism, The Secret of Adulthood, Habits Are the Invisible Architecture of Everyday Life. That was something that I wrote for my book Better Than Before.

 That was an idea that I had when I was thinking about how we make and break habits. But a lot of these are things that I’ve just noticed along the way and been gathering up for a really, really long time.

Brett McKay: So as you were putting together the book Secrets of Adulthood, how did you figure out which ones made it?

Gretchen Rubin: So I had this giant trove that I’d been working on for years, but I decided I wanted them to be Secrets of Adulthood, meaning there was something in them that could be useful as you were facing a challenge of life. So maybe you were facing procrastination or you were finding it hard to make a decision or you were perplexed by a relationship or you were trying to know yourself better. All of them are aimed to help give insight into something that is a challenge of adulthood. Because many of the aphorisms that I wrote were just observations, like a dog doesn’t gaze at a waterfall. I think that’s interesting. It’s true. Or the tulip is an empty flower. I believe that. The tulip is an empty flower. What is up with that? But those are mere observations. And then I had a lot of bleak aphorisms. As we were saying, the form kind of pushes you in a dark direction. And I had a lot that were very dark. And I thought, oh, you know, nobody wants my dark aphorisms. Let me distill this into the Secrets of Adulthood.

Brett McKay: I love it. Well, maybe you should release the dark ones as a secret item somehow.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know what’s funny? Gretchen Rubin after dark. What’s funny is on my book tour, a lot of times it would come up that I had written those. Everybody said, I want to read your dark aphorisms. And I think that’s the negativity bias, right? People are always interested in the dark things or the negative things. And so I should figure out what to do with them. Because I worked on them just as hard as I worked on the ones that ended up in Secrets of Adulthood. Brett, I am sure you know the feeling. It’s so painful to leave anything on the cutting room floor.

Brett McKay: It is.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s always very exciting if you think, oh, maybe there’s a way I can use this stuff after all.

Brett McKay: So let’s dig into some of your secrets of adulthood. I really enjoyed reading through your aphorisms, and I’ve kind of picked out some that I like, and let’s just riff on them. I’ll talk about them, and let’s just riff on it together. So the one that really stuck out to me is one of the very first ones. Happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, because I think when I was first writing The Happiness Project, I was really struggling to understand, like, how do you even think about happiness? What’s a framework for even contemplating it? And I realized that if you’re thinking about how to make our lives happier, we want to think about feeling good, feeling bad, feeling right, and an atmosphere of growth. So feeling good is enthusiasm, love, friendship, energy, all the things that we want to have more of. And then there’s feeling bad. So that’s things like anger, resentment, guilt, boredom. Those are things that make us feel bad. We want less of those. Then we also want to feel right, which means we want our life to reflect our values. We want to put our values into the world, and we want to demonstrate our values through our actions. And then also we want the atmosphere of growth. And so the atmosphere of growth is when we’re growing, learning, teaching, fixing, solving, where we feel like we’re growing or we’re contributing to the growth of others or to the growth of the world. And the fact is, sometimes when we do things to help us live up to our values or to cultivate an atmosphere of growth, we don’t feel very happy.

 Like an atmosphere of growth, when you’re learning to do something, often you feel insecure or frustrated, even angry. When you’re feeling right about living up to your values, often you might be doing something that you don’t enjoy. Like I remember a friend telling me how he went to go visit his very, very difficult father in the hospital, and his two brothers refused to go. They wouldn’t see their father. But he said, I really don’t like to go. I dread going. And we’ve never gotten along, and he was a terrible father, but he’s still my father. And so I feel like I have to go. And I’m like, well, yeah, it made you feel bad, but you feel right because you’re like, I’m living my values, which is we’re still father-son, and I feel like I need to do this. And so happiness doesn’t always make us feel happy.

Brett McKay: Yeah, when I read that, I love Aristotle. So immediately I thought of Aristotle.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, talk about aphorism. Yeah, got a million of those.

Brett McKay: But he talked about his idea of happiness, the way it was defined was flourishing or eudaimonia. And it meant just living a good life all around. And it didn’t necessarily mean feeling good. It wasn’t hedonism. And even Epicurus, he makes that argument that sometimes in order to live a pleasurable life, you have to do unpleasurable things in the short term.

Yeah, exactly right. There’s some things that don’t feel good in the short term, but if you do them, it’s going to lead to something bigger, and it’s going to make you feel good in the long run. Kind of related to this, another one of your aphorisms, there is no right way to create a happier life, just as there’s no best way to cook an egg.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, this came from an experience that I have often, which is because I write about happiness, people are always like, okay, what should I do to be happier? What’s the secret to happiness? And I always say, well, you know, it depends on you. It depends on your nature, your challenges, your interests, your values. There’s no one best way because we’re all different. And then they say to me, okay, well, which is like, what’s the best way? And so now, and I can never think of a satisfying answer. And so now I say, well, what’s the best way to cook an egg? And they say, well, there is no best way. It depends on how you like your eggs. And some people say like, I don’t even like eggs. And I’m like, that’s right. There is no best way to cook an egg, just like there’s no best way to make your life happier because it depends on each of us what we want.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea of like the secret to life, everyone’s just looking for it, reminds me of, you ever see City Slickers?

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah, Curly, you know, the guide on the ranch trip.

Gretchen Rubin: I’m not sure I ever actually saw it. Is this the one with Billy?

Brett McKay: With Billy Crystal?

Gretchen Rubin: Crystal?

Brett McKay: Yeah, he has like a midlife crisis and decides for his 40th birthday.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. I don’t think I actually ever saw it.

Brett McKay: Okay, well, it’s a great, I would recommend it. It’s a fun baby boomer movie about midlife that was made in the 90s.

Gretchen Rubin: You have me. Okay. I’m convinced.

Brett McKay: Yeah. But, you know, Curly is just like hardened trail hand who’s taking these guys on this dude ranch trip. And he said, the secret of life is just one thing. And he never says what that one thing is.

Gretchen Rubin: That’s funny.

Brett McKay: Because the answer is, well, it’s the one thing to you. You got to figure that out.

Gretchen Rubin: Right, right. Well, it’s funny because since so many people are like, but what is the habit I should work on the most? I actually did create a quiz that will tell the individual because I can’t like meet you and just from that tell you the right thing but this quiz which is just on my site will tell each individual like what right now is the thing that would move the needle the most on your happiness based on your answers. And of course it might be different in a month, but it is kind of uncanny how often people are like, oh yeah, you know, that is really where I feel like I need to do the most work. So there are definitely individual answers, but there’s no one size fits all answer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and related to that is the idea that what makes you happy is gonna change throughout your life.

Gretchen Rubin: Absolutely, absolutely.

Brett McKay: That’s something I’ve learned. Like what worked for me when I was in my 20s does not work for me in my 40s.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, and related to that is something called hedonic forecasting, which is the ability to predict what will make you happier in the future. And turns out we humans are really, really bad at this. We are not good at thinking, okay, what is the happiness consequence of this decision? And so that’s one thing, if you’re working on your happiness is to try to improve your hedonic forecasting because we tend not to be very good at it.

Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that stood out to me because I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Accept yourself and expect more from yourself.

Gretchen Rubin: Okay, this is a good example of something that took me months and months and months to wrap my mind around, because I got caught in like, well, it’s really important to accept ourselves and to show ourselves self-compassion and not to like be unrealistic and set ourselves up for other people’s expectations. But then I would also think, but we also have to try to get ourselves out of our comfort zone. And we do need the atmosphere of growth. And we don’t want to be complacent. And we don’t want to fall short of our potential. And then finally, I thought, well, both are true. And then I was like, okay, I could write about that for pages. But is there a way to distill those two truths that are in tension to distill that into a single sentence? And so saying, accept yourself and also expect more from yourself, that took me months and months and months, really, to write.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I’m spending like my entire life trying to figure out, am I accepting myself and expecting, like, am I being content, but not being complacent?

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes.

Brett McKay: And sometimes I have to ask myself, you know, when I think I’m being content, well, actually, am I just being complacent?

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, it’s the great challenge of our lives, I think, is to recognize. And people are always like, okay, but then how can you tell? And I’m like, that is what’s hard about adulthood. There’s no magic answer to tell you, is this something where you should accept yourself and just say like, hey, that’s not my thing, and spend your time doing things that are more in line with your true nature? Or are you like, no, this is something that’s reasonable for me to expect for myself. I can do this. I can expect this for myself. I want to push myself, even if it doesn’t feel good.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about change. You write a lot about change. We want to expect more for ourselves and get better. One of your aphorisms is, it’s easier to change our surroundings and our schedules than to change ourselves.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Oh, my gosh. I so firmly believe this because people will often, and I saw this when I was writing Better Than Before, when I was really focusing on habits, is people will be like, well, I want to be a completely different kind of person. And I’m like, I don’t know if that’s possible, but if it is possible, it’s very hard. And then I’m like, but you could just change your schedule. You could just change your surroundings. You could work on the things around you and your conscious thoughts and actions. And that’s much easier. I remember I was doing an interview with a reporter in front of an audience, and there was this, to me, very poignant moment where she said, I want to be the kind of person who loves to get up and go for a five-mile run every day. And I was like, I don’t think you ever will be that kind of person. Like, I don’t want to be discouraging, but knowing you as I know you, I don’t think that’s who you are. I don’t think that’s how you’re wired. And in some ways, we just have to say to ourselves, you get what you get and you don’t get upset.

 And like, I’m me. I’m like, but if what you want is you want to be fit, if what you want is to have a healthy body, if what you want is to be consistent in your promises to yourself to do something that’s going to be really good for your life and your mood and your immune function and your memory, that you can work on. You can put it in the schedule. You can set yourself up for success to keep that habit. But saying like, well, I want to be a different kind of person so that this behavior will come easily, that’s not a good way to succeed. You have to say, given who I am, what can I do to get where I want to go? Instead of, can I transform myself into an utterly different kind of person and therefore live a different life?

Brett McKay: No, I totally agree. I see it in my own life. So going back to Aristotle, if you want to be fit, you have to do fit things or put yourself in a fit environment will get you, help you out a lot.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, exactly. Excellence is a habit. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Speaking of change, another one you talk about is changing other people. Because in adulthood, you’re going to deal with just so many frustrating, frustrating people.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes.

Brett McKay: And we’re just like, why can’t you just be like this? But you have an aphorism for that. It’s, we can’t make people change, but when we change, our relationships change, and so others may also change.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. What got me thinking about this was when my daughters were very young, I’m an irritable person. I’m a cranky person. I’m a carping person. I’m a high-strung person. I’m a rigid person. Like, that’s who I am, right? And if you have little kids, that’s a hard way to be because they are disorderly and messy and throw your schedule off. And I was just a more irritable kind of parent than I wanted to be. And I would get frustrated and kind of crabby, and they would get frustrated and crabby, and then it was just, it all went downhill. But then when I was like, okay, I’m going to get up earlier, so I have a bigger margin in the morning, so I can get up in just sort of like my own quiet way, get dressed and get organized and have my cup of coffee. Thoreau said, I love a broad margin to my life. I’m a person who needs a broad margin. I’m going to build in more margins so that I don’t feel rushed or pressed for time, and so I’m not hustling them along. We have plenty of time. When I started doing all these things to make my…

 And then just working on staying patient, staying good-humored, seeing the funny side, and not constantly depressing. When I relaxed, they relaxed. When I had a warmer, more tender attitude, they also became calmer and more cheerful. And so I didn’t do anything to change them. I only changed myself. But because I changed, they responded. And so then the atmosphere of our household changed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This reminded me when I read that aphorism of Bowen Family Systems Theory. Are you familiar with Bowen Family Systems Theory?

Gretchen Rubin: A little bit. I mean, I know that it’s, yeah, but in what respect?

Brett McKay: Yeah, so there’s this idea, this thing developed by this guy named Murray Bowen back in the 50s, 60s, and his idea was that, you know, we carry over our relationship dynamics that we developed when we were kids in our family of origin to other relationships. And one of his big ideas is there’s often a lot of what he calls anxiety in a relationship. I mean, anxiety isn’t like nervousness. It’s just kind of like stress. Everyone’s just kind of freaking out about stuff. And he says in order to change that dynamic, one person in that relationship, they have to be differentiated. So they have to not catch the anxiety of the other person. He says you have to be a calm, non-anxious presence. And then his idea is that, well, if you change, if one person changes themselves in the system, then the system becomes more calm.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes. That’s interesting. I think that’s 100% true. In my own family growing up, my father is just this very calm, unflappable, cheerful, enthusiastic person. Like whatever you want to do, that’s great. And I realized much later in life how much I had taken that for granted and how much his attitude really did act as a buffer for other people’s agitation or, you know, that he could kind of absorb it and then let everybody kind of calm down or reach equilibrium. And it’s only, you know, with much greater maturity that I was like, that’s a lot of work. I always thought that’s just his nature. And I’m like, that’s not easy for anyone. Like that is a way that he is choosing to be. And I realized how valuable it was and probably how much energy it took to be always that person in the system who was able to be like, let’s just chill out a little bit here. Like, let’s have a sense of humor about it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I agree. I’m like you, I’m very high strung. Not super high strung, but I’m cranky. I mean, that’s why we went to law, possibly.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, cranky. Yeah, it’s good for cranky people. Yes.

Brett McKay: It’s good for cranky people.

Gretchen Rubin: It’s a cranky profession, yes.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One of the hardest things, or can be really hard about being an adult, is being a parent. Super complex. Actually, I’ve noticed this. Maybe people talk about how being a parent is hard, like when they have babies, little kids. I actually didn’t think being a parent of babies or little kids was that hard. It was just because you have to make sure they’re fed and safe, and it’s fun, and sometimes it’s tiring. I’m finding it’s getting harder and harder to be a parent as my kids have gotten older, because their problems have gotten bigger and more complex.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, they say little children, little problems. Big kids, big problems. Yeah, that’s a folk proverb. Well, I think when they’re young, it’s physically demanding. And when they’re older, it’s more emotionally and intellectually demanding.

Brett McKay: Yes. So you’ve got some aphorisms about being a parent. And one of them is, I really resonated with this, we can’t change our children’s natures by nagging them or signing them up for classes.

Gretchen Rubin: Right. I mean, it’s just, again, it’s like you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Like, of course, we can help people reach their potential, and we can help them accept themselves and also expect more from themselves. But in the end, you’re not going to change people’s natures. You know, with a lot of these aphorisms, there was kind of an origin story, or there was something that happened to me or something that I read, which really caught my attention and sort of had me thinking and turning it over in my head, like a dog with a bone trying to understand it. And in this very funny encounter with somebody that I hardly knew, she was the mother of somebody who had a son that was my daughter’s age. And she was talking about how he had gotten all this money for his birthday. And he was young, like a young teenager. And he wanted to start one of these, I don’t even really know what it is. It’s some kind of account where you can put your money in and you do kind of pretend investing. It’s the kind of thing that if you were the kind of kid that wanted to grow up and become a finance person or investor, you’d be very interested in.

 Like, he wanted to learn about the stock market and he wanted to place his bets and everything. And she was like, you know, though, I just think, wouldn’t he be better off spending that time doing something like learning ceramics? And I was like, let me stop you right here. I think you would like to learn ceramics. I think you should let your kid do what he wants. That’s a totally reasonable thing for a child to want to do. He’s not actually risking his money. He’s interested in a subject that’s, you know. So why would you say like, oh, no, I mean, it would be the rare child who would like to do both of those equally. And I think that that’s just what sounded fun to her.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As my kids have gotten older, I’ve noticed this more and more, is that they have their own personality.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, they do.

Brett McKay: And no matter how much I nag them about something like, hey, it doesn’t do anything. So it’s just trying to figure out, like, what can I do to harness that in a more positive direction is what I’m trying to do.

Gretchen Rubin: But I also think that there’s a difference. And I think about this a lot because I think it’s one of the big challenges of parenting, which is there’s helping people do something that they want to do, but they’re dreading doing either because it’s so much work or there’s so many steps to it or there’s something about it that just makes them really uncomfortable. So like, I live in New York City and neither of my daughters who are like 26 and 20, neither of them have a driver’s license because it’s so hard. They have to learn how to drive and it’s hard to practice because we live in New York City. And then it’s really hard just like to take the test. And one of my daughters failed the test. So then she has to take it again. And then it’s just, there’s so much paperwork. There’s so many steps. It’s so awful. So I am kind of badgering them about that because I know in the end, this is something that they want. They both know how to drive. It’s just like a lot of steps. But that’s different from saying, oh, I think you should.

 I’m going to badger you to take up scuba diving, even though you have no interest in it, just because I think it’s something that would be cool for you to do or something. Or what’s really hard, I think, is when, because the parent loves something, they want the child to love it too. And they become angry when the child doesn’t love it. Like everybody in our family loves University of Nebraska football. We’re all Cornhuskers. You should love University of Nebraska football too. And if you don’t love it, then there’s something wrong with you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can’t do that.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, you know, you can try to expose them. You can try to get them people interested. But at a certain point, it’s like people have their own. I mean, I don’t like the Olympics. And I can’t tell you how many people are constantly trying to convince me to like the Olympics. And I’m like, I’m just here to tell you, I’m not interested in the Olympics.

Brett McKay: Not doing it.

Gretchen Rubin: You know?

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think as a parent, what you can do is you can kind of think of yourself as a gardener instead of a carpenter.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, that’s the Alison Gopnik book.

Brett McKay: So you’re a gardener. You kind of create an environment where they can flourish because they come with these seeds of personality and talent and potential already embedded inside. And you can’t just reconstruct them and build them differently. All you can do is create an environment that nurtures those seeds. And then you see where it goes because it’s up to them after that.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Brett McKay: So here’s another favorite one of mine. My wife liked this one a lot, too, because she’s been talking about this for a long time. But I love how you really put this in a succinct aphorism. Before declaring that something is superficial, unhealthy, inefficient, dangerous, disgusting, or immoral, we should consider, maybe this just doesn’t suit my taste.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, so in my collection of aphorisms, I have a giant list of things that in previous times in cultures, people considered inefficient, dangerous, immoral. And it’s just bananas what people will take into their mind to oppose. I mean, when postcards were introduced, people were violently opposed to postcards. You know, it’s like, maybe you just don’t like postcards. You don’t have to decide that they’re immoral. And I remind myself of that when I’m thinking like, oh, it’s terrible that people are doing X, Y, Z. I’m like, well, maybe it’s just because I don’t like to do X, Y, Z, so I don’t understand why somebody else would like it.

Brett McKay: Yeah, as a person who’s been putting out articles and podcasts for almost 20 years, you’ve probably experienced this too. There’s people who are going to like criticize you. And the way they frame their criticisms like, you know, this is wrong and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then you’ll have people who say, I love what you’re doing. This is great. I think it’s the greatest thing in the world. And so this aphorism reminds me of that. And it reminded my wife of a story from Ben and Jerry’s, the ice cream example. And one of the guys, Ben or Jerry, was doing an interview and he talked about how they would get letters from people saying, your chunks are too big and this is why the ice cream is bad and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s awful. I’m not going to buy your ice cream anymore because your chunks too big. But then they’d also get letters saying, oh, I just love how big your chunks are. It’s one of my favorite things about your ice cream. Keep doing that. In fact, I want them bigger. And Ben or Jerry says, I wish I could just somehow swap the letters so that the people who were complaining about the big chunks would get the letters from the people who love the big chunks and then vice versa. So people could see like, oh, you know, it’s just taste. There’s nothing wrong with the ice cream. It’s just that your taste doesn’t suit it. And that’s fine.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. Well, in terms of creativity, to your point, I always remind myself that a strong voice repels as well as attracts. And that if you’re so innocuous that nobody objects to you, you’re probably catching nobody’s interest either because you’re right. Everything, somebody doesn’t like something. One of the funniest tourist slogans, my whole family grew up in North Platte, Nebraska. So I have a real fondness for Nebraska. And their tourist slogan for a period was, honestly, it’s not for everyone. And I think that’s so funny because it’s like, we love Nebraska, you know, but honestly, it’s not for everyone. And right. And so you can just say like, that’s just not my taste. You don’t have to say like, oh, there’s something wrong with that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Objectively wrong.

Gretchen Rubin: The chunks are too big. The chunks are too small. It’s like, I like a chunkier ice cream.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s so true. Another one that I liked, by trying to save things for a special occasion, we may squander them. Spices go stale, white shirts turn yellow, wine turns to vinegar.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah. No, I mean, I have kind of a hoarding nature. I will save things like I’ll buy a new shirt and I’ll save it or I will get new stationery and I will save it. And I have to remind my, it’s one of my 10 personal commandments is to spend out, meaning like put things into use, like use things up. Because by saving them, you’re often wasting them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so true. Life is for living, money is for spending. Use the good dishes, the good china, don’t save, don’t wait for it.

Gretchen Rubin: Use the good China. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah, so yeah, that’s a good lesson for adulthood to make it more enjoyable.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I had a pair of pants once that I loved so much that I saved them and wore them very sparingly because I wanted to like keep them in really good shape. But then, you know, fashions change. And then all of a sudden I’m like, they’re not great pants anymore. I could have worn them like 10 times more than I did, but I felt like I had to hold them back. But I feel this way creatively. I don’t know if you ever have this where you’re like, I can’t put out all my good ideas. Like if I put in all my good ideas, maybe I’ll run out of ideas. Maybe I need to hold an idea back. My sister, Elizabeth, who’s the co-host of the Happier podcast with me, she’s a television writer. And she said, they always remind themselves, put every good idea in the pilot, put in every good idea that you possibly can. Don’t say like, oh, we’ll put this in episode four, because you may never get to episode four. Use everything up right away and then trust that there will be more. So I think it’s true for the good dishes. It’s literally true, but it’s also true creatively, which is the more that we create, the more we will create.

Brett McKay: All right, here’s another one that I liked. It’s about doing well in life, making a change in the world, an impact on the world. To respect us, people must first notice us. We can’t earn trust and admiration from the sidelines.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, I mean, maybe that’s a little bit of a dark aphorism. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes people are like, oh, I’m silently working away and nobody notices me. Why am I not getting a promotion? It’s like, I think you’ve answered your own question.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’m sure you’ve noticed that as with your career putting out content, you can put out really great stuff, but if you’re not actually promoting it, no one’s gonna know how great the stuff is that you’re putting out.

Gretchen Rubin: I know, I know. I remind people of that all the time because they’re like, well, I don’t like to do that work. I’m like, well, that is part of the work. That isn’t like icing on the cake. If you wanna reach people through your work, you have to do what needs to be done to reach them.

Brett McKay: You gotta hustle. I think Ernest Hemingway is a good example of that. Like he really dedicated to his craft of writing, but the guy knew how to do self-promotion.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh my gosh.

Brett McKay: He created a myth around him.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, and that is, if you read biography of great artists, you usually see that they are tremendously self-promotional. You know, it’s not an accident that they are in the spotlight.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, there was a biography I read about Emerson. You know, we think of Emerson as this kind of sage that he was kind of above self-promotion, but that guy hustled. He was constantly promoting himself, getting himself out on the Lyceum circuit, speaking because he wanted to make a name for himself. And Thoreau, he wasn’t comfortable with that, and he didn’t have the success in his lifetime that he wanted. He actually kind of felt bad about it. I think he felt kind of bad that he didn’t have the admiration that he thought he deserved. Because he was a great writer, he had these great insights, but he just didn’t want to promote himself. And Emerson would get on to him, he was like, you need to get out there, man. But Thoreau was like, I just don’t want to do it. And Thoreau had to die, and then maybe 100 years later, he became famous.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, you know, it’s interesting. For a long time, I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Transcendentalists. So you’re inspiring me to dig up some book and read about them. Because I know a little bit about them, and I certainly admire their writing, but I don’t really know that much about their relationships. And that sounds really interesting.

Brett McKay: Oh, they’re interesting characters. There’s just a lot of bickering between them and sort of envy and comparison going on.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, didn’t Thoreau live with Emerson for a while?

Brett McKay: Yeah, Thoreau was his kid’s babysitter, basically, and handyman. And they were like best friends, but then they would have these falling outs. They’re really interesting characters to read about.

Gretchen Rubin: Okay, you’ve inspired me. I want to, I mean, as an aphorist, you would think I would have spent a lot of time studying the Transcendentalists because those characters are writing aphorisms left and right. And I love their writing, but I have always wanted to know more about their relationships. Okay, you’ve inspired me.

Brett McKay: All right, so another one I liked kind of hit home to me at this point in my life. It is, do you need more time or do you need to make a decision?

Gretchen Rubin: I remind myself of this all the time because the way that I postpone the difficult work of decision-making is sort of saying like, oh, I need to consult someone about that, or I need to talk to my husband about that, or I need to do more research about that. And it’s like, no, you don’t. You just need to make a decision. It’s just a form of procrastination.

Brett McKay: Yeah, usually you already know the answer.

Gretchen Rubin: Or you don’t know the answer, but you know you need to just decide.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a fair point. At that point, you probably just flip a coin. You have to do something.

Gretchen Rubin: You have to do something.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, another one that I liked. Oh, yeah, this was, I really like this one. This is about if you have a decision to make and you don’t know what to do, you have a heuristic and aphorism for it. When uncertain about how to proceed, make the choice that allows you to choose the bigger life.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, this is extremely helpful. I would say of all my secrets of adulthood, this is one of the ones that people most often will say to me has been useful to them. I can’t even remember where I wrote about it first. Maybe in Better Than Before? Anyway, and I’ll give an example from my life where my daughters were begging for a dog and my husband was like, okay, I’d get a dog. He grew up with cats, but he was open to it. But to me, it was a perfect balance because on the one hand, I knew all the happiness research about a dog and how much dogs bring happiness and actually even good health. I knew I had a dog growing up and I love my dog, but then I thought, oh, it’s all those errands and all those responsibilities and then we have to worry about the dog every time we want to leave town and we live in a New York City apartment, so it’s like a whole thing. And I just felt paralyzed because the pros and cons felt very equally balanced. And then I thought, well, choose the bigger life.

 And then the answer was immediately obvious to me, which was that for our family, the bigger life was the life with the dog. Now, somebody else might say, no, the bigger life is the life without a dog because then you could travel, you can be spontaneous, you have more money to spend, like you’re freer. And so that might be the bigger life. But for us, I was like, the bigger life is to get a dog. And we did and we were so happy we got the dog.

Brett McKay: I find that I have to be more intentional about that as I’ve gotten older. Because as you get older, you kind of get complacent, you become a hobbit where you’re just like, I just want to stay in my little hobbit hole and not do any things that’s comfortable. When I was younger, I was like, oh yeah, go do big things because I got nothing to lose. As you’re older, you’re like, oh man, if I do that, there’s going to be a lot of complications, I get the risk. So yeah, I need to make that my mantra. Choose the bigger life.

Gretchen Rubin: Yeah, well, for me relatedly, and this came to me after the book was already done, so I didn’t make it into the book, but I was realizing exactly what you were saying. I would have opportunities to do things, fun things, and I’d be like, gosh, I just don’t even want to deal with scheduling it. It’s like, well, pick a day, then one of us will have to reschedule and it’s just going to be this whole thing and then I’ll have to figure out how to get there. And oh my gosh, in the end, wouldn’t I just rather stay home and read in bed? But then I thought, scheduling is life. Like I say, I hate to schedule, but scheduling is life. Everything that I want to do needs to go onto my schedule. And if I’m not scheduling, then I am just staying home and binge watching The Office, which is, in a sense, my favorite thing to do and certainly the easiest thing to do. But that’s not a good life. Scheduling is life. So that’s how I try to embrace it for myself now.

Brett McKay: I like scheduling. That’s another great aphorism. Scheduling is life.

Gretchen Rubin: Scheduling is life. Volume II.

Brett McKay: Volume II.

Gretchen Rubin: Secrets of adulthood, volume II.

Brett McKay: Let’s do a few more because there’s so many. How many did you include in the book?

Gretchen Rubin: I think there’s a couple hundred.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s awesome. You could just flip to a page and like, here it is for you. I thought this was an interesting one because I think it’s true, but I couldn’t figure out why it’s true. To understand a new place, visit a grocery store.

Gretchen Rubin: Oh, I just think this is such a fun thing to know. If you’re in a new place, it’s just fascinating to visit the grocery store. Like, what is the food? How is it presented? How is it different? It just gives you an insight into a new place. It’s a very fun thing to do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we go to, our family would go to Vermont for the summer, and we’d always go to the, first thing we do when we get there, before we go to the Airbnb, stop by the local grocery store. And it’s always interesting to see what foods they have in New England that they don’t have in Oklahoma. It’s like devil dogs are a thing in New England, not a thing in Oklahoma. Maple cream donuts, thing in Vermont, not a thing in Oklahoma.

Gretchen Rubin: Maple. Everything maple.

Brett McKay: Everything maple.

Gretchen Rubin: But it’s funny because I remember when I went to college, I didn’t realize that there were like regional brands, that there would be brands that other people thought were huge that I had never heard of, like Entenmann’s. This is a thing, and they may have it now, but in Missouri when I grew up, we didn’t have Entenmann’s. And everybody, when I got to college on the East Coast, they were like, how do you not know this? It was like not knowing, you know, Coke. They thought it was this ubiquitous brand, and then there were brands that I knew that they didn’t know. So it is, and then like maple. You’re like, I’m in the land of maple now, and everything will be maple, maple, maple, or I’m in the land of lobster, or I’m in the land of, you know, whatever it might be. It’s fun.

Brett McKay: Here’s another fun one that I agree with. Once a group includes five people, a single conversation is very hard to maintain.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, so you’re reading now from the Simple Secrets of Adulthood. So I have my Transcendent Secrets of Adulthood, which is most of the book, which are what I hope are like deep insights. But as I was writing the book, because I just love hacks, I love a practical tip, I just couldn’t stop myself from making a list of those as well. And when I submitted my manuscript, I thought my editor would be like, Gretchen, these Simple Secrets of Adulthood just don’t belong with the other ones that are so much more transcendent. But she said, oh, these are fun. Let’s include them, like the one about the grocery store, or the one about the five people. This is something that I learned from writing my book, Life in Five Senses. This is called the dinner party problem. It’s a very well-established psychological phenomenon that once a group includes more than four people, it will almost inevitably break into smaller conversations unless you make enormous effort to keep people unified. And if you’ve ever been to like a single topic dinner party or something, you have to tell people that that is the rule and then really enforce it because people just will naturally break into smaller conversations. So it’s a useful thing to think about when you’re approaching a social occasion that that is something that you will encounter.

Brett McKay: I read into this, I agree, I’ve been in conversations where there’s more than five and it just doesn’t work. But also I relate to this rule because I was a waiter in college. I absolutely hated big tops where people get like 20 people and we had to smoosh tables together because it’s just like, why are you doing this? No one’s talking to each other. You’re only talking to the people in front of you and it makes it harder for the waiter. And so whenever I see…

Gretchen Rubin: You know, that is a great point. I guess it’s you want to feel like you’re together, but maybe you’re like, you’ll actually enjoy it more.

Brett McKay: Yes, you’d enjoy it more because after like, you know, two people over, like you have no idea what the other people are saying. And it makes it… Go ahead.

Gretchen Rubin: Well, and also talking across the table would be easier. So in a way you’re less, you feel like you have access to fewer people, but you might actually have access to more.

Brett McKay: Yes, and it’ll make the experience better for you and the waiter because the waiter can actually… It’s just easier to manage. So whenever I go into a restaurant, I see a big top, I’m just like, ugh, people don’t know what they’re doing. They need to stop that. That’s my pet peeve. No big tops.

Gretchen Rubin: But that’s interesting because I do think that our impulse is like, oh, well, we all want to be together and we don’t want anybody to feel like they’re stuck at the wrong table. It feels very high stakes.

Brett McKay: You could be in the same area.

Gretchen Rubin: Right, you could be next to each other.

Brett McKay: Next to each other, but you don’t need to smoosh all the tables together.

Gretchen Rubin: Interesting, I like that. See, and there’s room at the back of the book for people to write their own secrets of adulthood. So that would be what, like, you know, I’m going to write that down myself as a hack. So a lot of times reading these will inspire people to realize that they have their own.

Brett McKay: All right, last one, because I relate to this one a lot. If you don’t know what to do with yourself, go outside or go to sleep.

Gretchen Rubin: I mean, I just feel like that works. That’s just like, that is, to me, one or the other or both. I always am going to feel better.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I have this tendency. You probably have this tendency too. Everyone has this tendency. At nighttime, you’re tired, and then you get stuck on something that you’re just upset about and depressed about. And then because you’re tired, you start ruminating and go down this death spiral. And then my wife usually tell me, just go to bed, just go to bed. And then in the morning, you feel great and you have the answer.

Gretchen Rubin: Yes, yes, absolutely.

Brett McKay: Well, Gretchen, this has been a lot of fun. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Gretchen Rubin: Gretchenrubin.com. There’s links there to my quizzes, the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, the books, all my books, my writing. I have a newsletter, Five Things Making Me Happy. I have an app, I have products, I got all the things. And I love to connect with people on social media. I love to hear people’s observations and questions and resources that they suggest. So follow me on social media. I’m Gretchen Rubin in all the places.

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

Gretchen Rubin: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Gretchen Rubin. She’s the author of the book Secrets of Adulthood. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website Gretchenrubin.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/secretsofadulthood, where you can find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic.

 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for men and women alike. It’s a great way to support the show directly. You can learn more at dyingbreed.net. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think there’s something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Reminding you not to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought-provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition.

If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work, will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the “burnout society” and why so many of us feel tired from participating in what he calls “auto-exploitation” and “positive violence.” We then discuss how our burnout society is also a “palliative society” that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s “last man.” We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual, contemplation, and an openness to the mystery of others.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Byung-Chul Han’s books, including The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society
• Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew B. Crawford
• New Verse Review
• Steven’s work at The Lamp
• Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• Dying Breed Article: What Nietzsche’s Typewriter Brain Can Tell Us About Twitter Brain
• Sunday Firesides: Protect the Sanctum Sanctorum of Selfhood
• Sunday Firesides: We Need as Much Meaning Extension as Life Extension

Connect With Steven Knepper

• Steven at VMI

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Feelings of burnout and boredom have become prevalent in modern life. To understand the roots of and solutions to these issues, we can turn to both ancient philosophers and contemporary thinkers. Among the latter is Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose thought provoking analyses are gaining increasing recognition. If you’re not yet familiar with Han’s philosophy, Steven Knepper a professor at the Virginia Military Institute and the co-author of a new critical introduction to this modern philosopher’s work will take us on a tour of some of Han’s key ideas. In the first part of our conversation, Steven unpacks Han’s concept of the burnout society and why so many of us feel tired for participating in what he calls Auto-Exploitation and Positive Violence. We then discuss how our burnout society is also a palliative society that tries to avoid suffering at all costs and how our obsession with health has turned us into a modern version of Nietzsche’s Last man. We end our discussion with some of Han’s ideas for resisting the pitfalls of modernity, including embracing ritual contemplation and an openness to the mystery of others. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/han.  All right. Steven Knepper, welcome to the show.  

Steven Knepper: Thanks for having me. It’s honored to be here.  

Brett McKay: So you co-authored a book about a modern philosopher that I’ve been seeing more and more of in my readings. This guy named Byung-Chul Han, he’s a German Korean philosopher. For those who aren’t familiar with this guy, who is he and why am I seeing him more and more in my philosophical reading?   

Steven Knepper: Yeah. He is popping up everywhere today on the internet, on social media. So Byung-Chul Han, he is a Korean German philosopher, as you’ve said. He was born in Seoul, Korea. He’s living, I think that’s important to to point out. He’s continuing to write all the time. So, he’s very much a thinker on the move. He’s born in Seoul, Korea. As a younger man he studies metallurgy and is really into engineering, kind of material science. But as a young man studying those, he becomes more and more interested in philosophy and philosophical questions and literature. So he travels to Germany to study abroad and he lets his parents under the impression that he’s gonna continue his material science studies in Germany, but he makes this big move into studying theology, literature, and especially philosophy at the graduate level. So I think that’s just kind of a fascinating thing in and of itself.  

 About 15 years ago now, he had this breakthrough book that is really his turn to more topical problems, problems of the day. And that book was called “The Burnout Society.” And it was a big hit in Germany but it also was relatively quickly translated into a whole bunch of other languages. And Byung-Chul Han, some of your listeners may be familiar with Matthew Crawford, who wrote books like “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” And they might be familiar with arguments about how more and more we live in a society where there’s this war for our attention, where our attention is commodified. And you’ll be in the line at the service station and you get up there to pump your gas and suddenly the gas pump starts talking to you and giving you ads, or even above the urinal there might be ads. So, our attention’s getting pulled more and more in by these digital technologies and certainly all of those kind of more real world examples like the gas pump and the urinal pale beside the smartphone, which is algorithmically tailored to harvest our attention. 

 So Han is a really sharp critic of those kind of dynamics, and I think that’s a big part of the appeal. But he really zooms into on the ways in which, while acknowledging that all these things are designed to catch us, we also kind of catch ourselves. We go along with it, we are very easily encouraged into binge watching or going deeper into email. And he talks about how we auto exploit. And I think that’s what’s really captured people’s mind because I think a lot of people can recognize that in themselves. I know I can. The ways in which we don’t have to be checking work email but we do. The way in which we have a down moment and we pull out that smartphone. I think he’s really an astute critic of that. 

Brett McKay: Okay. So I hope we can talk more about these ideas, these criticisms he has of modern life in depth. And yeah. I’m sure our listeners are familiar with Matthew Crawford. We’ve had him on the podcast a few times, talking about “Shop Class As Soulcraft.” “The World Beyond Your Head.” So I think this will be right up their alley. I’m curious, you’re a professor at the Virginia Military Institute. So, how did a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, where they do drum outs, take an interest in this Korean-German philosopher?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I love VMI. I love working with cadets. As you might expect, they’re very ethically serious and they’re very disciplined and they live in a system that encourages discipline and virtue. But cadets are not immune from some of these same dynamics. They too struggle with screen addiction. They too struggle with being able to focus their attention. And a subset of cadets come to a place like this because they want that structure. They know they need it to succeed. So, in one ways, I think that working at VMI gives me some insight into some of the ways we can deal with these things because VMI, for instance, during their freshman year, what’s called the rat year here, cadets aren’t allowed to use their cell phones. But on the flip side, I think just like if I were teaching anywhere, I can see how my students are struggling with some of these dynamics.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s dig into Han and his philosophy, kind of bigger picture. How would you describe his approach to philosophy? Like what school of philosophy would you put him in? Is he a Aristotelian, an existentialist? What’s Han’s philosophy? How would you describe it? 

Steven Knepper: Yeah. There’s lots of different ways I could answer that question. And he draws on some very different sets of philosophical resources, including Zen Buddhism, including Christian theology at times. But I think I would answer that question for right now in the way that I think really focuses, why he resonates so much with people, is that he comes out of this tradition, especially in German philosophy, that’s very techno skeptical. Sort of earlier critiques even before the digital age that are concerned about instrumental reason, about how we tend to approach the world and other people as things, as objects, as machines. How there’s that reductionism involved in that. How bureaucracy and this technical reason rationalize our lives and organize it but then also might seem like they’re squeezing out room for freedom. So, some figures here you might think of on the left would be someone like Theodor Adorno and on the right would be someone like Martin Heidegger but also German Catholic thinkers like Romano Gordini or Josef Pieper, and Han draws on all these thinkers.  

 But more recently, there’s this turn toward thinking especially about technology and how it shapes the world. So someone like Heidegger is gonna talk about how technology inframes the world, it determines how we see the world in each other itself. There’s something about the way the technology restructures our world and that gets taken up in media theory by people like Marshall Mcluhan outside of Germany and a lot of other media theorists that Han is in dialogue with, who are looking at the ways in which, yeah, technology isn’t just sort of this passive transmitter of information or this tool that we use. Technology and especially communication technologies shape how we see the world often in ways that we’re not aware of and I think we’ve all seen that with the digital. Think about how the experience of smartphones has reshaped how we experience the world, how we experience time. So he’s certainly a philosopher that picks up those concerns and takes them in very interesting and precise ways into our digital present day. 

Brett McKay: Okay. So, yeah. He’s kind of taken a turn towards media theory. And yeah, he does talk about Marshall McLuhan. I’m sure people have heard that phrase, “The medium is the message.”

Steven Knepper: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The idea is there that the tools that we use for media consumption or communication, it shapes the way we think. I did an article about this on our substack called Dying Breed about Nietzsche and the typewriter.

Steven Knepper: Yeah.

Brett McKay: And actually, there was a famous German media theorist that wrote about this, talking about how Nietzsche went blind. And once he went blind, he had to start using a typewriter. And this guy talks about how his writing style changed once he went from writing out by hand to writing with a typewriter. His writing became punchier, became more aphoristic, more bombastic. And so yeah. The same sort of thing happens. I’m sure people have noticed how their emails have changed since they started communicating primarily via email. I remember when I wrote handwritten letters, it kind of flowed and was more stream of conscious, and it was long sentences, and now with email, the medium of email, it’s gotta be short, punchy, and to the point, because that’s how you do email.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And even text messaging, I think, has refigured how we do email. But you might think too about something like how we’ve had this move that’s ongoing from text to video and then from video to short videos. Like on Google now, you can search for short videos. And there’s lots of research that’s emerging about what that’s done to our attention span, how TikTok kind of rewires our brain. And I think that’s a great example of this dynamic. People aren’t aware of how this technology is reshaping how they experience the world but it’s doing it and Han is part of that tradition that’s trying to make that explicit for us.

Brett McKay: Okay. So Han, he is trying to figure out why modern life can feel just weird, overwhelming, boring. Sometimes you just feel like you’re in this rat race and you can’t get out of it. It feels fast. So let’s dig into this more because I think everyone’s listening to that has probably experienced that. Let’s talk about that book you’d mentioned that was his breakout book, “The Burnout Society.” What is his central diagnosis of modern life in that work?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So he emphasizes in “The Burnout Society” that when it comes to feeling burnout, which is this new phenomenon that many, many people feel burnout, even though if you look at statistics, at least in the developed world, we have more “free time” than any other generation that came before us. But we often have this feeling of being run ragged, of being burnout, and he describes it to what he calls this achievement culture, where we have this sense of an open-ended possibility. There are all these things we could do, so therefore we try to do as many of them as we can. And we get hooked on these little doses of dopamine, on these little often quantified metrics of achievement. So this might play out in social media, where you’re looking for a certain number of friends or a certain number of likes. You post something and then you wait for the notifications to roll in and you get your little hit, but quickly it diminishes and you feel like you need to post something else, and it goes on and on and on and before you know it, how much time have you spent in that sort of strange little dynamic?

 It might play out in sort of being a workaholic at the office, where you’re checking your email even when your boss doesn’t expect you to. You’re answering emails, you’re impatient when other people aren’t answering emails outside the usual business hours. It could play out even at the gym, he says, where you become super fixated on numbers and on sort of micromanaging your achievement there. So, he sees it playing out in all these different areas. And I think it’s particularly interesting how he talks about how it plays out not just in those meritocratic spaces like being a super high achiever at work, but it infiltrates our entertainment. So, you feel like you’re just sitting down to watch a video, you know, to relax at evening, and you end up absolutely vegging out on the couch and autoplay binging half a series in one night. This is a pretty common experience now. And certainly the technology itself facilitates it with autoplay but he sees it too as this sense of, well, we could watch just this next one, it’s all there to stream right now. And so we end up doing it. So there’s a way in which, in pursuing more and more and more, we burn ourselves out.

 And in all this pursuit of more and more and more, what’s missing is a sense of, okay, what’s a good healthy balanced life looks like? What is a good sense of limits when it comes to these things? The open-ended injunction to achieve doesn’t give us any places to rest, doesn’t give us a sense of when we’ve accomplished something, doesn’t give us this robust telos to pursue. And of course, who benefits from this? Well, certainly advertisers do, on the internet. Clicks are money. Attention is money. But he’s very astute about how we have this, what he calls auto-exploitation.

Brett McKay: Yeah. let’s talk about that. So, auto-exploitation or sometimes it’s translated self-exploitation. And then he talks about this idea of positive violence. I think they’re kind of connected. What does he mean by self-exploitation and positive violence, and how does that connect with this idea of the achievement society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. What he means by positive violence, and that’s a strange little term in some ways. So negative violence would be coercion by outside forces. Someone forcing you to do something, someone threatening you so that you do something. “Check your email at these hours or you’ll be fired.” That would be kind of a negative pressure. Han would say that positive violence is stuff that we do to ourselves. So, it’s when we, in the pursuit of achievement, we just go and go and go and go and go. That’s what he means by positive violence. And he sees this move happening with kind of the dawn of the digital age from what he calls a disciplinary society that’s about rules and injunctions and negative discipline, he sees that giving way in a lot of senses to this positive exploitation. More and more, instead of telling us what not to do, powers that be, economic powers, political powers, are gonna encourage us to do more. And often it’s framed as, this is good for you, why wouldn’t you want to do more? But of course, this just serves some institutions, some companies, really, really well, but it can have a big toll on society and on individuals in the society that suffer burnout, fragmentation, feelings of Isolation, all these things that can come as negative consequences of the achievement society, according to Han.

Brett McKay: Okay. This actually reminds me of this idea of positive violence and self-exploitation in the achievement society and how we’re doing this to ourselves, trying to improve ourselves because we feel like we should because we can. Those are potentials that we can pursue. But then they can be used by other people or other businesses or governments for their own ends. We did a podcast a really long time ago about the happiness industry, about these consultants that come into companies and say, “Hey, we’re gonna develop a wellness program for your employees where we’re gonna have meditation sessions and you can have a nap room.” And it sounds like, “Oh, it’s great. It’s for the employees. It’ll improve morale.” But really,it’s like, well, we want to do that so we can get more out of our employees.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. Precisely. And in the book, The Critical Introduction that I co-authored, we talk about office space. And if you remember that movie, great movie with Jennifer Aniston’s character where she works at this restaurant where they have to wear these flare, like these buttons all over their uniform and be really bubbly and excited as they go about their job. And her manager at one point says to her, “You’re only wearing the minimum allowed amount of flare. Don’t you want to wear more? Don’t you want to wear more?” And it’s pitched as, why wouldn’t you want to do this? But it’s so clearly kind of degrading and coercive underneath the surface. So that’s maybe an extreme example but I think it’s a pretty good example of something that was already going on way back when office space was produced but I think has become much more prevalent in the time since then.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Because of the digital technologies, you see social media influencers like, hey, I’m living my best life and here’s what I do. Here’s the routine I follow to live my best life and you can do this too. And it’s like, man, that’s a lot to do when I’ve got a job and kids and other responsibilities, but you try to do it because you’re living in that achievement society.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And I think that one thing I        would like to specify, and I wish that Han would do more of this in his own writing, but I don’t think that the problem, at least from my view, maybe he would disagree with this, but I don’t think the problem is wanting to have a set of disciplines that pursue a goal, like fitness, working out, or trying to learn something new. I mean, all of these can be good things but what makes them pernicious in Han’s view is when you don’t have this ideal that you’re aiming at, which will sort of let you know when you’ve got there. You don’t have this sense of direction. You don’t have this sense that you’re aiming at flourishing. You are just sort of going from hit to hit to hit on these many achievement rubrics. And what gets lost is this rich notion of flourishing or this balanced life. And so, I mean, I think that’s what art of manliness is really good about. Certainly, you give people fitness tips and you give people time management tips. But again and again, you come back to this robust notion of what flourishing should look like. And I think that if you take that seriously, that actually counteracts the achievement society..

Brett McKay: Yeah. Maybe you could put it this way. In the achievement society, we tend to treat means as ends because we don’t have an ultimate end, really.

Steven Knepper: I think that’s a fantastic way of putting it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve seen this in my own life. I mean, a perfect example, I’ve talked about this before on the podcast and in my writing. You know, I was a power lifter for a while, really got into it. And I was always chasing the next PR. And it was fine for a while but then a couple of years ago, I was getting to the point where in order to increase the weight on the bar, I was just having to train harder and harder and it was just causing a lot of stress, physical. It beat me down. And I got to the point it’s like, I can’t do this anymore. This is no longer enjoyable. So, I still train but I’m not chasing numbers. I’m just training so I just feel good and because I enjoy it.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And one thing that Han emphasizes elsewhere in his works, I mean, so far we’ve talked about his diagnosis of our society’s problems but his books are kind of split between those more diagnostic works and works where he’s recommending some practices that will help counter this. And he’s written a lot about ritual and the importance of ritual. Ritual trains our attention. It allows our attention to be more robust. It gives time a shape. And you think about how traditional practices of exercise, you know, we might think about like, say martial arts, how there’s this ritualistic dimension to it and this communal dimension to it. And I think that’s the antidote, that’s not part of the problem. But there is this tendency for achievement society, if we use Hans terms, to take even good things and kind of twist them away from substantive ends to means, means, means, or many, many goals that don’t provide sort of lasting satisfaction or a sense of closure or pacing but you just chase one after another after another.  

Brett McKay: An example I just thought of as you were mentioning that we, where we take something that we maybe enjoyed for the thing itself and then turn it into achievement society thing, like a hobby. You see this happen all the time where someone has this hobby that they’re really passionate about and then they start sharing it on social media because they love it, but then it turns into a business for them and then their hobby becomes this means to gain influence and money and it kind of kills the joy of the hobby. 

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. And we might think about other things too. So, Han recommends contemplative practices as something that are especially important in our distracted attention divided present day. But you think about how like a certain practice of something like yoga or even daily prayer can be just another thing on the to-do list that you’re using as like a bandaid to sort of manage the worst feelings of being burned out or stressed or to allow you to just squeeze out a little more achievement. And that’s not sort of the transformative practice that Han’s recommending to really counteract this achievement society. But it can be sort of co-opted as part of the regimen.  

Brett McKay: There’s this great phrase that Han has, I think it’s in “The Burnout Society.” He says that people today are tired from not being able to be themselves. What does he mean by that? And how does the achievement society contribute to that tiredness?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that there’s many ways you could approach that but I think that Han has had this qualm about present-day society and the achievement society but he also sees some tendencies towards this in Western philosophy and Western society for a long time. He thinks that there’s often this unconscious kind of egotism to it, where you’re focused on being the best you. And for a lot of people to even question that just sounds insane. This is the mantra by which they live and by which they exhort others. But one of the dangers with that is that you never really know when you’ve reached prime you and also, often by sort of being so focused on you, you don’t open yourself up to other people or to the world or to great works of art or literature or ideas. You know, everything’s about self-maximization or it’s about that next little bit of achievement. And not only is that really bad ethically because we need to be attentive to others, Han doesn’t quote, as far as I know, Iris Murdoch, the great British novelist and philosopher, but he would agree with her that in some ways ethics begins with attention. We gotta be able to sort of give people our attention in order to treat them well. So there’s this ethical downside but there’s also this paradox in which the achievement society, it seems like you’re doing this all for your own benefit, but it feels so thin and you feel like you’re burning out. Whereas really, if you open yourself up to others and you have substantive relationships with other people or if you pursue kind of a disciplined practice that gives your life shape or religious practice, those things open up a depth of meaning and a depth of satisfaction but you only can access those if you let go of the ego, if you dialect the ego, if you make yourself receptive to them. When you get out of the way, then meaning can be discovered.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that phrase, tired from not being able to be themselves, it made me think of Kierkegaard and his notion of despair. And he had this idea that we have this idea of ourself as it should be. And I think he talks about someone who’s really ambitious, and it’s either you gotta be Caesar or nothing.

Steven Knepper: Yeah.

Brett McKay: So it’s like, if you can’t be Caesar, then it’s just you’re worthless. And I think Han would agree with that. We have this idea in our modern world that we got to be the absolute best and if we can’t do that, we’re worthless and then we just fall into this funk and we’re depressed. And yet Han, I think, he argues in “The Burnout Society” a lot of the depression that we see in the modern world, yes, he would agree that maybe there’s some biological components. Some people are just depressed because of something biological going on in themselves. But he argues that a lot of depression, people just feeling down and just in a funk, it’s because we are striving so hard to be this awesome thing that we think we should be because the achievement society tells us we need to be and we’re not reaching that, even though we’re trying really hard, we just get burned out and we’re just like, “Okay. I’m just gonna give up.”

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And my co-author, Rob Wiley, he’s a great Kierkegaard scholar. And I think part of what drew him to Han is that even though Han doesn’t “Kierkegaard that much” there’s a lot of shared sensibility. And I think one of the things is this notion of perhaps the most dangerous kind of despair is the despair that you’re not aware of. You’re not aware you’re in it. And I think he sees that as plaguing a lot of us that are caught up in this achievement society.

Brett McKay: So we mentioned that technology plays a major role in Han’s critique of modern life. How does he see digital technology, especially smartphones and social media, contributing to the burnout society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a great question. And my other co-author, Ethan Stoneman, this is really his wheelhouse. And one of the things that he points out is that really Han doesn’t turn to engaging digital technology fully until after the burnout society. That’s when you see him start referencing thinkers like Marshall McLuhan. That’s when you see him really giving attention to how smartphones have reshaped our experience of the world. So, I think the burnout society is still a great place to start with Han. But if you’re interested in the technology, you wanna look at some of those later works where he really goes in-depth on how technology is feeding into this achievement society mentality. But even in “The Burnout Society” he’s already talking about how the smartphone can be kind of like a portable, a mobile labor camp where we are just always pulling it out in any down moment and clicking, clicking, clicking. I think too, on social media, one of the things that he is insightful about is that there’s this drive to make yourself transparent on it, to sort of share everything about your life, everything that’s going on. And certainly, that’s really good for marketers because behind the scenes they’re creating intricate profiles for each user that they can then sell to other companies.

 But also cumulatively, it creates the sense that humans are really these thin things, that an online profile captures who we are as a person, and sort of the depth and mystery of the individual gets lost. You might think about something like dating apps, which I know lots of people that have met the love of their life on these, so I’m not trying to sort of just categorically dismiss them but there’s this real danger with them that you think that if you match with some preferences online, that when you meet the person, that you already know them or that you know there’s a compatibility there and you can lose track of that mystery of the other person. And of course, too, when we create online personas, we can either be consciously or unconsciously performing a persona that’s not really us. So, Han worries about how it creates this thinned out version of self and other. And he’s a big proponent of recovering real-world relationships, real-world friendships, where you can’t just sort of ghost each other if you don’t like how the conversation’s going, or where you might have to dwell in silence for a few moments when you’re sitting together at the restaurant, and where there might be this real tension. Where the other person might call you out or you might sort of need to stick with each other through hard times. All of these, he thinks awaken us to a richer sense of ourselves and others as having this unfathomable dimension of otherness or mystery. He thinks we hunger for that. Yeah, I do too.

Brett McKay: For sure. Yeah. Han’s critique about transparency I thought was really interesting because yeah, you see this ethos particularly online and social media, where you got to be transparent. So yeah. It benefits the social media companies. They get more information about you so they can sell ads to you. But also you see this ethos from the people themselves taking part in social media. There’s this idea that if you have a following, like your followers demand transparency from you. You got to let them know everything about you. Like, what are your thoughts about this issue? And tell me about your family life and your problems. And you get rewarded if you reveal things about yourself. Oh, thanks for being real. And you’re just so authentic. And Kierkegaard makes this argument too in the present age. He makes this comment how people, he was writing in the 1800s and he was writing about how people would talk about their personal lives very freely in the public, like in newspapers and essays and things like that but then when they were actually with people face to face, they wouldn’t reveal those things. Like they would just suddenly become very reticent and they wouldn’t talk about those deep personal things, but they had no problem sharing it with the mass audience.

 And Kierkegaard said somehow that that hurts being a self. Like you can’t become a self and an individual unless you have, he calls it a sanctum sanctorum, like a holy of holies that only you can go into. Because if you’re just living your life out in public, you’re constantly shaping yourself to fit what the public wants, so you can get the followers and the likes, et cetera

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s spot on. So it’s kind of interesting. This might feel like a bit of a digression but there’s this Emily Dickinson poem that I teach most semesters. It’s very short. It’s called, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Actually, it’s not the title. It’s just the first line that’s taken as the title. But it goes, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell, they’d advertise you know. How dreary to be somebody. How public like a frog, to tell one’s name to live long June to an admiring bog.” It’s a great poem, right?

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Steven Knepper: You know, especially today, students on their own immediately go to social media. But with that idea of transparency in mind, what does the frog do again and again and again? They say their same name over and over. But in this poem, Dickinson suggests that the nobodies that are behind the scenes that have a sense of privacy, they’re the ones that actually have mystery, depth, something interesting and new to say. So I think that that poem like way before we have digital technology is on to something about how always making yourself transparent kind of thins you out and loses something important.

Brett McKay: Another thing that Han explores is the role of boredom in modern life. What role does boredom play in Han’s critique of modern life and what does he mean by boredom?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. That’s a fantastic question because there’s a couple different types of boredom at play. One type of boredom is this restlessness that we have no patience for whatsoever. So, if you’re waiting at the bus stop and you have a down moment, probably you’re gonna feel an itch to pull out your phone if you’re like most people. So, we want to fill up every moment with something and we have no tolerance for that restless boredom. But Han actually is a big advocate of this deeper sense of boredom, profound boredom, where you let go of the restlessness and you sink into the moment and you just open yourself up. And he thinks that that kind of state is really important today because that’s the kind of state where new ideas might come from you or where you might notice stuff around you. Certainly if you’re an artist, that’s where inspiration might strike. So he thinks that this kind of profound boredom, that a lot of us that were lucky enough to grow up pre-digital, you know, as kids I think we reached this state often because you go through the restless boredom like, “Oh man, I’ve got all day, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’m tired of all my toys.” And you don’t have anything, any recourse. So over time you might come up with like an imaginative game or you might go out on a walk and you sort of sink into this more receptive open state.

 So, those are the two states of boredom in Han. Now I’m not sure this is exactly everything that’s going on and this might be only a partial answer to why he’s interested in that profound boredom. But I think Han, since he’s such a great diagnostician of what’s wrong with society, one of the things that he’s aware of is that, okay, if we’re already feeling really burned out because of this achievement society, what if we just let go of that compulsion to achieve in the midst of the burnout? Maybe there’s not that big of a gap between feeling exhausted and that profound boredom. And if we could just allow ourselves to sink into that, then maybe the antidote is much closer to the state of our problem than we think. So I think that’s maybe part of the reason why he’s so interested in profound boredom. There’s a qualitative leap between the burnout state and profound boredom but maybe the divide in another sense isn’t that far apart.

Brett McKay: Maybe it’s kind of like hair of the dog where you have to kind of lean into it a little bit more to figure out what it is you lack and really need.

Steven Knepper: Yeah, I think so. And you can see him sort of trying out different approaches to our problems. So, post-burnout society, he also starts to talk a lot more about openness to the other, and Eros is this thing that draws us out of ourself towards the other or towards the world. So here too, I mean, I think he thinks that, okay, we’re seeking all this fake community online, and he’ll talk about online community as often seeming like you’re encountering other people but really because of algorithms and really because you still kind of mediate that encounter, he says you’re actually trapped in kind of a mirror world. You’re trapped in what he calls the hell of the same, where if you really want to encounter other people you often have to go into the real world where there’s a little more risk and uncertainty in the encounter but there’s also the sense of depth and a richer possibility of a relationship. Martin Buber is another thinker that’s important to him. And Martin Buber will say things like when you enter into a real relationship with the other person, the relationship itself is bigger than the sum of its parts. It’s not just you and me, there’s now a we. And Han will say similar things. But you have to sort of open yourself up to that for that to happen. And he thinks a lot of people are seeking that on the internet but it’s pretty hard to find on the internet.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So, we’ve talked about “The Burnout Society” so we’re all feeling kind of burned out, according to Han, because we live in this achievement society that has this, we call it ethic of self-exploitation or auto-exploitation, where we’re pursuing things not because we have to but it’s this idea, well, you could do it, so you need to do it, and we have these tools that allow us to measure ourselves and make progress but you can never know when you actually reach that best self. And so you just get tired and burned out and it can cause boredom too because some of that stuff that you’re constantly doing can just wear you down and it can be boring. I want to talk about another book that he wrote, it’s a short one, called “The Palliative Society.” This is another critique he makes on modern culture. What does he mean by the Palliative Society?

Steven Knepper: So, in this book, his main argument is that there’s something seriously out of whack about our relationship to pain as a society. He sees our society as not just an achievement society but one that tries to avoid pain and suffering at all costs. And of course, Han thinks that in many cases, yeah, we want to try to reduce pain and disease, we want to try to reduce pain in all kinds of areas of life, but one of the dangers here is that to be human it means you’re gonna undergo pain. So if we get to the point where we think pain is always a problem, a problem to be solved with a technical solution, then what happens when you run into a situation where the pain can’t be solved? Maybe someone’s dying. And he thinks we’re really bad at accompanying people through painful situations. I think that’s probably true. But then Han would also say that many areas of life require pain in order to reach a higher level. So, you think again about physical fitness. This is one of the few areas in our society where I think that you still see some embrace of pain as a necessary step. In order to become a better athlete, you’ve gotta train hard, you’ve gotta suffer. But Han points out too that in education, you know, he’s a philosopher. To be a good philosopher, he says, you’ve gotta confront ideas that challenge your own. You’ve gotta wrestle with difficult ideas that make you uncomfortable. And it’s hard work and it’s painful.

 I would say the same is true. I’m a words guy. I’m an English professor through and through. But mathematics, you know, mathematics at a certain level becomes really tough. And in order to get through it, you’ve gotta be willing to sort of suffer through the hard work to get there. And then maybe most importantly, think about relationships. Think about a good marriage or a good friendship or with kids. Those relationships, there’s gonna be time when that loved one is suffering and they need you and it’s gonna be unpleasant to go through that with them. So any kind of real love entails suffering. And that’s ancient wisdom, that a lot of people would pay lip service to but actually, our vocabulary and our practices for dealing with that have gotten really thinned out. And he thinks that we basically live in a society that avoids pain.

For him, the COVID pandemic really revealed that because after the opening stages, when we got a better sense of what’s going on with this disease, he saw kind of an overreaction in all kinds of areas. We might think about schools shut down for kids long after we knew that this disease, thankfully, for the most part, wasn’t that threatening to children. And this strange way in which we couldn’t sort of balance that this is a tragic situation, that there’s gonna be negative outcomes no matter which way we go. He saw this as kind of failing the test in a pretty profound way. And he traces it back, at least in part, to this inability to deal with suffering and to sort of think about pain in an adjusted way.

Brett McKay: You mentioned that you think our vocabulary around pain and suffering has been thinned out. What are some examples of that off the top of your head?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, I mean, I think we see it in all kinds of areas. And there have been some really good contrary trends to this. But I think that when you think about parenting and how for a few decades now we’ve had the phenomenon of helicopter parents. Whenever your kid has problems, there’s a real not even just temptation but almost expectation from other parents, you might think, to jump in there and smooth it out for your kid. And sometimes that’s the right thing to do. Sometimes there’s situations the kids are in that they can’t deal with and they need adults to step in. But also there’s a way in which if you want your kid to be an adjusted adult, they’ve gotta learn how to suffer through some situations. They’ve gotta grow in toughness and courage. And I think we’re pretty poor at that kind of vocabulary. I think too. It’s really tough. It’s tough for me. And I’m a religious guy from a tradition that keeps some of these things more alive. But it’s really hard to accompany family members that are in deep sickness and on their way to death. It’s hard to know how to talk to them and it’s probably always been hard. But I think it’s become especially hard in our day where we tend to close that away in retirement homes and hospitals. So, those are some examples.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Another one that came to the top of my head was you saw this a couple years ago. I think you’re seeing a trend away from it. But the idea of trigger warnings in classrooms when you’re discussing heavy topics like sexual assault or crime or whatever, you’ve got to give a trigger warning to people. I think that might be another example of like, Han would say, this is an example of the palliative society and we want to reduce and eliminate pain as much as possible, even though to really understand an experience, you have to confront everything, even the terrible parts of it.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And Han would say, life itself is gonna throw up these really hard situations. So certainly in classrooms, you shouldn’t handle difficult material flippantly or brusquely. You should try to be sort of sensitive about it. But one of the ways, the reasons to study the humanities is to study the tragic and help you then process it when you have to encounter it in your own life. So, if you just sort of immediately bracket that off, then one of the main reasons that the humanities is important goes away. And people end up suffering more as a result for that, I’d say.

Brett McKay: Yeah. You become fragilized. We had the guy who wrote “The Coddling of the American Mind” or something like that. He writes about that. I would like to talk about this. I think it’s in “The Palliative Society.” Han has this kind of throwaway line. He didn’t really explain it or follow it, and I wish he did because that’s actually really interesting. He talks about this idea of the palliative society and wanting to eliminate pain. He likens it to the last man from Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” And he said that the last man is actually obsessed with their health. Do you know what I’m talking about when he wrote this? Can you flesh that out? Because I think that’s really interesting.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. And just a sort of a broader point. I think that one legit frustration that people can have with Han is that since he writes these shorter extended essay-like books, sometimes there will be these lines that almost feel like throwaway lines. You’re like, “Oh, I wish he would have just fleshed that out.” I think that’s a pretty common experience. His relationship to Nietzsche is a really interesting and complex one because one way of thinking about Nietzsche, and there’s certainly abundant textual evidence to think about this, is as this great philosopher of the will and of action. But he brings out a more contemplative side to Nietzsche and he pulls out these passages that show him emphasizing the importance of contemplation, of being able to have real repose. So that’s an interesting thing. But yeah. I think that he thinks that the last man is obsessed with health and obsessed with their own happiness in such a way that it has that unconscious egotism about it and also becomes very fragile and can’t face up to the tragic side of life, the suffering of life, and the suffering of others.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When I read that it made me think of, you know, we live in this world of wellness culture where we have all these devices and supplements we can take and there’s this talk about, we’ve got to extend our lifespan. And I’m thinking, like, why? Like, what are we doing with that? I mean, health is important. I’m not trying to dismiss health but it seems like we’ve made health an end rather than a means to a higher telos.

Steven Knepper: I think that’s exactly correct. And yeah. I don’t think the problem is that you want to be healthy or that you want to reduce suffering from disease or unjust circumstances or things like that. I think that’s all to the good and important. But I do think that one danger of sort of fetishizing health too much is that any risk becomes unacceptable or any difficulty becomes something to avoid. And that just really thins out life because so many of the things that make life most meaningful. And I think too, it’s important to make that distinction between kind of pleasantness and meaning. Often deep meaning, you know, you think about a Buddhist monk or a saint, you know, deeply meaningful life but one that’s full of asceticism and challenge.

Brett McKay: So, we’ve been talking about some of Han’s critiques and sort of diagnoses of modern life, and that’s what he’s most famous for. He’s a diagnostician. But as you said, we’ve been talking about it throughout the conversation, he does offer some potential antidotes to this feeling of burnout, this feeling of boredom, this feeling of flatness in modern life. And one of those things you mentioned was this idea of Eros and that we need to return to this idea of Eros. I think a lot of people, lay people, when they hear the word Eros, they think, oh, sex. But that’s not what Han means. What does Han mean by Eros and how can that help us out of the burnout society?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So his notion of Eros goes back to Plato but I think he definitely puts his own spin on it. But it’s this notion of Eros as this desire that draws us out of ourself towards some other good. So, he would distinguish that from the kind of lower level base desire gratification that often the internet trades on. You want to get those likes or yeah, if we want to talk about sex, pornography, literally masturbatory interaction with the internet. Whereas real Eros, yeah, you’re drawn outside of yourself towards the other and when you really encounter another person or you encounter the world, you realize that it’s bigger than your project. It doesn’t exist just for you. You discover this depth and richness and mystery. And so, yeah. When it comes to erotic relationships, sexual relationships, relationships of erotic love, he’d say that, yeah, there’s a big difference between that transactional kind of pornographic interaction and one where you’re attracted to the other person as a three-dimensional person and as a mystery. But he would also use Eros broadly as, well, we’re attracted to the beauties of the world or we’re drawn out of ourself into friendship. So, it’s much, much bigger than sex for sure.

Brett McKay: All right. So yeah. Eros takes us out of ourselves. So yeah. This kind of goes back to Matthew Crawford’s idea of the world beyond your head. If you really want to become a self, you have to get outside of yourself. And for Crawford, he talks a lot about the role craft can play in drawing you out of yourself, kind of get out of this morbid self-consciousness. But that can also happen through relationships, can come from looking at art, can come from spending time in nature. And another concept related to Eros that I thought was really interesting from Han was that if we want to open ourselves to those erotic encounters where we’re drawn out of ourselves, we have to have this stance of friendliness to the world. I really like this idea. What does he mean by friendliness?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, this is an idea that runs from his thinking from the very early untranslated works in German right through his most recent work. And what he means by friendliness is kind of this intent of openness to the world and to other people. So, sometimes he’ll use this language, especially when he’s drawing resources from Zen Buddhism, he’ll talk about becoming a guest house to the world, where you’re just kind of open to the world. And he sees this as a friendly stance. I think he’s really good at drawing attention to all these ways that when we’re in our phone, we’re literally closed off from other people in the world. Or when we’re all up in our head, again, coming back to Matthew Crawford, you can be walking down the street and maybe you’re not looking at your phone, maybe you don’t have headphones on, but you’re so wrapped up in your head, you’re not aware of anything that’s going around you or aware of anyone around you. So to have this friendly disposition towards the world is the stance of openness.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This made me think of Hartmut Rosa. He’s on my mind because we’ve talked about him on the podcast before but I also did another article from my substack, Dying Breed, about his idea of resonance. And he had this idea of resonance being like, you’re open to the world or the outside world talking to you and it kind of transforms you. And he makes the case that we have a hard time feeling that sense of resonance because we see the world as just aggression points. There’s things we got to do. So, like the example I gave, when I’m in my house, I’m constantly looking around like, all right, we need to fix that thing. This thing needs to be painted. We need to declutter that. I’m hardly ever just thinking, I’m just gonna be in my home and just enjoy my home. We can even see other people as aggression points, things we gotta do things with. Like, what can this person do for me? Or someone’s having a hard time and they open up to you, we think like, well, okay, I got a lot to do, what can I do just to get through this as quickly as possible so I can get on with my life? So we go, they’re there. Okay. You’ll be all right. And we just send the person on their way.

 And Rosa would say like, no, you have to actually kind of have a stance where you’re open to like, okay, just let this person who’s saying they’re sad just be there with them. You don’t have to fix anything. Just be there. And you might have this moment where like both of you feel like you’re edified in some way. I think maybe Han would agree with that. Like, instead of seeing the world as points of aggression, you’re just open to the thing or the person as they are.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And Rosa is a thinker that’s become much more important to me too or that I should say that I’ve just discovered more fully, even after writing this book, even though Rosa gets cited in here. And I think that as you suggest, Rosa and Han are approaching some similar things from somewhat different angles. And I think that’s useful because just like anything, if you look at it from one angle and then look at it from another angle, you’re gonna get a richer picture. But I think Rosa, he has this great insight that as moderns, we really like control. We want to eliminate as much contingency or risk from our lives as possible. We want more and more things to be under our control. And there’s something that’s understandable about that but there’s a real danger when it becomes as exaggerated as it has become for us, in that, to have a really rich relationship with something, to have a true relationship that has a back and forth, a resonant relationship as Rosa would say, then you’ve gotta relinquish control in order to have that sense of a meaningful relationship with a friend.

You can’t be all about controlling everything about the friendship and manipulating it, or that’s just gonna be a disaster in addition to being unethical to the friend. But also, we have this deep hunger to connect with nature but at the same time, we struggle to operate on any level other than, yeah, controlling it. So yeah. So Rosa thinks that we have to let go of this modern urge for control in order to see problems and fix them, in order to open up these richer spaces, these resonant spaces. In your example of someone that’s suffering, you don’t always need to fix the problem, you just need to be with them. That’s a good example of that.

Brett McKay: Does Han offer any sort of practical… I mean, Han would be like, “You can’t reduce my philosophy to a list of things to do” because he’s like, that’s kind of counter to what I want to say. But are there like some practical ways people can start countering this burnout society, this feeling of tiredness for just the everyday person? We’ve got jobs, families, and phones that never stop pinging us.

Steven Knepper: Yeah. I think so. And I think there are actually a lot of different practicalities and possibilities that he offers throughout his works. I think that he would bristle against the idea that he’s some kind of high theory self-help, in part because he’s challenging you to not just sort of make these small adjustments in order to achieve better in the achievement society, he’s calling for these more radical transformations and he thinks that’s where you’ll find deeper solutions. And certainly too, he’d like to see some more widespread changes in society to cultivate these things. But that said, one of the things I love about Han is that, he writes like editorials about the problems that teenagers in schools are facing in Germany. And one of the reasons he writes these short books is that he really does want to speak to non-academics about their problems. And I think that’s another reason why he’s become so popular. So yeah. Some of these possible remedies to achievement, to burnout, I think one is just cultivating that sense of openness. When you’re at the bus stop or you’re walking down the street or whatever, and you have this urge or there’s a lull in the conversation, and you have this temptation to pull out the phone, don’t pull it out.

 And if you really struggle with those things, Han doesn’t say this, but I think it’s a corollary of his positions. Yeah, go with a dumb phone or leave the phone at home. I think too, he has like long sections about how to be a good listener in his book, “The Expulsion of the Other.” I think too, things like, okay, maybe you’ve got a friend that’s going through a hard time, put yourself in that situation where you’re accompanying them through it. So these are all some things that come through. One we haven’t touched on much that I’ll add is that Han talks a lot about ritual and certainly talks about religious ritual and how one of the advantages of that is that it gives time a shape. So every day isn’t just the same empty box in which you fill it up with achievement but you have things like the Sabbath or you have festivals that give time a shape. And even if you’re not religious, you can try to recover a more variegated sense of time. So those are some practical possibilities.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He talks about meditation could potentially be one but like he said, well, don’t use a meditation app where it tracks your streak of how many days in a row you’ve meditated. You’re in achievement society mode if you do that. But just take a few minutes where you just sit there and contemplate something. I think looking at art, going to a museum just to stare at something for half an hour, that could do it. Being out in nature can be another source of that as well.

Steven Knepper: Learn how to tolerate silence. Learn how to be alone and not on technology and just be an observer.

Brett McKay: How has engaging with Han’s work changed the way you live personally?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m certainly someone that struggles with screens. And I have my periods where I do really well with it and others that I don’t do so well. So yeah. I think that studying Han is for me too, it’s become a way of trying to get a better grasp of some of these things in my own life. And yeah. I can remember times like, you know, it’ll be a beautiful evening and my kids are in a ballet practice and I’m outside here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are absolutely gorgeous. And there’s this great sunset, and I’m on my phone? Like doing what? That was one of the moments that just got to me and it’s like, yeah, this is bad. Changes need to be made. Changes need to be made for the sake of other people in my life but also for my own sake and having this richer experience of the world. So Han’s been a really important philosopher to me. And I probably got into him in some ways via Matthew Crawford. I knew Crawford’s work first. That really spoke to me. And I could see Han picking up on some similar themes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think that’s interesting. Han started off in metal work and then he became a philosopher and Crawford, he’s like a motorcycle guy, motorcycle mechanic, and then he went into philosophy. So yeah. They’re similar in that way. If someone wanted to dive into Han’s philosophy for the first time, where should they begin?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So, “The Burnout Society” still is a pretty good place to begin but I think some of these more recent works are great entry points too. I wouldn’t be surprised if many Art of Manliness listeners liked “The Palliative Society.” I think that’s a good book. Another recent one called “Vita Contemplativa” which focuses on contemplation as an antidote to burnout. I think that’s another good place to start. And certainly, I’d put in a plug for our critical introduction. Han’s written over 30 books and some of those aren’t even translated into English yet. So, what our critical introduction tries to do is give some through lines across Han’s body of work, situate him in among some other thinkers, show how he speaks to contemporary problems both in the ones that he addresses in his book and some others that we identify. So, it’s an academic book but it’s one that’s definitely pitched at the general reader with a little bit of background in philosophy should be able to navigate.

Brett McKay: Well, Steven, this has been a great conversation. Besides your book that listeners can find on Amazon, is there some place they can go to learn more about your work in general?

Steven Knepper: Yeah. So I’m working on an author website but I don’t have that up yet. But two places they might go. One is I edit this online poetry journal, “New Verse Review” which has kind of an eclectic focus. So, it touches on some of these questions about attention and contemplation for sure. But then the other place that you might look is, I’ve written a few pieces for The Lamp magazine that touches on similar themes, including I have an overview of Han that I wrote for that magazine. So if you go there and just search my pieces, that’s another, I think, good place. .

Brett McKay: Great. We’ll link to those in the show notes. Well, Steven Knepper, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Steven Knepper: Thank you very much. It’s an honor.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Steven Knepper. He’s the co-author of “A Critical Introduction” of Byung-Chul Han. It’s available on amazon.com. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/han, where you’ll find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. It’s for both men and women alike. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more. And that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours — from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk — can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.

Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up!: Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be and what happens to your body when, as the average American does, you spend two-thirds of your day sitting. He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how to easily incorporate more NEAT into your day.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Role of Nonexercise Activity Thermogenesis in Resistance to Fat Gain in Humans — James’ overfeeding study
• AoM Article: The Digestive Power of an After-Dinner Walk
• AoM Podcast #552: How to Optimize Your Metabolism
• AoM Article: The Importance of Building Your Daily Sleep Pressure

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you have a goal to lose weight? If so, you’re probably thinking about how you need to exercise more, and that can certainly help. But what about the 23 hours a day you’re not at the gym? How much you move during those hours, from walking to the mailbox to fidgeting at your desk, can be just as important in winning the battle of the bulge.

Here to explain the importance of what’s called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT, is Dr. James Levine, a professor, the co-director of the Mayo Clinic’s Obesity Solutions Initiative, the inventor of the treadmill desk, and the author of Get Up, Why Your Chair Is Killing You and What You Can Do About It. James explains how much more sedentary we are than we used to be, what happens to your body when you spend half of your day sitting.

He shares how doing the lightest kinds of physical activity, even standing more, can help you lose a significant amount of weight and improve other aspects of your health, from your sleep to your mood. And we talk about how you can easily incorporate more NEAT into your day. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/neat.

All right. James Levine, welcome to the show.

Dr. James Levine: Thank you so much for having me, Brett. So you have spent your career researching obesity, particularly how our physical activity levels can contribute to how trim we are or how fat we are. When it comes to the way our body burns or uses calories, you’ve broke it down in your work, and there’s basically three ways our bodies burn calories. What are those three ways our body uses calories?

Yeah, the three basic ways we burn calories are there is the basal metabolism. Basal metabolism accounts for about 60% of the total. The bigger you are, the bigger your basal metabolism, or more specifically, the greater your lean body mass, the greater your basal metabolism. Now what’s important is, yes, it’s actually the majority burn, but you can’t change it. So moving on, the next one is the thermic effect of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Now, those are the calories you expend when you convert your meal into intermediary metabolites like glycogen and glucose.

So, if you have three meals a day, you’re gonna have three thermic effects of food. It accounts for about 11% of the total. Guess what? You can’t really change it. Now, the remaining component, where we’ve done 60, we’ve done 10. So the remaining component is about 30% on average of the calorie burn is through activity. Activity is either non-exercise activity or putting on your lycra spandex shorts. I know, Brett, I think you adore those and going off for a run.

We all know what exercise is, but most people around the world actually don’t take purposeful exercise at all. So all of their calorie burn through activity is through non-exercise activity. And in terms of calories, we call that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And Brett, as a micro sidebar, if I may, even if you do go and do pilates three times a week or whatever that may be, when you actually work out how many calories you burn doing those three classes, which are 30 minutes, and you’ve done the three times a week, you’ve driven there, and so on and so forth. That only averages out to about 100 calories a day, and that’s if you’re having a proper workout.

Dr. James Levine: And so really, for nearly everybody listening to the podcast, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis are the calories you burn through daily energy activity.

Brett McKay: So, okay, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, shorthand, it’s NEAT. It’s called NEAT.

Dr. James Levine: NEAT.

Brett McKay: So basically, it’s just anytime you move during the day, like I’m standing up while doing this interview, talking to you, I’m gesticulating. That is NEAT, correct?

Dr. James Levine: NEAT are the calories you burn throughout the day. That is exactly correct. And I’m also standing up, Brett. There we go. Twin standards. But yeah, it’s all those calories you burn throughout the day. And it’s the calories you burn sort of as you get out of bed and go make coffee and go and collect the mail from the mailbox. It’s the mooching around you do during your day. It’s even sort of the tapping on the table as you’re waiting for the website to upload. And it’s sort of chopping up vegetables in the evening as you’re making your dinner. It’s wandering around the supermarket. It’s all those things you do that aren’t sleeping and eating.

Brett McKay: And how many calories, you’ve figured this out… Like how many calories do we burn in a typical NEAT activity? So if we’re just walking from the couch to the kitchen or we’re doing laundry, like what do we, like how much does it actually burn?

Dr. James Levine: So let’s think about that. First of all, as you know, what’s your NEAT for the day, and then how do you actually get to that number? So as we sort of agreed, it’s about 30% of your calories throughout the day. So that’s gonna be about, for an average person, about 700 calories. Now, what’s really, really interesting about NEAT is if you sort of look at this, if you compare 100s of people, the data set is 576 people living in high-income countries.

What you can see is actually an astonishing variation. Some people will burn 2000 calories a day more NEAT than other people. Example, if you happen to be a mail person delivering mail on foot throughout your day, or you work in agriculture, you can actually be burning 2000 calories a day more through your NEAT than if you’re actually sitting behind your desk all day long and then sitting in the evening in your rather comfy armchair.

Now, how does that actually compute? Now, what’s most important about all of this is that the sort of the biggest way of burning calories through your NEAT is to get off your bottom and walk. And I don’t necessarily mean sort of striding around, I mean mooching around. So if you get up and just walk at one mile an hour, which we call shopping speed, that’s sort of the speed when you’re going through TJ Maxx looking for the best deal. You’re walking on average about one mile an hour. You double your energy expenditure. You’re burning an extra 100 calories an hour.

So, you can immediately appreciate if you spend two hours online doing your shopping, sitting on your bottom versus mooching around at the mall for a couple of hours, there’s 200 calories right there. Now, if you walk a little bit faster at two miles an hour, you’re at 150 calories an hour. So now, Brett, you and I are both upstanding as we’re doing this podcast. We could either sit down absolutely statically still and burn almost nothing above basal. Or we could sort of stroll at about two miles an hour, which is the speed of a walk and talk meeting, and burn 150 calories each.

And so, when you actually compare people with very high NEAT to people with very low NEAT, people with very low NEAT are sitting on their bottoms all day. People with the highest NEAT are up mooching around, doing stuff on their feet, whether that’s at work or at play.

Brett McKay: All right, today, what’s the typical amount of NEAT that most Americans get? I think you said 700 calories?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, that would be a reasonable number right there. But again, as you’re listening to this, remember the key thing, Brett, is that this is highly variable. So as you’re listening to this podcast, and you’re somebody sort of a bit like my job, which is 100% behind a computer screen every single day of the week, then you know intuitively that that’s too much sitting. And I don’t know if you’re aware of this now, if you look at job postings, they will even put as a warning on the job posting, this job requires excessive sedentary time. It’s actually extraordinary.

On the other hand, if you happen to have a job, whether that’s working in a warehouse, whether that’s working in a bakery, whether that’s working in fields, whether that’s sort of something much more ambulatory, that could even sort of be a greeter at Walmart, if you like, where you’re also mooching around. You can imagine having a NEAT five, six, 700 calories a day more than the person confined to a sedentary job.

Brett McKay: So there’s been a lot of talk about rising obesity rates in the United States, and there’s been different arguments put forth about what the cause is. It’s people are eating more, people are eating more sugary foods, people are eating more fatty foods. And you highlight research, but oftentimes it gets overlooked is that people are just moving less. Do we know like how much less we are experiencing NEAT in America today?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah. If you go back sort of 200 years to the Industrial Revolution, people moved from agricultural environments into the cities. And then what happened, of course, is there were production lines in the big factories. And then what happened, what, in the 1950s or thereabouts, people started sitting down working behind desks. And in fact, office desks were actually designed including the chair with the wheels, to stop people getting up and moving because the ergonomists back then believed that if you could stop people getting up and walking, they would actually be more productive if they sat behind their desk all day long. They were wrong.

But, that is exactly sort of how things have evolved to push us down in our chairs. And are we sitting too long? Oh, my goodness. Yes, we are. How do I know that? Is it just because of the rising obesity rates that you talk of? And there are really good data to the effect that we have sat progressively more and more and more over the last 200 years. But in fact, our calorie intake has not increased substantially. The only data showing that it has are actually from Australia.

So yeah, our calorie intake has been constant, but it’s too much for the degree of inactivity we have. And it’s not Brett, just about obesity. There are 27 other chronic diseases and conditions associated with sitting too much. And that means things like diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, even some types of cancer, and of course, musculoskeletal problems. And so, yes, on the other hand, you may be listening to this podcast and smiling. It’s quite interesting, but it’s bigger than that. It’s really serious stuff. And it’s not just our bodies we’re hurting. We’ve set up a society whereby our kids are gonna ultimately receive the world we’ve created for them.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think it’s interesting you point out this lack of activity, physical activity on a daily basis is probably driving the obesity, a big factor in driving the obesity. You talk about, if you even look at office work, you talk about this in one of your books. If you look at office work 50 years ago compared today, you did a lot more moving in the office than today. You had to move even if you were just doing a desk job.

Dr. James Levine: This is a 100% correct. I think back to sort of when I started in the day. I’ll give you a fantastic example. My very first job was working for a really famous professor called Professor Davies, who is an osteoporosis professor. And of course, as you may be aware, osteoporosis is growing quicker and quicker, partly due to the lack of activity. And she asked me to gather papers about a certain document she was writing for the World Health Organization. I said, I’d love to.

Now, those papers were scientific articles. And in order to gather them, I kid you not, I literally had to get on my bicycle and cycle across London to probably one of 15 different libraries to gather all the articles she needed. Yes, it took a lot of time. But my goodness, I’d come into her office, sweat pouring down my back. Today, click, click, click, click, click, it’s done. And just taking that simple example, all of us listening who are of a certain age, remember how difficult things used to be where we used to have to go and get resources.

We used to… We even have to sort of walk to the printer, which was actually in the printing room. Yeah. Now we barely… We can actually spend our entire day when you think about it in the office at work. And if I need my lunch, click, click, click, DoorDash right to my desk and get home, drive through, click, click, click, Pizza at my door, and on we go. And if you sort of step back and actually think about how much time I spend sitting every day, if you think about it, what’s really interesting is you can’t really imagine a world where you don’t spend it sitting because it’s sort of a subsidiary symptom of how we actually live.

And so you don’t sort of analyze, Oh, I’m sitting a lot at the moment. You just live your life, you see. And so this is what’s happened. It sort of crept up on us. And all of a sudden, we’ve all become these terribly sedentary and rather unwell and sort of slightly blue, sedentary office workers, both in the office and at home.

Brett McKay: When some people, or I think when most people notice that I’m gaining some weight, I notice that I don’t move around all that much ’cause I have an office job that doesn’t allow me to move around all that much. They think, well, I can take care of this with just diet and exercise. But you argue that diet and exercise will never be enough to compensate for the lack of NEAT. The problem with dieting, just reducing calories, is that you can’t do that forever.

So, let’s say you reduce your calories and you do lose weight. Because you’ve reduced the amount of calories you’re consuming. But in order to continue the weight loss with calorie reduction, you have to decrease the calories even more because you’ve likely decreased your metabolic, overall metabolic rate, resting metabolic rate ’cause you’re smaller. So your body requires fewer calories. And so, it gets to a point where it becomes unsustainable. And I think…

Dr. James Levine:Let me jump in there, if I may, please. ‘Cause you’ve touched on a really interesting point. Not only is everything you just said correct, but it’s even sort of more subtle than that, if I may please. When somebody loses weight through caloric restriction, through cutting their calories down, yeah, body fat is disseminated. Somebody can also lose some lean body mass and body weight declines on a lower calorie intake. The trouble with this is the body is not a static system. The body, brilliant in its design, adjusts and actually becomes more efficient.

So in fact, once you’re at that lower caloric intake, the body is working more efficiently, making it actually more difficult to lose more weight. So you’re not even dealing with a sort of a simple mathematic is I’ve decreased my calories in, I’m now going to be able to maintain a lower body weight easier. That actually isn’t true because the body will sort of counter-regulate to make it more difficult to maintain your body weight.

Brett McKay: And then also exercise just relying on focused exercise activities to offset the amount of being sedentary. As you said earlier, it’s not gonna do much in the long run ’cause you might just burn 100, 200, 300 calories and that can’t make up for being sedentary every other hour you’re awake.

Dr. James Levine: Purposeful exercise for the sake of improving your health, like going to the gym or something like that, is fantastic if you like to do it. Let’s be clear about that. If you like to go to the gym, keep doing it, please. It’s really good for you. It’s really good for your health. But very interestingly, again, for even people who go to the gym, the harm associated with sedentariness, as you say, all the other time that you’re not at the gym, which is basically 95% of your week, the harm of sedentariness is still not eliminated.

So, if you go to the gym, great. But if you’re sedentary, you’re sedentary. And if you’re sedentary, it’s causing you harm.

Brett McKay: I feel like in the last decade or so, people, whether… You’re talking about dedicated exercise or just physical activity in general, people have been kind of down on physical activity as a method of weight management. There’s this idea out there that you can’t exercise your way or burn your way to weight loss. Diet is what really matters. If you move more at some times, you’re just going to slow down. At other times, your body’s gonna find ways to just compensate for that extra activity somehow.

But you did a study that proved, Yes, activity can keep the pounds off. It was this really complex study. You basically got a bunch of people, including yourself, and then you overfed them 1000 calories a day. And then you just watched what happened. Who gained weight and who lost weight. So walk us through that study. And what did you learn from this study?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, Brett, it was extraordinary. It was called the Great Overfeeding Experiment. And that is exactly what we did. But I have to tell you, this wasn’t done using a computer watch or guessing. This was done meticulously in metabolic laboratories at Mayo Clinic. It was a big, big deal. Every single food item was weighed and measured chemically. Every single movement was captured. Every calorie burned was analyzed. And even how people change their body fat was measured using precise technology down to a few 100 grams.

It was extraordinary work. A huge team of people helped do it. And what we found were two things that I think are really important. You can take a group of people, none of whom have obesity, and you can expose all of them to 1000 calories a day of overfeeding for months on end. And the extraordinary thing, first of all, is this, one person can take nearly all of those extra thousand calories and deposit it in body fat. That person is super prone, almost like a sponge absorbing water, to developing excess body fat.

On the other hand, another person can receive the same amount of excess food and somehow magically through their brain get up and start spontaneously moving. Their NEAT can increase for extra 1000 calories they’ve received. Their NEAT can increase 700 extra calories a day through movement, not going to the gym, through movement. 700 calories extra a day. On one hand, you’ve got somebody who seems to absorb every extra gram of food and deposit it in their body fat.

On the other hand, you’ve got somebody who you can overfeed a 1000 calories a day and gains almost no body fat because they switch on their NEAT. They get up and they move. So what you realize is, first of all, some people are really predisposed to gaining obesity. Yeah, we all know that and I’m sure some of your people listening are nodding their heads right now. But other people have this capacity from inside of the brain to get up and move so much more that they don’t gain any weight with overfeeding. And they never went to a gym. So that’s the first thing. Now what’s the second thing? The second thing is probably even more important than that.

The second thing is, if you are one of those people nodding your head right now, if you’re one of those individuals who has a tremendous susceptibility to gaining excess body weight, as soon as you sniff extra food, what you realize is that the body is designed in such a way that you can not gain more body weight. You cannot gain excess body weight and develop obesity if you are up and you are moving and your body has the capacity to do this. And you can even burn up to, if you like, 700 calories a day extra based on those data. So it’s a beautiful idea. You can win. You don’t need to go to the gym.

You can get up and move 100s of extra calories a day, whether that’s converting a standard meeting at work to a walk and talk meeting, whether that’s converting shopping online to actually shopping by foot, whether that’s getting your groceries delivered to your door from the supermarket, or actually going to the supermarket and physically choosing it. You can integrate movement into your day, so much so to stave off excess body weight, and you can even burn up to an extra 700 calories a day doing it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Did you all figure out what causes some people to have that natural tendency to, when they consume more calories, they just start moving more naturally and others don’t do that? Is there a gene?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, we spent a lot of time on that. And again, what’s fascinating is this. Think about it for a second. So what we did in that experiment is we got completely healthy, normal volunteers and we overfed them. We checked that they took every single extra calorie that they were given. We measured that. We even measured their urine in their stool, I should tell you. We had freezers full of poop. And what we then measured was that people responded to that by increasing their NEAT, their movement throughout their day. If you think about it for a second, how did people know to do that? It had never been discovered before.

I mean, how did that happen? People, if you like, knew to do it subconsciously because there’s a mechanism in the brain that counter-regulates how our food relates to our activity. And we thought, well, we’ve got to go and try and find that area in the brain because then we can actually help people really achieve their goals. And so we had a whole neuroscience team led by Dr. Novak, a brilliant young neuroscientist, and she identified tiny parts of the brain right in the hypothalamus, which is an old part of the brain that switches on your NEAT and switches on NEAT more in some people than others. So in fact, right at the center of your brain right now as you’re listening to this podcast, your brain is analyzing your calories in, your calories out, and is propelling you to move more or move less. So yes, there’s a deep biology underpinning this.

Brett McKay: Okay, so in some people, there’s a part of the brain that’s more discerning or more activated so that whenever you take in excess calories, it sends a signal to move more. And then in some people, that part doesn’t switch on as strongly. But a big point you make in all of your books you’ve written is that even if you don’t have that natural tendency to want to move more whenever you consume excess calories, you’re not destined to be an inert lump. You can still take action. It doesn’t have to be big change. Just take small, tiny changes throughout the day to counteract that.

Dr. James Levine: Absolutely. And the trick, if you like, I actually, as somebody who looks after patients, I really don’t like tricks. But nonetheless, for you, Brett, the trick. The trick to all of this is to make a decision. Is to make a decision with your day? Today. Is today going to be the day I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and step forwards? Or is today gonna be the day I stay on my seat? If you decide to stay on your seat, my only prayer is that tomorrow you think the same question of yourself.

On the other hand, if today is the day right now that you are going to get up, take control, and take a step forward, the moment you do that, you will do it tomorrow and you’ll do it the next day. And the data suggests that if you can find those moments throughout your day to consistently be up and moving, and you do it for 21 days approximately, it will become a habit. Just like sitting down in the evening every evening and binge watching is a habit, you can actually have really cool and healthy motivational movement habits as well.

So, if you can find those moments to get up and move throughout your day and keep doing it, it will become a habit. It’ll become part of your life. And here’s what the data from… We’ve worked in over seventy US corporations, here’s what the data from corporations show, it’s really great stuff, is once you’ve taken on one good habit and done it for 21 days, we call it the NEAT ripple effect, is a good movement habit will beget, will make another movement habit. And so, one becomes two, and all of a sudden two becomes four. And what happens is people who are sitters become people who are movers.

And people who become movers also influence their families, their kids, husbands, and wives, and friends to become movers as well. And so, there’s a NEAT ripple. But the trick, the trick, the trick is to think right now, today is today. I’m gonna get up and take control of my life and take that first step forwards or not. And if the answer is yes, do it now. In other words, Brett, what I’m saying is, if you can get it into your mindset, into your thinking that I’m gonna fight the chair, I’m gonna win this battle, you can actually do it.

Brett McKay: And what’s great, you offer suggestions on how you can do that. I think the trick is understanding, Okay, our social environment is pushing us to be sedentary. Everything is like, you do everything sitting down. And I think one trick is just, can I do this typically sedentary activity? Can I do it while moving somehow? So, you offer suggestions like, if you like to watch TV, get yourself a really cheap treadmill. You can find them on Amazon for 300 bucks now. They’re so cheap. And then just stick that in your television room. And while you’re watching your favorite show, just walk at one point one miles per hour on that treadmill. Or if you like playing video games, do the same thing. You can play a video game while you’re walking. Or like you said, if you take phone calls during work, don’t do that sitting down. Do that while you’re walking.

Dr. James Levine: You are a 100% correct. And I’m telling you, what’s really cool about this is the other thing I mentioned is once you’ve… And I will tell you now, 300 bucks for a treadmill in your house, that’s expensive these days. I mean, they’re coming in at a $100 now, or you can get a secondhand one, or you can get… People are throwing away their exercise bicycles. I mean, take it, refurbish it, put it in your TV room. And you’d be surprised that you can binge watch, I’m actually starting to re-watch Seinfeld again, I hate to tell you this, but I can binge watch Seinfeld gently cycling on my stationary bicycle.

It makes almost no noise and I’m getting just as much TV. And there is so much we can do if we put our mind to it. And the other thing, Brett, you mentioned is we sort of, society has put us in our chair. But the other thing to think about for a second is how we can change the society. Now, I don’t mean changing the world, let’s be serious, but how can I change the society I live in? So, next time if I’m dating, next time I choose a date on, I can’t remember the name of the website, whatever, where you’re swiping left and swiping right, I’m actually going to choose a date for somebody who also likes to go walking.

I’m going to sort of say, next time we all sit to come for my birthday, and for those of you listening, my birthday is November the 20th. Next, for all of you who are going to come to my birthday party, yeah, we’re going to have cake, you bet we are. But also, once we’ve done our cake, we’re also all going to go out for a walk together, we’re going to do a family walk. So, we actually have the opportunity to influence the micro society we live in, but we need to choose to do that. And it’s all part of the same thing, make that decision, take your first step, and the rest is going to flow from there.

Brett McKay: And one thing you point out in your book is that you work with a lot of patients who have had extra weight, and just by simply increasing the amount of NEAT in their lives, they’ve been able to lose weight, a lot of weight. They don’t even become serious gym goers, they’re just moving more during the day.

Dr. James Levine: A 100%. And so, yes, and if you like, there is the world of what I call testimonies, and this is fine, and I’m a 100% respectful. But as somebody with a science background, I’m actually more interested in the hardcore data from the scientific studies. And the scientific studies conducted in normal US office workers show that even in people who don’t want to lose weight, they will tend to lose weight and become more active. But in people who want to lose weight, people will start, if they activate their lives, they take on NEAT, are going to be losing 10 to 20 pounds slowly and gently, if you like, without breaking a sweat. And they’re gonna do that over six months, and then over the six months, the same.

And so, what’s really powerful about this is, Yes, 60% of the population may be dieting in any given year, but what’s really cool about NEAT is NEAT is going to help you keep off that excess body weight, and it’s going to nudge you forwards and forwards and forwards. And what’s important about this is you’re not gonna get a sports injury from NEAT, you’re not gonna have to pay a gym membership for NEAT, everyone can get up and move throughout their day without paying a penny for doing it. And what it’s gonna help with, for those people who want to lose weight, you don’t have to lose weight, even if you have excess body weight, you’re not obliged to. If you want to, this will help.

Brett McKay: So we’ve been talking about the benefits of NEAT and weight loss, but you mentioned earlier, there’s other benefits to moving more throughout the day. How can NEAT improve metabolic health? We’re talking like how we regulate glucose.

Dr. James Levine: Oh, this is really, I hope we have enough time for this, Brett, but let me explain briefly. This is super cool. Experiments were done where healthy volunteers came onto a research centre, very, very carefully monitored, and their glucose from their blood was being monitored every 30 seconds. These individuals were given breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the metabolic unit in the research centre, and then were instructed to get on with their normal day. And that was, computer work for the morning, then lunch, computer work, and a bit of Facebook, and then dinner, and then evening time, Facebook, binge watching, and TV, okay?

And we measured their blood glucose every 30 seconds continuously throughout the day. And what actually happens is, when you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain and then slowly descends over a total period of about an hour and a half. After each of the three meals, that’s what happens. Then we said to people, we want you to do exactly the same day again. We’ll measure your glucose again. We’ll give you the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner again, but we want you to do one single thing different. After every meal, we want you to take a 15-minute walk or stroll at one and a half miles an hour. That’s literally strolling.

15 minutes after every meal. Now, as I mentioned, without the stroll, normal day, you have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, your blood sugar, your blood glucose climbs to a mountain, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. If you add a 15-minute stroll, that’s it. The mountain becomes a hill. It literally halves the size of that blood glucose mountain. 15-minute stroll after each of your meals. The biggest predictor of Type 2 diabetes is the size of those mountains. So all of a sudden, for taking a 15-minute stroll after each of your meals, everyone listening can do this. You halve your blood glucose response to meals and potentially risk of Type 2 diabetes. What a win, win, win!

Brett McKay: Now, that is really powerful. Another thing you talk about is the benefit of NEAT to our mental health. I know a lot of people out there are struggling with their mental health. What effect can NEAT have on that?

Dr. James Levine: There has not been one clinical trial in depression prevention that includes a walking program. That hasn’t helped people. Many of us are susceptible to feeling blue. I am. Feeling low, feeling bad. Most people listening will know that when you’re feeling bad and you go for a walk, for a reason you quite can’t understand, you actually feel a little bit better. What’s really powerful are the data that show that if you actually sort of take on NEAT walking as part of your routine, that will actually help you feel brighter, smarter, and sort of more alive. All of us already sort of know this. We all know this. When you’re down, somebody says, let’s go for a walk, and you feel better.

This is actually a truth. And so for those of us who can take on a NEAT approach to life, not only is your sort of body going to be better, whether that’s with respect to obesity prevention or diabetes, blood pressure, whatever it may be, but actually you’re gonna feel brighter too. And what’s really cool is once you feel brighter and happier doing a little bit of walking, even after each of your meals, guess what? You’re gonna keep doing it and you’re gonna take on more stuff so you can feel even brighter and happier. And again, that’s what the data suggests.

Brett McKay: Another thing you’ve seen in your research and working with patients is that a lot of these patients that come to see you, they talk about, I’m just so tired all the time. And it seems weird because like, you’re just sitting around all day. Why would you be tired? But I think everyone has experienced how doing absolutely nothing can just be exhausting. And by incorporating some more light physical activity during your day, it’ll actually give you the physical energy you need to do the things you want to do in life.

Dr. James Levine: I think we all, again, know this to be a common truth, but Brett, that allows me to touch on one other thing, which is so important and this will not shock anybody. Sleep. Sleep is a critical component of this equation. It is absolutely critical. And the data on NEAT and sleep are fascinating. We brought people again onto our amazing research centers at Mayo Clinic. These are extraordinary places where people volunteer to do studies to help us understand what’s going on. And we brought them onto the research center. And we said, Have a good night’s sleep in your normal way.

Get used to our facilities. And people did. What we then did is we sleep restricted people. We said to people, you’re gonna sleep 30% less. We’re gonna wake you up. We’re gonna twiddle your toes. We’re gonna keep you awake. And my goodness, yes, you’re gonna get tired. And that’s exactly what happened. But here is what the data show. The data shows when you sleep restrict people, they eat more. We all know this. When you’re tired, this is me, by the way. Okay. This is me. When I’m tired, I eat more.

This is always the case. For some reason, you reach for the choc, you reach for the chips, whatever it may be, but you eat more. This is what happens when you sleep deprived. You’re feeling tired, you’re feeling pooped out, you’re noshing, you’re eating a few snacks here and there. But the one thing when you’re tired you don’t want to do, is to get up and go for a walk. When you’re fully rested and you’ve got good sleep, you get up and you feel, what’s the word we all use? Energized. That’s what we feel. And that energized means get up and go for a walk. Get up and do some cool stuff. Let’s do something fun today. And guess what? You think less about that food you’re going to lean on to deal with your tiredness.

So I fully understand that people may have two or sometimes three jobs. I totally get it. I totally do understand that there is tremendous stress at the moment and tremendous mental anguish. But if you can find a good method to get good sleep, whether that involves, for example, stopping your coffee at noon or starting to relax early in the evening so you’re ready for sleep, not stressing yourself out with text messages or arguments before you go to bed, whatever it may be, if you can find a method of getting good sleep, that is a critically important part of the NEAT equation.

Brett McKay: Well, I also think moving more can help you sleep better. I’ve noticed my own life. There’s this idea I’ve heard about sleep pressure. You have to build up some sleep pressure so your body wants to go to sleep. And one way you can do that is just moving more. I’ve had the best nights of sleep when I’ve had a really active day. I think the best night of sleep, I’ve been chasing this night of sleep for 20 years now is when my wife and I, we went to Rome. And you just walked. There’s, like, all day. You’re just walking hours on hours. And I remember we came back to our hotel and we just laid down and we just both fell asleep. We didn’t wake up until, like, 14 hours later, and we both felt that was the best night’s sleep.

And I think it’s because we just walk so much. And I noticed in the times where I don’t move a lot during the day, I have a hard time falling asleep.

Dr. James Levine: This is 100% correct, your body… If you remember earlier, Brett, we were talking about the parts of your brain that are sort of monitoring all of this, one question you’ve got to ask yourself is, Okay, I’ve now got my movement going, just as you say. You walked around Rome all day, you sort of met your NEAT goal set by your brain. What happens if you don’t? And I think a lot of people actually understand this, but haven’t necessarily thought about it the way you put it. So if I am sort of forced to sit in meetings all day long, and I assure you that’s often many of my days, you get home sort of feeling this sort of anxiety. This sort of tightness inside of you. And I don’t know about you, but I get this thing sort of like my thoughts, and I get frustrated and irritated much more than if I’d actually had an active day where I dissipated all of my energy. And I think the other thing that, again, many people relate to, when you’ve come back from work and it’s been a day that you’ve been in your chair, you haven’t been up, moving and so on and so forth, what’s one thing you do? You reach for a beer. Really, what that’s saying is I need an anesthetic. There’s too much pressure in my head. I need to anesthetize myself.

And so therefore, the complexity of getting a good night’s sleep absolutely relates to the need to burn off the energy that our body needs us to burn off. We’re designed to get up and move. If you suppress the human, the human doesn’t do well. We get really internally upset by that, and we need to move. So part of our argument is that by forcing people to be seated all day, it’s fundamentally unnatural to people, and they need to move just to function normally. And your day in Rome is illustrative of that.

Brett McKay: So we talked about some ways people can incorporate more NEAT into their lives. There’s an activity that you do sitting down. See if you can do that standing up or even walking. For people who want to incorporate more NEAT in their life, is there a goal they should shoot for? Like, what’s the minimum dose of NEAT that we need to get before we start seeing that benefit? Is it an hour of extra NEAT two hours? Is there steps? What have you found in your research?

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, I mean, this is a terrific question. There has been a huge vogue, as many people know, to buy various gadgets, to look at various watches and sort of monitor stuff. Now, if you’re somebody who loves monitoring stuff, go for it, enjoy it. That’s great. But what is actually the truth and again, when you study this in sort of normal folk, what you find is if you give people a monitoring device, they’ll use it for a short period of time, and it can be literally, I kid you not, days. And their use of that monitoring device will fall off almost exponentially, almost sort of like over a cliff face, and they’ll sort of put it into a drawer. And how many people listening today have exercise monitoring devices, wearable little things that are in their drawer that’s powered down, that’s unused? So my advice to people is to actually look at it completely differently.

If you love monitoring stuff, get the equipment. It’s great. If you’re going to take on for yourself a goal, I suggest you take on one goal, not 100 goals. One thing. What’s the one thing you’re going to do for the next few weeks, and let’s say for the sake of argument, is every Thursday, and this is as simple as it gets, every Thursday I have to do a conference call with central corporate where they talk about health and wellness, whatever it is. It’s a 40 minutes call every single week. I only have to listen to fulfill my obligations. So I’m going to do that walk and talk. That’s one thing I’m going to do every Thursday. Super simple. Actually, what I’m going to do is I’m going to have a little chart on my fridge, and every time I do it, I’m going to put a check mark against it until I’ve done it 21 times. Monitoring, as simple as it gets.

On the other hand, I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to say, you know what? My daughter loves the art stuff, and I live in Washington DC, where all the galleries are free at Smithsonian. So once a week, I’m going to go with my daughter and we’re going to stroll through the art gallery, and we’re going to do that together for two months. Now, honestly, do you need to put that on your fridge to remind yourself to go for a walk with your daughter in the art gallery?

No. What you want to do is to do it for three weeks and it becomes a habit between you and your daughter. And so what I suggest again, is be smart, what works for you. But pick something, find a way of monitoring it, and do it. And the last concept I’d like to share with you in this regard is the idea of rewards. Now, rewards are great, okay? They’re really, really cool. But again, you have to be smart. So giving yourself a reward to go to the mailbox and collecting your mail on foot every day, to me, honestly, sounds a bit silly. I’m not going to reward myself for collecting the mail. However, if my goal is to walk a half marathon, and I had this amazing patient who did this, she came into clinic in her wheelchair, and she sent me a photograph of her and the grandchildren when they walked a half marathon.

I kid you not, it was like, it blew my mind. Her reward was if she could walk a half marathon, she’d saved up enough money to go to South Dakota for a week. That was her reward and that was her goal. And she actually said to me, Actually, the reward was to do it. So I think if you can think of the idea of finding things that you want to do, finding a method to record it, and then finding a method to recognize yourself, pat yourself on the back, or have some sort of achievement recognition that you’re off to the races.

Brett McKay: I love it. So just find ways to move more. That’s it. Again, it’s not hard. It doesn’t have to be that hard. It could be as simple as standing up at work occasionally. It could be doing the walk and talk, something that I’ve done after reading your book, or we’ve done this for a long time as a family. When we park somewhere, we park the furthest away so we can walk there, take the stairs. Kind of becomes a game. Finding ways you can move more in an environment that is fighting for you to sit more. It’s kind of fun to be a rebel. I’m going to move more instead.

Dr. James Levine: Yeah, be a rebel for yourself. Do it. Get up and move.

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

Dr. James Levine: Well, I mean, it’s fantastic. If people wish to go to the library and get the book, Get Up. It really summarizes the work we did in the lab. It’s, of course, available on our favorite online website as well. And that’s great. But also places like mayoclinic.com have really high quality information on the Internet. And so please please make a decision to get up and move today and learn more from these various resources and make it happen for yourself.

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

Dr. James Levine: It’s my pleasure as well. Thank you so much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. James Levine. He’s the author of the book Get Up!: Why Your Chair is Killing You and What You Can do About It. Check out our show notes at aom.is/neat, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com and while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a weekly edition and a daily edition. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what we’re doing at The Art of Manliness.

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 would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you how to listen to ao podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The era of artificially intelligent large language models is upon us and isn’t going away. Rather, AI tools like ChatGPT are only going to get better and better and affect more and more areas of human life.

If you haven’t yet felt both amazed and unsettled by these technologies, you probably haven’t explored their true capabilities.

My guest today will explain why everyone should spend at least 10 hours experimenting with these chatbots, what it means to live in an age where AI can pass the bar exam, beat humans at complex tests, and even make us question our own creative abilities, what AI might mean for the future of work and education, and how to use these new tools to enhance rather than detract from your humanity.

Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton business school and the author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. Today on the show, Ethan explains the impact of the rise of AI and why we should learn to utilize tools like ChatGPT as a collaborator — a co-worker, co-teacher, co-researcher, and coach. He offers practical insights into harnessing AI to complement your own thinking, remove tedious tasks from your workday, and amplify your productivity. We’ll also explore how to craft effective prompts for large language models, maximize their potential, and thoughtfully navigate what may be the most profound technological shift of our lifetimes.

Connect With Ethan Mollick

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean.

The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences.

Today on the show, Carl Trueman unpacks this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers — Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre — who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we’ve lost something essential in moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud by Philip Rieff
• Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor
• After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre 
• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
• AoM Podcast #723: Men Without Chests
• AoM Article: 3 Essential Books for Understanding Our Disorienting Modern World
• AoM Article: Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill?
• Carl’s writing at First Things

Connect With Carl Trueman

• Carl’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about living your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today in the show, Carl Trueman impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian and the author of the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles Taylor, Philip Brief, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discussed how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moved you from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at a aom.is/modernself. Alright, Carl Trueman, welcome to the show.

Carl Trueman: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on Brett.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self, and you explore how our concept of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with this change. First one was Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age, Philip Rieff, sociologist, we’ll discuss him. And then Alasdair MacIntyre, he’s popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I’ve read these three guys and I’ve always wondered like, why hasn’t anyone written a book where they’ve synthesized these three thinkers? ‘Cause they’re all hitting on the same idea, and they’re trying to figure out like, what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But before we get to these thinkers, we’ll start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, good question. I think what I’m trying to get at there is, is how we imagine ourselves as sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find ourselves. What is it that makes us us? So for example, if we would go back to the middle ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, who are you or what are you, you’re likely to get an answer to the effect of, well, I’m the son of so and so, or I’m the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated with this particular area. You’ll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you’re unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.

You’re probably going to get an answer that touches on things that relate to inner feelings. I’m a spiritual person, for example, or to go down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book. You might get somebody saying, well, I’m a gay person, or something like that. And the shift there has been towards this inner space, we’re not so much marked. We don’t so much understand ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings as we understand ourselves as a collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I’m really trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are and what we are relative to the world around us?

Brett McKay: And you talk about in the book Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of defining ourself to the inner, he calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that what makes me really me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera I have inside. And this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we’re all familiar, but which would’ve been meaningless back in the iddyl ages. What makes me authentic is my ability to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that fundamentally I’m an individual. I define myself, I’m defined by my individual desires, passions, feelings. And I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’ll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity ’cause yeah, it’s something I think we take for granted ’cause you hear it so much these days. But something you do in the book is you do a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define ourselves by our inner feelings? And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, this goes back hundreds of years. I mean, you’d go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch how do we go from a point where we define ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession, to whatever we feel inside of ourselves?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer in a sort of short way without indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level the last 400 or 500 years have witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquifaction of the world in which we live. What do I mean by that? We’re typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a lot more. I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was. And that’s a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. The one side of the story is the old traditional markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial.

On the other hand what moves in to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes. Descartes is wrestling with a difficult question in the 17th century when everything around seems to be changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere? Is there a an archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that? Because that is the one place that is certain. And he finds the certainty, of course, in his own mind. I think therefore I am and Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that’s taking place in the 17th century where that inner space, the one constant we all feel in our lives these days is our self-consciousness. Our psychological lives seem to be the one thing that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it’s that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards I think that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested in the world today.

Brett McKay: And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the development of Romanticism. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that?

Carl Trueman: Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, an artist such as JMW Turner, Casper David Friedrich, music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Choppa would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say the music of a Choppa to the music of a Bark, you don’t have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bark you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to, I know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to Chopin’s Nocturnes that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It’s not chaos, but it’s really pulling on the heartstrings. It’s attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bark is not. And that’s reflective of romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is really wanting to explore, stimulate and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

Brett McKay: And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting ’cause I think a lot of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means to be a self. I’m gonna create, I’m the creator of myself. I’m the artist of my life. And I’m thinking, you don’t realize this, but like that’s Frederick Nietzsche. You don’t know it. So tell us about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is a remarkable 19th century philosopher. Has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there’s one lecture given on Nietzsche’s philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche is the man who caused the bluff on the enlightenment. If we would take Jean Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space. And he wants to ground morality very much in sort of spontaneous sympathetic reactions. Rousseau essentially says, as soon as you’ve got laws, you know something’s gone wrong. If you see an injustice taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There’s a human instinct for justice. Rousseau in other words, he’s rightly pointing to the role I think of feelings in ethical reasoning. If you see somebody being beaten up and you feel nothing emotional, you’re a psychopath.

We understand the need for feelings in our ethical decisions, but Rousseau grounds that really in an understanding of human beings as having a human nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute, you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn’t play any positive constructive role in your thinking, but you’ve smuggled something in that plays the role of God. You’ve got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you’ve substituted him with human nature. You still think there’s such a thing as human nature. And human nature has an authoritative moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you can’t do that. If you’ve killed God, if you’ve got rid of God, if you’ve killed God, you’ve really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a con trick pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where the features in the sort of the psychological story is, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. But he’s detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

Brett McKay: And this will have consequences later on. We’ll see that. And Alasdair MacIntyre, we’ll get to him, he grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas ’cause they’re significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity in Charles Taylor’s thinking on that. By authenticity you meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that’s kind of a sort of a given. That’s how you wanna live your life today. And if you don’t do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor think authenticity became a moral ideal?

Carl Trueman: I think it’s really in the 18th and early 19th century, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. William Wordsworth writes this poem, it’s not one of his greatest poems, this poem, the Idiot Boy, which is this, a poem about a child. We would say today a child with serious learning difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this. Why are you writing a poem that appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his students and friends, he says, basically, I’m not mocking him. I’m using him as an example. We would now say I’m using the Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you have when you go to somebody like that, so we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, et cetera.

What you’ve got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It’s not being corrupted by the conventions of society. With the idiot boy what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would say, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It’s alienated us from that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that’s where you get the emerging notion of authenticity. This idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions to those untamed, untrammeled truly human feelings inside and live according to them, then that’s what it means to be truly human or that’s what it means to be an authentic human.

Brett McKay: And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

Carl Trueman: That’s the idea. The romantic idea is a sort of a return to a rural idyll, if you like, where you don’t have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village, I can guarantee you that the rural Italy is not as idyllic as the Romantics thought it was.

Brett McKay: And Nietzsche called them on their blood and was like, yeah, you think that’s what it’s gonna happen. But actually probably not what’s gonna happen if everyone’s living by their inner desires.

Carl Trueman: Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very naive view. We could somewhat simplify, we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is it’s society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche you know you’ve got the idea that actually what makes us great of the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here is what Charles Taylor sets up for us, is that there’s this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external, where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy, as we progressed through the enlightenment and things like technology allowed you to travel. You’re no longer tied to the family farm. Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions and political life. The church started losing authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had philosophers like Nietzsche just adding fuel to the fire. So there’s an inward turn. Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self is a sociologist named Philip Rieff. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Rieff lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there’s four ages. What are those four ages of the self?

Carl Trueman: Well, Societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, it’s say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age I think one of the models is dominant. The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public square. So the great example of this might be fourth century BC Athens where being involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing, the polis, it’s the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. It’s the idea that…

Brett McKay: I was gonna say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you’re an idiot. Like you’re a private person, you’re looked down upon, you weren’t even a person basically.

Carl Trueman: No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, man is a political animal. He’s meaning man is a man of the polis. He’s a man of public life. And as you rightly point out the opposite of politicos is idioticos, the private man. So that’s the first arrangement. And Rieff sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is, that’s an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious rituals. We might think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature that a society where religious man was the ideal. That’s kind of literally, which would be produced in that sort of culture. Where you have the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this rag bagg bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, if you may have Muslim friends, and they go on the Hoge to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be human. This is replaced for Rieff what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, Charles Dickens’s books are full of economic man. He’s writing about industrial revolution, England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Grad Grind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society. And Rieff sees all three of these as having something in common.

They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this, it is the role of society in shaping you to be a political, religious or economic man to direct you outwards. So education is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role. Rieff sees the present age, and he’s writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It’s one of those books, triumphal Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says that what we have at the end of this is what he call psychological man. And Psychological man is the man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the first three.

And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a member of society. And a psychological manner reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society’s role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So one could draw a contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boys school in England. Team sports was central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That’s not child-centered learning that sort of dominates the airwaves today where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man, it’s a very, very different culture to the first three.

Brett McKay: And it seems like it’s similar to Taylor’s idea of expressive individualism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s Taylor’s expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. The romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century. It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human to permeate the whole of society and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And something Rieff talks about, one of the defining characteristics of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the analytical attitude?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a lit has with a lot of things in Rieff, it’s a bit opaque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He’s a hard read. He’s a very hard read.

Carl Trueman: And I think actually that’s part of the game. He’s trying to disorient the reader sometimes. But I’ll give you his definition and then I’ll try to sort of unpack it a bit. The definition that he gives in Triumph Of The Therapeutic is the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Now, he’s talking there about Freud, and I think what he’s trying to get at is this, that for Freud society makes demands upon us. And it does that, it curbs our inner desires in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms for Freud, males want to rape and pillage.

Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, but we can’t live together if we’re savages. So there’s a trade off between the desire of the individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates though, those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions. We are never happy. We struggle because we’re not allowed to be who we really are because we need to be civilized. And I think what Rieff is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It’s not that we can ever come to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two, but the goal of therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think to the analytic attitude is there is no objective moral order there, there is no divinely sanctioned moral order.

There are really just social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they’re ultimately, you’re not grounded in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you’re wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you’ve gotta analyze in order to try to engage in in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, he’s there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after Nietzsche, you had Darwin’s theory of evolution. So basically yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God’s dead. There’s no objective moral order, so what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That’s about as good as you can do.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s a sort of, it’s a therapy, to use Rieff’s term. It’s therapy. It’s helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it’s a negotiating strategy.

Brett McKay: And one thing too, Rieff talks about, even though Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the 20th and 21st century, like we’re still living under Freud’s shadow. We all are psychological men. I mean, I’m sure all of us have picked up a book on cognitive behavioral therapy or how to manage my anger. And it’s never like, well, don’t be angry because God said not to be angry. It’s like, well, if I wanna have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so, yeah, Rieff says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. I mean, it’s very much the case. I think there’s a sense in which a traditional religious man was born to be saved. Therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. As a pastor at times I’ve married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that it’s easy to love your wife on the wedding day. She’s beautiful, the sexual desire is bubbling away, you love each other’s company, you’re embarking on this lifelong adventure together.

But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raised the question, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day or is it when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an instrument? And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love and think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. Hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another. So, yeah. But you see that, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love. And I would say a very impoverishing way.

Brett McKay: So again, Philip reached describing inner turn towards defining ourself. It’s all about just what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque hard to get through, it really does capture, it helps you understand like this rise of wellness culture in the West of everyone that’s worried about their mental health, even if they don’t have like a severe mental illness. But like, everyone’s just concerned about, okay, my anxiety, or I’m feeling nervous, or I don’t have full-blown depression but I’m feeling kind of sad. What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Rieff describes, well, here’s why you have that idea.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. Because I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time, these are not unnatural things. We can’t be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you are engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition that we experience frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They’re part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders into connecting with other human beings.

Brett McKay: One argument that Rieff makes in the triumphant therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much, or western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think it wouldn’t be aligned with like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the psychological man creep into religious life?

Carl Trueman: Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It’s Joel Osteen down in Houston. I think he has 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, Your Best Life Now, every day of Friday, it’s always confused me that one ’cause I tend to think Saturday’s the best day of the week. But every day of Friday. You think about, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society but even in more Orthodox Christian circles. Think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you’re Catholic listeners, it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re a Protestant, a lot of people choose their church on the basis of, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor sermon scratch where I feel I’m itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it traditionally was a matter of, sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into their mold or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.

Brett McKay: What are your thoughts Re? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life, or are you kinda like, ah, just get it all out of there?

Carl Trueman: Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism, but one of the things that, I didn’t do this in the book. I didn’t have space, but I wouldn’t wanna say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. Having said, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we are more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We are more aware of the importance of that inner life. It’s not the psychological struggles aren’t important. They are. And I think, look back to my education that I mentioned. I’m not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team. It was necessarily the best model of education. It’s very different one to the one that applies today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are an improvement on the model that I experienced. So yeah, the rise of the therapeutic, it’s not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and has shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.

Brett McKay: You didn’t talk about this guy in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but I’d love to get your thoughts on him, Jung. ‘Cause Rieff talks about Jung a lot in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic. And I’d love to get your thoughts on this because you see him more and more in the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson who’s talking about archetypes all the time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Rieff argues is that Yung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud where all you do is you just try to figure out what’s going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy. What’s your take on Yung?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he’s a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don’t want to make a naive historical connection there, but it seems to me from what I’ve read of Jung, that he’s wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure that binds us all together. I think Rieff in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic, he refers to Jung as having a sort of a weak God. And there’s that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk in universal terms about what is good for human beings.

But I’ve never heard him make that final leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible, but he always seems to be somewhat equivocal to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I’ve not read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Rieff makes some comment somewhere that it’s almost preferable to have Freud’s non-existent, but powerful God than to have Jung’s existent but very weak God. And there’s a sense in which I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I’d almost rather be dealing with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of Jung, and we’ve had guests on the podcast who are big in the Jung and talk about archetypes. And I’ve read all the, especially since I’m in like in the manosphere, there’s a lot of mytho poletic stuff where people go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior. And I read these books and like I always think they’re interesting, but it’s like, what much to do with this? ‘Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king architect. I’m like, what does that mean? And they tell you just, well, you gotta think about Pharaohs and you’ll somehow become, like you’ll harness it. I’m like, I don’t know. And to me it just makes more sense. Okay. I’d rather just like, okay, what’s the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of this vague, weird general archetype?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question which Nietzsche would raise as well, of, are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is, you’re sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which is typically justifiable. It’s interesting you raise it in the manosphere that, it’s fascinating to me that this is the manosphere, because it’s precisely in the manosphere that I think we are seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s actually useful in organizing your life just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor, we talked about Rieff, they’ve all described this inward turn, we shape our sense of self by what’s inside of ourself. And it’s no longer external things that it’s helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alasdair MacIntyre. What does Alasdair MacIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn to defining ourself?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book After Virtues where he sort of lays this out, the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you enter this realm of we might say radical subjectivity, you end up losing he would say the great narratives or the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. One could take an example, when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb, or just part of the woman’s body? Behind your convictions on those things like two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it’s virtually impossible to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative to the other group. So for McIntyre, society’s ability to have important discussions starts to break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences.

Brett McKay: He says that since there’s no longer a common moral language, common objective, moral background, where we’re having these debates, what we had to resort to, he calls emotivism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. And essentially that is that, your moral views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral objectivity. So, debates become, you think you’re talking about principles, but you’re actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

Brett McKay: And I think what McIntyre’s idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they’d never go anywhere. ‘Cause we’re just yelling past each other, basically.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now get to go by default to the courts, because in the courts you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don’t have to persuade the populist to vote for you in some way. And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States, has been focused on Supreme Court decisions. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the debating floor of the Senate.

Brett McKay: What did MacIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?

Carl Trueman: Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher as Benedicts option, I think he published the book within 2015, 2016. Rieff’s on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you’re gonna have to return to a kind of local level.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it’s Nietzsche or Aristotle. That’s her choice.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I would say, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity. But yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it’s hard. And going back to local, that’s gonna be hard. And I think even McIntyre says he’s not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think he argued that people today they’ve forgotten like even how to do that. And so it’s gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we’re not sitting in the same room. I’m not even seeing your face. We’re just talking through a computer. So much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of real physical, geographical place where you could actually build a local community.

Brett McKay: And I think the conversation so far, what we’ve hopefully painted for our audience is that okay, reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your sense of self it’s, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we’re all kind of winging it in a way. And that’s why you have existential crises ’cause you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. And then, because we’re deciding how we look at our life, or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this debate that’s intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is the good life.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. I mean, when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some of that’s connected to the disembodied nature of social media. When I was growing up I had a group of friends, they were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real rich, strong interaction because we were actually real presences in each other’s lives. Social media insults are cheap, falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we’re engaging simply to the views they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are than would’ve been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there’s a strong, it’s not just philosophical stuff that’s going on there’s also technological stuff that is reinforcing and exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you’re online, you’re a psychological man.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Yeah. You are disembodied.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Rieff and McIntyre, I couldn’t help but think about CS Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we’ve been discussing today?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this, Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is anthropology, what it means to be human that is becoming the big question of the age. And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like the Triumph of The Therapeutic is one of those books that the author could not have known how truly he was putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was.

It’s more true today in some ways than other times. So I think first of all, Lewis is useful because yep, anthropology is the problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there is some sort of moral structure to the universe and I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that’s something worth exploring. I think we’re at a point where we’re beginning to see that yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we have, but in doing so, we’re actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point too, Lewis, he’s not offering all the answers, but he’s certainly pointing us in the direction of the right questions.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Because we’ve been talking about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel, and whatever you felt, that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order and that some things should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time, for the right reasons.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that’s where I think returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue. The old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings, but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.

Brett McKay: I think yeah. Role not only for Aquinas, but the great books like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the sentiments, looking at good art. The religious life can play a role in that, helping you order your desires.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, I mean, this is the Enlightenment thinker, Friedrich Schiller has this idea that human beings, we have two drives. You have the rational drive, and we have the Sensuous Drive. And those two, if you allow the one to run amuck, it’s a disaster. If it’s the rational drive, you end up with a French revolution. If it’s a sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have each informing the other. And for Shiller art was the answer, as you just said, contemplating great art. That’s what brought the two together. And that’s, I think, not a bad way of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It does matter what art you contemplate.

Brett McKay: Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

Carl Trueman: That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me.

Brett McKay: It did. Well, Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carl Trueman: I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners that’s every two weeks, column at firstthings.com. It actually has a print version, but it’s also an online magazine dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for World Magazine online as well, which is, that’s a more distinctively protestant thing. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess, but firstthings.com Would be the primary place to go and read me.

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

Carl Trueman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks For having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Carl Trueman. He’s the author of the book, the Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/modernself 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 sign up for a new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind time listening when podcast would put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.