Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness https://www.artofmanliness.com/podcast/ Men's Interest and Lifestyle Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:06:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 Podcast #973: A Butler’s Guide to Managing Your Household https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/podcast-973-a-butlers-guide-to-managing-your-household/ Tue, 25 Nov 2025 14:55:32 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=181352 Note: This is a rebroadcast. It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and cleaned. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tip-top shape? My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field-tested, insider advice […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and cleaned. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tip-top shape?

My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field-tested, insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the major-domo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butlers and household managers and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping.

In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practice of having servants like a butler and maid ebbed in the mid-20th century but has made a comeback today. We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a “butler’s book” to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you’ve probably neglected (hint: go take a look at the side of the door on your dishwasher), his surprising choice for the best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets, and much more.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and clean. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tiptop shape? My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field tested insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the majordomo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butler’s and household managers, and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping. In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practices of having servants like a butler made ebbed in the mid 20th century, but has made a comeback today.

We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a butler’s book to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you probably neglected. Hint, go take a look at the side of the door of your dishwasher, his apprising choice or best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets and much more. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/butler. All right, Charles MacPherson, welcome to the show.

Charles MacPherson: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Brett McKay: So you have served as a professional butler for over two decades, and you now run an organization that trains butlers and other professional domestic staff. And I think most people when they think of butlers, they think of butlers as men who served English aristocrats and American robber barons, the 19th and early 20th centuries. But butlering is still alive and well today. And I wanna talk about what it looks like today. But before we do, can you kind of give us a brief history of domestic service? What was it like 100 years ago? When did it reach its peak, etcetera?

Charles MacPherson: So that’s a great question because I think understanding history allows us to really understand where we are today. So let’s very briefly, let’s start back 150 years ago or so, we’re in the Victorian era, Queen Victoria’s on the throne, and there is a huge amount of domestic staff. In fact, it’s the second largest employer, if you will, in the United Kingdom compared to farming, right after farming, which is number one. And so these people are required that the amount of domestic staff are required because the homes of the day didn’t have rain water, didn’t have electricity. And so for the wealthy to live, as we all know, when we watch PBS and watching Agatha Christie and so on, that took a mountain of people to be able to undertake. And so that’s the height of the most number of domestic people. And then we go Queen Victoria dies, her son King Edward, so we go into the Edwardian era, World War I, and now for the first time in history, we have people leaving domestic service.

And so all of a sudden, this is when men start to leave domestic service really. And so now this is where women are starting to really become prominent in domestic service and they’re now serving at the dining room table, which society is shocked by to see a woman in the front of the house. And then all of a sudden we go through World War II, now we’re into the 1950s and all of a sudden the world has changed. And there is now the modern conveniences based on the war. So we have clothing that’s available, we have food that’s available, we can go to grocery stores.

And so being a domestic service is a dying art. And as we go into the 60s, into the 70s, there is no one going into domestic service. It’s really has come to an end and it’s just the very few that are left. But then we get into 1980 and Ronald Reagan becomes President, Margaret Thatcher becomes Prime Minister, and we have Reaganomics. And now all of a sudden, we have a huge amount of wealth that’s being created by a very small group of people. And so as they acquire their wealth and they start to acquire toys of homes and boats and airplanes, they want to live comfortably. And so all of a sudden there’s, well, let’s hire a butler, but there really are no butlers except some old timers.

And so all of a sudden there’s this demand for butlering and people start to go back into private service. And so all of a sudden as we get into 2000 and up, all of a sudden there’s a huge amount of demand for private service because the wealthy continue to be wealthy and to generate money. And so it’s incredible the career that it’s become. And so now it’s really a career where you can make a lot of money and where it’s no longer being in servitude like you were 150 years ago, but being in domestic service today is actually an honorable career. And so it’s really interesting how it went from the height to almost being extinct in the 60s and early 70s. And now all of a sudden here we back are at 2024 and there is more demand for domestic service than can actually meet. So the supply, we just don’t have the supply.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. So at its peak when in the Victorian era when you had just a household of staff, if anyone’s seen Downton Abbey, they’ve probably…

Charles MacPherson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: That’s what people typically think of domestic service. Like how many people did a typical aristocrat have in their home?

Charles MacPherson: Well, so when you think about it, it really comes down to what was the size of the house. But some people could have 20, 30, 40, 50, or 100, so it was all… Remember, farming was all done by hand, so there was a huge amount of people on the estate just in dealing with the farms, which generated income for the estate. But to run the inside of the household, there’s no microwave, there’s no fridge, there’s no electric mixer. So just in the kitchen alone, to be able to produce the meals they did, you needed an army of people. And then the washing of all the dishes and all that stuff was done by hand, of course ’cause there were no dishwashers, there’s no electricity. And so those houses often had 20, 30, sometimes 40 people because that’s how much staff it took to be able to make all that happen.

Brett McKay: And the butler at that time, like his job was just to oversee that, manage all that?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler at the time… So if we go in the 1800s, the butler at that period is really… Yes, he’s running the household and he’s the one who serves that table and he’s the lead, but he’s really running the front of the house. So he’s running everything that the guests and the family see. And it’s the head housekeeper who runs the back of the house, who is dealing with the housekeepers and the laundry and all that kind of stuff. And then chef was responsible for the kitchen. And if you were really fancy back then, you had a French chef that was de rigueur of the time. So butler really is front of the house, head housekeeper is back of the house, then chef is the kitchen. So it’s still interesting that there’s still three very senior positions, but the butler ultimately was responsible for overall everything.

Brett McKay: And then you highlight in this history that you did of domestic service, that in the 19th century and early 20th century, there’s all these really detailed guides written by butlers and other domestic servants on how to do what they do with the professionalism. Like they really took their job seriously.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, absolutely. And I think that, well, what’s interesting is that when Mrs. Beeton wrote her book on Household Management in 1861, that’s considered the first self-help book to ever be written. And that was as we’ve gone through and we get the first industrial revolution, we’re getting into the second industrial revolution in the 1870s, so all of a sudden we have the birth of this middle class, and so they want to live, but the problem is they don’t know how to live. And so Isabella Beeton writes this book on household management, teaching the middle class how to run a home, and if they are lucky enough to have a servant or two, how to manage them and so on. So it’s actually quite interesting. So as that first book kind of takes popularity and is still in print today, which is quite interesting, and that is then we have other people who see that and everyone kind of jumps on the bandwagon and everyone says, well, if she can write a book, I can write a book. And so that’s where you have all these books being written in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

Brett McKay: But I think it’s interesting speaking of how domestic service started to wane in the 20th century. I think it’s interesting that whenever I read biographies or histories of famous people who were… They weren’t rich, they were probably solidly middle class, maybe upper middle class, even in the early 20th century, they would usually have a maid and a cook. And you rarely see that today.

Charles MacPherson: Well, when you think about it, again, those homes were hard to manage. They didn’t necessarily have running hot water. A lot of things were still oil lamps or candles at nighttime, so all that had to be taken care of into the dust and the soot, which is actually how spring cleaning came to be ’cause everything was closed up all winter. And so you had all this dust in the house from your lighting implements. But if you were middle class, you usually at least had a housekeeper or I should say a maid. A housekeeper is different from a maid. They’re two different things.

Brett McKay: What’s the difference?

Charles MacPherson: So a housekeeper is truly a professional who is able to manage the household, if you will, employees can report to her. Where a maid is just the worker bee, if you will. The maid isn’t in management position. So the management position is really the housekeeper or the head housekeeper.

Brett McKay: Okay. And so yeah, through the mid 20th century, many upper middle class families had that, but then eventually it went away.

Charles MacPherson: Well, it went away because the world is changing and first of all the cost is becoming prohibitive. But what’s fascinating is that during World War I, world War II, we were able to mass produce to be able to keep the war machines going. When the war comes to an end, there’s this excess of capacity for production. And so that’s why all of a sudden foods and clothing and everything become so readily available after World War II because the capacity of these factories is there and they have nothing else to do. And so they start producing for the mass markets. And as we get the burst of the middle class that continues to grow in the 1950s, it allowed you to be able to function without staff.

Brett McKay: ‘Cause you have washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners, all that stuff.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. All those things are starting to come in. And so those appliances that are saving time. At the time, when you think about it, particularly in America, the dream was 2.2 kids and a dog and a white picket fence and mom stayed home and took care of the house while dad worked. And so she kind of fairly or unfairly becomes the maid and takes over, but at least she has the appliances to be able to make it easier. It’s not easy, but to make it easier.

Brett McKay: Okay. So domestic service started going down throughout the 60s and 70s, but then in the 80s you started to see the revival of it.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: How did you get involved in butlering, and then how did you learn how to be a butler when it kind of became a lost art?

Charles MacPherson: So what’s fascinating is that in the 1990s, I was in the catering business. I was in the off-premise catering business. And one of my clients was one of Canada’s wealthiest families that every Canadian knows and loves. And I had mentioned to the lady of the house one day just in conversation, I was thinking of maybe leaving the catering world and to do something else. And she said, oh my God, what are you gonna do? And I said, I haven’t figured it out. And she said, well, Rick, my butler is going to be leaving soon, so why don’t you come and work for me? And so I said, well, let me think about it. And I told my mother. My mother said, absolutely not. I don’t want you to be a servant. I said, well, I think it’s a good job. And I thought about it, and of course I did the opposite of what my mother recommended, and I took the job.

And so it was the lady of the house who taught me how to butle. And so that is a verb that you can use correctly. And so every week she would give me lessons on how do you drive the car so the person in the backseat isn’t nauseous? Or how do you get the grass stains out of her children’s t-shirts and jeans? What’s the difference between a breakfast table, a luncheon table, a dinner table? Where does the oyster fort go? How do you open the door for someone? How do you take their coat? How do you put their coat back on? How do you walk with someone with an umbrella? It was quite fascinating. So after a year, I was the majordomo for the household. The family had three homes. I had up to 30 full-time staff that were reporting to me throughout the year. And it was really an incredible opportunity.

And I call it my Shirley MacLaine moment, you don’t know if there really is reincarnation, but if there is such a thing, if I am fortunate enough to be reincarnated from a previous life, I was very lucky I was either a butler or a nobleman who had a butler because this career just seems so logical to me and so evident of just what to do. It was never a mystery. As I was learning, I realized that what my job was about was logic and just to think about, well, what’s logical? And that’s really how my education became, was because of this lady and just continuing to learn on my own and meeting others.

Brett McKay: So back 150 years ago, the duties of a butler was to take care of the front of the house. What are the duties of a butler in 2024? What’s a typical?

Charles MacPherson: So in 2024, the butler is now an expensive commodity, but the butler is actually managing the household. And so some households, the butler may be in the front of the house for serving. In some households, the butler doesn’t serve, the butler is purely an administrative position. But when you think about it, the butler is actually managing the household from a perspective of that the average household spends more money and has as many or more employees than very small businesses in the US. So you’re really a business person taking care of a business. And so you’re taking care of everything from, whether it’s staff management, whether it’s putting together operational manuals of how the household’s going to run, when are things cleaned and when are things maintained, taking care of accounts, when plumbers are coming or electricians to fix things because things always break down in those homes.

Making sure that those bills are authorized for payment and that that work’s been completed. Making sure that the household is running. And so the butler today really is trying to be at least one or two steps ahead of their employer to always be thinking and anticipating what’s going to happen, what needs to happen for the family. And so it’s quite fascinating actually, but it’s not as much of a service role, but it is a very detailed role that keeps you really busy. When you think of these large homes, they’re actually commercial facilities with the amount of when you’re talking about 10, 20, 30, 40,000 square feet, we’re talking about commercial cooling units and commercial kitchens. And so it becomes complicated. It’s not just the little furnace that you and I grew up with and probably still have in our homes today.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like a butler today is like a chief operations Officer.

Charles MacPherson: [laughter] That’s a great way to put it. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Does domestic staff still live with homeowners like they did a century ago?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, great question. And so the answer is no. Domestic staff today have a life. They have a family and so they don’t live in, and in fact, it’s hard to find people who want to live in and if you’re going to live in, you actually can make more money than if you live out ’cause that’s considered a premium to be able to live in versus live out.

Brett McKay: Okay. And the way you’ve made it sound like is that being a butler or being on domestic staff like this could be a lucrative, very fulfilling career.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Where can you go to butler school, which is 4, 6, 8 weeks and you walk out with a job starting at 65, $70,000 a year, and a good butler by the time they’re within 5 years with the right experience, they’re at a 100, 125,000 plus benefits, full benefits and the retirement plan. And we have butlers that are making anywhere from a quarter of a million to $350,000 a year based on the home that they’re managing and the work that they do. So you can make a lot of money if you’re good at it, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s an honorable career to be able to manage a household. And what I love is as I jokingly say, but it’s you’re kind of seeing history happen from being a fly on the wall and watching the movie stars or the captains of industry or the politicians that are coming to the household for your family and seeing what’s happening and knowing what’s gonna happen before the rest of the world knows what’s happening. And I think it’s pretty fascinating. I think it’s a really great career and I think a lot of people don’t actually think of it as a genuine career.

Brett McKay: So you’ve written several books based on your insights and experience as a butler that can help the average person who might not be able to afford a butler, how they can improve different facets of their lives. And I wanna focus on this conversation today on what we can learn from butlers about managing a home and making it not only a place that runs efficiently, but it’s pleasant to spend your time in. And I start off, you talk about that butler’s traditionally had this thing called the butler’s book. What’s the butler’s book? What sort of information does a butler keep in a butler’s book?

Charles MacPherson: So the butler’s book is really the bible for the butler of how the household run and it keeps track of everything. So whether it’s contractors telephone numbers or how do you use the remote control to go from the DVD player to the satellite dish to regular cable television so that you’ve got the kinda like the cheat sheets in there, or you’ve got household schedules of when employees are working, you have things like inventory. So for example, in my butler book, one of the things that I used to keep was all the inventories of the different Chinas so that when we were entertaining and when I’d be sitting with Mrs in a meeting and the chef and we’d be discussing about a party that would be coming up and everyone would say, well it would be nice to use the green dishes for that thing.

And then I’d be able to look in my butler’s book and say, well, there’s 36 people coming for dinner and we have 35 dinner plates, so we’re short of plates, so either we have to change to a different service, or I have to go buy some more of this green service if I can find it kind of scenario. So you keep cheat sheets like that that are there for you or master things on when are you taking care of certain inventories or mechanical things around the household or what are the spring cleaning projects and all that kind of stuff. So all that’s in the butler’s book. So the butler’s book really is the Bible. It’s the one place when you need something that’s where you go.

Brett McKay: And I can see this being useful for just anybody who has a house.

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brett McKay: Yeah. My wife and I run into that experience where we’re hosting a party and we think, well, do we have this thing? And we’re like, well, I don’t know, we kind of, we have to spend 30 minutes looking for it. And we’re like, well, we can’t find us, let’s go buy another one. So you buy another one and then after the party happens, like, oh, here’s this thing that we were looking for, we just waste of money.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly, exactly. No, but I think the butler’s book would be able to tell you the kind of thing where you keep those things and as long as you put them back where you’re supposed to, then you’re in good shape. But the butler’s book is really this tool that makes you more efficient and more successful at doing what you want to do.

Brett McKay: So what sorts of information do you think just a lay person should keep in their own butler’s book for their household?

Charles MacPherson: I think that just keeping simple things like all your telephone numbers for the plumber, the electrician, where is the electrical boxes if you have more than one in your household, and where’s the main disconnect to turn the power off? And when do you open your pool if you have a swimming pool, and when do you close it? So kind of keeping a calendar. Or when do you wanna clean the eavestroughs? When do you wanna be able to deal with certain things in the yard or when do you wanna clean the windows or put the storm windows on, or take the storm windows off? When do you wanna do a bit of a deep clean inside the house? And so what’s interesting is that when you start to look at all these projects, when you look at the calendar, it allows you to be able to spread it out throughout over the years so that there isn’t one month where you have nothing to do and in the following month you can barely keep up.

So that’s what’s great about the calendar within the butler’s book is that it allows you to plan things, so that way you can plan things ahead of time so you know that you wanna have your windows washed in April, and so in January or February as you’re just kind of looking ahead of things that you wanna do, you say, oh, let’s schedule the window cleaner now and let’s get it done so that at least they’re scheduled. So it’s not the last minute when you’re trying to get ahold of them when everyone else is. And so the butler’s book is really there as the tool to help you plan and just to remind you of what needs to be done.

Brett McKay: Where do you recommend keeping your butler’s book? Is this in a physical book that you keep around?

Charles MacPherson: Well, traditionally the butler’s book was always kept in the butler’s pantry, which is between the kitchen and off the dining room kind of scenario. But most of us don’t have butler’s pantries today. So I always love it in the kitchen somewhere because I think that’s where everyone can find it. And I’m also a really firm believer that the butler’s book is a living, breathing document. And so you shouldn’t be afraid to write in it when something changes or when you learn of something. And so maybe it’s something that just is always kind of handwritten or maybe once a year you sit down and you type out all the changes and then you just print off a clean copy. But I think that the butler’s book needs to be in a place where everyone knows where it is, everyone has access to it and where you’re not afraid to write in it, to update information.

Brett McKay: And I was doing some research before this conversation about modern butler’s book. There’s actually software that modern butlers can use these days where they basically create a butler’s book, but it’s in the cloud. So I know a lot of butlers for really affluent families who have maybe two, three, four homes, they have to know what’s going on in all these different homes. So they have all this stuff just on the internet.

Charles MacPherson: Yes, but I’m not a firm believer in things becoming overly computerized in a household. I think that it becomes overly complicated and you end up being a data entry person versus a manager. And so I’m actually a real firm believer that the butler’s book, as an example, should just be in a three ring binder that’s in a place where everyone knows where it is. Now you can keep the master document in a word file, for example, that’s in the cloud so that you can check it from wherever you are if you need to look something up. But I’m not a firm believer that everything should be in the cloud because if the power goes out or you can’t turn the computer on for whatever reason, how are we gonna access this information in the cloud while we’re in this emergency kind of scenario? I think the theory is always really great and this great fantasy, but I don’t think it actually works in reality. And so I think it’s much easier to be able to have it printed where you can take the book with you to the mechanical room that’s telling you how to do something so you can follow the steps. I think just makes it easier.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of the things you can keep in a butler’s book is a calendar of home maintenance. I know it’s gonna vary from location to location and home to home, but generally what sort of home maintenance regimen do you recommend people keep to keep their home running in tip top shape?

Charles MacPherson: So I think you need to first of all think about where you’re located. So for example, if you’re gonna be, for example, in Florida or you’re gonna be somewhere warm, you’re gonna have obviously very many different requirements than if you are going to be up in the north where there’s snow, for example. So first of all, based on your physical location, where there’s snow, which is where I happen to be right now, the butler’s book would say to me in October, for example, okay, so you need to get ready because winter’s coming. So do you have salt? Do you have sand? Do you have a good brush to take the snow off the car? Do you have enough windshield washer fluid? So it kind of gives you those checklists of things to do as you get ready so that once you have that first snowfall, it’s not a panic kind of scenario of not being ready for it. Or you’re going to the hardware store to go and get sand or salt or whatever, and it’s all sold out because everyone’s thinking at the last minute.

And then when you’re down south, simple things like how do you get your house ready for hurricane season if you’re in Florida, for example? Or what do you need to think about if you’re in Arizona from a temperature perspective from the outside of the physical house? What are you gonna do for the air conditioning unit? Does it need an overhaul once a year? And if so, what time of the year are you gonna do that? So I think you start with the location of where your house is, and then the kind of home you have. Whether it’s an apartment or whether it’s a physical house or a townhouse or whatever, everything needs some kind of maintenance. And so the other thing, the reason I like the binder concept is that as you put your calendar in the butler’s book, you might not think of everything right away.

And so you can start to fill it in over the year as you go through the life in your household. And so when it’s the first day of that first snowfall and you’re not ready, you think, okay, now I know I need to get ready. And so now you make a note in your book of what you need and to get ready for that particular item. Or when are you gonna open the pool if your pool closes in the winter because you’re in the north? And when do you open it again kind of thing? Or when do you wanna be able to fertilize or do what you need to do to your roses that are in your garden? So I think there’s always something. And I think it comes to you really easily as you go throughout the year in the life of living within your household.

Brett McKay: Okay, so your household maintenance routine, it’s very seasonal. And as you say, it’s gonna vary by where you live. But you have a good annual list in the book that can apply to most everyone. So for example, in winter, you have things like vacuum your fridge coils, flip the mattresses. Spring, change batteries on smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, wash the outside of the windows, have AC inspected, get your outdoor grill ready. Summer, you’ve got clean out and organize your garage, wash out garbage and recycle bins. And then fall, you’ve got have chimney cleaned and expected and then clean the dryer vent. We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Something else I’m curious about, one of the things I’ve had problems with with managing my own home is finding good contractors and maintenance workers. Do you have any advice on that?

Charles MacPherson: So finding a good person, they’re worth their weight in gold, if you can find them. But once you do, you need to be able to stay in touch. So that’s… First of all, when you are looking for a trades person, go to your neighbors, go to people you trust, read reviews online, but you need to be able to be clear about what are you looking for so that when you actually speak to the trade person, you can actually ask them intelligent questions. ‘Cause you’ve thought about what do you need or why something needs to be fixed or repaired or why you wanna build something. It doesn’t matter what the situation, but you need to have a clear plan of what do I need this person to do so that you can be clear to them so that they understand what your needs are, so you can compare.

And I think that when you interview two or three people, you kind of get a gut feeling right away, who’s the good one and who’s not. And listen to your gut instinct, and then make a note of things in your butler’s book of okay, so we tried John the electrician, he was really good, but he wasn’t really clean. So the next time he comes, I need to make sure he knows to take his boots off before he comes in my house and so on and so forth because the work is good, but he just was a bit messy. And so just to remind yourselves that the next time John comes over, you can say, okay, John, remember I need you to take your boots off. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay, no problem. So I think that being clear about what you’re looking for is really important ’cause I think that’s where the relationship breaks down is that both parties aren’t communicating well with each other.

Brett McKay: Okay. And yes, if you find a good one, make sure you put that in your butler book for…

Charles MacPherson: Put in the butler book, but also, for example, pay them on time because then they’ll want to come back kind of scenario. So you gotta think of things like that too, and be nice to them and offering them a glass of water on a hot day or a cup of coffee. I remember as the butler, what we used to do is we used to make muffins and coffee for every trade that would come to the house every day. And so we became the popular house because they all wanted to come to us first thing in the morning to get their coffee and their muffin for free. That’s how I kept the trades happy. And so being nice to trades, you get it back tenfold. First of all, you should just be a nice person, and they’re doing a job that you need. But second of all, if you keep them happy, they’re gonna be more willing to come back the next time you need them.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about managing the inventory in our home. So we mentioned dishes or things for parties. But I was actually having this conversation with a friend the other day, and he wanted to know, he was like, how much toilet paper do I really need to keep? And how do I know when I need to restock ’cause I’m tired of having to when I need it the most, it’s all gone? So any advice there on managing just household inventories. Could be dishes, cleaning supplies, paper towels, toilet paper, et cetera.

Charles MacPherson: So you’re talking about two different inventories. And so if we’re gonna talk about furniture, fixtures and equipment, which we call FF&E, that stuff like dishes and furniture and art and all those kinds of things. So that’s one kind of inventory that you’re keeping. So usually we do a picture of it, and then we record how many of that item there are in inventory and where it is in the household. But the inventory that your friend is talking about is what we call a consumables inventory. And so what we’re actually consuming, so everything within the kitchen, whether it’s a spice or a meat or anything that’s in the freezer, but then that’s also cleaning supplies. And there’ll also be toiletries, it’ll also be makeup and shaving cream and all that kind of stuff. So those are all consumables. And so the easiest thing to do, first of all, so let’s take the toilet paper, let’s answer the question to your friend, how much toilet paper do I need? So first of all, you need to figure out, how many bathrooms do you have? So you have two bathrooms or three bathrooms. So right away, that’s gonna be one roll in each of those bathrooms. And then you wanna have potentially a couple of rolls that are there for a change underneath the counter.

So if we have three bathrooms, we had three rolls plus we have two extra. So that’s nine rolls already just to keep the bathrooms full. And then on average, you’re going through, for the sake of the argument, you’re going through a roll a week. And so you’ll know at the end of the month kind of how much you’re consuming and how much you need, or you’re using two, three or four a week or a month. And so what we do is we do what’s called a minimum-maximum inventory number. So what’s the minimum number? We know we never wanna have less than nine rolls of toilet paper, but we never really need more than 24. And so once a month or every two months, you count the toilet paper. And when you get down to nine, then you know you need to order the balance to get you back up to 24. So you need to order 16 kind of thing. So it’s actually simpler than you think. Once you come up with the minimum-maximum, then you just set an inventory date and maybe it’s once every three months kind of scenario.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And I thought that was really interesting. You mentioned the FFE, the furniture, fixtures, and equipment inventory.

Charles MacPherson: Yeah.

Brett McKay: This would be good for any household to do ’cause this is important for insurance purposes, right? You wanna know if you have art or furniture, you wanna have a picture of it and like value of it ’cause if your house God forbid burns down, you’ll be able to have a reference to your property. You say, here’s what I had and you start making claims.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that most people are underinsured, and the insurance companies will tell you. And so nobody really wants to spend their weekend doing a household inventory. But let me tell you, God forbid you should ever need it, you’ll be the happiest person in the world to have that. Because if God forbid something happens to your house and you need to make an insurance claim, they’re gonna wanna see all that kind of stuff. And what’s interesting is the insurance company, if you’re insured for the sake of the argument for $100,000, the insurance company doesn’t just write you a check for $100,000, you have to actually go and buy the stuff and the insurance company reimburses you. So that’s I think important to know right there. And second of all, maybe you’re insured for $100,000, but maybe you have 150,000 worth of stuff that you didn’t think about. And so now all of a sudden you have less than when you started. So do you have a stamp collection or do you have China or silverware or jewelry? Do you have books kind of stuff? What kind of art do you have? What kind of household tools do you have? All that kind of stuff is important. And so doing an inventory really helps you understand what kind of insurance coverage you need and then what you have in case of an emergency.

Brett McKay: Okay. We talked about home maintenance, talked about managing toilet paper inventory, talked about managing your big inventory in your house. Let’s talk about keeping our homes clean. First question is, what do you think are the pros and cons of cleaning your own house versus hiring someone to clean it for you?

Charles MacPherson: I think the main thing is if you’re gonna do it yourself is do you have the time to do it properly? And if you do and if you want to do it on your own, then I think that’s great. Then go for it. But if you don’t have the time and you want to hire someone, that’s okay too. But the biggest mistake is that people aren’t clear about what they want. And so a cleaning person will come in and do what they think needs to be done and then you’re upset. Well, I can’t believe they didn’t clean the chandelier, da da, da, da. I was like, well they only had three hours to be in your house, they can’t do everything. Or they didn’t iron the sheets. Well, are they supposed to? Did you talk about that before you hired them? And so most people don’t have a proper job description in place. And that’s I think where things fall apart the most is that the expectations are one thing and the deliverables are another and no one’s speaking to each other about what they’re going to do and so people are disappointed. So I think being clear about what your needs are, if you’re going to hire someone, but I think that whether you hire someone or you do it yourself, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way. I think it just comes down to time and if you can afford that.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In the book, you make a distinction between house cleaning, housekeeping and deep cleaning. What are the differences between the three?

Charles MacPherson: Yeah. So deep cleaning is really when you’re pulling something apart. So you’re cleaning the chandeliers, you’re wiping the baseboards, you’re lifting the carpets, you’re taking the pillows and off the couch and you’re vacuuming inside the couch and underneath the couch. And so you’re really pulling the room apart is a deep cleaning. House cleaning is really just taking care of the house on a weekly basis, usually, or twice weekly where you’re vacuuming, you’re dusting, but you’re just keeping things going, you’re not doing the deep cleaning. And then housekeeping is really making a house a home and making it feel inviting that things are where they should be and that you need. So the housekeeping is everything overall, how do you feel within that space? House cleaning is what we do on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, or twice weekly. And then deep cleaning is those special projects. When we flip the mattresses, when we turn carpets around so that they wear evenly in every direction. So those are always the big jobs.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about just house cleaning. You have these golden rules of house cleaning. What are some of those golden rules of house cleaning?

Charles MacPherson: Well, the golden rules of housekeeping or cleaning are really about making sure that you’re organized and that you have the right tools, that you have the right chemicals, and that you’re working methodically throughout the household. And you’re starting in one place and you’re working towards another so that you know where you are at any one point. And so the golden rules are making sure that we don’t cross contaminate. And so making sure that we understand that we have different cloths for different locations. And so we’re not using the bathroom cloths in the kitchen or in the bedroom and so on and so forth. And one of the golden rules that we remember also is remember that when you’re cleaning from a room, you always start from the top and you work your way down because dust of course falls. So that’s why you don’t wanna work from the bottom up. And so the golden rules are just about being logical about what we need to do.

Brett McKay: So one of the ways you recommend being logical and efficient about cleaning your house is to have a cleaning list. So just as your butler’s book should have a maintenance list for your home, you have different cleaning lists broken down by daily, weekly, and monthly. So here in the book, you got daily cleaning on the list, tidy clutter, wipe down counters and stove tops. Weekly, you wanna give each room in the house a good cleaning, dust all the surfaces, vacuum all the floors, clean the bathroom, that includes cleaning the shower, toilet and counters, replace the sheets on your bed. And a point you make on the weekly cleaning is that you don’t have to do all this in one day, you can break it up throughout the week. So one day you do the bathrooms, another day you do the bedrooms, and the next day you do the kitchen. And then for the monthly list, you have things like scrub shower grout, descale showerheads, clean doorknobs and handles, and dust vents.

Charles MacPherson: So to your point, it’s weekly, monthly, yearly kind of scenario, whatever, but it’s about what do I need to do every week in my bathroom? So I know every week I’m gonna need to be able to clean the shower and the sink and the counter, and I’m going to need to clean the toilet and the floor. But I don’t need to every week pull the medicine cabinet apart, or I don’t need to take the shower curtain off if it’s cloth and wash it kind of scenario. I don’t need to wash the walls down every week because the humidity actually captures dirt or the light fixture above the sink doesn’t need to be cleaned necessarily every week. You might give it a dust with a duster, but you’re not pulling it apart and really cleaning it that thoroughly every week. And so that’s what you’re really kind of keeping track of is every week, what do we need to do? Every month, what do we need to do? And then what are the special projects that we wanna do? And sometimes there’s no special project for that particular room.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. And one job I saw on these checklists that people probably don’t think about a lot is clean the dishwasher.

Charles MacPherson: So what’s interesting is that you think to yourself, well, what do you mean I need to clean my dishwasher? But that to me would be something that I would put on my quarterly list. I would say, okay, it’s March. I do it every three months, it’s time to clean the dishwasher. And so the side of the door, so when you open the door and the door is open, there’s the edge that runs on the three sides, the top and the two sides, that gets really dirty because as you’re putting dirty dishes into the dishwasher, food product falls in that area and it doesn’t get washed when the dishwasher door is closed. So you actually need to clean that. You need to… If you have filters in the dishwasher, in the bottom of the dishwasher, sometimes they need to be emptied and cleaned out. Sometimes if you have a very fancy dishwasher, it’ll do it by itself, but you need to keep an eye on all that kind of stuff. I’m not a really big believer that you need to run a chemical through your dishwasher, although there are those that are available, but you need to actually clean the filter if it is necessary and you need to actually clean the door, the sides of the door.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for your weekly cleaning, so this is when you’re kind of, it’s not a deep clean, but just sort of the maintenance cleaning you’re doing to make sure everything looks nice. You recommend to be efficient with this, to have a butler’s caddy. What’s a butler’s caddy and what do you keep in it?

Charles MacPherson: So a butler’s caddy is the caddy that you’re gonna carry around. So what are you going to have when you’re cleaning throughout the house? And so the caddy is gonna have your cleaning cloths in it. It’s going to have whatever chemicals that you happen to be using, your tools. So for example, do you need soaps or do you need any sprays to disinfect something? Or do you need a squeegee? Do you need paper towel? Do you need baking soda? Do you need like a cream cleaner for certain ceramic things that you’re cleaning? So it’s about thinking about where are you going to be cleaning and what are the things that you need? Because the worst thing is, is that as you’re cleaning, you’re kind of carrying everything in your hand and then you realize you’ve forgotten something and you don’t really wanna go back to to the closet, wherever you keep all your cleaning supplies or under the sink or wherever it happens to be.

And so you don’t really do it, you just kind of, I’ll do it next time. And you just kind of forget about it again. So the caddy just makes it easy. If everything’s in there, then no matter where you are in the house, you have what you need. Even for example, like the different color cloths. So I always have said blue for poo and pink for the sink in the kitchen so that we don’t have cross contamination. So that we’re using blue cloths in the bathroom and pink cloths in the kitchen and then a different color cloth everywhere else in the house. All that’s just in the caddy. And so it makes it really easy as you’re moving around the house that you have the right tools.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned about cleaning a room effectively and efficiently. One thing you mentioned is you clean from top to bottom. Any other tips on cleaning a room effectively and efficiently?

Charles MacPherson: So the most important thing is, as you’ve said, is to start from the top and to work your way down, but then you always wanna work in a circular direction. Now, it doesn’t matter if you go clockwise or counterclockwise, but you need to be in a circular direction because at some point you may need to stop so you know exactly where you were in that process, so where to go. But if you’re doing what I call the zigzag method where you’re just kind of moving all over the room, you tend to forget something because it’s not logical. But when you’re going in a circle, you know exactly where you are and what you’re doing. And I find that very helpful.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Do you dust first then vacuum?

Charles MacPherson: So it depends on what kind of vacuum you have because some vacuums actually put dust out. So you have to think about it. So sometimes you’re gonna wanna vacuum first and then dust, sometimes you’re dusting and vacuuming. In my house, for example, I have a central vacuum. So for me, I would dust the room and then I would vacuum the room as I kind of work my way out of the room. So that’s how I do it. But you need to have a good vacuum to make sure it’s not putting dust in the air. What do you want is a good filter on your vacuum.

Brett McKay: Any tips on dusting?

Charles MacPherson: So dusting, the biggest mistake that people make is that they use too much water. You don’t need a chemical, you just need to have a really good cotton cloth. Cotton t-shirts as they wear out in your house are great to be able to cut up for dusting cloths. And so what you do is you wet your hands under the running sink, you give them one shake and then you dry them off in that cloth. And then that cloth at that point is the perfect humidity level to be able to dust ’cause you just want it to be able to grab the dust. But I think that we tend to use too much water, which actually does more damage than good.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about bed making. How often should you change the sheets on your bed? I know it is a contentious…

Charles MacPherson: Oh, my God, it is such a contentious issue. And so there’s surveys, for example, in the UK where the average man changes his sheets every three to four months.

Brett McKay: Holly cow.

Charles MacPherson: Exactly. And that kind of shocked the nation when those surveys came out last year, but you need to do it at least once a week. And the reason you need to do it at least once a week, even if you are the only person sleeping in that bed, is the average person sweats give or take a liter of fluid throughout the night. And so we’ve got this liquid that’s going into the bed, first of all, and you just have skin that this falling off. We all have natural skin, dead skin that’s falling off. It’s not because you’re not healthy or sick, it’s just as normal. So we have that dead skin that’s falling in the bed, we have the humidity that’s in the bed and we all drool at night. We don’t like to think that we do, but we do. So all this kind of stuff is important. And so minimum once a week is when you should be doing your bed.

Brett McKay: Any advice on making a bed?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I wouldn’t make my bed as a kid. My mother and I fought about that bitterly until finally my mother said to me one year, she said, oh, I’m going to give you a present. I said, you are. She said, yes, I’m going to buy you a new duvet for your bed. So let’s go shopping. So I was all excited and I went and I picked out some new sheets with my mother and my mother changed the bed recipe for me. And so what she did is she put a fitted sheet on the bed and she gave me a duvet that had a duvet cover on it. And that was it. And I was told every morning if I wanted to come down for breakfast, I had to just give the duvet a flick so that my bed was made. And it was so simple, I actually did it. So I think it’s about being smart about the bed recipe versus maybe parents wanna have a more complicated bed. So maybe you have a fitted sheet and a flat sheet and a blanket and a duvet. All that’s really great, it’s just a lot more work. And there’s not one right or wrong way to do I, they’re just different. So I think it’s about thinking about the application of who sleeps in the bed, who has to make the bed and who has the time and ultimately what do you want?

Brett McKay: Do you recommend letting the bed air out a little bit before you make it?

Charles MacPherson: Oh, absolutely. For that exact reason that because of the humidity that’s in the bed, the bed needs to be able to air out. And bed bugs and bugs, they love that moisture and they love that humidity and they love that warmth. So if you make the bed right away, that humidity stays trapped in the bed, which is something you don’t want.

Brett McKay: Okay, I’m gonna ask you. This is a greedy question. This is for me.

Charles MacPherson: Okay.

Brett McKay: I clean the showers in our home, so I’m always looking for advice on how to do this job better. Any advice on the best way to clean a shower?

Charles MacPherson: So I think the best way is, first of all, is to have a squeegee in the shower and not the one that you buy for showers ’cause they’re not good generally. What I have in my shower is I actually have a squeegee that you buy at the hardware store for windows. So it’s got a proper black rubber tip on the end so that it squeegees perfectly. So first of all, I think you need a professional squeegee. But second of all, if you have the ability to somewhere either under the bathroom sink or somewhere to be able to keep some soap and a brush so that you can actually brush down the shower on a regular basis and then rinse it and then squeegee it. It becomes really easy because the more often you do it, the easier it is to do and the faster it becomes. The mistake that people do is that they wait too long and then the buildup starts and then it becomes really difficult to clean and then you resent it and then you don’t want to clean it. So having the ability to rinse down the shower, having the squeegee right there, that’s a good one for windows, allows you to squeegee whether you’re doing tiles or you’re doing a glass shower door or glass shower wall, which is what I do. It makes it really easy so that A, the bathroom always looks good, but B, I never get enough buildup that I never really resent that once a week when I use the soap or twice a week when I use the soap because it’s really not hard, it’s just a quick rub down.

Brett McKay: So you recommend squeegeeing after every use?

Charles MacPherson: Absolutely, because the problem is, the water marks go onto the glass and they don’t necessarily come off when it gets wet again. And so that just makes it harder to clean. And the problem is, of course, nobody ever wants to squeegee after you shower, everyone likes the ability to be able to just have a shower and thank you goodbye. And so that’s what you need to think about. Are you prepared to squeegee your shower or if not, maybe a shower curtain is the way to go.

Brett McKay: Best product for cleaning a shower?

Charles MacPherson: Well, I think the issue is that you need a soap. And so I’m a really firm believer in dish soap because it’s got a low pH balance, so it doesn’t really affect anything. It works fine on metal surfaces. It works really well on tiles and tubs and all that kind of stuff. So a dish soap actually is a great cleaner. But if you need a bit of a chemical, Pine-Sol is very good at getting rid of water stains. It is a great way to go. I’m not really a believer that you need to bleach the shower because there’s no bacteria per se in the shower unless you’ve got buildup that’s been there for years and years and then you’ve got mold and bacteria. But if you’re doing it regularly, there really generally isn’t a need to be able to use a harsh chemical. And so the most important thing is making sure that the bathroom airs out, that the door is open. And if you have a window, that the window’s open every once in a while to let the air and the humidity escape.

Brett McKay: One tip that I picked up recently that’s been a game changer for cleaning the glass, at least in the shower, vinegar seems to be really awesome, like a vinegar mixture.

Charles MacPherson: Vinegar and water is a great mixture for certain things. Absolutely. And there’s pros and cons to what they call green cleaning products, which in this particular case would be the water and the vinegar. So I think that, again, then it would be having a squeegee bottle with the vinegar and the water already mixed in it, that’s somewhere handy so you can grab it quickly, give it a little bit of a quick spray, and then you can rinse it and use your squeegee. So again, it’s about the easier you make it for yourself, then the more likely you are to do it. And the more often you do it, the easier the job becomes.

Brett McKay: So final question, in The Butler Speaks, you wrote that being a butler is about giving people the little luxuries in life. So after you’ve taken care of the big stuff of keeping a house, right? You’re doing the maintenance, the cleaning, managing inventory. What are some of the little luxuries people can give themselves to make their home a joy to live in?

Charles MacPherson: I think it’s about thinking of anticipating. So, for example, if you like to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, then that cup of tea can be a real pleasure if you have a nice teacup and you have a nice little teapot. You have some of your favorite tea, so that becomes a pleasure. So whether you’re making it for someone else or you’re making it for yourself, that becomes something really enjoyable. Or, for example, my mother, she likes to have a glass of wine in the evening. She uses a nice glass. She uses one of her crystal glasses from the dining room, not because she’s trying to be particularly fancy, but she just really enjoys that glass. And she says, well, I have to wash the glass by hand no matter what glass it is. So whether it’s just an everyday glass or a crystal glass, it’s the same thing. And so she gets more pleasure out of using the crystal glass. Or a simple pleasure can just be, for example, just having your bed made so when you come home and you crawl into bed, there’s nothing I think nicer than crawling into a freshly made bed. So to me, those are the little things that are enjoyable to try to think about.

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

Charles MacPherson: So the books, you can go to Amazon, which is anywhere in the world, and the books are available there. And you can go onto our website at charlesmacpherson.com. And that’s where you can find out about a lot of things there too.

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

Charles MacPherson: The pleasure has been all mine. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest here is Charles MacPherson. He’s the author of several books, including the book, The butler Speaks. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, charlesmacpherson.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/butler, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to get us reviewed on Apple podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only to listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,094: How the World Wars Shaped J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1094-how-the-world-wars-shaped-j-r-r-tolkien-and-c-s-lewis/ Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:38:45 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191603 When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers — they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism, and sacrifice.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle Earth. We explore how both world wars shaped the perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis, found their way into works like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infused their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, and timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the Inklings, and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling.

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Book cover for "The War for Middle-Earth" by Joseph Loconte, inspired by podcast episode 1094, featuring WWII planes flying over London’s Tower Bridge with a cloudy sky backdrop.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When people think of JR Tolkien and CS Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from the bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside, it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers, they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism and sacrifice. 

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle-earth. We explore how both world wars shaped perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis found their way into works like The Lord in the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infuse their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the inklings and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth.

All right, Joseph Loconte, welcome back to the show.

Joseph Loconte:

Brett, it’s great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called The War for Middle-earth, and this is where you explore how both World War I and World War II shaped the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Why did you decide to do a deep dive into how these wars affected these guys?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think particularly the Second World War, as I began reading more and researching more, it became obvious, Brett, that the real action is the Second World War. Both men were affected profoundly by World War I — impossible not to be affected if you fought it, if both those men did and they survived. It was a traumatic experience for both, and I think it helped to shape their imaginations. But the Second World War is where the action is because now they are living through a cataclysmic event. It’s an existential crisis for Great Britain from 1939 to about 1945 really. And that’s when they’re writing their most important works, the works that we associate with these men. The Lord of the Rings, The Screw Tape Letters, The Great Divorce, and then the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. All that is going on in those nightmare years between 1939 and 1945.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so to understand these works, you have to understand World War II.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s exactly right. And you have to understand, I think Brett is also from the British perspective, not the American perspective, because as my British friends like to remind me, we showed up late to that war.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, they saw it firsthand during the Blitz as getting bombed day in and day out. It was brutal.

Joseph Loconte:

Think about it, Brett. Let’s just take the London Blitz for a second. 76 consecutive nights save one of aerial bombardment on the city of London, and within a few days it’s millions, literally millions of people, women and children mostly evacuated from London into the countryside. And this is the way that CS Lewis gets the idea for The Chronicles of Narnia. Think about how it starts about children sent away because of the air raids into an old house with an old professor out in the countryside. He writes in the opening lines to The Chronicles of Narnia in 1939. So the war becomes a spark for their imagination.

Brett McKay:

Well, you mentioned World War I had a big impact on them and their experience in World War I carried over to their experience of World War II. Both of these men fought in World War I. What were the respective experiences like?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, both of them served as a second lieutenant in the British expeditionary force. They served in France. Tolkien was sent to the SOM in 1916 and the opening day, the Battle of July 1st, 1916, is still the single bloodiest day in British military history. Nearly 20,000 soldiers killed on the opening day. Tolkien will arrive a few days later, but the battle of the P song will rage on for months. And he lost most of his closest friends in that war, as did CS Lewis who arrives on the western front in France on his 19th birthday, happy Birthday, CS Lewis. And here you are with bullets flying a mortar shell will go off close to Lewis. It obliterates his sergeant and fragments of it strike him in the chest, the hand he thinks he’s going to die. And so it’s a profoundly difficult grief stricken moment for both of these men. And there’s no question in my mind that you carry not just the physical wounds of physical scars, but the emotional scars of that into your adult life.

Brett McKay:

Are there any instances in their later writings where you can see the influence of their experience in World War I show up?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think, and other authors have looked into this. John Garth, for example, who’s written a wonderful book on Tolkien and the Great War, lemme read you a few lines just from The Hobbit here, Brett, which Tolkien published in 1937. He wrote The Hobbit in 33, publishes it in 37. Here’s a few lines. He’s describing the goblins. “The goblins are cruel, wicked, bad hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones hammers and swords, daggers, pick-axes, tongs they make very well. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once for wheels and engines and explosions, always delighted them.”Now what does that sound like? It sounds like the diary of a guy who served in the mechanized slaughter of the First World War, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also see the influence of World War I and Tolkien’s writing. The way he describes Mordor. Mordor is just sort of this desolate hot, gray, ugly place. And during World War I, that’s what a lot of Europe looked like.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And he says explicitly in a couple of places in his letters that the advanced to Mordor with Frodo and Sam when they go into the dead marshes and the line from Sam is there are dead things, dead things in the water. And Martin Gilbert, who wrote one of the definitive books on the Battle of the Somme, says Tolkien is describing exactly what a soldier would’ve experienced in with these craters created by the mortars filling up with water, men, soldiers would slip into them die, and they’d be there for days or weeks on end. So it’s a vivid, explicit memory from the First World War.

Brett McKay:

And what about Lewis? Because he’s known for his Christian apologetics, but it seems like World War I kind of entrenched his atheism that he had then.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, think about the poetry he’s writing in 1917 to 1919 his book of poems. This is an atheist raging against what seems to be an unjust universe. And if there is a God, he’s a sadist. Let us curse our master air, we die, the good is dead. I mean, it’s pretty grim stuff. I think it does deepen his atheism. But at the same time, I think it helps to launch him on a spiritual quest because he’ll begin to figure out that his materialism is unsatisfying. Because Lewis can’t get away from the fact that he has these profound experiences of joy and experience of beauty. And he can’t, at the end of the day conclude that it means nothing, that there’s nothing behind it. And so that’s part of his spiritual question. Tolkien, of course, will play a huge role in his conversion to Christianity.

Brett McKay:

You spent a lot of time in the book discussing the cultural mood that overtook the West after World War I. We typically think of it as an age of cynicism and disillusionment, the lost generation. And you do that because you argue, and a lot of other historians argue the aftermath of World War I planted the seeds for World War II. Tell us more about the cultural mood of that time period and how did CS Lewis and Tolkien respond to that?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, it’s a big question, Brett. Lemme take a stab at it. Barbara Tuchman, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Guns of August, she describes the mood by the end of the First World War. She puts it in one word, disillusionment. Disillusionment. And what are people disillusioned with? They’re disillusioned with the ideals of Western civilization, the political and religious ideals. So democracy, liberal democracy, capitalism, the ethics and the principles of religion, the idea that individuals matter and have dignity. I mean, it was hard to maintain this concept of the heroic individual men and women making individual decisions that matter. The whole concept of virtue. All of that seemed to just vanish into the killing fields of 1914 to 1918. So disillusionment. And of course that just creates a vacuum. People still have a yearning to believe, a yearning for the transcendent. And instead of reaching for the old faiths, the great historic faiths, they’re reaching for what you might call political religions. So it’s no coincidence, Brett, that what do you see being launched in the 1920s and thirties in terms of political and social movements? Well, eugenics, think about that. The movement of eugenics, the pseudo pseudoscientific idea of eugenics takes hold in Europe and in the United States as well. Fascism, Naziism and communism, they all take flight in the light of the carnage of that first world war. And Lewis and Tolkien have a ringside seat to that in Great Britain.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you also talk about psycho-analysis really rose to prominence during this period too, because people were looking for meaning because they didn’t see any. And they said, well, maybe the best we can do is lay on a couch and talk about our childhoods.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And Freud of course, really comes into his own in the 1920s, is booked the future of an illusion. He goes after religion as a psychosis, and that becomes a dominant view. And that influenced CS Lewis when he was an atheist in a profound way because he thought, well, religions are just wish fulfillments, wish fulfillments. That’s Freud. And Lewis has to shake himself loose of that thinking. And he does in his first kind of spiritual autobiography, the Pilgrim’s Regress, which he published in 1933, a couple of years after he became a Christian, he goes after Sigmund Freud with an ax, rhetorically speaking. He realizes this is all kind of begging the question with Freud, what is it that we truly wish for? So yeah, there’s a real influence of psychoanalysis. Think about the ideologies, the forces that are pressing on these guys as they’re starting to write their epic work spread. And this is what’s so deeply encouraging to me. I think that they are deliberately pushing back against these ideologies, the totalitarian state, the idea that the individual doesn’t matter, religion as a psychosis, the idea that there is nothing heroic about human life and think about what they’re writing, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, the Space trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia. They are deliberately pushing back against the cultural literary establishment of the day.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you talk about Tolkien started this pushback even before he wrote The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings as a professor at Oxford. What people often forget about Tolkien was that besides being a fantastic fantasy writer, he was a first rate scholar and one of his expertise was in Beowulf.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes, that’s exactly right. I think that was probably the most important work for him professionally and personally, this Scandinavian hero from the sixth century who takes on grendel these monsters, Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon. And he translated that work. He taught on it for decades, and it clearly influenced his imagination about the idea of the heroic, the individual who goes out to meet danger and doesn’t flinch. And he’s doing it not for his own personal glory, but he’s doing it because there’s a deep need to protect the innocent from great harm. And you see how Beowulf just works its way through his great imaginative works. You’re absolutely right. And that’s a deliberate pushback though. He’s trying to retrieve. I think Brett Tolkien and Lewis both are trying to retrieve the concept of the epic hero, but they’re reinventing him for the modern mind in the 20th century, and that’s part of their great achievement.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You talk about Tolkien got that idea from Norse mythology besides Beowulf, he devoured, he loved the myths of the North, but this idea of the tragic hero, like you stand up for something because it’s right, even though you know there’s a good chance you’re going to fail.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. There’s something about the idea of your back is to the wall, but you’re not going to back down. You’re going to die on your feet. And that appeals to both these men. The thing about Lewis, he said himself, outside of the Bible, the most important work on his professional life piece of literature would’ve been Virgil’s aad. And what’s the aad? Anas is this heroic figure who takes on this great calling, this great task, the founding of Rome. It’s the founding myth of ancient Rome. He’s kind of a reluctant hero and he has to face all kinds of dangers. So both these men were drawn to these epic stories of the heroic quest, and that’s what drew them together in friendship. One of the huge threads in their friendship.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about how they met because that was really interesting. But yeah, so Tolkien, he was a devout Catholic. He was using Beowulf professionally, but also personally on this mission. I’m going to push back against all this stuff I’m seeing during this time in the interwar period, CS Lewis, as you said, he was an atheist, but you describe how his love of classics and of myths, that’s the thing that eventually led him to his conversion to Christianity.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think one person we have to mention in this journey is George McDonald, the Scottish author, 19th century Scottish author who in his fiction, he imbues fiction with a sense of, I don’t know how else to say it except a transcendent. There’s something enchanting about McDonald and what Lewis said about McDonald. He first picked him up, fantastic, his fictional work in 1916 in the middle of the first World War. And Lewis said, when he read that book, he said, I knew after a few hours that I had crossed a great frontier. And that when McDonald had done was he had helped to baptize his imagination. Lewis’s phrase. Now, I’m not sure I know exactly what that means, Brett, the baptize your imagination. But Lewis went on further to say it helped him to learn to love goodness, this skeptical atheist, learning to love goodness through this author of imaginative fantasy. So that was a template in some ways, I think for Lewis, profound influence on his literary life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean he talks later on about the role of myth, like Nor Smith Greek myths and his conversion. So the McDonald work helped him become a theist, but then he talks about his conversion to Christianity with that famous Addison’s walk with Tolkien where he had this conversation. He’s like, yeah, I can actually say I’m a Christian now. But Lewis talks about this idea of the true myth.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. What does he mean by the true myth?

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And this is the conversation in Addison’s walk with Hugo Dyson, a JRO, Tolkien and CS Lewis After dinner, they’re walking and Lewis’s great hangup. And this kind of went back to Freud was Christianity. It’s just like all the other pagan myths. That’s what he’s thinking more or less up until that moment. It doesn’t have any truth value. It’s a nice story. It’s an inspiring story. Tolkien challenges him because Tolkien’s understanding of myth was, there’s the great story, the Christian story. God becomes a man. The God man dies for our sin rises from the dead. The person of Jesus. That’s the great myth. Myth meaning, not that it’s not true, but it has this sort of epic feel, heroic feel. It expresses our deepest aspirations and longings in that sense, it’s mythic. But what Tolkien helps Lewis to see is Christianity. It’s a myth that became fact. And the reason CS Lewis was so drawn to these other pagan myths is because they were derivative of the great myth. They were splintered fragments of the true light as Tolkien put it. And that’s the intellectual breakthrough Brett, for CS Lewis on Addison’s walk when he begins to grasp for the first time, wait a minute, Christianity has the ring of truth, the myth that became fact, that’s the breakthrough. And within a matter of days, he becomes a Christian.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, let’s talk about 1926, because that’s the year Lewis and Tolkien met.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What was that initial meeting like and how did they meet?

Joseph Loconte:

It didn’t go well. I’ve served the different colleges and faculties faculty meetings. They’re in a faculty meeting and they’re arguing over the curriculum. And we won’t get into the weeds here, but they’re just debating what should be taught, what should be emphasized. The older languages, the older literature or more medieval literature, they’re on different sides of this debate. And so they are circling each other like tigers in the wild. But that initial tension and opposition, it turns into friendship. I think a huge step was when Tolkien invites CS Lewis, this probably within a matter of months, I think, to join a reading club. And Brett, the reading club was Icelandic sagas. Only Oxford Dawns would do this, right? They get together to read Icelandic sagas in their original Icelandic and Tolkien invites Louis, and they discover this common love of these epic stories and also a love of language. And that’s the beginning I think, of the friendship in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So they started off being part of this book club, this book group. When did they start critiquing and workshopping each other’s writing?

Joseph Loconte:

That’s a great question. There’s another turning point in the friendship, and I think this was in around 1931, I think it was just before this Lewis’s conversion, that Tolkien shares with CS Lewis, the story of Baron and Lutheran, the Elvis Princess and the Mortal Man. And he wrote this really during the first World War, modeled on his relationship with his wife Edith. It was the story that Tolkien said was closest to his heart, and he’s got a draft of it and he sends it to CS Lewis to get his feedback. Now you think about that. This is a deeply personal kind of story. Emotionally Tolkien is really invested in it. He sends it to Lewis to see what he’s going to do with it. Does he have any advice? And what he does is so crucial to the relationship. He writes Tolkien back, he says, I’ve never had such a pleasant evening reading a story like this.

I’m paraphrasing now, and I’m going to send you pages of critique. Quibbles will follow. He sends off I think about 10 pages of critique of the story to improve it. And Tolkien will incorporate many of Lewis’s suggestions. But the point here, Brett, is that that’s a moment of vulnerability because authors, being an author myself, I don’t like sending manuscripts that are not done really completed to anybody to read. This is an uncompleted manuscript. He sends it to his friend, it’s close to his heart, and his friend responds beautifully. And if he had not, I think the relationship would’ve collapsed. But instead, it’s a window into both their hearts, and it’s the beginning of what’s going to become a really profoundly important and transformative friendship for both of them.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s a good lesson on friendship. If you want friends, you have to be vulnerable sometimes. Yes. And what made their friendship so unique was that they could both give and receive criticism. And that’s hard to do. And they could talk about everything too, like their writing, their spiritual stuff, intellectual stuff. And as you said, it became a transformative friendship for both of them. Tolkien, he wrote this in his diary talking about Lewis. He said, this friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good. And something else that brought them together that you talk about in the book was that they started what you call a conspiracy of Don’s at Oxford. What do you mean by that?

Joseph Loconte:

The conspiracy of Dons? Well, there were different things they were doing. They had this little club of they’re going to push back against bad trends in the curriculum. So they have these Dons like-minded Dons who are trying to hold on really to the classical medieval Christian tradition and making sure that that is upfront and center in the curriculum. So that’s part of the conspiracy. But then what that kind of evolves into with Tolkien and Lewis as the anchor is of course the inklings. And these are like-minded Christian authors who decide, look, we’ve got to be engaged in this cultural fight against the modernist movement in literature, which is so dehumanizing, the disintegration of human personality, anti heroic. We’re going to push back against that. So the inklings come together right around in an early 1930s after Lewis’s conversion, and they’re meeting in Lewis’s rooms at Malin College every Thursday night. They move to Friday later on. But every week for something like, I don’t know, 15 years almost without fail, Brett, these ink links with Lewis and Tolkien as the anchor will meet every week to share their latest literary creations, a portion of it, read it out loud, and then to be critiqued by these other authors in the room. Pretty scary stuff if you’re an author.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And you talk about CS Lewis in a letter to Tolkien, he even wrote, he says, look, the world, they’re not writing the kind of books we like to read, like the inspiring Noble books. And so he says, we’re going to have to write them ourselves.

Joseph Loconte:

That’s right. That’s exactly right. In 1936, this conversation tos, we’re going to have to write them ourselves. So what happens? They have a pact. You could argue this is part of the conspiracy of the Dons to push back against the establishment. They make a pact. Tolkien is supposed to write a time travel story. Lewis is supposed to write a space travel story. Tolkien doesn’t ever finish his time travel story. He starts and doesn’t finish it. But then he’ll publish The Hobbit in 1937 and almost immediately starts writing the Lord of the Rings. Lewis publishes out of the Silent Planet, the first of the Space trilogy. And what that story, what trilogy does, Brett, we can get into it more, is it’s retelling really the story of the fall, the biblical story of the fall. And it’s using this mythic literature and the genre of science fiction to do it. It’s a profound reflection on the nature of evil and the tragedy of the human condition.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about The Hobbit. So Tolken finished that first draft in 1933, world War ii. You could start seeing, something’s going to happen here soon with The Hobbit. We typically think of it as a children’s story. Did he write it primarily as a child story or was he trying to do something bigger with it?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, he writes it primarily as a child story because he was telling it to his children. He just loved to read stories to his kids and make up stories and share them with his children. So that really was aimed at children. But because of Tolkiens, just sensitivity, his maturity, his depth as an adult, you read that story and it’s speaking to adults as much as it’s speaking to children. So he had high expectations, let’s put it this way, high expectations for what his children could and should learn. And Lewis is the same way. Even as they’re writing for children, they want to expose them to the realities of this life, the tragedy, the darkness of evil, but also the capacity for individuals to fight against the darkness. They want to introduce him to the problem of dragons, the problem of evil, but also to heroes who know how to slay dragons. So it’s speaking to two audiences at the same time. I think Brett is safe to say.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And Tolkien said that this idea of battling dragons, battling evil, that can be done by regular people. And I think he even said that he patterned the hobbits after the ordinary working class people he fought with during World War I.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. He literally says in one of his letters that his Sam Gaji is indeed based on the English soldier with whom I served in the first World War and considered so far superior to myself. That’s how he describes it. So one of the most beloved characters in all of modern fiction, the Hobbit is based on the English soldier in a trench.

That’s fascinating, isn’t it? That’s fascinating. But dragons, both these men really saw the dragon as the embodiment of radical evil. There’s a wonderful speech, an address that Tolkien gave in January of 1938 as the storm clouds are gathering in Europe. Brett, the Gathering storm, the totalitarian states, Italian fascism, German Nazism, and of course the Soviet Union. He delivers this talk in 1938. It’s supposed to be a talk to children, young children about dragons. And he gets into some pretty serious stuff about the nature of the dragon, the embodiment of evil. And there’s a line there that I love in this speech. He says, dragons are the final test of heroes, the final test of heroes. We are called to engage against the darkness. And he’s delivering this message to kids. Amazing.

Brett McKay:

So he started the Lord of the Rings in 1937. Then he worked on it sporadically throughout World War ii. Can you see instances in that book you can point to and say, yeah, this was definitely influenced by World War II right here?

Joseph Loconte:

Well, that is a fabulous question, and I’ve dealt with it some in my book and more dissertations need to be written about this. If you think about the Battle of ER fields, for example, I think what’s going on there, this defiance, let me read you a few lines from the Battle of Peller fields, and I’m going to connect it to the war moment. Stern now is ER’s mood and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come hither for he thought to make a great shield wall at the last and stand and fight there on foot till all fell and do deeds of song on the fields of Lenor. If you think about what Britain is doing from 1939, particularly up until about 1942, Britain is alone. Britain is hanging by a thread, an existential thread.

The Battle of Britain, the Blitz on London, all of Europe, Western and central Europe is occupied by the Nazi. The United States is nowhere near to joining this war. The Soviet Union is up to its mischief. France has fallen. They’re alone. And what Winston Churchill does as the Prime Minister is he delivers speeches like that. I have nothing to offer for blood toil, tears and sweat. We will fight them on the beaches. And that rhetoric, that oratory is in the air and justice Churchill is helping to inspire the British people to stand against the darkness of fascism. You have to imagine that that British spirit is also working its way on Tolkien’s imagination as he’s writing out some of these passages in the Lord of the Rings.

Brett McKay:

I don’t know if you came across, I don’t remember reading this in the book, but did you come across any instances where Tolkien or Churchill cross paths, or where Churchill commented on Tolkiens work at all? Cause it seemed like they were kind of like Tolkien and CS Lewis. They were romantics like Churchill.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, yeah. An appreciation for the great epic hero. They’re all in that place. I have not yet found any example of where the two of them ever met. The closest thing I can think of is when and around 1939 or so, the British government reaches out to Tolkien because they want to give him training to be a codebreaker, a code breaker for the foreign service and to work at Bletchley Park. And he gets several days of training and code breaking because he’s a language guy and they think, Hey, this guy could probably help us. And the end of the day, they won’t need his services. But if he had become a codebreaker, he may well have met Churchill in that context.

Brett McKay:

Well, that’s a good thing to point out about both these men during the war, they write these big epic books, particularly Tolkien, but CS Lewis is very prolific during this time. But this wasn’t their full-time job. They were professors and they had really heavy schedules with that. And then they were also contributing to the war cause Tolkien did that code breaking training, and Lewis did civil defense stuff. He was an air raid warden for the Home Guard.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that’s one of the reasons. This is such an encouraging story to me, Brett, and challenging story, because with all these responsibilities and having served as a professor myself, knowing what’s involved in that, if you care about your students, you’re grading papers, you’re going to faculty meetings, you’re doing academic research, you’re doing extra war work as well. So when exactly are they writing these great epic stories that at least initially they’re not getting paid for? Well, they’re stealing away time from other things. They’re writing in the evenings, they’re writing on weekends. And what does that tell us, Brett? It tells us they have to write. There’s something in them. It’s part of their sense of calling. I think as Christian scholars and writers, they can’t not write. It’s part of what they have to do. And I think also their sense that their own culture, their civilization needs these stories Right now at this moment of cultural crisis, the language that Winston Churchill used in one of his speeches after the disastrous Munich Pact, giving Hitler Czechoslovakia, effectively, Churchill talks about the need to recover Marshall Vigor moral strength and Marshall vigor. Well, there’s a political element to that, but there’s a cultural element, and I think these guys sensed Britain. It needs stories of heroism, of valor, of sacrifice for a noble cause at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the inklings, the stated purpose was, okay, we’re going to get together, critique each other’s work writing. But it sounds like a lot of the meetings, it started off like that, but then it would just kind of wander or they’d just start discussing other stuff. When did they start going beyond their stated purpose? What kind of things did they discuss there?

Joseph Loconte:

We don’t really have any transcribed notes from this. We can only speculate a little bit from the letters from Tolkien and Lewis. There’s one letter from Lewis describing the inklings to a friend. He says, we gather the talk about literature, but always we talk about something better. I love that phrase, Brett, and you just wonder what it was these guys were talking about, I suspect, because most of them, members of the inklings had served in the First World War, their combat veterans. And I think there was some of that discussion about the Great War and what came out of that. So I think that’s some of it. They also had just a wonderful sense of humor. I spoke to various people, interviewed here for the book, and Owen Barfield was one of the members of the inklings and his grandson also named Owen Barfield, who’s done a lot of thinking about the inklings shared with me. These guys just, yeah, they loved a good pint of beer and they had a great sense of humor. So who knows what they were talking about in some of those sessions, but boy, do have been a fly on the wall.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Lewis even said about that idea of laughter and humor. He said, there’s no sound I like better than adult male. Laughter.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yes. The chapter in his wonderful book, the Four Loves the chapter on Friendship, which I think is one of the most magnificent pieces of writings, reflections on male friendship that you’re ever going to find. It is drawn from his experience with the inklings and the idea that we find ourselves amongst our betters. We don’t deserve to be in this amazing circle of people and with our drinks on our elbows and the fire is blazing and something opens up in our minds, something even beyond the walls of this world. And he goes on to just talk about what an amazing gift it is. Who could have deserved this kind of fellowship that’s coming out of the inklings that’s in the chapter in the Four Loves. But of course, the theme of Friendship, Brett, it is central if you think about it to the Lord of the Rings and to the Chronicles and Narnia. And that is not accidental, the intense camaraderie that these men felt when they fought in the First World War with their comrades. I think they wanted to recapture something like that. And so they were always forming these reading groups. And then the inklings became the great haven of sanity, a beachhead of resistance, I like to call it, against the cultural darkness and madness and rage of the day.

Brett McKay:

And I was impressed. They kept it up even during the darkest moments of World War ii. I mean, they could have said, look, there’s some bigger more important things going on. London’s getting bombed every night. Do we really need to get together in a writing group and drink beer? But they’re like, no, we have to do that.

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I think that’s right. It’s like they felt that it was essential probably for them in their own emotional, intellectual, spiritual lives, but I think they thought there’s something necessary here in the writing that we’re going to do. They couldn’t have possibly imagined the impact that their writing was going to have. But let me read you a few lines from one of the students. It speaks to your point here, Brett, one of the students of Tolkien and Louis describing the impact that these men had on her generation as they’re teaching in the classroom, as they’re going back to these great classic works, a Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, the need to reintroduce these concepts in the modern era for the modern mind. Here’s a few lines from Helen Wheeler. She says this, what this meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduates was what happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in life.

Indeed, they were the same. Now, think about that. What a profound thing to say from this young woman. What happened in the Great Books was of equal significance to what happened in real life. In other words, the Great books are great books because they embody the human condition. They teach us great truths about human life and human experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and those ideals, the highest ideals that are expressed in those great books. They were needed at that moment of crisis. That’s what I think Helen Wheeler is understanding. We needed to be reminded of these incredible struggles and virtues at this moment of existential crisis.

Brett McKay:

Another quote that stands out to me from CS Lewis talking about why you should just keep doing normal things when everything else around you just seems like it’s going crazy. This is shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped, and everyone’s kind of freaking out about nuclear apocalypse. CS Lewis said this, if we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things, praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts, not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Wow, that’s a beautiful line. And it was so consistent in his life, Brett, and he lived that way. And the only way we can understand his incredible productivity, particularly during the Second World War, which I’m trying to emphasize in the book, is the sense of urgency. It’s not fatalism, but it is a sense of urgency. They’ve got to get on with their callings in the worst possible circumstances. And you’re probably familiar, Brett, with that incredible sermon that he delivered learning in wartime. This is within a few weeks after Germany invades Poland and the beginning of the Second World War, and they’re expecting a German invasion at any moment. And he speaks to these very anxious undergraduates in church. And learning in wartime has a very similar theme that if we wait for the conditions to be ideal before we get down to our work, we’ll never get to it. Conditions are never ideal. We got to do our best and leave the results to God. It’s a profound reflection on calling on Christian calling echoed in the passage you read as well, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s good advice for us now, because a lot of people are anxious these days. They kind of put their life on hold because they feel stymied by uncertainty. But you can’t let that defeat you. You have to keep getting on with life. You have to keep doing those human things. You have to keep doing those things you feel called to.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And also think about this for Lewis, he’s had this profound sense of the need to communicate the truths of Christianity to as broad an audience as possible. So when he’s approached by the religious programming director at the BBC, and they ask him, look, give us an explanation and a defense of Christianity in a series of radio broadcasts. We’ll give you 15 minutes at a time. Lewis doesn’t even listen to the radio. He’s completely out of his comfort zone. He’s an academic, right? He’s an egghead. He has no necessary skill writing for radio, but he agrees. And so he travels down from Oxford by train into London, and that was not without risk. The city still being bombed, the BBC had been bombed. And he starts delivering these incredible addresses, unpacking the meaning and significance of the Christian faith. And do you know the first line in the first broadcast, which became the first line in mere Christianity, the broadcast became the book Mere Christianity, but the opening line, you know what it was, Brett?

What was it? Everyone has heard people quarreling. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Now, why does he start there In Anglican, England in 1941, when people quarrel Brett, they’re arguing over a standard of behavior that the other guy has violated. You took something that didn’t belong to you, you cut me off in line. That wasn’t fair. That wasn’t right. We’re always appealing to a standard outside of ourselves, and we violate those standards ourselves. Lewis’s point is that is the clue to the meaning of the universe. This is the moral law that we all know, a moral law that presses down upon us that we can’t escape, that we know we ought to obey, and yet we violate it. That’s the clue to the meaning of the universe. So what is he doing? He’s reintroducing moral truth and a moral law at a time when moral absolutes and the moral disintegration of Western civilization, it’s all up in the air. It’s all up for grabs right now, it seems, Brett. But he is pushing back as best he can. So he starts there with the moral law. He will take the audience ultimately to Jesus as the great Savior, but he doesn’t start there. He starts with the universal moral law.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, he called it the Dao. The Dao. Yes. Yeah. Well, so you mentioned speaking of CS Lewis and how the war influenced these guys works that we wouldn’t have the line, the witch and the wardrobe if it weren’t for the London Blitz. So tell us about that. What was Lewis’s connection to the evacuees during the London Blitz?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, I mean, within days of the evacuation, four girls show up in his house. He lives there with his brother Warney and Mrs. Moore that he’s taking care of. And these four girls come into the home and immediately his life is turned upside down. And he writes to his friend’s sister Penelope and says, I never paid much attention to children, don’t really even like them. But now the war has brought them to me. And not only do they have a profound influence on Lewis, I mean, think about it. He will then go on to write one of the most beloved series of children’s books that has ever been produced. A confirmed bachelor who doesn’t like the company of children, learns to somehow get into their world and to empathize with them and to help them to understand here’s what it means to be a good and decent and virtuous person, even a person of faith. That’s a transformation in Lewis’ life. And that ability to communicate to children about children, to get into their emotional worlds. That would not have happened without the Blitz because children are not just showing up in the first weeks. They’re staying with them for weeks at a time, and then another batch of children would come in when the first batch is ready to go. It’s amazing.

Brett McKay:

So that people talk about the difference between Tolkien and Lewis and how they approach using myth fantasy stories to teach virtue. Lewis is a little bit on the nose about it. You can read the Chronicles and Narnia and like, okay, Aslan, that’s Jesus obviously. Tolkien was a little bit more subtle about his symbolism in his work.

Joseph Loconte:

Much more. Brett, and I think I can speculate a bit at the reasons for this. Part of it I think was Tolkien had been a Catholic for really all of his adult life. There wasn’t a dramatic conversion to Catholicism for him. And he was a profoundly serious believing Catholic. And it just shaped him in so many ways, his outlook, it’s embedded in his outlook. CS Lewis has a dramatic conversion from atheism into Christianity. So there’s more of the apologist, maybe not so much the evangelist, or you could use that word, but certainly the defender of the faith, the man who wants to communicate this truth because he knows what it’s like to be in the darkness. It’s very vivid to him passing from that darkness into the light of the gospel. And so I think Lewis was more willing and ready to use imagery that would more clearly suggest a Christian truths.

Christian symbolism and Tolkien didn’t feel the need to do that, but Lewis did, I think, because of his conversion experience. That’s a little bit of speculation there, but I think it’s probably right now, I will say this Tolkien, when he published the Lord of the Rings, it comes out in the 1950s finally. And as the atomic bomb is out and about, as we say, and a lot of people assume that the ring is just an allegory. The whole thing is an allegory for a warning against the atomic bomb, and Tolkien sets them right. He says, of course, my story is not an allegory of atomic power, but of power, exerted for domination. Power exerted for domination. That is one of the central themes, of course, in the Lord of the Rings, if you go to the Council of Elron, it is a morally complex, rich, thick discussion about the nature of power and the corrupting influence of the temptation to power. And that is deeply embedded, I would argue, in Tolkien’s Catholic Christian faith.

Brett McKay:

So another thing that Tolkien worked on during World War II besides the Lord of the Rings, this was for his family, for his children, is these Father Christmas stories. And you could see World War II pop up in these Father Christmas stories. Tell us about that. And I think these are available, these are published now. I think you can buy these now and read these stories.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. Yeah. There’s an entire collection. I think his granddaughter, one of his granddaughters, had pulled this together. It’s a lovely collection illustrated Tolkien would early on when he had his children, he wrote these Christmas letters, father Christmas and illustrated them, put them in the mailbox, and the kids are thinking they’re getting a letter from Father Christmas, and they’re very whimsical throughout the 1920s, these whimsical stories of Father Christmas and the polar bear and their mischievous adventures and all this. And then they take a turn, even as early as 1933, the year that Hitler comes to power, they take a turn where the appearance of goblins and the goblins, of course, these are wicked creatures. They’ll have a role to play in the Lord of the Rings, but they’re these dark, wicked creatures now entering the scene of Father Christmas. And so by the time you get to the letters, I think from 1941, Christmas 1941, Tolkien writes to his daughter, Priscilla, the youngest father, Christmas again. And he’s talking about how there’s been incredible battle and many people have been killed, and half the world is no longer in the right place because so many people have been displaced. And Father Christmas can’t deliver presents the way he used to because half the world is in the wrong place. Well, he’s describing exactly what has been happening, of course, in Europe with the mass evacuations, the evacuees by the millions. So he can’t escape the war, even in a Father Christmas letter to his daughter, Priscilla. Wow.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And so we’ve talked about some examples of how World War II was influencing Tolkiens and Lewis’ work. So Tolkien, he wrote a lot of the Lord of the Rings during the war. I mean, he was influenced by this epic clash of good and evil and the heroism that was called upon during the war. And then the first in that Lord of the Rings series would be published in the 1950s.

And then you got CS Lewis, he’s doing his apologetics, his lectures, his broadcast, the B BBC asked him to do for morale. He’s doing that during the war. And those lectures and those broadcasts would eventually become mere Christianity. And that was published in the 1950s. And then during this time, Lewis is also writing the Chronicles of Narnia, and he was inspired by the kids who came to live with him during the Blitz. So these works that both men were famous for in the post-war period, the foundations for them were really laid during World War II. And what I think is interesting about these guys, when you talk about them, they both have firsthand experience with war, and they were influenced by it in their creative work, but they were also really appalled by it.

Tolkien talks about not just the human destruction, but the environmental destruction. I think that’s something that Tolkien really focuses on and is overlooked in his work. He’s really appalled by the destruction that war does to our natural environment.

Joseph Loconte:

Exactly right.

Brett McKay:

So they saw war firsthand, but they still thought that violence was sometimes necessary to defend the good and the true. How do they walk that tension in their work?

Joseph Loconte:

Boy, that is a fabulous question, Brett, because they are not holy warriors. There’s no triumphalism in their works. Their heroes are reluctant heroes quite often, and they’re filled with anxiety and self-doubt. Bilbo Baggins is a modern hero, isn’t he? In some ways? Does he help the company or does he find a way of escape? And again, it’s not an accident that Lewis chooses children as the protagonist and includes a mouse named Rey Cheap. So the whole concept of the heroic, they are reinventing as well. It’s, boy, what can we say there, Brett? It’s so counter-cultural what they’re doing that they want to hang on to this concept of the heroic, but they know that triumphalism is just, it’s not tenable. No one’s going to buy this. And in their own experience, they can’t either from their own experience in the First World War, and I think from their religious perspective.

So there’s a realism about human frailty, but there’s also a realism about the nature of evil and the existence of radical evil and the idea of a just war. Even though though Will’s words are not used in their writings, they really are representing the just war tradition. In other words, the use of lethal force to protect the innocent from great harm. That is one of the key themes, isn’t it, in both their works. And I think having a ringside seat, as they did in Great Britain from 1939 to 1945, pacifism and neutrality was simply not an option because they could see what was happening to those nations that supposedly claim neutrality and then were overrun by the Nazis within a matter of months.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a tough tension to walk, to find war appalling, but also feel that sometimes it’s necessary.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. And I think it really is expressed in the characters, in their reluctance to engage in this great battle. But then the conscience, they can’t escape their conscience and the need of the hour. And so Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia, he’s got these children, he calls these children, summons them into a battle. He doesn’t leave them on their own, but he summons them into this battle. And as you read the text, this is what’s so profoundly striking about the Chronicles and Arnie, the battle scenes, they’re vivid. They’re not inappropriate for young people necessarily, but they’re vivid. It’s what it would’ve been like to be in a hand to hand kind of combat. And Lewis wants to give that realism and the anxiety and the struggle and the fear, all of that is mixed in their writings. Tolkien and Lewis, both. They don’t shy away from the horror of combat one bit, and yet they want to insist that wait a minute, evil has to be challenged. We see that in Beowulf. We see it in the Aeneid. We see it in the great works of the classical Christian tradition.

Brett McKay:

So both these men, Tolkien and CS Lewis, they basically laid the groundwork for fantasy novels in the 20th and 21st century.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

But how did their wartime experiences, both World War I and World War ii, how did that make their fantasy stories different from the modern fantasy novels that kids might be reading today?

Joseph Loconte:

Yeah, that is a fabulous question. I mean, one of the criticisms that you sometimes hear about these guys is that they were writing escapist literature. If it’s fantasy, it must be escapist, escape, the difficult problems and challenges of life. And what Tolkien, and Lewis both said in different ways, both in their writings and even in some of their letters, this isn’t escapism. This is the opposite of escapism. Because what these stories do is they expose the darkness of the human condition, and they point us toward the virtues, the values and ideals that are required to meet the darkness that we encounter in life. And that is not escapism. I’ll give you a personal example of this, Brett. I didn’t start reading the Lord of the Rings until I was in my forties. I was working on my doctoral dissertation on John Locke studying in the UK there in London, reading Locke during the day, and then reading Tolkien at night.

And in English Pub, it doesn’t get any better than that, right? So here I am in my mid forties and I’m reading the Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I’m finding myself morally invigorated, invigorated, wanting to take on the challenges of the day of my life with a new kind of courage and strength and resilience. If you’re thinking about the ideas of virtue and honesty and sacrifice for a noble cause. Well, this is not escapism. This is what makes life meaningful. This speaks to our deepest aspirations as men and women, as people with a soul. And so it’s the opposite of escapism, and I think that’s part of what they’re doing in an amazing time. When on the one hand there might’ve been a kind of militarism, utopianism on one side or just defeatism, we can’t face this horror, and they’re saying, no, there’s this middle way. There’s this middle way. It’s a kind of Christian realism about life and how to meet it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think one thing you wrote in the book, a lot of modern fantasy novels today, they’re about self-discovery, but the novels that Tolkien and Lewis wrote, they’re more about you have to just rise up to the occasion so you can protect others and lift up others.

Joseph Loconte:

Yes. That’s where, again, Brett, I want to emphasize this. They’re combining the best of the classical world, those ancient myths, a Greek Roman mythology, the medieval world, Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Beowulf, they’re building on that foundation, but then they are very deliberately giving it a Christian emphasis, imbuing it with Christian values, so that what these heroes want is not personal glory. They are willing to sacrifice for this greater cause. So think about the whole story of the ring itself. The hobbits are not on a quest to gain something of great value, some great treasure chest. The whole point of the quest is to destroy it, to destroy the ring of power. In other words, renunciation. And if you think about the time period, the 1940s, the second World War, when the combatants on both sides are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, that’s the mood of the hour. And here’s Tolkien writing a story about renunciation sacrifice for others, humility. Now that’s that’s going against the establishment in a huge way.

Brett McKay:

So these books were written in a time that’s pretty different from ours in 2025, but their stories still resonate with audiences today. Why do you think that is?

Joseph Loconte:

That is a wonderful question. I’m still mulling that in my head because here we are talking about them 80 plus years later. I think there’s several reasons. There’s not a single answer to this, Brett, but I think there’s several reasons. Let me quote you from a line that Lewis wrote. I think it helps to give an answer maybe after Tolkien completed the Lord of the Rings, Lewis has it now in manuscript form, and he writes to Tolkien and he tells him how delighted he is to have it. He’ll be going to read it and reread it, and then he says this to Tolkien in the letter about the Lord of the Rings, the impact of it. So much of your whole life, so much of our joint life, so much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away without a trace into the past is now in a sort made permanent.

I think what Lewis is saying that somehow what Tolkien has done in the Lord of the Rings, he’s captured their common journey through life with all of its struggles and its joys. He’s captured some of that. He’s captured the war experience, and it’s hidden in the pages of the Lord of the Rings. So it’s a profoundly human story, profoundly human. It’s so accessible. And at the same time, it also speaks to these universal transcendent themes, and that’s what they do in the best of their works. They’re accessible. Their characters are like us. They’re not the superheroes that we create now in Marvel comics. They’re hobbits. It’s a mouse named Repe Cheap. It’s children in a Wardrobe. They’re utterly accessible, but they’re engaged in a real struggle in the forces of light, the forces of darkness, and there’s something profoundly moving and transcendent about their works. It just speaks across cultures, across generations, doesn’t it?

Brett McKay:

Well, Joseph, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Joseph Loconte:

Well go to my website. That’d be the best place to go. www.josephloconte.com. You’ll see where you can buy the book. You’ll see also my YouTube history channel history, and the Human Story, and we’re releasing some videos on Tolkien and Lewis and other things that we’re working on. So love to have you check out the site.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joseph Loconte, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joseph Loconte:

Thank you, Brett. So good being with you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joseph Loconte. He’s the author of the book, The War for Middle-earth. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, josephloconte.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/warformiddleearth where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. And while you’re there, sign up for our free Art of Manliness newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at Art of Manliness. 

And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a rating on your favorite podcast player. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think with something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,093: Family Culture and the Sibling Effect — What Really Shapes Who You Become https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/family/podcast-1093-family-culture-and-the-sibling-effect-what-really-shapes-who-you-become/ Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:19:11 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191542 When we think about what shaped our life trajectory, we often focus on the way our parents raised us. But what about our siblings? What role do they play in who we become? My guest today makes the case that siblings may be just as influential as parents in impacting how we turn out. Her […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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When we think about what shaped our life trajectory, we often focus on the way our parents raised us. But what about our siblings? What role do they play in who we become?

My guest today makes the case that siblings may be just as influential as parents in impacting how we turn out.

Her name is Susan Dominus, and she’s a journalist and the author of The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan and I start our conversation by unpacking the broader question of what drives human development more — nature or nurture. We then dig into how siblings shape us, from the impact of birth order to how rivalry can raise our ambitions and alter our life paths. Along the way, we also explore the influence parents do have on their kids — and why it may not be as strong as we often think.

Connect With Susan Dominus

Book cover for "The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success" by Susan Dominus, inspired by Podcast episode 1093, featuring three figures on staggered blocks against a blue background.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When we think about what shaped our life trajectory, we often focus on the way our parents raised us. Well, what about our siblings? What role do they play in who we become? My guest today makes the case that siblings may be just as influential as parents in impacting how we turn out. Her name is Susan Dominus and she’s a journalist and the author of the Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. Susan and I start our conversation by unpacking the broader question of what drives human development, more nature or nurture. We then dig into how siblings shape us from the impact of birth order to how rivalry can raise our ambitions and alter our life paths. Along the way, we also explore the influence parents do have on their kids and why it may not be as strong as we often think. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/familydynamic. All right, Susan Dominus, welcome to the show.

Susan Dominus:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very happy to be here. So

Brett McKay:

You wrote a book called The Family Dynamic where you explore how family culture and how siblings affect us even into adulthood. And you start off the book talking about a childhood memory of having dinner with a friend’s family, and you felt incredibly out of place when the father of your friend turned to you and asked you to solve this math problem. How did that moment lead to you researching and writing a book about family culture and the role siblings play in raising each other?

Susan Dominus:

Well, I guess I should first say the book is called The Family Dynamic, and it’s about the way that siblings affect each other and their paths to success. It is also about the way that parents affect kids. And that moment was really powerful for me because I just really had a sense of how different family cultures could be and the family culture in that family was very clearly around skill learning and achievement and mental acuity and just a kind of constant teaching environment. And although I grew up in a very warm and supportive household, that wasn’t really the energy in the household. I don’t think my parents saw themselves as educators of us. And so on the one hand, I was really relieved to go back home where my parents really just had expected us at least at meals to chew with our mouths closed.

But at the same time, I did think, well, the Goldie boys are better at math than I am. Is that because they’re just better at math or is that because they’ve grown up doing these math problems and who could I have been if I had been growing up in a household where we were doing math in our heads for fun after dessert and talking about current events at the table and just having a slightly more kind of elevated learning environment? It’s not for everyone and not every kid would want that, but I was like an eager beaver little overachiever, and part of me thought maybe I was missing out.

Brett McKay:

And you highlight other famous families that had a family culture around the dinner table that might seem like overkill for a lot of families. Like the Kennedys. Joe Kennedy would famously tell his kids like, you got to prepare some presentation about this foreign policy thing that’s debating in Congress and present it to the family at dinner.

Susan Dominus:

And it wasn’t just that he had them present to the group. He had all the other siblings prepare too, so that they could grill the sibling who was in the hot seat that day or that dinner. So that’s how you see. I think the way that it’s hard to separate out sibling dynamics from parent child dynamics. The parent was setting this tone for performance and achievement, but there was also clearly a competition among the siblings that he thought could be used to harness high performance in his kids.

Brett McKay:

He wanted one of his kids to be president.

Susan Dominus:

He definitely thought that one of his kids would be president. He definitely thought his firstborn would be president, who sadly and tragically died young serving in the military. But it was always a goal. It was always something spoken about. So that also gets at the way that expectations can really play a role in what happens in families.

Brett McKay:

So you’re a mother of twins, correct?

Susan Dominus:

I am, yes.

Brett McKay:

So how did that parental experience drive your investigation into sibling dynamics?

Susan Dominus:

I think that parents of twins, specifically fraternal twins are experts in realizing personally how much of their children’s upbringing is affected by nature and how much of it is really nurture. Because when you have fraternal twins and you are reading them the same stories every single night and you are having the same dinner table conversations and you’re sending them to the same preschools and you’re feeding them the same broccoli, and one of them turns out to be a tremendous athlete and tennis player. This is theoretical. Neither of my kids plays that much tennis and the other one of them is obsessed with art. You could say that there is some differentiation going on there, but probably those parents also saw those signs when the kids were really, really little that as soon as they could talk, one of them was interested in pictures and wanted to play with paints all the time, and the other one couldn’t stay away from tennis balls. I mean, in my kids, I think I saw the seeds of who they were so early. So it’s a very humbling experience as a parent, you realize you can’t take credit for the stuff that you’re proud of because maybe the other one doesn’t have that quality. But you also can’t blame yourself that much for the things that go wrong because you see that so much of who kids are is what they’re bringing from the moment they’re born.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed that with my own kids have a son and a daughter, and they’ve had the exact same, I mean, we’re going to talk about this. It’s probably not the exact same family experience. There’s differences whenever you had a second sibling. And our lives have changed as we’ve gotten older as a family, but we’re doing the exact same thing. We’re teaching the exact same things. We have the same rules, but completely different personalities, and there’s nothing we can really do about that.

Susan Dominus:

Of course, that’s really magnified in friends. You are raising them in real time at the same time too. It’s not like, oh, I was a different person. I was two years older when I had learned some things along the way. It’s all happening right in front of you. I do think it’s possible that there are magnifying effects. I think sometimes parents, and there’s some research to support this that they decide one kid is the academic kid and then they shower that kid with encouragement in academic pursuits, less so the other child, and then you have a kind of cascading effect or an amplifying effect, I guess you could say.

Brett McKay:

So in this book, The Family Dynamic, you highlight several different families that have managed to produce several highly successful and ambitious adults. You decide to focus on high performer adults and the dynamic they had as kids.

Susan Dominus:

The funny thing is I would say that I’m as interested in generic achievement as any other parent in my demographic. I think I’m a little more interested than other people maybe in what makes people defy the odds, what makes people have big, bold thoughts, what makes people feel that they uniquely can bring something to the table that no one else has brought? What makes people feel like they can change the world, have the confidence to feel that way, and then have the skills to go ahead and execute it. So it wasn’t a book just about generic achievement, it was really a book about how do you get your kids to dream really big, whatever their talents are, how do you foster that sense of confidence and possibility? I think that’s something that I really craved to be honest as a kid myself, my parents, my mom in particular grew up very, very poor and was a very cautious person and very much a worrier. And just as in some households I thought like, gee, what would it have been like to grow up in a household where we did math around the table? I think I often thought, what would it be like to grow up in one of those families where there’s a sense of irreverence, a sense that just because other people have tried and failed doesn’t mean that you won’t succeed. I’m very interested in that energy.

Brett McKay:

So besides these living families that you highlight and look at in your book, you also use the Bronte sisters as your go-to family to figure out what makes people or siblings who all have these big ambitions, what makes them tick. For those who aren’t familiar with the Brontes, who were they?

Susan Dominus:

So there were actually many Bronte siblings. Several of them died young, but the most famous Brontes were Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre, which is one of the greatest novels of the 19th century, and her sister, Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights. Another great, Anne Bronte, wrote a couple of exquisite novels as well that were also really original. I mean, that’s what these three novels all had in common is, or these three novelists I should say. Each of them wrote unique, beautiful works of literature, and each of these books were completely different from each other. They were unique even within the family. Wuthering Heights is this great kind of torrid, romantic, almost supernatural tale, really very gothic. And Jane Eyre has a tremendous amount of realism, but is told from the point of view of this very modest and humble and not particularly beautiful governance, which was a perspective that had never really been represented in novel form in just that way. So the sisters totally influenced each other. They also had a brother who had a huge influence on them, and they’re probably some of the most famous siblings in history.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about how the sisters encourage each other. I forgot which one it was, but there was one sister who found the other sister’s writing, and she told her, Hey, this is really good. And at first the sister was kind of mad like, Hey, what are you doing? Rummaging through my stuff like that, typical sibling spat. But the other sisters had been writing too, and they decided that maybe they could get something published if they worked together.

Susan Dominus:

That’s exactly what happened. Charlotte Bronte, I think was sort of at her wit’s end. She was a bust as a governess. They had all thought that their brother was going to be the one who made it big. And by then he was a total burnout addict, unfortunately. And I think Charlotte was trying to figure out what they were going to do. They’d all been avid writers for fun from their very earliest years. And the way the story goes, I mean, who knows if it’s true, but she wrote about it in the forward to one of her books. She stumbled on her sister’s poetry. This is Emily Bronte’s Poetry, thought it was tremendous and realized that if the three sisters combined their poetry, they could get a book out and maybe make a little money. And the book didn’t. I think it sold literally two copies, but it was well reviewed and I think it gave them the confidence to think they could really keep going. But I always say that from the very beginning, their artistic careers were literally bound up with each other. They were all bound up in the same book. And without the three of them probably it wouldn’t have happened for any one of them

Brett McKay:

Because they’re also battling. There are women in the 19th century, and there’s the expectation like, well, you don’t write, your goal is to become a mother, a wife, and their father. It seems like their father kind of inculcated be ambitious, but for women, your ambition is to be an awesome wife and mother.

Susan Dominus:

I think that’s exactly right. On the one hand, he encouraged them to read widely, much more widely than most men encouraged young women to read at the time. And he himself loved to write, even though he wasn’t terribly good at it. He had other skills, but he definitely, from what we can tell from correspondence, he seemed to encourage them really to focus on the practical and was afraid of his daughters getting entirely lost in a dream world, both of fiction and a dream world of unrealistic ambitions for themselves.

Brett McKay:

So the sisters had to, they were relying on each other to be each other’s boosters for this.

Susan Dominus:

No one else was encouraging those young women to be writers particularly. No.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you talk about the Brontes as a way of showing how both someone’s siblings and parents can shape their life trajectory. And we’re going to talk about both of those influences today. But let’s first take a step back and look at the central question of your book, which is, how much influence does a child’s environment or upbringing really have on how they turn out anyway? I mean, that’s the question. It’s the old nature versus nurture debate. After pouring over the research and talking to experts, what conclusion did you reach on that question?

Susan Dominus:

The easiest way to put it is that 50% of the difference among individuals can be explained by nurture, and 50% of that difference can be explained by nature. What people get wrong is that they think that nurture is basically parenting. So they overemphasize the role of parenting and put it right up there with nature, meaning how you were born and what you came into the world with. But nurture is not just parenting. Nurture is everything in your environment. It’s your siblings, it’s the town you live in. It’s where your bedroom is located in the house, and whether it got a lot of sun or not, it’s who your next door neighbor is. It’s what nature documentary you watched when you were seven years old that lit you on fire. There’s so much in your environment that shapes who you are, and so much of that is random. And in a way, the most important thing a parent does is determine whether or not their child’s going to go to college. Because at least in the past, that has been one of the single biggest drivers of how people fare in life in terms of economics. And economics is highly tied to longevity, education, highly tied to marriage stability, all these things. So outside of education though, parenting is just one of a bazillion things that happened to us over the course of our lives that are part of nurture.

Brett McKay:

And something that researchers have done to try to figure out nature versus nurture is do these twin studies. And so what these twin studies do, they’ll find twins who were separated at birth for some reason and got moved to different locations completely and said, okay, how did their lives turn out? How similar and how different are these people who they’re genetically the same, but they grew up in different environments? What do we learn from those studies?

Susan Dominus:

There’s a lot of critique of that research because a lot of it’s anecdotal and it’s really hard to, as you can imagine, the case study, it’s not nothing, but it’s not vast. So they study twins who are raised apart, but they also can learn a little bit about nature and nurture by comparing how similar identical twins are to each other. And then looking at fraternal twins and seeing how much like each other they are as well. But going back to the twins who were separated at birth, they do often find that those twins eventually end up in pretty similar places, income wise, education wise, marital status wise, regardless of how they were raised. So there’s some research that finds that, let’s say you were adopted into a family in which the parents stayed married, but your own parents whom you never even knew divorced, that child is probably going to have a divorce rate that’s more like the genetic parent than the one who raised them.

Brett McKay:

Interesting. And you talked about this one interesting study. It’s not probably very applicable to humans, but it’s with mice, laboratory mice where the scientists will basically create a ton of mice that are genetically the same, but then they’ll look at how do these mice, these genetically same mice end up? You put them in different environments, they can end up pretty different because the way they interact with the environment changes the kind of mouse they become.

Susan Dominus:

I love that you brought up that study. It was really a study that was intended to look at neuroplasticity in mice, but what it found ultimately was just what you said. They took these clones, these mice are clones, they are each other, and they put them into this kind of fun house environment at birth, essentially. And just by happenstance, some mice were near a fun toy and some weren’t and made a move towards one randomly and another one didn’t. And those minor differences really, really seemed to set them on different paths over time. And there’s just this endless iteration, we’re all new inventions of ourselves that come of the combination of what we came to be put on this earth with and how that interacts with the 10,000 things that happen to us over the course of a day. So we’re like almost a whole new creature every day, and that we’re being shaped by our environment, which is interacting with what we brought to the table in the first place.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re an identical twin, you might have different friends than your identical twin sibling, and that’s going to affect the kind of person you’re going to have. Maybe different interests maybe have different goals or ambitions in life than your other sibling.

Susan Dominus:

That’s exactly right. I mean, there is more similarity among identical twins for things like personality traits, but it’s not perfect. It’s not a perfect concordance. It’s not a hundred percent. So that’s how we know that the environment is really, really powerful.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about how siblings can affect how you turn out. And I think there’s this popular idea that people like to talk about around the kitchen table or when they’re with friends, and that’s birth order or sibling order. Does birth order have an effect on personalities and outcomes? Cause I mean, I think typically there’s this stereotype of like, well, older siblings are going to be more successful. They’re ambitious, they’re kind of seen as the leader. The younger kid is seen as less motivated, more the fun lover. What does your research tell us about how birth order affects how children turn out?

Susan Dominus:

There’s two really prominent findings that seem almost contradictory, but I’ll lay them out for you. One of the things that research finds so consistently is that the oldest child in the family tends to have the highest IQ, tends to have the most cognitive firepower that shows up over and over again. And people think the reason for that is that they are the only ones in their family, the only child in their family who had the benefit of their parents’ exclusive attention when they were young. And it’s one of the best arguments we have for the power of enrichment, right? It’s a great argument for the power of environment. And in fact, there’s also something about a sibling effect in there. We know that oldest children who have younger siblings do better cognitively than only children. So there’s something about the fact that they are interacting with younger siblings that is thought to consolidate their knowledge or enhance their abilities.

Somehow the mechanisms are not well understood, but there’s something about being the oldest sibling that gives you a cognitive edge relative to younger siblings and even relative to only children. That said, there isn’t a ton of research that finds that oldest siblings have different personalities from younger siblings that you can reliably predict that the oldest sibling is going to be, let’s say, the most conscientious. A lot of the research on sibling order that was done would ask kids in a family who’s the most conscientious in your family, let’s say, where they would ask them to rate their siblings conscientiousness scores. If you are 25 and your oldest sibling is 32, yeah, they look like the most conscientious one in the family. They are more mature. The oldest child, as one of the people I interviewed said, will always be the oldest child, which is to say the most responsible because they’re older, but they’re not necessarily particularly conscientious relative to other people their age. So a lot of the research was conducted in ways that were imperfect, and the best conducted studies on sibling order finds that there are not a lot of personality differences that correlate with birth order. I know it’s a shock, but it’s true.

And you sort of know it because you may have even had this experience where somebody will say to you, well, I am the middle child, so I’m the peacemaker, and you kind of nod your hip and you’re like, yeah, yeah. But then you meet somebody else who’s a middle child and they say, yeah, I was a middle child. I was always forgotten. So I’ve always been kind of a pain in the neck. And they think that their birth order explains everything, but it’s like astrology. You can tell yourself any story you want as a result of your birth order, but birth order, let’s say, as we’ve already discussed, your environment is multifactorial. So the idea that your birth order alone would place such an outsized role in your personality, it doesn’t really make sense.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so birth order may not have as large of effect as we often think, but it can affect the IQ of the firstborn. And as you mentioned, that’s because parents typically invest more time and energy in their first kid because they’ve got more time and bandwidth to pay attention to them because they’re the only kid. But as you add a second, third, fourth kid, the parent’s attention gets split between the kids. But what’s interesting is that there’s research that suggests that heavy investment in the older child can actually trickle down and benefit the younger children.

Susan Dominus:

Well, that’s the idea is that the way the economists look at that is they say, oh, it’s a rational choice to invest more in the oldest child because we know there are trickle down effects when the oldest siblings do well, that tends to elevate the performances of the younger siblings. So if you can maximize performance of the oldest sibling, you’ve already done your work, right? That’s going to affect the younger kids even if you don’t do anything else. So it’s a funny economic analysis. I don’t think anybody consciously thinks that way, but it does sort of make sense.

Brett McKay:

So in the families you studied, how much influence did older siblings have on younger ones, both positively and negatively?

Susan Dominus:

I think that I saw that happen a lot in the families I wrote about. The Meia family, for example, is this really prominent family of Mexican American jurist and philanthropists, really prominent figures at a national level. And they grew up in a very disadvantaged community in Kansas City, Kansas, or at least their home was very humble. And their oldest sibling went to college, obviously before they did. His name was Alfred, and he was the first in the family to go to college, and he got to Kansas University before any of them did. And they all say that because he was there and had already navigated financial aid and had already made friends and gotten into a prestigious fraternity, it made it so much easier for them when they got there. Now things didn’t work out as well in terms of conventional achievement for Alfred because he was the first one there, and he was kind of an only at the time, and he was the only Mexican American kid in a predominantly white fraternity.

He felt a lot of financial pressure. He felt really alienated. He ended up dropping out of University of Kansas and keeping it a secret from his siblings. And none of them ever spoke about it, but they all credit him with their ability to succeed in that environment because I see it in my own kids. Going to a really big state school can be a very overwhelming experience. You don’t know how to get into the good classes. You don’t know what the good classes are. If there’s somebody who’s there before you paving the way, it is immensely more helpful. So older siblings can really see also talent in their younger siblings that I think parents don’t always recognize just because they’re not in the same environment that kids are immersed in. And also, I think that older siblings can see the future in a way that parents sometimes can’t.

And so they can be really great sources of vision and advice. And also adolescents in particular would much rather get advice from a sibling than a parent. I often quote Lisa Damour, who’s a wonderful psychologist and speaker who says that parenting advice when given to an adolescent, she calls it the kiss of death advice. If you want your kid to do something and they’re 16 years old, the best way to turn them off, the idea is to suggest it. So in my own life, having an older brother was really influential for me because I looked up to him and when he suggested I do something, I took it pretty seriously.

Brett McKay:

So older siblings can pave the way for the younger ones, and they can give each other advice or suggestions that can steer them in certain directions because siblings see each other in a way parents can’t. What role does rivalry and competition play in the effect that the older sibling has on younger siblings?

Susan Dominus:

I think you see it most closely in a family wrote about called the Graffs, the three siblings there are Adam Graff, who’s this tremendous serial healthcare entrepreneur, a younger sister Lauren, who has written many lauded novels and is many times National Book Award finalist, one of the great novelists of our generation. And then their youngest sibling, Sarah True, was an Olympic triathlete and is currently an Iron Man champion. So they’re really an extraordinary family. But I think when they were kids, Lauren and Adam jostled quite a bit in her recollection, of course, because the older brother, he doesn’t remember very much of it at all. But Lauren once told me that a huge part of her motivation came from a kind of fury that burned in her about feeling underestimated by her brother.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, the rivalry can really catapult them to success. It could be a driver, and I think you can see that with the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena.

Susan Dominus:

Well, I think in a way that Williams sisters, what drove them was having somebody as good as them to practice off of all the time. But I’m sure the rivalry was there too, but it was also just kind of proximity to greatness mean. And obviously the Kennedy father thought that in cultivating that rivalry among the siblings, he would push them to greater heights. Somebody said to me at a party recently, oh, now in my daughter’s fight, I don’t feel so bad about it. I think maybe something positive is coming out of it, not a bad spin. I think it’s also just a calculation every parent makes. What’s more important? Is it more important to you that your kids get along or is it more important that they succeed even if you could control how any of those things interact, which is unlikely. It was just an interesting reflection.

Brett McKay:

Another dynamic that sibling rivalry can create besides pushing siblings to achieve more is just pushing sibling to differentiate themselves within the family. One sibling became an entrepreneur, another one became a writer, and then another one became an athlete. And Lauren, the novelist, she said she became a huge reader because her older brother wouldn’t let her talk. But it seems like they were each really trying to carve out a distinct lane for themselves. So siblings could differentiate themselves by leaning into distinct personality traits, different interests sometimes like choosing a different high achieving path like the Groffs did. But I’m curious, did you find any instances where one sibling, maybe not consciously, but they chose a less, we’ll say, less optimal life path in order to differentiate themselves from a high achieving sibling?

Susan Dominus:

I’m sure that that happens. I think that there probably are families in which if the sibling feels that they can’t compete at the level that the other siblings are performing, that they just stop trying. It feels like a familiar dynamic. I can’t say that I came across any families like that over the course of my reporting. I mean, I was looking for families where almost everybody was high achieving, but I do feel like that dynamic seems familiar.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think it might happen. I thought it was interesting. You talked about, I think there was one family where a dead sibling affects the living siblings, and the living siblings didn’t even meet or know their dead sibling. Tell us about that. I thought it was interesting.

Susan Dominus:

Yeah, I think there used to be a term, a theoretical psychological term called the replacement child. And there was this idea that when a child dies very, very young, that child becomes he or she of sainted memory. They never had the chance to grow up to be somebody who disappointed their parents or through a tantrum or trashed the family car or dropped out of law school. They die when they’re all adorableness and they are all potential and when they die very young. And so I think being a sibling in a family where a sibling has died and all you’ve ever heard about is how perfect that child was. I heard two things from surviving siblings. One was, we didn’t want to be a burden to our parents. We didn’t want to cause them pain. I think that’s true also sometimes in families where one of the children is severely disabled. So there’s this pressure to not be another source of pain in your parents’ life, but rather source of joy and pride and ease. But I also think that when you sort of deconstruct what they are saying, I think there also is a sense, a keen sense of awareness of how beloved this other child was and a desire to live up to that reputation.

Brett McKay:

I think typically when we think about sibling dynamics, we think of when we were kids, you’re all in the same house under the same rules. You’re experiencing mom and dad at the same time, but eventually you get older and you guys go your separate ways, oftentimes different parts of the country, and we stop thinking about the sibling dynamic. It’s like, oh, I don’t see my sibling all that often except at maybe Christmas or Thanksgiving. How does the sibling dynamic continue even into adulthood while adult siblings are separated from each other?

Susan Dominus:

It’s interesting, I reported this book over so many years that I really had a sense of how sibling dynamics do play out over time. So for example, one of the families I wrote about, there was some distance among the siblings and then the parents got very sick. Often that can be a source of tension among siblings, but then when people start to get older and the parents aren’t there anymore, then you also really look out for each other’s health in a new way, and that can bring you closer to whether you ever intended it or not. And so I think sibling dynamics change over time and in a way that is both predictable and also quite moving.

Brett McKay:

Speaking of that idea about how sibling dynamics can change over time, one of the recurring themes in your book is how no family is the same over time. So for example, the firstborn may experience an environment of very different parental resources. Maybe their parents are newlyweds and they’re still in college or just starting their careers, they don’t have a lot of money. And then the later sibling is born and the parents’ financial circumstances have changed because dad and mom have got great jobs. And so those two kids aren’t going to have the same experience. How much do changing family circumstances shape sibling outcomes?

Susan Dominus:

Yeah, this is the work of Dalton Conley who’s a sociologist who eventually became very much interested in the role of genetics and shaping personality, which is not the typical stance of a sociologist. That said, he has done really interesting work about how every sibling does kind of grow up in a different family depending on where the family’s finances are. So for example, he writes about families in which one sibling was able to go to private school and then the parents’ finances kind of fell apart and another sibling went to a not very good public school. And those kids might have very different outcomes. It’s especially true when that applies to a college education or even were the parents married or divorced? If you have one kid who’s 15 and the parents are married and then three years later that kid’s already left the house, but his younger sibling who’s now 15, the parents are fighting, they’re splitting up. That can set you on a really different path to, so every child grows up in a different home. That’s a statement that I think applies to my own family. And I think it’s not just that you are bringing your own perspective to how you interpret your family, but your family is changing over time. And that means that you at 12 are experiencing a different family than your older or younger sibling does at the same age.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine that can create guilt for some parents because they want to treat all their kids fairly and they feel like, well, I wasn’t able to give this one kid that opportunity that I was able to give this other kid. But I guess you can’t beat yourself up because there’s nothing you can do about that.

Susan Dominus:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think in a way, I really hope that my book would be a relief to a lot of parents in that one of the main messages in the book is you have less control than you think over their fates because there is so much of an element of luck that comes into people’s lives, and that along with what kids are bringing to the table themselves, it’s true the decisions you make financially might have different effects on your kids. But as I said before, their environment is multifactorial and with the exception of whether you send your kid to college or not, I mean, we’re assuming all families here. We’re not talking about abusive families that can really do serious damage, but reasonably healthy loving homes. There’s a pretty wide range of behavior that really won’t affect the outcome. So for example, I think parents agonize over, should I co-sleep with my child or not?

Should I do gentle parenting or not? Am I attachment parenting or not? Should I punish my kids? How do I get them to be more disciplined in doing their homework? I think all this stuff has less of an effect than we think it does, at least on personality outcomes, how your child feels at any given moment. That’s important, but it’s also hard to predict how your child’s going to feel. So the example I always give in that regard is let’s say you have two kids who are very different, and both of them are naturally talented artists, and both of them have mothers who shower them with praise for their work and give them lots of art supplies and offer them art classes. One of those kids could grow up and say, I loved art. And then my mother smothered me and put so much pressure on me, and then I walked away altogether. And then the other one could at the Venice be an all give us toast that says, I just want to thank my mother who believed in me and showered me with classes and art supplies. So parenting is not one size fits all, which is why I always say that parenting advice should come with a caveat. Don’t try this at home. The best advice I give to parents is just know your child. You love the child you have, and go from there.

Brett McKay:

One dynamic with parenting that you did find that influenced children was these two types of parents. You often came across overcomer parents and thwarted parents. Tell us about that.

Susan Dominus:

Well, I think that this is something I saw in a lot of the parents that many of them were extraordinary themselves. So for example, just to return to the Bronte sisters, their father had grown up like dirt poor in Ireland child, I think of a tenant farmer was definitely a reach that he would ever end up at Cambridge, which is where he did end up getting his decree. So he had made tremendous leaps of class and education within one generation. We know they were very proud of their father, and they grew up reading the academic books that he won for prizes at Cambridge. But you see that a lot in a lot of the families I wrote about. But then on the other hand, you also have parents who are very talented but didn’t quite achieve what they wanted to. And I think they infused their children with it.

They sort of put that energy into their children. So Tony Kushner’s mother was a tremendous concert violinist, one of the youngest women ever to chair the violin in an orchestra and had to give up her career because she gave up her career for her children, basically, but really felt that she had been robbed of the potential for greatness. And Tony Kushner, the playwright, speaks a lot about how much she urged him on and how much her energy and talent kind of motivated him or Diane, this extraordinary director in New York and elsewhere, really one of kind generational talent. Her father had directed theater in Tokyo when he was in the military after the end of World War II, and loved, loved, loved it, but came back to New York, had kids, couldn’t quite figure it out, never really got there. But she says she remembers looking at a photo of him when he was in Tokyo right before play went on and having that same harried look that she has before a play, and realizing how much his dream was sort of completed by her.

Brett McKay:

And I think Joe Kennedy was another example. He was successful in business, and then he sort of took his ambition to the political realm. I think he wanted to be president, but that wasn’t the cards for him, probably because people didn’t like Catholics. And then he’s like, okay, if I can’t be president, then one of my kids is going to be president.

Susan Dominus:

If that’s true, that’s a great example. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Brett McKay:

So something else you talk about, well, I was struck by this as I was reading the book, these high achieving families, these siblings that you highlight, the parents had really high expectations, but they were pretty hands-off. They weren’t helicopter parenting. Can you flesh out that dynamic because I thought it was really interesting is high expectations, but coupled with hands-off approach to parenting,

Susan Dominus:

I think that’s a great observation. The parents set this sort of ambient expectation that their children would work hard, would succeed, would throw themselves into whatever they did, and then they let them do it. There’s all this research that finds really good research that finds that when young kids are doing a puzzle, if their parent or even somebody on the research team intervenes and kind of solves the puzzle for the kid, the next time the kid sits down to do a puzzle, that kid is much less motivated. And I think that that probably applies not just to small children, but certainly to adolescents. And I think it’s very common for parents of my generation to feel this responsibility for their kids’ success and to really get in there with them and sit down and help them write their essays and knock it out with them and be hovering by their side. And I just think it makes it harder for the kid to do it on his own the next time, and they’re less motivated because they feel less ownership of it, and they’re not doing it for themselves. They’re doing it to please their parents, which is always going to be less motivating than doing something to please yourself.

Brett McKay:

So what do you hope people will take away after reading your book?

Susan Dominus:

One of the things we didn’t talk about is this idea of like, well, how do parents encourage their kids to dream big? And I think part of it is a little bit temperamental. I don’t know if you can become an optimist if you’re not naturally one, but the parents and the families I wrote about really were true optimists. And they said things to their kids like, with God’s help, all things are possible, or just all things possible, or The sun shines on all of us, meaning there’s opportunity for everyone. And I think those kinds of inspiring messages, as hokey as they are, I think kids need to hear it. And at the same time, I feel that it’s my hope that parents would tell their kids, look, if you want to reach for the moon, you want to shoot for the moon? I am right there with you and go for it. I’ll support you and you should. That said, if you don’t want to shoot for the moon, that’s okay too. You know what I mean? In other words, life is not all about achievement, and I love you for who you are. It’s just to meet. It’s about creating a sense of possibility should that kid want to aim really high.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, Susan, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Susan Dominus:

Well, I frequently write, I’m a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, so obviously nytimes.com. I’m on Instagram almost never anymore @suedominus. And my book, The Family Dynamic can be found obviously on Amazon, but also at independent bookstores everywhere.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Susan Dominus, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure,

Susan Dominus:

Brett. Thank you so much for having me on. I really loved talking to you,

Brett McKay:

My guest was Susan Dominus. She’s the author of the book, The Family Dynamic. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at a aom.is/familydynamic where you can find links to resources so you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition to the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you’ll find our podcast archives. 

Make sure to also check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. 

As always, thank you for the continued support. This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,092: Hercules at the Crossroads — Choosing the Hard Path That Leads to a Good Life https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/podcast-1092-hercules-at-the-crossroads-choosing-the-hard-path-that-leads-to-a-good-life/ Tue, 04 Nov 2025 14:30:54 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191444   In a story from ancient Greek philosophy, Hercules faces a choice between two paths: one promising pleasure and ease; the other, hardship and struggle — but also growth and greatness. According to today’s guest, this ancient parable is more relevant than ever. Dr. Paul Taylor, a psychophysiologist and the author of the new book […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]>  

In a story from ancient Greek philosophy, Hercules faces a choice between two paths: one promising pleasure and ease; the other, hardship and struggle — but also growth and greatness. According to today’s guest, this ancient parable is more relevant than ever.

Dr. Paul Taylor, a psychophysiologist and the author of the new book The Hardiness Effect, returns to the show to argue that comfort has become our default mode — and it’s making us mentally and physically sick. To reclaim health and meaning, we must actively choose the path of arete — a life of effort, engagement, and challenge.

Paul first outlines the four traits that define a psychologically hardy person and how we grow by embracing and even relishing discomfort. We then dive into the physiological side of hardiness. We discuss how intentionally seeking stressors can strengthen both body and mind and some of the practices and protocols that lead to optimal health. We end our conversation with what tackling heroic, Herculean labors looks like today.

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Book cover for "The Hardiness Effect" by Dr. Paul Taylor, featuring a colorful brain graphic and the tagline "Grow from stress, optimise health, live longer—choose the hard path to a good life like Hercules.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In a story from ancient Greek philosophy, Hercules faces a choice between two paths, one, promising pleasure and ease, the other hardship and struggle, but also growth and greatness. According to today’s guest, this ancient parable is more relevant than ever. Dr. Paul Taylor, a psychophysiologist and author of the new book, The Hardiness Effect, returns to the show to argue that comfort has become our default mode. It’s making us mentally and physically sick. To reclaim health and meaning, we must actively choose the path of arete a life of effort, engagement, and challenge. 

Paul first outlines the four traits that define a psychologically hearty person and how we grow by embracing and even relishing discomfort. We then dive into the physiological side of hardiness. We discuss how intentionally seeking stressors can strengthen both body and mind and some of the practices and protocols that lead to optimal health. We enter conversation with what tackling heroic Herculean Labors looks like today. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/hardiness. All right, Paul Taylor, welcome back to the show.

Paul Taylor:

Thanks for having me, Brett. It’s such an honor to be a returning guest on your bloody awesome show.

Brett McKay:

Well, we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, Death by Comfort. You got a new book out called The Hardiness Effect, and I love that word, hardiness hardy. People need to use that more. And we’re going to talk about what that is exactly. But I want to talk about how you opened up this book and how it frames what you talk about in the book. You start off The Hardiness Effect with one of my favorite myths from antiquity. It’s the choice of Hercules. For those who aren’t familiar with that myth, can you walk us through it and then explain why did you use this myth as the framework for your book?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, look, it’s one of my favorite stories as well, Brett, and the myth goes back to Socrates who told the story of a young Hercules and in the Greek version he’s Heracles, but we’ll just go with Hercules. So he was the son of the God, Zeus, and he found himself standing at a literal and a moral crossroads, and two goddesses appeared in front of him. One was Kakia who said her name was happiness, but it was actually vice and the other was Arete, which means virtue. Now, Kakia was beautiful and seductive, and she promised Hercules an easy life, one of luxury, one of comfort and pleasure. Without effort, everything he could possibly want would be handed to him. And then on the other hand, on the other road was Arete. She was pretty plain in appearance, but she had a bit of a natural beauty.

And she told him the truth that her path would be hard. It would demand discipline, courage, and effort, but it was the only one that led to true fulfillment. So Hercules, as we probably know, he chose the Arete path and that choice actually defined him. It leads to the famous 12 labors of Hercules. These were impossible challenges that he had to undertake, that forged his character and ultimately led to Zeus deifying and making him a God because he was impressed with this character. Now, this story, it’s not just mythological, it’s also psychological as well. And it actually inspired Zeno who I know you know Brett was the founder of Stoicism. And today, this represents the choice that we all have between a life of comfort and a life of challenge. And I used it to frame the hardiness effect because I believe that we’re living through our own version of that myth right now, only Kakia has had a makeover. She no longer tempts us with this debauchery, but seduces us with a life of comfort and convenience, the life of, we think about it’s climate controlled homes, processed foods that are engineered to hijack our dopamine systems. We have endless digital entertainment that gives us an illusion of connection, but ultimately delivers loneliness. And this modern life of ease, I think leads to a life of disease. Now it’s really comfort creep on a civilization scale. We’ve now medicalized normal emotional experiences. We’ve created effort for ease and created a society with a default discomfort. And the outcome really is fragility. It’s physical, it’s mental, it’s emotional fragility. And we see that in rates of obesity, chronic disease and mental illness reflecting it. So really the story of Hercules at the crossroads became my metaphor for modern human condition. And every day we choose, do we walk Kakia’s path of ease and decay or Arete’s path of discipline, growth and meaning. And really the hardiness effect is an instructional manual for choosing arete. In the modern world, it’s about building the psychological and physiological capacity to take the hard path because that is the one that leads to the good life.

Brett McKay:

At the beginning of the book, you talk about the consequences of our modern day Kakia path that a lot of westerners are living. And you get into the statistics, obesity, diabetes, mental illness has just been creeping up for the past several decades. And you argue that it’s because just our way of life where we can be sedentary and be isolated and not do hard things is what’s contributing to that?

Paul Taylor:

Absolutely, a hundred percent. If you take an animal out of its natural environment, that animal does not do well. And this is what’s happened to us is that we have slowly over time moved into an environment that is not natural for us. We are not meant to be creatures of comfort. It is actually through challenge, physical and mental challenge that we actually become really human. And when we don’t have those challenges, we actually decay. The body just reacts to the environment.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, we had Herman Posner on the podcast. He studies metabolism.

Paul Taylor:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. One of the big takeaways I got from him is that the human body has to move. You have to move for overall health, and if you don’t, you just get fat. What’s interesting, other primates like gorillas and chimpanzees, they can sit around and eat leaves all day and they don’t get fat because they don’t have to move. But for some reason, humans, you have to move in order to stay metabolically healthy. And our environment, our lives no longer compel us to do that anymore.

Paul Taylor:

That’s right. And actually when you look, our biology is so wired from movement. Hernan is absolutely correct. And what we know is that when we don’t move, not only does it affect us physically, but it also affects us mentally and psychologically. Every time you exercise, I like to tell people there is a neuro symphony going on in your brain. There is this orchestra of neurotransmitters. Everybody knows about endorphins, but when you exercise, we also release dopamine. We release serotonin, release noradrenaline, release endocannabinoids, and cafallons in our brain. And these are all positive neurotransmitters that not only help your brain to function well, but are really important for good mental health. And so I always say to people, if you have a life where you’re not moving very much, and especially if you combine that with eating a crappy diet and not sleeping very well, good luck with your mental health because you are swimming upstream massively. We’re just starving our body of what it actually needs to perform normally, nevermind optimally.

Brett McKay:

So we all face this choice to choose Kakia, but the problem we have today is that it’s not so much a choice. Like Kakia is almost like the default and you have to kind of fight against it. And you have to choose arete intentionally. I mean, maybe you can argue 200 years ago you were kind of forced to choose arete because you had to farm and you had to work hard just to live your life. And kakia was sort of like a luxury. Today it’s the opposite. And you have to intentionally choose arete, and you propose that hardiness is the way to choose the path of arete. And what’s interesting, hardiness, it’s a fun word I think of the hardy boys, kind of these vital young men, you’re full of vigor, but there’s actually a psychological concept. How do researchers define hardiness?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, look, it’s a bit of a close cousin to resilience and often they’re used interchangeably in the research, but they’re actually not the same. Resilience is more of an outcome. It’s about bouncing back, but it doesn’t tell you how to get there, hardiness actually does. So it was first identified by Dr. Suzanne Kobasa and Dr. Salvato Maddi in the 1970s and really explains why some people thrive under stress while other people crumble. So they did this landmark 12 year study at Illinois Bell and Telephone company, and they were going through a corporate crisis. And they found that over these 12 years, about two thirds of the employees fell apart under pressure, but a third of them didn’t just cope, they actually grew stronger. And they found that these group, they shared three core attitudes, a challenge orientation, a control orientation, and a commitment orientation. So let’s look at each one of those.

Challenge orientation and hardiness is about seeing both change and adversity as opportunities for growth rather than threats. Control is the belief that you control or heavily influence your environment or your destiny. And in psychology we call that an internal locus of control, and it’s also about focusing your energy on what you can control or influence rather than feeling like a victim. And then the last is commitment. This is about being fully engaged in life and living with purpose instead of withdrawing or wandering aimlessly. Now these guys started the research, but other researchers like Paul Bartone, he’s a US Army psychologist and he’s great and he’s a bit of a mentor of mine in this area. He really expanded the research and he found that hardiness actually predicted who passed and who feels basic military training, and then found that hardiness predicted who passed special forces selection course.

And it’s then it’s been shown that hardiness predicts career longevity and high pressure careers such as the military, police and first responders. And so if resilience is about bouncing back, hardiness is about bouncing forward. It’s the process that creates resilience. And the benefits are huge as well as predicting success in high pressure environments, high hardiness scores predict better cardiovascular health, stronger immune systems, lower rates of anxiety and depression. And even kids who are higher in hardiness are much more likely to go to university independent of their socioeconomic status, which is pretty critical. And then in my own PhD research, we ran a six week hardiness intervention and we saw measurable improvements, statistically significant in mental wellbeing, in stress tolerance and hardiness as well as measures of cognitive performance. So we showed that you can learn it, it’s not just a trait you were born with, it’s a set of learnable skills. And I’ve added a fourth C that of connection, which I’m sure we’ll unpack a little bit. But really for me, choosing hardiness, like you said, is today’s version of choosing the path of rite. It’s committing to growth through discomfort both psychological and physiological. And the payoff is a life that’s not just longer but also fuller and more engaged and more meaningful.

Brett McKay:

So what you’ve done in the book, you’ve broken down hardiness to two parts. There’s psychological and physiological hardiness, and it seems like those three C’s you laid out the challenge control commitment. And then the fourth one that you’ve added connection. We’ll talk about that here. That makes up psychological hardiness. Correct?

Paul Taylor:

Correct. That’s right, yes.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s dig deeper into these different components, these four C’s of psychological hardiness you mentioned. The first one is challenge. This is about seeing adversity as a challenge instead of a stressor. How can seeing stress and adversity in your life as a challenge as opposed to something just to upset you, how does that change your psychology and even your physiology?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, look, it has a massive effect. It changes how we think, how we act, and even how ourselves behave. So at its core challenge orientation, this is about how we appraise stress. It’s the view we take of it. So when something tough happens, whether it’s you’re in a big project given an argument or some sort of a setback, your brain decides almost instantly is this a threat or is this a challenge? And that split second perception actually dictates both your psychological leaning and your physiological response. So if you view it as a threat, you go into avoidance mode. So you’re motivated to leave, to procrastinate, to run away. It’s the flight part of fight or flight. Whereas if you see as a challenge, it’s what we call approach orientation. In psychology, you actually lean in and then physiologically it’s very, very different. When you see as a threat, your body constricts your blood vessels, cortisol rises, your cognitive flexibility drops, and the chemicals that the major stress hormone is cortisol, and I’ll come back to that in a second.

But when you see something as a challenge, your cardiovascular system actually responds like it does during exercise, your blood flows freely, oxygen delivery improves performance and cognition actually rise. And this is the fight part of the fight or flight. Now, the chemicals involved in your body with a challenge orientation, it is about the hormones, adrenaline and no noradrenaline, which in your side of the ditch, they call it epinephrine and norepinephrine. Now the half-life of those chemicals is about a minute, and that means with about four half-lifes, that chemical’s out of your body. So within five minutes, your body is back to homeostasis. So same me and you both have the same situation. You view it as a challenge, your body is back to homeostasis within five minutes. With me, because I’ve released cortisol, the half-life of cortisol is well over an R. So that means that ours later, even when that challenge or threat is gone, my body is still in a stress field. I still have cortisol going through my bloodstream, attacking my organs and my brain. Now this isn’t just theory. There’s research by numerous psychologists that show that our mindset towards stress literally changes our biology. And people with a challenge orientation, they recover faster from stress, they got lower inflammatory markers and they performed better under pressure. And I recently interviewed professor Jeremy Jameson. He ran a series of experiments with college students before an exam, I think, do you call it the GRE Brett?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. To get into grad school.

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, that’s it. The one to get into grad school. And he told half of them that anxiety was a normal thing and it actually prepared their body to action and could translate into better performance. And the other half the control group, he told no such thing. And then they all did a mock exam. And the people who he primed that anxiety, this challenge orientation, they did better in the mock exam, but they also then did better in the real thing as well. So your perception influences your performance as well. And the stoics understood this. 2000 years ago, Seneca said “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.” And the idea is that the friction is the forge. Hardiness is about leaning into that friction deliberately. That’s the key thing.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s a powerful concept to understand if you see your stress in your life, not as a threat, but as a challenge, there’s so many benefits to that. Any tips that you found? Research backed tips on how you can strengthen your challenge muscle? I mean, I think one you talked about is this idea of acceptance and reprisal.

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is really key. It goes back to even the historics who talked about life being hard, the Buddha, the first noble truth of Buddhism is life is suffering. Well, the word is actually dca, which means hard to do. So it’s first of all accepting that life is going to be hard. And then it’s about accepting that you are going to come through challenges in your life. And I tell this to my kids, I say to my kids, life is amazing, but it is also going to be hard at times. And it’s about how you react to that. So first of all, it’s just accepting that life is going to be hard, that occasionally you will get shit sandwiches from the universe and that acceptance puts you into a state where you can then reappraise. This. Reappraisal is training your brain to interpret stress as fuel rather than poison.

I call it stress alchemy. When you feel that surge, the heart rate rising, your tension, instead of saying to yourself, I’m anxious, say I’m energized. That’s the key thing. And this is the psychological framing, and it’s basically the Stoics talked about life being a contest. So it’s about getting yourself up for the contest of life and seeing these things as challenges to actually test and develop you. So that’s really key. And that reappraisal of viewing stuff as a challenge rather than a threat. You can do it not just in the moment when you’re dealing with stress, but also you can look back on it and actually taking time for your listeners to think of times in your life that were really hard or stressful. And then looking back now, how did that benefit you? What was the silver lining that came? So you can do this arete appraisal two ways. One is viewing things as challenges, but then secondly, looking back on the hard stuff and going, Hey, what did I learn from that? How did I actually grow from that? And that’s really key.

Brett McKay:

Alright, let’s talk about that second C, which is control. It’s about having an internal locus of control. What can the stoics and Admiral James Stockdale teach about developing an internal locus of control?

Paul Taylor:

I love that. So I have a copy of Epictetus’s Enchiridion, which roughly translates as a manual for life. And the very first line of this is of things, some are up to us and others are not. This is really about the stoic dichotomy of control and it’s one of the most powerful psychological tools ever developed. Marcus Aurelius, he put it beautifully, you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. And this is really what’s at the heart of the control component. When you’re in control orientation, you don’t waste mental energy on things you can’t change, whether it’s the weather, other people’s opinions, the economy or those sorts of things. You focus on what you can do and what you can influence. And that actually reduces our stress. It takes us out of victim mode and gives us some agency, right?

So the stoic said that we must focus on that which we can control and refuse to invest our energy in that which we can’t control. And a lot of people get into trouble psychologically when they’re investing their energy in stuff they can’t control. They’re in their own heads wishing their past to be different, wishing other people to be different, wishing the universe to orientate around them. These are all things that we can’t control. Now, Stockdale, I love that you mentioned Stockdale. He’s a bit of a personal hero of mine and he is a modern day stoic and he really embodies this control orientation. Now Stockdale, he was shot down over North Vietnam and he spent seven and a half years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison camp. And four of those years he was in solitary confinement. He was tortured on 15 separate occasions. But what kept him going was stoicism is specifically Epictetus’s Enchiridion that he had brought that to war with him when he got shot down.

He talks about this in a number of his books as he ejected out of his aircraft and he was coming down to land, he could see the Vietcong coming in to capture him. And he said to himself, I’m now leaving my world, the world of technology and I’m entering into the world of Epictetus. And he knew that he couldn’t control his captors or his circumstances or the torture, but he could control how he responded to it. So Stockdale famously, he took control of his mind. He maintained leadership over the other prisoners because he was the senior officer in there and created meaning within chaos. And it was that focusing on what he can control that was really central to his success in there and him helping his other fellow prisoners to get through. Now, studies in both military and organizational settings show that people who have a strong internal locus of control, they experience less anxiety, they perform better under pressure and they recover faster from trauma. And so it’s proactive rather than reactive. And you can actually train yourself into this way as well. You can develop your control muscle if you like.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. How do you do that?

Paul Taylor:

Well, it’s basically changing your narrative. So say you got pissed off about something, a lot of people will go, they made me angry or this ruined my day, or I had no choice in this. All of those things are handing away control. It’s actually about self-awareness is really the first thing. And reframing that in your head from they made me angry too. I chose to feel angry. I decided to let that affect me. Now that can be a bit uncomfortable at first and a bit awkward, but it really is incredibly I empowering because what you’re actually training yourself to do is to realize that you have a choice about how you react to things. That’s really key. And I think that another second practice is the stoic idea of visualizing your day. Now this might seem a bit pessimistic, but it’s actually really helpful. It’s basically the stoic excuse to Marcus really famously would do this.

He would think about all the things that could possibly go wrong, the bad people he would meet and what he would actually do for that. So it’s about mental rehearsal so that when the bad stuff happens, you’re actually ready to do that. And then it’s about doing little small daily acts is about making your bed properly, finishing your workout even when you don’t want to. Choosing the healthy thing rather than the unhealthy thing and then reflecting on it and going, Hey, I made a conscious choice. There are around control. Every little action just builds that muscle bit by bit.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the third C is commitment. What is it about commitment that makes us more hearty?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, so it’s interesting, there’s a number of different elements to commitment, but they all interact with each other. So it’s really about being fully engaged in life. And I am increasingly concerned about modern society, and I know you are Brett as well. I listened to your podcast that there’s an increasing amount of people who are spending an increasing amount of their spare time within the confines of four walls with their heads buried in a bloody screen, either scrolling on social media or watching crappy tv. These people are what I call passive consumers of life. And it’s the polar opposite to high hardiness commitment, high hardy, committed people are fully engaged in life, whether it’s their work, their relationships, their health or their learning. They’re people. You know these people because they’re curious, they bring positive energy, they derive their meaning from participation, not from results.

And I really think that this commitment, it’s a bit of an antidote to apathy. So in our culture it’s really easy to live that passive life of scrolling, multitasking, of numbing yourself with drugs and alcohol. But when you’re committed, you’re really present. And the stoics really talked about this as well, and Seneca said, it’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. And this is about whether or not you are fully engaged. Now, linked to that in commitment to orientation is a sense of meaning and purpose. And in Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which I read as a 17-year-old that had a pretty profound effect on my life. And he showed that those who survived the concentration camps, they weren’t the strongest or the smartest, but they were the people who were committed to a purpose that was bigger than themselves. And the hardiness research actually echoes that. Salvador Maddie found that people who were high in commitment, they kept deeply engaged in their work and their relationships under stress. They handle stress far better than people with low commitment and they actually experience a lot less burnout.

Brett McKay:

So what are some things we can do to develop our commitment muscle?

Paul Taylor:

So one is about really clarifying your values. And I think part of the problem in modern society is the decline of religion. Now, I’m not religious at all, I’m more of a spiritual person, but I think what religion does was it gave people a sense of shared values and meaning. And when that’s missing, if you don’t deliberately find it, people can end up in an existential vacuum. So it’s really about getting clear on your values, the stuff that is meaningful to you, and then it’s about creating systems around because motivation that will get you started. So this gets into another part of commitment to orientation, which is about being committed to your health. It’s not just about having goals, but it’s about having processes that will actually help you to get to the person that you want to be and ideally linking them to your values.

And then I like to get people to do what I call a tombstone statement, which is what would you like to be written on your tombstone that would sum up your contribution to society or your little corner of the universe? It’s kind of a morbid thing, thinking of how would I be thought of when I’m dead? But that is the thing that uncovers that deeper sense of meaning and purpose. So getting clear on your values and on your purpose in life and then trying to live intentionally using those values as a compass. These are the things that really help to drive that commitment orientation.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so you added a fourth C to these three Cs of psychological hardiness. That’s connection. What is it about connecting with others that makes us more psychologically hearty?

Paul Taylor:

Well, look, Brett, the human brain is essentially a social organ. And we need that social connection. We know that when somebody is lonely, it is as bad for their health as smoking 20 cigarettes a day. It takes 10 to 12 years off your life and it’s hugely, hugely important. We talked about Stockdale in the Hanoi Hilton. The thing that got these guys through when they were put in solitary confinement was they created this thing called the tap code where they could tap out the letters of the alphabet on the walls and the pipes and they created all this shorthand and the tap code was the glue that held these guys together. When you connect with somebody else, you release oxytocin and vasopressin in your brains. Now they’re the hormones of love, trust, and social bonding, but they are also the most potent anti-stress chemicals that human beings produce.

And decades of research on military veterans as well as people who’ve been through trauma shows that those who are socially connected, who have people that they can lean into, they suffer much less PTSD and suicide than people who don’t have those social connections. And it’s because we are evolved to survive and thrive in tribes. And social support is one of the most powerful buffers against stress that we have. I mean Paul Barone showed this on PTSD and also there’s a researcher, she showed the people with strong social relationships, they’ve got a 50% lower risk of premature death than people who don’t have those relationships. So connection for me is hugely, hugely important. And that’s part of today’s massive problem of Kaia is that we are massively digitally connected, more connected than we’ve ever been, but we are really disconnected when it comes from to face to face perspective.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we had Derek Thompson on the podcast a while back ago. He wrote an article for The Atlantic about how it’s basically there’s no loneliness epidemic because people aren’t really feeling lonely because we have all of this technology that can basically, we don’t feel like we’re lonely and so we don’t feel like we have the need to reach out to people, but we’re still seeing the ill effects of not actually connecting with other people.

Paul Taylor:

When you do face to face interactions, it is very, very different to online interactions. And he makes a good point that we don’t actually notice it because we still think that we are connected. But there is nothing that replaces that face-to-face interaction. And other research has shown that it is about catching up with people in person. It’s about having good friends that you will see at least once a month. That is one of the real key things here.

Brett McKay:

So it takes intention. You have to be intentional about this because everyone’s schedule’s crazy. You’re not just going to run into your friends like maybe you would’ve done a century ago. You have to plan for it, you have to choose it.

Paul Taylor:

You absolutely do. You’re a hundred percent right Brett. And it’s not about waiting for other people to organize something, it’s about being the connector in your little corner of the universe. Taking that on board I think is really key.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s psychological hardiness. So there’s the four Cs challenge orientation, have an internal locus of control commitments to being engaged, have a higher purpose that you’re going for and then connecting with others that can give you psychological hardiness. Let’s talk about physiological hardiness. And we had you on last time talking about your book Death by Comfort. And one of the things we talked about in that podcast was how hormesis can be the antidote to the damage that all this comfort is causing to us physiologically. For those who aren’t familiar with hormesis, what is it?

Paul Taylor:

So hormesis is basically it’s summed up by the words of Frederick Nietzsche, that which does not kill us, and I’m sure all your listeners can finish the sentence makes us stronger. And this goes back, it actually goes back to biology like core biology. Edward Calabresi first noticed in his PhD research he was giving pesticides to plants to try to kill him and seeing what was the smallest dose that would actually kill them. And he found that at small doses, the plants actually flourished when they were given small doses of poison. And that led him to a whole heap of research and other researchers that they enjoined in. That shows that when we are exposed to small intermittent doses of stress, we actually get stronger, more robust at a cellular level. So when your body is presented with stressors, something called the cell danger response kicks off.

And that is the cells actually responding to stress by upregulating protective pathways. I describe them in the book, there’s things like NRF two and HIF one, but these drive our antioxidant defenses, they make our mitochondria stronger and they drive cellular cleanup processes like autophagy. And it’s basically your sales saying, Hey, we’re under a bit of pressure here. We need to get fitter, we need to train for this eventuality. And so for me, physiological hardiness and psychological hardiness or physiological hormesis and psychological hardiness, they’re like two sides to the same coin. The hardy mind reframes stress as a challenge and the body uses stress as medicine. So we actually, because of exposure to small amounts of stressors, and think of the obvious ones like exercise, cold exposure, heat exposure, all three of these activate these stress response pathways and not just in humans, in fruit flies, in worms, in cats, in dogs, in rodents, all primates all respond to those stressors and fasting as well with an upregulation of these stress response genes that in humans switch on at least 300 protective mechanisms.

So the goal here is not to avoid stress, but it’s to dose it deliberately. So there’s a hermetic curve. If you don’t do anything, it’s bad for you. You start to do some of these stressors, it’s good for you, a bit more is better, but there is an optimal point where it starts to become too much after that. And so this is about dosing it deliberately and intermittently. And the ancient stoics, they did it with cold baths and fasting, and this is about stress inoculation, it’s about nature’s physiological hardiness because of exposure to stress and appropriate recovery. That’s the key thing. And it actually keeps us biologically young and adaptable.

Brett McKay:

So in the book, in the section about physiological hardiness, physiological robustness, you provide different forms of hormetic stress, stress that can be medicine for individuals. One of the most potent ones is exercise. And in that section you recommend that people focus on two markers of fitness, VO2 max and strength. Why those two?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, look, they are really critical. Just before I dive into that, two legendary exercise physiologists released a paper, I think it was 2013, exercise prevents and or treats 26 common chronic diseases. That is just crazy. You imagine if the pharmaceutical industry produced a pill that would simultaneously reduce your risk of 26 chronic chronic diseases and that the reason is that it releases all of these mykines, which are signaling molecules. But to answer your question now, so your VO2 max, that’s your maximum oxygen uptake, how much oxygen you can take in and use, and it’s the gold standard measure of cardio respiratory fitness. And lots of your listeners will have heard of it. And if they have an apple watcher or Garmin or whoop band or an oil ring, it’ll actually estimate their VO2 max and then you can look up tables online to see where you are.

What we now know is that your VO2 max is the single biggest predictor of how long you’re going to live way above everything else. So there was a massive 2018 study I talk about in my book from the Cleveland Clinic that followed over 120,000 people who’d all done stress testing on their heart and had their VO2 max measured and they followed these guys, they were in their fifties or their sixties at the start and they followed them for 15 years and a bunch died and a bunch obviously didn’t. And then they went back and looked at the data 15 years ago around their VO2 max and they found that VO2 max was associated with dramatically lower all cause mortality and there was no upper limit that meant that the fitter people got the longer they actually lived. And it was way more predictive of future death and having heart disease or diabetes or high blood pressure, any of those things.

So it is about training for your VO2 max. So how do you do it? Well, first of all is a bit of a base of zone two training, and your listeners may have heard of this. It’s 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. Basically you can talk but you can’t sing. Now that’s a base, but you can’t just do zone two and hope to improve your VO2 max. That will really help your mitochondria. The best way to build your VO2 max is the Norwegian four by four protocol. So this is basically you do four minutes of all art exercise, you can pick any piece of equipment, a rower, a step or a treadmill, whatever, or you can just be out running and you go as hard as you can for four minutes to the point that at the end of those four minutes, your heart rate should be 95% of your maximum. That is like I’m almost dying. And then you recover for three minutes. You just sort of turn your legs over for three minutes and you do that four times. That’s the four by four protocol. That is the single best way to re your VO2 max. And you only need to do that once a month. That’s key. And then I think, did you ask about the second one, which was about strength

Brett McKay:

Training? Yeah, strength, yeah, strength training.

Paul Taylor:

Yeah. Look, I know you’re a big fan of strength training and the second biggest predictive of how long you’re going to live is your muscle strength. And it appears in the research to be muscle strength, not your muscle mass. Stronger people live longer and they stay independent for longer. And it’s because our muscles aren’t just for movement. I mentioned it earlier, they are endocrine organs. Your muscle is an endocrine organ that secretes these molecules called myokines that reduce our inflammation, improve our brain health, and improve the health of all of our different organs. So really it is about using that muscle. And we know that becoming stronger is protective against sarcopenia. That’s that loss of muscle and bone as you age. And that if you become sarcopenic in old age, it actually dramatically increases your risk of pretty much every chronic disease. So I’m a big fan that everybody who’s listening to this podcast should be lifting heavy.

I don’t care what sex they are, what age they are. In fact, the older they are, the more important it is to lift heavy. And a good program if people don’t do it would be just full body strength training sessions. Ideally three of those a week focusing on compound movements, the big lifts that use multi joints, things like squats, deadlifts, presses, pull-ups. Plus also I think it’s really important to add in single leg work like Bulgarian split squats or lunges because that stability is really, really important, especially as we age and especially if you get over 50 as well as single leg work, do some balanced stuff as well because what we now know is if you’re in your sixties and you fall over and break a hip or a pelvis, you got a 50% chance of being dead within the next five years. So the takeaway here is simple. You need to train your body to be hard to kill. Cardio makes you harder to kill from the inside out and strength makes you harder to kill from the outside in and together is this physical foundation of hardiness. I think we need to do both.

Brett McKay:

Awesome. So yeah, strength train three times a week and then get in some zone two cardio and then a HIIT workout. 

Paul Taylor:

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable with the Norwegian four by four and you can just look it up. It’s not pleasant, but it’s useful.

Brett McKay:

I do it once a week. Yeah. So another hormetic stress you talk about is light. How is light a stressor?

Paul Taylor:

So light is both, as I said, it’s a hermetic stressor so you don’t get any of it and it’s really bad for you. You get some, it’s good, you get more, it’s better. But there is an optimal point and everybody knows with sunlight that you could get too much sun and that can cause skin cancer. But what most people don’t realize is that if you have low vitamin D or even suboptimal vitamin D, which according to different agencies, between 70 and 80% of us globally have suboptimal vitamin D, if you have suboptimal vitamin D, it increases your risk of pretty much every cancer other than skin cancer. Now, if I take a step back and talk about light in general, we now know that light is a signal to our body and it triggers adaptation. So morning sunlight sets your shahinian rhythm, it boosts your serotonin, it anchors your sleep wake cycle and without it your hormones drift, your sleep quality tanks and even your metabolism suffers.

So as I said, low vitamin D levels, they’re not just linked to increased risk of cancer, there is a significant increased risk of cardiovascular disease, a massive increased risk of depression. And actually they’re finding increasing vitamin D acts like an antidepressant. People with low vitamin D have immune dysfunction as well. So I’m all about outcomes. So it’s about getting your blood tested and you want your level to be, if you’re in the states, 40 to 60 nanograms per deciliter, that’s what you use. Over here we use nanomoles per liter. So it’s between a hundred and 150 MLEs per liter, or if you live in the states, 40 to 60 nanograms per deciliter. Now the other thing is you’ve got to look at your skin tone. If your skin is darker or you live further from the equator, you’re going to need to get more sun exposure than people with light skin or who live closer to the equator.

And then when we get to red and near infrared light, that’s when things get really spooky. I mean, Einstein talked about quantum physics as spooky action at a distance and we now know that light has quantum effects on our cells. It’s just ridiculous. But rather than do a deep dive into that, I want to talk about how we use this therapeutically. So red light and near infrared, their wavelengths are between 620 and about 1,050 or more. So red light, which is that sort of 620 to 700 ish, that has a massive effect on your skin. It’s great for healing, it’s great for inflammation, it’s great for eczema and even childhood acne and even in adults, it has really good effects on our skin. It’s good for wound healing, it’s good for burns. They now treating burns victims with red lights straight away and then near infrared lights, which has a slightly longer wave of length, kind of 820 to 1,015 nanometers that actually penetrates through your skin and actually interacts with your mitochondria and triggers the activation of an enzyme called cytochrome sea oxidase.

That’s really important for the electron transport chain, and I don’t want to get too geeky in the physiology, but basically near infrared light stimulates your mitochondria to produce more a TP, the cellular energy, and that’s the fuel for everything in your body. And we know that having good efficient mitochondria protects you against a whole he of physical diseases. So really this is about driving this cellular agents of energy, your mitochondria through that near infrared light. And then as I said, the red light’s good for your skin, but also sunlight is also therapy as well. And then the darkness is really, really important as well for those circadian rhythms. When you change your sleep wake cycle, basically you mess with your circadian rhythms and you mess with your biology. Most people don’t realize, Brett, that your hormones run off circadian rhythms and lots of your cells do too. So when you mess with your sleep cycles, you’re actually messing with your biology.

Brett McKay:

How do you get red light near infrared light?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, so you can get panels and masks and things like that. So they’re all available commercially and there’s a range of expense based on the size of them and the par and all of that sort of stuff. I get mine direct from China from a factor, it’s called red L led and it’s a lot cheaper and they will make a lot of the ones that American brands put their brand on and doubled the price from it. But I have a red and near infrared light panel and I used it. I had open heart surgery at the start of this year. I found I was born with a dodgy aortic valve and I think that red light and near infrared massively helped my recovery.

Brett McKay:

So another stressor you recommend is nature. Typically we think of nature’s, oh, it’s relaxing to be out in nature. How is nature a stressor?

Paul Taylor:

Well, it’s this balance of stress and recovery that’s really key and nature definitely falls up more on the recovery side. Now there are obviously there’s a bunch of challenges out in nature, temperature, variation, terrain, microbes, all of these things that can stimulate adaptation and they strengthen our immune and our nervous system. So we actually know that when you spend time in nature, if you go walk through the forest, you actually pick up some of the microbiome from the forest, even walking beside the sea. You’ll pick up some of the microbiome in the sea and it actually is good for us. There’s stimulation of it, but then spending time in nature can be hugely relaxing as well and can give us profound recovery. The Japanese, they call it shin Yoku or forest bathing as some people may have found. And when I was researching the book, I couldn’t believe how many research studies, there were studies around forest bathing and study after studies showing that spanning even 20 minutes in nature, lowers your cortisol, lowers your blood pressure, lowers your heart rate, and actually improves immune cell activity.

And then we have the microbiome connection that I talked about. So when you or your kids, they play in the dirt or the garden or you walk barefoot, you’re actually exposed to the microbes in the soil and they interact with the microbes in your skin and even in your gut. And that helps us to regulate inflammation and immune function. So we know that kids who live on farms, adults who live on farms have got much more diverse microbiomes than people who live in cities. This is linked to something called the hygiene hypothesis, that basically our obsession with cleaning and disinfecting everything has actually weakened our immune systems and increased rates of autoimmune disorders and allergies. And an interesting little tidbit for your listeners, Brett, I live in Melbourne in Australia that has the highest rate of allergies anywhere in the world. And you know what they’ve linked it to.

Melbourne also has the highest rate of cesarean section birth anywhere in the world. And what we now know is that being born cesarean section completely changes the immune system, mostly through the gut microbiome. Having a natural birth actually triggers the activation of the immune system. So that time in nature is hugely important. And then there’s this whole idea of grounding or earthing, which I used to think was woo woo. But again, looking into the research, there’s actually a lot of physics behind it that basically when your feet or your body is in contact with the earth’s surfaces, the electrons on the earth, they have biological effects. Now the research is pretty early, but it’s very, very interesting. And there is evidence increasing, evidence of improved sleep, reduced inflammation from grounding our earthing and probably it’s due to changes in our autonomic nervous system and stress as well. So just getting out, spending some time walking, getting your feet, your bare feet on the surfaces of the earth, grass, sand, rock, whatever, actually reconnects us to the world and resets our electric charge. It’s pretty bonkers, but it is real.

Brett McKay:

And one prescription you give people to get more time outdoors is following the nature pyramid. We’ve written about this on the website, it’s really cool. So it’s the 20-5-3 rule. So you want to get 20 minutes in green space three times a week, five hours in a semi wild environment once a month and then three days completely off grid annually. So that’s like a camp out or something. And that’ll give you enough nature that you need for overall health and wellbeing.

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, I love that. I love the stuff that’s just simple that people can go, yeah, you know what, I can do that. And I tell you what, if you do that 20-5-3 prescription, you will notice a significant effect.

Brett McKay:

Going back to that balance between stress and recovery, you talk in the book about nutrition and you focus on a few things that are essential for health and strength. You talk about avoiding ultra processed foods, which is something we discussed the last time you’re on the show. You talk about protein, how essential protein is people should aim to get at least 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. It’s often better to get more, get a gram per pound of body weight. And then you talk about the importance of omega fatty acids. What are omega threes and why are they so important for hearty health?

Paul Taylor:

They’re essential and they are structural fats for your brain and they’re also very potent anti-inflammatories for your body. And I really encourage people to get their omega index tested. You can do this at omega quant QAN t.com. I’ve got no association with these guys whatsoever. They just do brilliant testing. So they’ll give you an omega index or an omega score. It’s the amount of omega threes and percentage of those fats in your rare blood cells. And what we now know is that if people with a score of 8%, they live about five years longer than those who score around 5%. Like you show me some one thing in nutrition that can extend lifespan by five years. I don’t think there’s anything other than omega fatty acids. And what we now know is that the Japanese, on average, their omega index is about 8%, Americans is about 5%, and the Japanese live five years longer than the Americans.

So we really need to increase our omega index and we can get there if you eat lots of fish. That’s why the Japanese have it, particularly fatty fish, salmon, sardines, anchovies. But a lot of people will have to be supplemented. If you’re not eating fish three or four times a week or more, you really got to supplement and about two grams of high quality fish oil or if you’re plant-based algal oil, the stuff algae, the stuff that the fish feed on, that is actually a really good way to reach your omega fatty acids as well. And I think as well as minimizing ultra processed foods, they are the two most powerful nutritional interventions you can do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, something I’ve been doing lately for the past couple months is I’ve started eating anchovies and sardines. As a kid I was like, that’s gross. That’s what grandpas eat. But then Michael Easter, he had an article on a substack about you need to eat more small fish. I was like, okay. So I went to Whole Foods and bought some cans of sardines and anchovies and they’re not bad. They taste like tuna fish, anchovies a little salty, but I try to get two to three of those a week and it’s easy and it’s cheap. It’s not that expensive.

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, that’s right. And I’m a fan of eating anchovies, and I think it’s useful to explain to people why small fish, small fish don’t live as long the big fish, particularly big fish like tuna, you’ll find that they tend to have more heavy metals in them, more mercury, because they eat lots of small fish. So having the small fish like sardines and anchovies is a really good way to do it.

Brett McKay:

So you wrap up the book by revisiting the Myth of Hercules, and you frame your recommendations using Hercules’ mythical 12 labors, and they’re kind of a summary of the principles we discussed. So let’s end there. What are the Herculean labors a modern person should undertake to live a life of arete?

Paul Taylor:

Yeah, look, the first one I think is overarching and it’s actually forging the hardiness mindset. This is that actually choosing to see change and adversity as opportunity for growth just as Hercules did then it’s embrace life’s challenges. And I love this idea that stoics talked about life as a contest. The Olympic games are upon us, and I think we need to view life as a contest and actually get into the contest with passion and view all of these challenges as little tests of your character and wake up every day and go, you know what? I’m ready for the contest. I think that’s really key. Then it’s focus on the stuff that you can control. Don’t invest your energy in the stuff. You can’t get committed to life. Be fully engaged in life. I get people to look at their screen time and if you are spending three Rs or four hours of your life on screens extrapolated over your lifetime, that’s like 10 to 15 years of your life with your head buried in a screen.

So it’s, for me, it’s about choosing to engage fully in life. And then the other say about connection, having meaningful face-to-face interactions with friends. And then the rest of it is really about that physiological hardiness is actually engaging in these deliberate stressors of exercise, of heat, of cold exposure, of nourishing your body when you’re eating, of exposing yourself to beneficial light and then making sure that you recover. But the key for me, Brett, I think the last thing that I’d like to impart to your listeners is that recently scientists have roughly estimated our chances of ever having being born, and they reckon it’s about one in 400 trillion. And if you think about it, all of your ancestors way back to your homo Habilis, homoerectus ancestors, they all had to survive in order for you to be alive. Somebody probably survived the plague in England, one of your ancestors, somebody probably survived just World War I or World War II. But this is the thing is waking up every day and going, I have won the greatest lottery ever. I’ve had a one in 400 trillion chance of being alive. Let’s not waste it and let’s embrace the contest. I think that’s the key thing.

Brett McKay:

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

Paul Taylor:

So the best place to go would be my website, which is paultaylor.biz. You can get the book there. You can also get the book on Amazon and also my podcast, which is the Hardiness podcast. I think if you’re interested in this, there’s going to be a big deep dive on hardiness in that podcast.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Paul Taylor, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Paul Taylor:

Thank you for having me on again, Brett, and love your work. Absolutely love it.

Brett McKay:

Thank you so much. My guest was Dr. Paul Taylor. He’s the author of the book, The Hardiness Effect. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, paultaylor.biz. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/hardiness where you’ll find links and resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,091: Make Friends With Death to Live a Better Life https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/podcast-1091-make-friends-with-death-to-live-a-better-life/ Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:10:44 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191383  Reading in the email newsletter? Click here to listen to this week’s episode  We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance. We hide it behind hospital curtains, euphemize it in conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance. We hide it behind hospital curtains, euphemize it in conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living.

But my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to fully embracing life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discuss practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at memento mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure.

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Book cover for "Memento Mori" by Joanna Ebenstein, featuring flowers, fruit, and a skull against a dark background. Subheading: "The Art of Contemplating Death to Make Friends with Death and Live a Better Life.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance while we hide behind hostile curtains, euphemizing a conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living, but my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to a fulfilling life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. In today’s show Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discussed practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at Memento Mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure. After the show is over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/mementomori. All right, Joanna Ebenstein, welcome to the show.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you founded a project called Morbid Anatomy that explores the different facets of death. You also wrote a book called Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, which is about how thinking about death, meditating on it, making it a part of our lives can actually improve our lives in the West, particularly in America. I think we’re not particularly comfortable with talking about or thinking about death. But what’s interesting, and you talk about this in your book, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in America where we did have a relationship with death, and this was largely before the 20th century. So what happened? Why did people lose this relationship to death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, that’s a great question and a really important one. And what I like to say, and I always say this to my students at the beginning of class, the idea that we can deny death at all is a luxury unique to our time and place. So until the late 19th to early 20th century, people butchered their own animals. People died in the home. The idea of a good death was to die at home surrounded by friends and loved ones. The parlor was a place to lay out the body of the dead in the home, and life expectancy was much shorter and many children died before reaching adulthood. And on top of that, we have wars and the Civil War, World War I, and the influenza epidemic. So I think this idea that death is something exotic and far away and something that is possible to ignore just wasn’t present in the 19th century.

That’s brand new. I don’t think any other culture has had that situation in our culture. When someone gets sick, they go off to a hospital, which is where they usually die. We put our old and old age homes. So these are all new developments that push the idea of death and aging further and further from our daily experience. And this was very much not the case in the 19th century. I think watching the movie Gone With the Wind, which many of your listeners out there probably have watched is a great, great example of how death was a part of everyday life in Victorian era in a very prosaic way.

Brett McKay:

My family, we just finished watching Gone With the Wind.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Ah, it’s wonderful. Right, and that scene, I think when we talk about mourning practices, I love to show that scene where Scarlet accepts the dance offer of Rhett Butler when she’s in mourning right. And shocks, everyone’s like, oh my God, you can’t possibly do that. So that shows not only death practices, but also the rigor of mourning for women especially.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about that. That’s interesting. You talk about it in the book, the rituals and culture that we had around death in 19th century America. It seems like we imported that from Victorian England.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes, I think that’s true. And from what, I’m not a specialist in this, but from what I have read, it seems to me that death practices in the West had not changed substantially between the ancient Greeks and the Victorians until the present. So this idea of anointing the deceased with oils and dressing them and laying them out in the parlor or in the home for viewing, this was also done from my understanding in the ancient Greek world. So I think in the Western world, the Victorian traditions were very, very longstanding traditions that were probably part of all of Europe is my guess. And that’s how they made their way to the United States. It’s really only with modernization, the beginning of hospitals, the rise of hygiene. And then what many historians also point out is the kind of twin mass death events of the influenza epidemic in World War I that kind of wipe out those old traditions of mourning.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So before the 20th century, death was just part of the home life. When someone died, they died in their home, and then the funeral and the body preparation, it happened in the home. It didn’t get sent off to a funeral home.

Joanna Ebenstein:

To a professional. It’s that professionalization. Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

And something I learned while reading your book, sort of this transition from the 19th century to the 20th century in our relationship to death, why living rooms are called living rooms.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that amazing?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I read about this in, there’s a man in my community called Stanley Burns who is a collector of postmortem photography. Actually, I found his book when I was about 17, I think was a really life-changing event. So postmortem photographs are part of morning practice where people take pictures of their dead loved ones and keep them either as little keepsake say as a locket, maybe with some of their hair or maybe put it in the family photo album or maybe send out to friends, whatever. And he wrote a book on this tradition of postmortem photography where he talked about this. And so yes, I believe it was Ladies Home Journal. I can’t remember exactly the name. It was something like that. And it was in the early 20th century. Somebody wrote an article and they were basically agitating for people to change the name of the parlor to the living room because the parlor had traditionally been a place that you would lay out the bodies of the dead. But now with these new funeral parlors, the parlor was becoming a room for the living, the living room. And that’s where we get the name.

Brett McKay:

And you mentioned hair lockets another weird, I mean, not weird, but it’s interesting for us or weird for us, people would make wreaths out of the hair of dead loved ones.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. Living and dead. So if you look up for those listeners who are curious, if you look up Victorian hair art or Victorian hair work, you will see this. There were many, many practices that, again, as far as I’ve seen women did in the wake of a death as part of mourning. And I think of it as both memorializing the dead, creating a work that keeps the memory of the dead alive, but also is a form of mourning. So one of these is working with human hair. And actually here at Morbid Anatomy, we have a teacher, Karen Bachman, who has reverse engineered how hair art was created, and she teaches it for us. And I took this class, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but when you try to work with human hair, it’s really hard and it takes a lot of concentration and it’s very meditative actually.

And by doing this class, I began to think, well, I think all of these women doing this in the wake of a loved one’s death, it wasn’t just about the final product that the final product is beautiful. It’s also about this meditative act that you’re doing with the mortal remains of your loved ones. And interestingly, we think about bone and hair being the two things that live on from our bodies when we die, and these hair works to speak to what you’re saying, these beautiful wreaths that are people create flowers or designs with human hair, sometimes in lockets making different kinds of designs. This hair that was made in the 18th or 19th century still looks beautiful today. So there is this immortalizing aspect to working with hair.

Brett McKay:

So in America, there was a period when death was just part of everyday life. You saw it every day. If you worked with animals, there were sicknesses where people just died, children died. That was a common occurrence. There were wars and people would die there. And in the 20th century, we had this shift where death became something we just hid. It became professionalized. And when you’re sick, you went to a hospital and then you die in the hospital and then your body would get carried off and a professional will take care of it. And it’s all very sanitary, but also impersonal at the same time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I am glad you brought up the sanitary because I think that’s really part of the drive too, is of course, one of the things that’s happening in the late 19th into early 20th century is changing ideas about what is hygienic and what is safe. So people start to be a little afraid of bodies where maybe they weren’t so much before. And this idea of getting rid of them as quickly as possible, which I think we continue to have today.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so death, we kind of hide it. We pretend like it’s not there. What have been the psychological consequences of having an aversion to thinking about and acknowledging death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, from my point of view, I think there are a lot of very unhappy unrealized people. I know we’re going to probably talk a little bit later more about these kind of practices of how people kept death close at hand. But in my experience, from the different practices that I have spontaneously developed or learned from history, if you are able to come to terms with the fact that your time on earth is limited, it is much easier to make decisions about what you want to do with the time that you have and to live a life that is true to you so that you don’t die with a bunch of regrets on your deathbed. So my husband is a death doula, and so death doulas are practitioners that work with the dying to help them through the dying process. And what death doulas say is that, well, they group it into four different categories.

If you have regret, if you have unfinished business, if you have grief and shame, I think those are the four major categories. But essentially these things hold you back from a good death, from an easy death. Perhaps you haven’t said the words you want to a loved one. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a feud with someone and you wish you’d resolved it, whatever. And so death doulas help work with people who are on the verge or starting to see their end in sight to resolve these things so that they can let go and die peacefully. So I think there’s this not dying peacefully thing. And also in my experience, I think many people that I have seen die suddenly realizing that they wish they had done certain things in their life that they didn’t. And this is regret. And so for me, I feel like by contemplating death and by having practices where I’m constantly saying, okay, what do I want to do with my time on earth rather than What do I want to do?

If you just phrase it with my time on earth, suddenly you can feel that immediately, right? It’s like there’s an urgency and it kind of cuts through the model where everything is clear, that knowing there’s brevity helps, at least for me to see what it is that I prioritize, what my values are, how I want to live my life on earth. So I think when we neglect to do that, we neglect living a full life which might make us bitter or angry or sad or unrealized at the very least. And I think there’s a lot of fear around it, and that fear is really easily manipulated by others, I think.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What are the benefits of making friends with death? I mean, that’s kind of the whole premise of your book. It’s like, well, if we get more familiar with death, it’ll help improve our lives.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell a story from my own past, which I think illustrates it. So I have always loved to travel. My family are all travelers. I really enjoy it, but I hate to fly. And anytime there’s turbulence, I freak out. And this is true to this day. And by freak out, I don’t mean jump up and down, I just mean my heart’s beating really fast. I can’t relax. And I used to be so afraid of flying that when I was waiting in line to get onto the plane, I would have these kind of intrusive thoughts where I would imagine the people around me and how they’d be acting if the plane was plummeting down. But I love travel and I wasn’t going to stop because I was afraid of flying. So the way I dealt with it, and this was a spontaneous ritual that I developed, is this is from about the time I was 13 on or something.

I would sit on the plane, I’d fasten my seatbelt, stow my overhead thing, close my eyes and think to myself, okay, if I die on this flight, what do I wish I had done differently with my life? And I’ve been doing that since I was 13. And I was really surprised to find when I was doing research for this book that Steve Jobs had a very similar ritual. So he did a commencement speech for, I think it was Stanford, right after he’d been diagnosed with a certain kind of rare cancer. And he revealed that he did exactly the same thing. He would look in the mirror every day and say, do I want to do what I’m doing today? And if the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he’d make a change. So I think Steve Jobs was saying and did say that by contemplating death, he lived this incredible life that we all remember him for. And I am no Steve Jobs, but I will say that I’ve lived a life that is true to who I am. And so although I do not want to die and I’m not seeking death, I hasten to say that if I did die tomorrow, I’d be okay with it because I did what I wanted to do. And I think that’s the gift that contemplating death gives. It helps one realize with clarity what one really wants to do with one’s time on earth, and also helps you have the courage to achieve it.

Brett McKay:

Something I was struck by is how the work of the psychologist Jung has influenced your philosophy of death. Can you tell us about that?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Sure. I love Carl Jung, and when I first read Carl Jung as a, I guess in my early thirties, a friend of mine, my friend Susanna McDonald, gave me a copy of man and his symbols. And when I read it, I was just thunderstruck and I just thought, wow, this person thinks exactly like I do, but he’s way smarter than me. So what I love about Jung is I feel that Jung creates a bridge to our ancestors. He has real respect for the way people have thought about the world, and he has a wisdom. And part of his wisdom to me is about wholeness, or I would say complimentary duality rather than binary duality. So the way that Jung looks at the world, there are these archetypal polarities. And so you have on the one hand life and on the other hand, death and the mark of a balanced healthy culture would be that we give equal primacy to both sides of that polarity.

And he has this idea of the shadow, which probably everyone’s heard of, and this is the idea that there’s a part of ourselves or part of our culture that is unacknowledged, unrecognized and pushed into the unconscious, where then it can create fear and dis-ease essentially from his point of view. The important thing to do with these polarities is to find balance. And it’s important to go into the shadow and bring it to consciousness. So rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, rather than saying, oh, no, I’m not like that, that person over there is like that trying to say, where is there a part of me that is in what I recoil from? And that just speaks to me. It feels very true and very balanced and young thought that he shared my view that contemplating death is essential to being a mature adult. And that’s something that instinctively, I think I always felt this idea that there’s a real, to me, immaturity, to pretending that we’re not going to die. Everyone who has ever lived has died and every single person will die. And so rather than deny it, it just seems to make better sense to look it in the eye, and then by looking it in the eye, it ceases to be so frightening.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. It sounds like you had to come to terms with death and embrace death in order to become fully human.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Exactly. And that especially as you got older, this is one of the things he said when you were from middle age on that one of our main tasks in life was to prepare for our own death. And part of that was to figure out what we think happens after you die. And he was quick to say that whatever you believe doesn’t mean it’s capital true. And it also doesn’t mean that your opinion won’t change later, but you must have, in his opinion, you must have your own idea of what will happen after you die. And that is part of what will ease you through the death process.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Jung said you had to develop your own myth of death, and it didn’t mean you invented a fairytale about death to comfort yourself, but it was about creating this symbolic framework for yourself. It’s kind of like an inner narrative about what you think about death that will help you approach mortality with meaning rather than fear.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it has to be what I think is so beautiful about what he said, it can’t be received wisdom. He would say, you can’t be on your deathbed and say, Dr. Yung thought this or that. You have to believe it. It has to be something that comes through your own struggle.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What you do in your book is you offer readers, practices, exercises that they can do and also suggestions on films, books, art to look at, to help them develop their own myth of death. As you said, it’s not something you can just be told, you have to live it. You actually have to do this stuff. So let’s talk about some of these practices. Let’s talk about the title of your book, Memento Mori. This is a practice that has been done throughout the world and throughout time. For those who aren’t familiar with the practice, what is Memento Mori?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so a Memento Mori is a practice or an artwork or a ritual that reminds you of your own mortality, your own personal death, so that you can then live the best life possible. That’s how I see it. And there are many, many forms of Memento Mori. The oldest that I know of were in ancient Rome, I’m sorry, in ancient Egypt. That’s the oldest that I’ve heard discussed where I’ve read that at the height of a feast, people would bring out a skeleton or a mummy as a reminder to those feasting that life is short. In ancient Rome, you might be gifted with a larva convivial, which were these little bronze skeletons at a banquet and also some banquet floors. I’m sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. These have skeletons of sorts. And this idea in the Roman tradition is carpe diem, like eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, you might die.

Then in the Christian tradition, the meaning is a bit changed, right? It’s kind of the opposite. In the Christian era, you have rosary beads that are half living, half dead, or you have paintings of a skull in an hourglass, which probably many, many of your listeners have seen. And these were intended to remind the viewer that you might die, but in this case, not so you could eat, drink, and be merry, but rather so you could be ready to meet your maker. So a reminder to resist sin and resist temptation in order to live a holy life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Memento Mori is Latin for remember, you will die. And in Roman culture and ancient Roman culture, sometimes this is used to push to enjoy life while you had it, the whole carpe diem thing. But other times, especially with the stoics, Memento Mori was more of a moral check for virtue because it was a reminder time short. So be good. And people probably heard this story, which it’s not exactly true, but I think it captures the spirit of this  Memento Mori idea that when a Roman general was paraded through the streets of Rome, after a victory, he’d have a servant next to him who would whisper in his ear, Memento Mori, remember your mortal? And the idea was that it was to help him keep humble, despite having this big victory. Later on in art, you sometimes see carpe diem and Memento Mori paired together like you’d have a skull next to a blooming flower reminding people that life’s brief. So you got to make it count. 

Brett McKay: 

And I want to talk more about Memento Mori art, which has been a theme in art at different times. Any examples of momentum, moori art that really stand out to you?

Joanna Ebenstein:

So there’s many art traditions that draw on this. One is the dance of death. So this was something that came to prominence during the Black Plague, and this is when you see this whole series of images where death is leading off people of different genders and social stations. So you have death in the maiden, you have death and the priest death and the child. Those are really amazing and often these really wonderful looks at a culture at large. There’s another tradition called Death in the Maiden, which comes from what I can understand, not just the dance of death, but also the story of Persephone in ancient Greece. And Persephone was the goddess of the dead, but she started life just as the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She was kidnapped by Hades, the king of the dead, and became his queen in the underworld, and she was basically abducted from her life.

And so this idea, again, of death in the maiden, there’s this image of a deathly figure taking a very beautiful young woman. Those are pretty amazing, and some of them are quite erotic and very strange if you’re interested in those. I have a book called Death: A Graveside Companion, and I collected as many of those as I could because they’re quite surprising. And they’re from around the 1600s or 1500s. They’re very, very graphic. But then probably my favorite Memento Mori genre are what are called Half Living and Half Dead. And these are images. If you look up half living and half dead on the Internet, you’ll find these as well, half a beautiful young man or woman with clothes that are fashionable in the time it was made and half either skull skeleton or decaying cadaver. And so the idea here is the inextricable relationship between life and death.

Brett McKay:

My favorite genre of Memento Mori art comes from the Dutch Golden Age, the Vanitas.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh, yes. Those are wonderful.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so vanitas are kind of a form of still life, and I think it’s really interesting to note that still life in French is nature mort, which is dead nature. So there’s already a memento mori aspect built into the still life, which is shocking. But these are still life that are very explicitly about mortality. So you have skulls or glasses, you have decaying flowers, and you have all these symbols of things that you won’t be able to take with you into the next life. Globes and jewels and card games and all the pleasures of life. So these are beautiful oil paintings very beautifully rendered that you would hang in your home as a reminder of the brevity of all of the things you love.

Brett McKay:

And then you also mentioned that aristocrats in Europe, they would often just acquire skeletons or human skulls and just display them somewhere in their house.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. And again, it was a sign of a memento mori. It was a reminder. And you see these in paintings of saints too. You see a saint holding a skull and contemplating it. So this idea of using human remains as a way to remind us of our death, that’s something that continues for a very long time. And I think it’s worth remembering too, that before we had these cemeteries where people would be buried forever, people would be dug up after a certain number of years so as to make more room for more people in the church. And then those bones would be kept often in artistic arrangements or in piles that would then act as a memento Mori as well.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I’m struck by whenever I read history books, even in America in the 19th century, how frequently people just unburied dead people to either move the body or sometimes just to look at the body.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, yeah. Or there’s that wonderful story of the pre-Raphaelite, was it Rosetti? I think it was Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti, who buried his favorite muse with some of his poems, and later in life decided to dig it back up to take the poems, but they decay. So yeah, I think that again, it’s coming back to this idea that I think we’re really afraid of the dead body now. We’re afraid of the dead, and that was not the case for most of human history.

Brett McKay:

An example of that, of a person in 19th century America who unburied a dead loved one that really sticks with me is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Joanna Ebenstein:

I didn’t know about that.

Brett McKay:

His wife died and he was just distraught, and he decided one day to go to her tomb and open up the casket to look at her, and no one knows why he did it, but it was after he had that encounter looking at his dead wife, and I’m sure she was decomposing at that point. That’s when he quit his job with the church he was at, and he struck out on his own and started doing his essays and lectures on self-reliance and all that stuff.

Joanna Ebenstein:

That’s such a great story. I’ve never heard that, but that speaks to everything we’re talking about. His direct contemplation with death changed the course of his life, and he left the safe comfortable world behind and became someone we remember today.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think, I mean, we’re psychoanalyzing a guy that’s been dead for almost 200 years, but I wonder if he looked at his wife and just looking at her dead body, he realized she’s not coming back. I have to move on with my life. That’s over. I have to move on.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it also reminds me in the Christian tradition and in the Buddhist tradition, there are meditations, death meditations that revolve around contemplating the decomposition of the body as a really strong momentum mori as a reminder that you will die of the impermanence of everything that you base your life on. There’s something really profound about that.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I was speaking of cemeteries. I love going through old cemeteries that were built in the 18th and 19th century because a lot of the gravestones were Memento Mori, my favorite one. You’ll see it every now and then. A gravestone will say, here lies so-and-so, the date of birth, date of death, and then it’ll have a skull or something, and then it’ll say, remember me as you pass by as you are now. So once was I as I am now, so you will be prepare for death and follow me.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And so again, that just shows how long standing the sentiment and the idea that the sentiment is useful to us in some way is

Brett McKay:

Okay. So you recommend people make or collect their own memento mori, put it somewhere in their house and just it’s a reminder of death that you can look at. I think it’s a great practice that people can do. But you mentioned this death meditation as another way of doing Memento Mori. You mentioned the Buddhists have a death meditation, Christianity. There’s a history of death meditations. Walk us through what a death meditation looks like.

Joanna Ebenstein:

There are so many different kinds of death meditations, but one thing I’ll start with by saying is my husband is a longtime meditator, which is how he became a death doula. And what he tells us is that in the eastern tradition, meditation itself is a preparation for death. So the idea is that after the death of the body part of us lives on, and it has to navigate a series of confusing spaces in order to get to the next stage of existence, whatever that might be, many cultures that believe that I should point out on some level or another. But meditation is supposed to help us keep our wits about us in a moment of complete upheaval. So I think that’s a really interesting thing to point out. First, he teaches a death meditation for morbid anatomy, which is really about leaving your body in your mind and then coming back and also talking about what happens to the body as you start to die.

There are these meditations in the Christian and Buddhist tradition in which you meditate on different levels of decomposition of the body, and the Buddhist would even go to the charnel grounds and look at these bodies as a form of meditation and have artworks around it. My personal favorite death meditation comes from the Jungian tradition, and it’s by a woman named June Singer. And I found it so calming to do it, and I still come back to it in times of stress. It’s basically a slow letting go of everything you’re attached to in your daily life. So what really stuck with me is think of your desk and all of the piles of things that you’re working on right now. You can let that go one by one. You let the things you’re attached to go. And by doing that, there’s such a sense of, for me at least, it’s not fear, it’s relief, and it’s this reminder that the things that we find important right now, there’s so many things I imagine, Brett, for you, certainly for me, I have to do this and I have to do that, and I can’t wait.

But when you start to let go, that disappears. It’s not important anymore. You’re moving somewhere else. And if you’ve ever read any near-death experiences, which I really enjoy reading, this is what these people say again and again. So near-death experiences are when people who technically are dead, their brain is dead. They’re flat lining on an EKG. These are often people that are brought back from heart attacks or put into comas for surgery. And while they’re in this state, they have these different experiences and they all, or many of them, report this kind of feeling of letting it all go. And maybe it’s painful to let it go, but then when they have to come back, they really regret it. I think there’s just something really nice to think about that all of the things we think are so important right now that we’re so attached to the feeling of letting it go is a really beautiful feeling.

Brett McKay:

I think one of the scariest things about death is that we don’t know what happens after death. It’s the biggest mystery in humanity. So yeah, we always wonder, do we move to a different realm? Do we get reincarnated or is it we just cease to exist? How have different cultures throughout time thought about what happens to us after death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, there are so many different particulars, but I’d say the overwhelming feeling of every, it seems to me, every culture until modern scientific culture is that there is some continuation where we go on in some way. And so in ancient Egypt at different time periods, there were a different number of souls, but as many as 12 different souls we had, which all went to different places, one of them goes into a statue, another goes into a mummy, another goes into an underworld. So there’s this tradition of more than one soul. And that’s pretty common. There is the tradition of reincarnation, which is really strong. The idea that we’re reborn or transmigration of souls, they also call it reborn into another human or animal form. There is the idea that we become ancestor spirits, so many, many cultures around the world continue to cultivate a relationship with the dead because it’s believed that they are in a realm where they can continue to assist the living and protect the living.

And I was just talking to a friend of mine who’s an archeologist about, I think he was talking about an African culture where they believe that if you’re separated from the bones of the dead, then you lose this vital protection that is part of how you can successfully live your life. So again, there’s different particulars, but I think the commonality is that we continue on in some way, and I think that’s what makes the last 150 or so years when this idea that I think many elites might’ve had but really trickles into the mainstream, that that’s it, that when we die, it’s zero game over. That’s when that idea really, really comes into our lives. And I think what Jung said, coming back to Carl Jung is that’s why it is our obligation to come up with our own myth of death because maybe for our great great grandparents, those questions were answered by their culture, by their religion. We don’t have that, or I shouldn’t say that. Some of us do, but more of us don’t have that than probably ever before in human history. So whether we’d like it or not, it’s our obligation to come up with our own belief and our own understanding.

Brett McKay:

And I think both beliefs, the idea that the soul continues on or it’s just you cease to exist when you die, whatever idea of death you take, both can be motivating here now as we’re living.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think another thing to that point that I include in the book is information about nurses and death, doulas who have worked with those who are dying and what their biggest regrets are. And I think that’s really interesting to think about. There’s a death doula in our community who says that when she’s working with a dying, the regret she hears the most is, I wish I had said I loved you more. And when you think about that, that’s a really simple thing to remedy if you keep in mind the fact that you’re going to die. So I think there’s so much we can do, again, using this as a God and as an encouragement to live a really good life unique to ourselves.

Brett McKay:

One of the interesting sidebars you had in that chapter about the afterlife and trying to think about what we think happens developing your own myth of death is idea psychopomps. Is that how you say it?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

What are psychopomps?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I love that word. Psychopomp is one of my favorite words. It’s from the ancient Greek, and it means soul guide, literally. And so a psychopomp could be a deity, it could be a shaman or a priest, and basically a soul pomp is someone who helps you make your way from one realm of existence to another. The figure that I end the book with is a figure called Latote, which is a new folk saint in Mexico, and she takes the form of a female grim reaper. And she is also seen as a psychopomp. She’s not the one who creates death. She’s not the agent of death, but rather she is your guide who takes you to the next realm.

Brett McKay:

We did a podcast back in 2022 with this guy named Christopher Kerr who has researched this phenomenon that happens. You talk about this in the book, I think it’s related to psychopomps, is as people get close to death, they start seeing visions or dreams of people who have passed away before them.

Joanna Ebenstein:

This is true. There’s so much anecdotal evidence or anecdotal suggestion that these old traditions are true, and that’s one of them. Yes, this is very common that people, I hear this from hospice nurses I know too. And not only that, but they say that this is partially how they determine how close to death a person is when they start to talk about loved ones coming to them and their dreams or visions, they know that they don’t have too much time longer.

Brett McKay:

And these people, they talk to them, they talk to these people in the room. And so if you’re in the room with a loved one who is dying, you might see them talking to their grandparent or their parent and you’re looking around and I’m not seeing anything but that person sees that person. This happened with my aunt. She passed away recently. She had some degenerative disease, and a week before she passed away, she started talking to herself, but she was talking to someone else. And when her sons asked her mom, who are you talking to? She’s like, well, it’s the lady in black over there. And they’d say, what are you talking about? And she’d say, well, that’s just between us and we don’t know who the lady in black was. It could have been an aunt, it could have been a grandmother. And what’s interesting is Christopher Kerr guy, he’s a doctor, and he’s not trying to explain like, oh yes, there’s life after death. He’s just trying to report on the phenomenon in an objective way. This happens. And one thing you notice when children are passing away, they typically don’t have anybody that have passed away yet, but if they had a pet that passed away, the pet will show up.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that interesting.

Brett McKay:

And be their little guide.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think this speaks one of the main principles of my book that I start with some main principles, and one of them is, I call it practice versus belief. And this is what I love about these stories. I think there’s a way we can listen to these stories like you’re telling, which are amazing. And tell us something really interesting, and this is what I love about the union end approach as well, is we can say that those stories, whether they’re capital true, whether they reflect in actual reality, we can never know, or at least we can’t know at this realm, but we can know that they’re common and they happen to people, which means they’re real and means they mean something. So whether they’re happening in the psyche or happening with something beyond the psyche, almost doesn’t matter. It’s still a human situation, a human truth towards the end of life. And my feeling is even if that is an illusion from the perspective of science, what a beautiful illusion to have at the end of life. What a beautiful gift, right?

Brett McKay:

Oh, for sure. And it’s comforting to me, and this is something you mentioned earlier, that oftentimes when people have a near death experience, it feels so good to be transitioning out that when they’re brought back to life, a lot of times they’re really disappointed and sometimes just kind of angry, really angry about it. I didn’t want to come back. So it’s nice to know that whatever’s beyond getting there seems to be a really pleasant passage. So let’s talk about how we respond to the death of others. Do we know how long humans have been using mourning rituals when someone dies in their community?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I think that that number changes all the time. But when I was working on the book, I think at least the Neolithic era, they found graves that have different kinds of offerings for the dead and the dead put into fetal position. So this seems to suggest that we have been mourning for at least that long.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so it’s been a long time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. I think it’s a human universal as far as I can see, that we have rituals around ushering the dead into their new realm of existence, however we perceive of that or conceive of that. So

Brett McKay:

How do these mourning rituals that we developed, how do you think they help us process the grief that comes when someone dies?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I think having a ritual that’s held in community helps create meaning around something that can seem chaotic otherwise, and also creates a place where we can share our feelings and our grief with the community, which I think is really essential. Some people think that our lack of proper grief rituals is a real epidemic in our particular culture. I talk in the book about Martine Tel, who unfortunately he’s passed away. He grew up in a Native American tradition and then end up being initiated into Mayan shamanism in Guatemala. And he wrote a book called Grief and Praise, which is really all about where he sees the shortcomings of the affluent Western world’s mourning practices, and in his traditions and indigenous traditions, the ones that he’s from, the ideas that we have to mourn fully to the extent that he says, you have to look bad when you’re done.

That’s what mourning properly means, bawling, shrieking, going through it all in order to get it out of our body, to literally express it, to push it out, because otherwise from their tradition, it can become disease, it can become tumors, which they call solidified tears. So I think there’s, between him, and then I was reading also a lot about, oh my goodness, it’s been a while since I wrote the book. I can’t remember his name, but he was an activist who was in Columbine, and he had been with his best friend when his best friend was shot, and he ended up becoming an opioid addict later in life due to prescription drugs. And he was saying the same thing in his mind, our lack of proper grieving is part of what creates the violent culture that we live in.

Brett McKay:

I’ve noticed this going back to this idea that we’ve tried to hide death in American culture, and we’ve lost a lot of the elaborate mourning rituals that we had that sometimes would take a week, two weeks, months, years even. 

Joanna Ebenstein:

Look in Gone With the Wind, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Gone with the wind. And now what we do instead is like, all right, we got to get this funeral done. And then if you’re feeling sad, well then here’s an antidepressant or sedative. And sometimes people need that for their pain, but oftentimes it seems like they take it because they feel like they have to drug themselves to interact with other people. They feel like they can’t fall apart in front of others. You definitely can’t or scream. So they feel like they have to keep their composure and just move on. And so they need to take the drug to do what’s expected just to get on with life.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think to get people back to the workforce, I think people don’t really tolerate staying out of the workforce for too long. And it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that this has helped cultivate.

Brett McKay:

So grieving over a loved one feels awful, but what can that grief teach us about love?

Joanna Ebenstein:

And that’s something that I turn to other people in my community because that’s not the kind of grief I’ve experienced yet. The people that I love and have lost were older, and I got to say my goodbyes, and I was there when they died, et cetera. But there was a woman in our community called Karen Montgomery, and she would come to a lot of our meetings. She was in a lot of my classes, and she was talking about the Treasures of grief. And so I asked her, could I interview you about this? And she was going through a situation where her father was dying of a disease that ultimately meant that he would drown in his own mucus, I think, in his own fluids. And she was watching him become closer and closer to that state. And what she told me that I think was really interesting and really beautiful, that her grief at times was absolutely horrible, but it felt like a cracking open also, and that cracking open allowed in other things.

So she said that she would have these incredibly moving experiences. It felt like she was feeling emotions much more closely. She would cry when someone said hello to her on the street. There was just a sense of the beauty of the world that I think was part of her very real reckoning with knowing she had a limited time with this man that she loved so much. So I think from what I understand, as someone who has not again, experienced that kind of grief, it can be a both and, right? I don’t think it means the grief isn’t present or there’s no pain, but it’s more like that pain opens you up. And I always think of, there’s a Rumi poem that I put in there that Leonard Cohen also drew on the imagery, which is the idea that it’s the crack in us that the light gets in, that the beauty comes in through the wound, through the crack, through the pain.

Brett McKay:

The grief makes the love more poignant. It accentuates it.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. And I think this is the other thing that we lose when we lose a contemplation of death. And going back to the vanitas paintings that you love. Part of what makes things so heartbreakingly beautiful is knowing that we will lose them. That’s our condition. That’s the earthly condition. But without that knowing, we would lose it is the beauty is intense.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter where you talk about how humans have a tendency to communicate with their dearly departed, and even people who don’t necessarily believe in the afterlife will do this. What do you think is behind this desire to stay connected to the dead?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I love that. And I was really surprised by that research myself. So there’s a guy up at Columbia called Nando who did this research. And what he says in his book, which is called The Other Side of Sorrow, I think, or the other side of grief, which I highly recommend, is that he was a scientist studying grief. And after his father died, he found that he was talking to him and he had no belief. He didn’t believe that there was a man in the afterlife that he could talk to. It was more just like a visceral response to the death. And what he found in his interviews is many people said the same. And in fact, they said, whether it’s capital T, true or not, doesn’t really matter, but they talk to the dead and it makes them feel better. And again, this is what I always want to come back to is this idea of practice over belief.

I spent a lot of time in Mexico and I was talking to a Mexican friend about his grandmother who has died, and I said, tell me about your grandmother. What do you do on Day of the Dead? And he said, oh, on Day of the Dead and on Simon Santa, I go to the cemetery and I talk to my dead grandmother. And then he’s like, well, I mean, I don’t know if I’m really talking to her, but that’s what we do. And I heard this again and again, it’s not, at least with young, educated people, the sense I get is it’s not about belief. It’s about tradition and practice. And I think that’s something we can all learn from. I think one of the biggest challenges to living at this particular time in human history is we have this voice inside us that’s always saying, is that real? Is it not real? Is that true or is it not true? And I don’t think 300 years ago, most of our ancestors had that voice. So I think it estranges us from experience. I talk to the dead, I talk to my cats, I talk to everybody. If I had to answer, do I really think I’m talking to the dead? I don’t know, but I know it makes me feel good. And I think that’s, again, coming back to our own myth of death.

Brett McKay:

I just love the idea of just staying connected to the dead. They’re still with you, even though they’re bodies in the ground decomposing, or maybe it’s been cremated. I mean, that’s why I love the movie Coco so much.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh my God, right?

Brett McKay:

It’s my favorite Disney movie. That movie destroyed me when I watched it. The thing that got me was when that one skeleton ghost guy who was about to be forgotten, because there’s only one person in the living world that still remembered him, and then that person died, and then that guy, no one on earth remembered him. And so he disappeared. And I was like, I don’t want that to happen to my grandparents, my ancestors. I want them to be their memory still to be here some way. So I want to stay connected to them somehow. So that’s why I like genealogy. I like looking at old pictures of my family that have died. I just love that idea of making sure that their memory still lives on in some way.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think that’s a deep, deep human drive. Again, in an age of rationality, we might question it, but that’s what people have been doing for millennia all around the world. It’s a natural part of being human, whether again, there’s an external truth that we’re responding to or it’s just what our brain wants to do. It’s real and it’s comforting, and it’s beautiful.

Brett McKay:

So one thing you recommend people do is to start thinking about their own death. So through Memento Mori, these different practices, getting comfortable with death, coming to terms with it, but also thinking about your own death and what you want it to look like, and there’s this idea of the good death that’s out there. What is the good death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I think that’s a very personal question. Typically, during the Victorian era, the idea how people wanted to die, what they called a good death was to die at home surrounded by their loved ones, including the children where they could then tell people what they wanted done with all of their property and things, and then dying peacefully. Now, it can be lots of things. I hear a lot of people saying that for them, a good death would be dying in their sleep without pain. So I think that’s a question one needs to ask themselves. What is a good death to you? If you could choose how to die, what would that be? For me, I’d like to be conscious. I’d like to go into the mystery with consciousness. I don’t want to be drugged. I want to experience this mystery, but I think that’s a very personal question. How about you, Brett? What’s a good death for you?

Brett McKay:

I was actually thinking about this while I was reading your book. So I’d like to be aware that I was going and I’d like to be surrounded by loved ones in my house. That’s how I’d like to die.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think it’s wonderful that more and more people through hospice, et cetera, being able to do that, right? I think that’s wonderful.

Brett McKay:

And then you also talk about different rituals that people have done on different cultures to prepare for their death. One is the Swedish death cleaning. What is Swedish Death cleaning?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. So Swedish Death Cleaning is, I think it’s amazing, and it’s part of the Swedish tradition from what I understand, where as people grow older, an act of care and love and practicality is to start to get rid of their things. And I can say as someone who’s been on the other side of death in this culture, my ex-boyfriend, his mother died when we were together and emptying out her house was terrible for him. He had an estate sale, and it was so brutal to watch people picking over and trying to bargain on the things his mother loved that are now completely worthless. So the idea is to save your loved ones, this trauma of having to deal with all of your stuff. And so my mother’s going through this right now. She’s emptying her house. She’s going through every bag and every box and getting rid of things. So I think it’s a natural part. It can be at least a natural part of getting older and preparing for knowing that you don’t have that much time left.

Brett McKay:

And then you talked about this too. Even if you’re young and healthy and death is not anywhere near you, you can start preparing, doing your own Swedish death cleaning by taking care of the practicalities of your own death. And it’s just basic stuff that people talked about, life insurance for your family and make sure they’re taken care of when you’re gone. An advanced directive,

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

What do you want? Want that to look like? A will. Estate planning, that practicality stuff. You don’t think about that, but it’s like the gift you can give your family before you go.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And just to piggyback on that, there’s a member of our community, John Troyer. He’s at the Center for Death in Society in Bath, and he lost his sister and his mother and his father, I believe. And he said if he could have changed anything, it would’ve been having their passwords. So I say that to all your listeners, leave your passwords somewhere for your loved ones. That’s something that I’ve done with my husband as well, a will and your password so that person can get into your bank account. And all of those things, you’d be shocked at how hard that can be once you die.

Brett McKay:

So after years of studying and teaching about death, how has your own relationship to mortality changed?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I would say I’m not afraid of it anymore. And in retrospect, I would say that’s probably why I started this project. I started to have this obsession with looking at the way death was dealt with in different times and places as a way to understand things that could be complimentary to our own view. Growing up in a culture as many of us many are, listeners have, I’m sure, where we’re not given a whole lot of tools on how to deal with death or how to prepare or how to live our lives, really. And I think doing all this work, I’m ready to go. I mean, don’t want to, it’s not my dream, but whenever I start freaking out too much, I just go back to that Jungian dream meditation. And I imagine myself emotionally divesting myself from everything that I care about and how good that feels. And I just come back to that again and again in these times where so much is uncertain and we can only do the best we can and hope to die with the fewest number of regrets.

Brett McKay:

And it sounds like it’s improved your life now you’re happier, you’re more content. It puts things in perspective.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I would say to an even greater degree, the reason that I’m ready to die is because I’ve lived the life I want to. I’ve taken a lot of risks. I don’t have a huge bank account. I don’t have a lot of security, but I’m doing work that I absolutely love that feels important and vital and meaningful to me and to my community. And that gives me a sense of meaning and satisfaction where I feel like this is what I wanted to do with my life, and I did it. And I’m really, I don’t want to say please, because it’s almost just satisfied. I have satisfaction and I have good relationships with people that I care very much about, and I hope to hold their hand, one of their hands as I go into the next stage of existence. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

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

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, you can learn more at morbidanatomy.org if these are the sorts of things that interest you. I do encourage you to come. We have a really vibrant community of people from all over the world who are having conversations about this. We have classes, we have lectures, we have many books, and if you’re in Brooklyn, we have an open to the public research library. I’m sitting in it right now. You can also find us on social media at Morbid Anatomy on Instagram and Facebook.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joanna Ebenstein, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much, Brett. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book and it’s been a pleasure for me too.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joanna Ebenstein. She’s the author of the book, Memento Mori. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, joannaebenstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mementomori, where you’ll find links to resources where you can dive deeper into this topic. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. 

Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our Art of Manless newsletter. You got your daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give a review of the podcast. 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. As always, thank you for the continued support. This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,090: Chasing the White Whale — Into the Depths of Moby-Dick https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/podcast-1090-chasing-the-white-whale-into-the-depths-of-moby-dick/ Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:24:22 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191301   If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick — or, more likely, you skimmed the CliffsNotes and wondered why this dense, whale-obsessed novel was considered a classic. That was me in 10th grade. But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife, and it hit me completely differently. […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick — or, more likely, you skimmed the CliffsNotes and wondered why this dense, whale-obsessed novel was considered a classic.

That was me in 10th grade.

But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife, and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be a profound meditation on free will, perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels.

To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures — and why it might be worth picking up again— I’m joined by Mark Cirino, a professor of American literature. Today on the show, we discuss why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked, the novel’s major themes, and the timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest.

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Illustrated cover of "Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville shows a large whale breaching the ocean, with rays of light and stylized waves, as featured in Podcast #1, published by Penguin Classics.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you went to high school in America, you probably read Moby-Dick, or more likely you skimmed the Cliff Notes and wonder why this dense, whale obsessed novel was considered a classic. That was me in 10th grade. But earlier this year, I decided to revisit Moby-Dick in midlife and it hit me completely differently. What once seemed like a tedious story about a guy chasing a whale revealed itself to be profound meditation on free will perception, self-reliance, leadership, and obsession. It’s now one of my favorite novels. To help unpack why Moby-Dick endures and why it might be worth picking up again. I’m joined by Mark Cirino, professor of American Literature. Today on the show we discussed why Moby-Dick was initially overlooked the novels, major themes and a timeless mystery of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/MobyDick.

Alright, Mark Cirino, welcome back to the show. 

Mark Cirino: 

Thanks so much, Brett. Great to be back. 

Brett McKay: 

So you are a Hemingway scholar and we’ve had you on the show before to talk about Hemingway as a writer and For Whom the Bell Tolls. But you also teach a class about Herman Melville’s, Moby-Dick, which is your favorite novel. So if you are an American, you went to high school in America, you probably read this book, I dunno, right around 10th grade. That’s when I read it. It’s when we did American Literature. And if you were like me in 10th grade, you probably used the Cliff Notes a lot. And I wanted to talk about Moby-Dick because I recently reread it earlier this year as a 42-year-old man, and I absolutely love this novel. It’s one of my favorites now. And I hope with our conversation we can inspire some listeners to either pick it up for the first time or revisit it if the last time they read it was in high school English class. So let’s talk about big picture. Let’s talk about this guy Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick, who was this guy when he wrote Moby Dick. What’s his story?

Mark Cirino:

Herman Melville was born in 1819, so he was born into the era that we really call American Romanticism, which began around that time. And he was a fairly prominent writer of seafaring narratives, type P Omo, just kind of romps in foreign lands. And with Moby Dick, he became more interested in writing in an abstract way. So in other words, he kept with the maritime adventures and ships, but instead he began to write in an allegorical and abstract way where he began to be all encompassing. And when this book was published in 1851, people just weren’t ready for it. Some people noted that it was an impressive book and so forth, but it wasn’t like it sold very much. It wasn’t like Melville became this unimpeachable bard of American letters. Melville would go on to write a lot of abstract work, philosophical, political, psychological, and then he really became more of a poet later in his life before he died in 1891, to the extent that when he died in 1891, his obituaries didn’t really say that he was the author of Moby Dick.

First and foremost, he was more the author of Typee, Omoo, these early romantic yarns. And it was only until later, maybe the centennial of Melville’s birth, so 1919 where people began to rediscover Moby Dick and say, wow, this is actually worth reading. If I can tell you really quickly, Brett, there’s one particular scholar named Raymond Weaver who taught at Columbia, who was prominent in what is now known as the Melville Revival, which is kind of the rediscovery of Moby Dick and the rediscovery of Melville himself. And my grandfather was a student at Columbia for Professor Weaver. And so he was one of the students reading this book that nobody had ever heard of or nobody thought much about, but this guy was like John the Baptist when it came to Melville. So now years later, Moby-Dick is celebrated as an unequivocal great American novel, and it just goes to show, it might get us to think about that the American literary canon is as subjective as anything else you think of Moby-Dick dropped down from the heavens as sacred text. It really wasn’t that it was discovered by some literature professor.

Brett McKay:

It reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. 

Mark Cirino:

Same thing, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. When Fitzgerald died in 1940, he was convinced Gatsby was a failure. Gatsby was out of print and it had to be reintroduced. And then now of course it’ll never go out of print.

Brett McKay:

It’s interesting, Melville had written a lot and he was well known for his writing before Moby Dick, but today, I think most people, if they’ve read Melville, the only thing they’ve read from Melville is Moby Dick, or they might’ve read Bartley the Scrivener, and that’s about it. What do you think that is?

Mark Cirino:

So I’ve read several other Melville novels to try to answer exactly that question, Brett. I was like, why? Everyone would say Melville is one of the great American novelists of all time. Everybody would say that. And then you could ask those people who say that, okay, so name two Melville novels. And they would say, well, Moby Dick and Bartley, the Scribner, okay, Bartley, the Scribner is the short story, right? So what does Moby Dick have that the others don’t? Especially since they’re kind of covering the same terrain? And if I can just be reductive and try to figure this out, the first thing it has is Ishmael. And Ishmael is this singular narrator. He’s funny, he’s imaginative, he’s enthusiastic, he’s discursive like he goes on tangents here and there, and he’s very insightful about human behavior. So Melville had never done that before, create such a perfect narrator.

The second thing it has is Ahab, this enormous figure, this mad captain determined to get vengeance on this monster of the sea. So he’s almost godlike or royalty, he’s just larger than life. And Melville had never created such a larger than life protagonist. And also Moby Dick himself, the whale, this creature that is the object of so much fury and so much scrutiny. That is the great quest that Ahab is on. And so triangulating these three unbelievable characters within this novel creates such an alchemy, such power and mystery that none of his other books ever approached this kind of structure.

Brett McKay:

Why do you think this novel is so intimidating? I think some people, they have Moby Dick on their two read list or they remember reading it from when they’re in high school and they’re like, Ugh, Moby Dick, I can’t do that. What is it about this book or the way it’s written that makes it intimidating?

Mark Cirino:

Well, you’re going to have to tell me about how you felt about it as a 10th grader. I mean, it’s kind of long. It’s not long as 19th century American novels go necessarily. I mean, there are lots longer novels. I think the writing is pretty dense and poetic and Baroque Melville writes in a very intense way. So it can be very hard to kind of unpack some of the poetic imagery, some of the philosophical ideas. Absolutely, some of that can be difficult to unpack. Ishmael also goes on digressions as I mentioned. So there’s the very simple story, which is Ahab has been wounded by this one particular white whale named Moby Dick and has now determined to set out and avenge it. And our narrator, Ishmael happens to be on that ship, the P quad. So that’s a very simple story, just a very simple story of vengeance and actually also a holy grail story trying to reach one particular object. But at the same time, Melville layers on top of this very simple, straightforward, linear story discussions about religion and politics and commerce and law and history and psychology and philosophy and nature. So it goes on and on and on. And I think that can be very either frustrating or disorienting for lots of readers.

Brett McKay:

I think when I was in 10th grade and I was reading this book the first time I remember I’d get to the chapters where Melville would just inject these almost pseudoscientific textbooks about Whales chapter 32, where you just see it’s just basically the scientific name of the whale and the description of the whale. And I remember in 10th grade, like what does that have to do with the story? So I’m just going to skip this. What do you think is going on there? Why did Melville do that? I mean, he does that several times there at the book. I remember there’s one where he just talks about the anatomy of the sperm whale head. What does this have to do with Ahab getting Moby Dick

Mark Cirino:

On the surface? It has nothing to do with it. And chapter 32, which is called Cytology, probably has caused more additions of Moby Dick to be turned into Frisbees and launched across dorm rooms all across the United States than anything else in American literature. So Ishmael takes us on a really convoluted taxonomy of the different kinds of whales and the way they looked and their behavior. And I think this is part of Melville’s vision, of course, I’m only telling you what its effect is to me as a reader. I can’t tell you what he was going for, he never proclaimed it. But I think in addition to this narrative, he was trying to say everything about whales all at once. So he was trying to come at it from an adventure point of view. He was trying to come at it from a metaphysical point of view, a historical point of view, and in this case a scientific point of view.

I’ll tell you a couple of effects that Chapter 32 has on me. The first thing it does is it shows how engrossed and enthusiastic Ishmael is as a narrator. And that’s no small thing, Brett, if you’ve ever been talking to somebody, even if you’re not inherently interested in what the person’s talking about, if they are so obsessed and hyped up on what the story is, sometime that’s charming and engaging. And I definitely find that with Ishmael, you don’t really need to be as excited about whales as Ishmael. You just need to know that Ishmael is very excited about whales. So Ishmael is eager to tell you everything that he’s learned about whales. And the second thing that I would offer about the ology chapter is as Ishmael is offering an organizational system of whales based on how they look and how they behave, this book comes out in 1851 and in 1851, weren’t we doing the same thing about human beings? We have a hierarchy of human beings that we valued depending on how they looked and how they behaved and where they were, where they lived. If we don’t in 2025, we certainly were in 1851. And so when I mentioned earlier that the Wailing adventure is kind of an allegory or a metaphor for larger things, that could be something that’s a cytology chapter suggests.

Brett McKay:

I think for me, the effect it had on me whenever he goes into these scientific digressions about whales, it made Moby Dick the whale — I understood it more, and it also made him even more impressive in a way. I don’t know if that was the effect he was going for, but that’s what it did for me. It made the whale more impressive.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, because he’s saying, you have to understand this thing from all its vantage points, how big its head is, what its tail is like on and on. There’s even the chapter about a whale’s penis, only to show that we have never really encountered monsters like this before.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned the big picture outline of the book. It’s this guy named Ishmael. He hooks up with this ship called the Pequod, and he’s the book’s narrator and the ship’s captain is Ahab, who’s been injured by this whale named Moby Dick. And the book is all about Ahab trying to find this whale, essentially. That’s what it is. And then along the way, they’re doing some welling, then there’s some other things going on. But let’s talk about the main themes of Moby Dick. You mentioned some of them earlier, science, philosophy, religion. What would you say are the big themes you see throughout this novel?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, there are a lot of themes. I think Melville touches on a lot of things. One of the elements that he’s addressing is the difference between free will and determinism, which is simply do you have control of your own actions? In the very first chapter, which is called Loomings, Ishmael is describing a kind of magnetic pole that he has to the sea. So it’s almost like he doesn’t choose to go. The sea draws him. And he’s saying that happens all the time that we’re drawn to certain places, we’re kind of sick of society and we’ve got to go into nature. And by the same token, the reason that theme is so important is because when Moby Dick injured Ahab, Ahab believes that Moby Dick sought him out personally to injure him like you, I want to get you. And so Ahab is personally insulted that one particular whale injured him.

Meanwhile, I think maybe most common sense readers and certainly Starbuck in the novel, they’re like, Ahab, that’s what whales do. It was instinct. Why would you take it personally? God designed this whale to defend itself and to attack potential threats. You just have to accept that. And so you see there’s a distinction between did Moby Dick act intentionally with a human motivation or was it just mechanical instinct? And that question gets turned around when Ahab is suggesting his act of vengeance on the whale is also instinct. He’s drawn to it magnetically, almost like the whale was drawn to him. So this kind of gets at a lot of questions about human behaviors. When do we act according to our own consciousness versus when do we act kind of programmatically? And so that’s certainly one of the themes.

Brett McKay:

So what do you think was going on in Melville’s time where he was thinking about free will versus determinism? What was happening in America at the time?

Mark Cirino:

Well, I think one of my favorite sentences in the novel is when Ishmael says, “Who ain’t a slave?” And I think that’s one of the most courageous sentences in that novel. In 1851, he says, who ain’t a slave? And some people actually were slaves, but he’s talking about something a little larger. He’s saying, okay, is slavery a legal issue or can it also be a psychological issue? Are there things that even free people in 2025 are slaves too? And then as one of his contemporaries, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, well, what if you’re a slave driver to yourself? What if you are imprisoning yourself through limitations or habits or prejudices or small-mindedness or things like that?

Brett McKay:

Another theme that you talk about and that you see in the book is this idea of objective versus subjective.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

What’s going on there?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah. So basically there’s a juxtaposition between subjective perception, how an individual sees the truth of something and objective reality, what the empirical facts are. And this is really set up in so many ways, and I think the best way to analyze this idea is the Dublin chapter where Ahab nails up a single coin and says, whoever can spot Moby dick first. This one particular well gets this very valuable coin. And then there’s an extraordinary chapter where Ishmael describes several people starting with Ahab, going up to the delo, looking at the shapes and the figures and the symbols on this coin, and essentially interpreting it or reading it. So we might think of an inkblot test. Well, an inkblot test objectively is an ink plott. But subjectively, there might be an image or a memory that it calls up to you individually, and that the same is true for the dub. So it ends up revealing more about the person than about the coin itself. So Ahab looks at it, and you remember what he says when he sees the coin. He says, you see that that’s Ahab. Those things over there, that’s Ahab, everything, Ahab, Ahab, Ahab. So it’s the greatest expression of solipsism and self obsession, self absorption, because Ahab sees himself in everything. He’s self-obsessed.

Brett McKay:

Another chapter where you see that exploration of objective versus subjective. It’s one of my favorite chapters, one 18 The Quadrant.

And this is a scene where someone’s trying to bust out the quadrant. Sailors use this to navigate. You look at the stars and you can figure out where you’re at. And Ahab is like, I’m not having it. He’s like, I hate this thing. He says, fool. He calls it foolish toy babies play thing of hudy admirals and commodore and captains. The world brags the thee and thy cunning might. And then he says, science cursed thee thou vain toy and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven whose live vividness, but scorches him as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light. And he said, level by nature to this earth’s horizon are the glances of man’s eyes not shot from the crown of his head as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament, curse thee thou quadrant, and he dashed it to the deck.

No longer will I guide my earthly way by the level ship compass and the level of dead reckoning by log and by line, these shall conduct me and show me my place on the sea. And I think that’s a great idea. He’s like, I’m rejecting science. I’m not guiding my life by the objective science. I’m just going to use my own self to guide my life. And I read that and I can see, okay, that’s not good to reject objectivity, but at the same time, I’m kind of inspired by Ahab like I’m going to do what I want to do and not what some instrument tells me to do. I think it’s very relevant today where we have ai, people are going to chat, g gt asking chat, GBT to make decisions for them about, well, should I take this job or even about their romantic life? And I think Ahab would say like, no curse the chat GPT, and he’d smash it.

Mark Cirino:

There is definitely that to it. And this is like Luke Skywalker using the force and not putting the blast shield down. And he’s like, I’m trusting my own instinct is strong enough to solve this problem and execute this mission. And I agree with you that is inspiring. But we can see also the cautionary tale of how they can get you into trouble, how you can forsake facts and say, I got this. And there’s a difference, especially in romantic literature, capital R. So I’m not talking about romance novels, I’m talking about romantic literature. The difference in romantic literature is trusting yourself, and I’m using self as its own word, trusting yourself, which means the heart’s core, that deep inner part of you that maybe other people don’t see, maybe you don’t even see. It’s your soul trusting that which is a divine correspondence to nature and to divinity versus trusting your ego.

And so Ahab may let ego get in the way, or other leaders may let ego get in the way and they forsake facts. But I do agree with you that if you’re using instinct properly, if you’re balanced, that can be inspiring. There’s one other illustration of this, Brett, that might add a layer to it in the chart, which is not dissimilar from the quadrant. In chapter 44, Ishmael is saying essentially, Ahab wanted this whale so badly. He was so bent on this obsession that he says all possibilities would become probabilities. And as Ahab fondly thought, every probability the next thing to a certainty. And so we all know people like this, the people who they can’t see reality because they want something so badly, and because I want it to happen, I can will it to happen. So it cuts both ways because the more kind of sober, realistic people may say, wow, that’s not going to, I don’t think that’s going to work. But the fact is, don’t our heroes don’t. The really great adventurers and leaders and inventors don’t, they have this kind of little strain of hyperbole to them, this little extreme element to them. We’re going

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about some of the characters more specifically. We’ve been discussing them kind of on the surface. I want to go deeper with this.

Mark Cirino:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the narrator, Ishmael. Moby Dick starts off in a famous way. Everyone probably knows the first line of Moby Dick. It’s “Call Me Ishmael.” What does this line do for the narrative? And what does that tell us about Ishmael that he started off this story with? Call me Ishmael.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a question that people have been wrestling with for 150 years. What does “Call me Ishmael” mean? On the surface, it’s a really folksy introduction to our narrator who’s going to sit down and tell you a nice wailing yarn. But on the other hand, it might be a little shifty. There’s a difference between saying, my name is Ishmael and call me Ishmael. Call me. Ishmael is kind of establishing the authority of who is telling the story and who is going to be listening to the story and at the mercy of who is telling the story. So if somebody tells you, call me blank, they are kind of setting the terms of the narrative. In fact, we can go onto the second sentence of the story. He says, call me Ishmael some years ago. Nevermind how long? Precisely, so it’s already he’s telling us what to ask and what not to ask. He’s a very engaging narrator, but again, he’s also setting the terms. We might also wonder about the name Ishmael, because I dunno how many Americans are named Ishmael. This is a quintessentially American narrative, and we have American characters named Ishmael and Ahab.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, why is that? Is there something symbolic about the name Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

There must be. So when he says, call me Ishmael, he is alluding to a figure in the Bible, the son of Hagar, who is an outcast. So when he’s saying, call me Ishmael, he might be suggesting that he serves that same kind of role in society or that same kind of role in the narrative. One of the things about Ishmael, and I think this is truly the genius thing about the novel Moby Dick or one of the genius things is that Ishmael is not the protagonist, and Ahab is not the narrator. Ishmael is kind of on the periphery off to the side observing. Sometimes you don’t even know how he has access to certain events that go on on the P Quad, but he can sometimes get into the thoughts of Ahab. Sometimes Ahab does something all by himself, even below Deck, and you wonder how does Ishmael know what is going on? Does he have imaginative powers? Does he have supernatural powers? Is he a fiction writer? Where does the truth and imagination blend?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, this reminds me going back to The Great Gatsby. It’s the same thing with Nick Caraway, the narrator, then Jay Gatsby’s the protagonist. And my son just got done reading The Great Gatsby, and he had this funny comment. He’s like, Nick Caraway is just always kind lurking. I don’t know why he’s there and these different situations, how he knows what’s going on, but he’s just kind of there in the background. I’m like, yeah, he is kind of a lurker.

Mark Cirino:

That is a great parallel. It’s exactly the same. The central phrase for Nick Caraway is you remember, and I’m sure your son just read this, when Nick Caraway is talking about this party that he’s at this really kind of seedy party in this apartment, and he looks outside and he sees kind of a bystander, and he says, I was within and without. So simultaneously, he was two places at the same time, and he was two people at the same time. And that is the brilliance of Gatsby, the way it’s narrated. But of course, Moby Dick came way earlier, and so I’m sure that Fitzgerald modeled it after Ishmael.

Brett McKay:

So Ishmael, as you said, he’s this really enthusiastic guy. He’s really enthusiastic about whaling, and he’s also kind of an outsider. What does Ishmael represent, do you think? Because Melville’s writing symbolically in this novel, so Ishmael must represent some idea that he’s trying to convey.

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think Ishmael might be the stand-in for Melville. I think he’s the writer of the, I think he’s the poet. And so the poetic leaps that Ishmael takes, the philosophical and psychological leaps that he takes, he’s really the poet and the novelist on the ship. Ahab doesn’t think on those terms. Ahab is thinking he must get the whale, and if this novel were to be narrated by Ahab, it probably would be very direct. It wouldn’t be much shorter. But Ishmael is more expansive, and I think it’s kind of showing what it’s like. And this goes back to the Nick Haraway thing, what it shows to be in the proximity of these larger than life figures. So Ishmael is kind of awestruck. He looks around with a sense of wonder at whales, at these great captains at all the events, the violence, and he’s sort of our standin and also Melville’s standin.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about Queequeg. Queequeg has always been one of my favorite characters. For some reason, I just find him endearing. Why do you think this cannibal sailor dude from the South Pacific is such an endearing character?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, first of all, he’s great at being a harpooneer. So he gets on the Pequod due to merit, and that’s fantastic. He’s more qualified than Ishmael to get on the Pequod. He’s a great friend. He’s generous, and I think, well, you can answer why he’s endearing to you. What he’s endearing to me about is that he’s in the Emersonian sense of being self-reliant in comfortable in his own skin, which is in his own heavily tattooed skin. Imagine being a heavily tattooed Pacific Islander, observing Ramadan carrying heads in your sack in Manhattan in the middle of the 19th century. You would be extremely conspicuous. He has absolutely no embarrassment about his own actions. They give him a wheelbarrow to lug things around him. He puts things in the wheelbarrow and carries it because he doesn’t understand how wheelbarrows work, and it feels like, well, didn’t you feel silly?

He’s like, no, why would I feel silly? I don’t know how to do. This isn’t something I’m familiar with. So he’s completely at ease with who he is. I find that very inspirational. One of the great chapters in Moby Dick is called the monkey rope. And in the monkey rope, you remember this episode Brett, where Queequeg is on top of a whale carving it up, and Ishmael is on the boat tethered to Queequeg with a rope, and Ishmael finally realizes if Queequeg falls in, I fall in and if I let go, Queequeg falls in. And then he takes another step back and goes, well, isn’t this just like every human being all across the world, is that we all are connected, even if it’s not with a tangible rope, if I’m driving to work and someone swerves in, I’m done. If the pharmacist isn’t paying attention when he gives me my medicine, I overdose and I’m done. So we all depend on one another for survival. We just don’t see it on an everyday basis. And so Ishmael’s having this very physical connection, but he also appreciates this sublime metaphysical connection he has to him also.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love that insight. He lacks that morbid self-consciousness that a lot of westerners have, and that’s admirable. Someone who’s comfortable in their own skin. I think that really ties in. I think Melville is probably getting it at that idea in American romanticism of just what Emerson hit on. You got to be your own guy, as Thoro said, March to the beat of your own drummer, that sort of thing. And that’s admirable.

Mark Cirino:

Emerson says, anybody can be themselves in the privacy of their own room. The key of being yourself, a fully functioning human being is to be yourself out in society. That’s the challenge when conformity is really pressuring you to be like everybody else. He said, if you can maintain who you really are, really are deep down that is greatness. And Ishmael’s looking around to see like, oh, who’s doing this? Am I being, he’s kind of like jittery is in a foreign land at complete ease. 

Brett McKay:

Talk about Ahab. He is one of the great figures in I’d say world literature. He’s part tragic hero, part madman. How do you think Melville wants us to understand Ahab and his obsession for the whale?

Mark Cirino:

Wow. So many ways. I think for starters, we can ask ourselves if we are Ahab at all. If there’s in common parlance, the white whale is like, Hey, what’s your white whale? It’s like, what’s the one thing that you keep trying for that you can never get? And it’s like, oh, I might be obsessive about certain things that I keep failing about or that I’m destined to fail, and I’m really driving myself crazy about it. What is your white whale? So we might all be Ahab at one time or another in our lives. Hopefully we recognize it before it’s too late. So at one point, it’s about obsession and monomania only thinking about one thing and how that, remember Brett, I hope you’re comfortable with spoilers. The way that Ahab dies I think is so crucial.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Mark Cirino:

Are we okay?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. If you haven’t read Moby Dick yet, you can fast forward. Let’s talk about this.

Mark Cirino:

Okay. Well, the manner in which Ahab dies is he’s impaled by his own harpoon.

And how symbolic is that? That what really ended up killing him was not necessarily the whale. It was his own violence towards the whale got turned on himself. I also think Ahab is a quintessential dictator. So the P quad is run in a fascist way, and so Melville is talking a lot about government and leadership. One of the aspects of the P quad is that there are people from all over the world. Almost every nationality and ethnicity is represented on the P Quad. It’s like a floating united nations, of which Ahab is the leader, is a commander, and Ahab sooner than later, gets everybody to do exactly what he wants them to do. The passion of his leadership, his charisma, his magnetism has overwhelmed everybody else on the P quad, so that his doomed insane mission becomes unanimous.

Brett McKay:

That sounds, I mean, I know this is probably not a great parallel, but it reminds me of Steve Jobs when he was the head of Apple. People would talk about how he could just because of his charisma in his just obsession with making the best product possible, he would get people to do what they thought was impossible. Oh, interesting.

Mark Cirino:

The way you’re saying it, that almost sounds like a positive application.

Brett McKay:

Well, so I mean, it was positive. We got the iPod and we got the iPhone, but the way you hear people describe working for Steve Jobs, he was a real jerk. He was awful working under him. He was mean, and he even recognized that as he was dying. He was like, yeah, I probably could have done things differently, but maybe not. Maybe he couldn’t have done things differently to get accomplished what he accomplished.

Mark Cirino:

What I think about sometimes when Ahab gives that first pep talk where he gathers everybody around and he essentially says, Hey, you know why you’re here. We’re here to kill one whale, Moby Dick. And Starbuck is like, Hey, I thought we were going to do see how many whales we could catch so we could make a lot of money. He’s like, no, no, no. We’re getting one whale. We’re going to get vengeance on the one whale who injured me. What that makes me think of is to look at a Nazi rally from the 1930s and how Hitler was so passionate filled with evil and hate and madness. You could tell the power of his insanity was greater than the emotions that anybody else in that room had. And Ahab even knows it. Ahab knows what he’s saying, might be ruinous and wrong, but he also knows there’s nobody who is his equal. Nobody wants it as bad as he does. Nobody wants the opposite as bad as he wants what he wants, so he overwhelms them.

Brett McKay:

I mean, when I read Ahab, I think Melville paints a really complicated character. On the one hand, his obsession ended up killing him and lots of other people too. But on the other hand, I mean, Melville does paint Ahab in a kind of romantic light in a way he’s got on a bad course, but there’s something attractive about this dynamism, and I feel like Melville would say there’s a role for passion, this whole American romanticism thing, but it’s got to be harnessed in the right way.

Mark Cirino:

You make a great point. So first of all, just a couple of things about that. First of all, I think there’s a moment where after Ahab kind of riles the entire Pequod up and everybody’s on his side, there’s a line that should make your heart sink, where the beginning of chapter 41, Ishmael says, I Ishmael was one of that crew. My shouts had gone up with the rest. My oath had been welded with theirs and stronger, I shouted more, did I hammer and clinch my oath because of the dread in my soul? A wild, mystical, sympathetic feeling was in me Ahab’s quench list feud seemed mine. That is for anybody, and it doesn’t have to be grandiose like politics or religion or life and death. It could be any time you went along with something that you deep down knew better then you got overpowered. 

And the other thing that your comment made me think about Brett was there’s a moment where Ahab is really humanized, where he’s all by himself, at least he thinks he’s all by himself, or perhaps Ishmael’s looking on, and he leans over, he’s thinking about his wife, and he’s thinking about what his obsession and what his career as a sailor has done to his family and how he’s spent way more time out on the ocean than on land. And one teardrop drops into the water. And what Ishmael Surmises is there was more substance in that one teardrop than there was in the rest of the ocean combined because of just how long did it take that tear to form? Probably he had never done it before, but there is that, it’s kind of a yin and yang type thing where yes, Ahab is all one thing, but there’s one dot of humanity and sanity and family man where he kind of remembers who he really is.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about another character, really important character, the whale, Moby Dick. I’m sure lots of people have written essays when they’re in high school like, well, the white whale represents this. What do you think the white whale represents?

Mark Cirino:

Okay, so let’s take one baby step back. And I think a lot of readers of literature who were asked to read this book, let’s say in high school and 10th grade seems actually very early to read this book, but let’s say they did. And their professor, their teacher said, now we’re all going to write essays about what Moby Dick represents, what the whale represents. And a common complaint is, well, why does the whale have to represent something? Why can’t it just be a whale? Why can’t it just be? And we have to have a discussion in that class about there is such a thing as literary symbols. Things do represent other things, and we don’t really need to presume this. We don’t have to guess about this because actually Ishmael tells us what the whale represents. He says in chapter 41, which is called Moby Dick, and let me just quote a sentence or two, all that, most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the leaves of things, all truth with malice in it.

All that cracks, the sinews and cakes, the brain, all the subtle demons of life and thought all evil to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically a saleable in Moby Dick. So Ishmael is saying everything bad about the world, Ahab ascribed to this one particular whale. Now, it’s very important that Ishmael is saying that is what the whale symbolizes to Ahab. The thing about a symbol is that it means different things to different people. An American flag will mean something different to an American and someone from a different country. A cross means something different to a Christian and a non-Christian, and this is the way symbols are. They mean different things to different people. We almost started our conversation by talking about the difference between objective and subjective. So we have to be very careful that the whale doesn’t mean the same thing to everybody.

Ahab is trying to make Moby Dick mean the same thing to everybody. He wants everybody to hate it as much as he does. But in fact, the very next chapter, chapter 42, which is called The Whiteness of the Whale, begins when Ishmael says what the white whale was to Ahab has been hinted, what at times he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. So for every person in the book and for every reader, the white whale probably means something different. I know that’s frustrating, and I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m equivocating, but what it really is, it’s a celebration of subjective perception over objective reality.

Brett McKay:

And so, okay, Moby Dick represents evil to Ahab and he has to kill it. What does it mean to Ishmael?

Mark Cirino:

Yeah, so exactly. So Ahab is saying, once I kill Moby Dick, everything will be better. And now we may look at that and go, what is going to happen once he kills Moby Dick? He’s going to live happily ever after. Do we really think that’s what’s going to happen? So in Ishmael’s case, in chapter 42, he takes a philosophical point of view. Chapter 42 is called the Whiteness of the Whale. And he says, do you know what really bothers me about Moby Dick? The thing that really kind of exasperates me is that he’s white, and by that it’s saying he’s blank. He has no definition. It’s his absence. He says, vague, nameless horror. So what frightens Ishmael is that he’s a white whale, and it could mean anything in that sense. It means whatever you think it means. You are projecting your own anxieties, fears, prejudices onto this blank screen.

If you’ve ever had to write something and you look at a white sheet of paper, that could be very anxiety causing. But here he’s saying, and this is kind of counterintuitive because I think our culture, we look at white as pure and clean and innocent. And here he’s saying, you know what it’s like, it’s like if you’re caught in a whiteout or an avalanche and your surroundings have no definition. In 1851, the early 19th century, if you looked at the map of America, there were white spots, there were white areas, things that hadn’t been fully settled and explored. And romantic writers, Emerson and Thoreau were like, don’t explore externally. Don’t explore the continent. Go within, explore the white spots in your own brain, the areas of your own psyche and consciousness that you haven’t thought of before.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, there’s a great line in that chapter, chapter 42, talking about how the whiteness, it’s this void, this blankness in how it’s anxiety producing sort of existentially anxiety producing. He says, this is it that by its indefiniteness, it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with a thought of annihilation when behold, the white depths of the Milky Way.

Mark Cirino:

Incredible. That’s incredible. Yeah, if you are an imaginative person, if you can project and then you can spiral out of control because it’s just blank. There’s a line in Walt Whitman’s song of myself, which is 1855, and I might butcher it, but I’ll do my best. He says, the white topped mountains are in the distance. I fling my fancies toward them, fling my fancies toward them. So he’s looking essentially at a white easel or white canvas, and he’s like, whatever’s in my brain that is going to project onto it. And that’s scary. What Ishmael is gesturing towards is that we really, as human beings seek definition. We seek boundaries. We want things to be contained. And if the white whale is so enormous and he’s white, we don’t know if there’s any end to it. It could be just an infinite beast.

Brett McKay:

You’re a Hemingway guy. You have a podcast called One True Podcast, and it comes from this line from Ernest Hemingway in a movable feast where he describes how he writes, and he says, all you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know. What do you think is the true sentence in Moby Dick?

Mark Cirino:

Well, that question is just, now I realize how evil that question is because there’s about 91 true sentences from Moby Dick. I can choose one of my many one true sentences. So as the novel goes along, and this might be a little bit of a key for people who get frustrated with some of Ishmael’s digressions, we start to see a little bit of a pattern in how Melville structures Moby Dick. What he’ll do is he’ll spend a few pages of a chapter talking about some arcane aspect of wailing or whales or the practice of wailing. And you’re saying, why am I engaged with this? Why do I need to know this? And then at the very end, maybe the last sentence or the last paragraph, Ishmael will tie it in to a larger, universal or metaphysical concept, and you’re like, oh, now I see why we’re talking about it.

And it’s absolutely brilliant. Many of these chapters are absolutely brilliant. One such chapter is called Fast Fish and Loose Fish, and this is chapter 89. This very small chapter is essentially a rule book about whaling, which is to say, what do you do when two rival ships are both pursuing the same whale? How do you know who gets it? And the short answer is, whichever ship is fast to it or attached to it, and if the whale is loose, if it’s unclaimed, then whichever ship becomes fast to it gets this whale, and you’re like, well, this is kind of interesting. I never thought that there was a rule book about wailing, but I guess there’s rule books about everything that’s kind of interesting trivia, and that’s that. But towards the end of this chapter, Ishmael begins to talk about being fast and being loose in the sense of metaphysics or your soul or your spirit or your psyche.

And then let me just end the chapter the way he does. He says, what are the rights of man and the liberties of the world, but loose fish, what all men’s minds and opinions, but loose fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them? But a loose fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling, ISTs are the thoughts of thinkers, but loose fish, what is the great globe itself, but a loose fish? And what are you reader, but a loose fish and a fast fish too? And that last sentence brings it home and kind of twists the knife in where he’s basically saying, okay, so what are things that you are susceptible to being influenced by? It goes back to a lot of the strains of conversation, Brett, that we’ve just been having, which is okay, who could come along and convince you to do something that you wouldn’t ordinarily do? And then he goes back to, but what are you fast to what has already claimed you in ways that you might not even be aware of? Like, who ain’t a slave? What are you imprisoned by? Have you ever taken a step back to say, what am I loose to and what am I fast to? It’s an absolutely brilliant way to parallel this weird, trivial law of wailing and the way we all experience life.

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. I hope it’s inspired some people to go pick up their old copy of Moby Dick and give it a reread. Where can people go to learn more about your work and what you do?

Mark Cirino:

So I am actually hosting two podcasts. One, as you say, is Hemingway specific called One True Podcast. The other is called the Norton Library Podcast, of which there are two beautiful episodes about Moby Dick with the editor, Jeffrey Insco and I have recently published an edition of Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms with the Norton Library that I hope everybody enjoys. 

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Mark Cirino. He’s a professor of American literature. Check out the podcast he hosts. He’s got the Norton Library Podcast, as well as One True Podcast, which is about Hemingway. You’re available on all podcast players. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mobydick where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic. 

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,089: The 6 Practices of the Ultimate Morning Routine https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/advice/podcast-1089-the-6-practices-of-the-ultimate-morning-routine/ Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:23:12 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191198   There’s been a lot of talk about morning routines in the last few years. But the idea is hardly new; famous men from Thomas Aquinas to Benjamin Franklin structured their mornings to accomplish great deeds and live flourishing lives. A modern advocate of this age-old practice is Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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There’s been a lot of talk about morning routines in the last few years. But the idea is hardly new; famous men from Thomas Aquinas to Benjamin Franklin structured their mornings to accomplish great deeds and live flourishing lives.

A modern advocate of this age-old practice is Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning, first published nearly twenty years ago. Long before morning routines became a trend, Hal was experimenting with his own — researching and refining what actually works. Through his experiences and those of the millions who’ve tried his approach, he’s cut through the aspirational noise to offer a doable, effective framework for starting your day right. Today on the show, Hal shares the six practices of the Miracle Morning routine, why he chose them, and how they set up your day for success. We also discuss how long the routine takes and how a shortened version can be done in just six minutes, as well as how to make it work if you’re not a morning person. Along the way, I share what my own morning routine looks like.

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Book cover of "The Miracle Morning" by Hal Elrod, featuring a yellow sunburst on a blue background and a subtitle about transforming your life before 8AM through the ultimate morning routine.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. There’s been a lot of talk about morning routines the last few years. The idea is hardly new famous men from Thomas Aquinas to Benjamin Franklin structure their mornings to accomplish great deeds and live flourishing lives. A modern advocate of this age old practice is Hal Elrod, author of The Miracle Morning. First published nearly 20 years ago, long before morning routines became a trend, Hal was experimenting with his own researching and refining what actually works through his experiences and those of the millions who’ve tried his approach, he’s cut through the aspirational noise to offer a doable, effective framework for starting your day right, today. 

On the show, Hal shares the six practices of the Miracle Morning routine, why he chose them, and how they set up your day for success. We also discuss how long the routine takes and how a shortened version could be done in just six minutes, as well as how to make it work if you’re not a morning person along the way. I also show what my own morning routine looks like. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/morningroutine.

Hal Elrod, welcome to the show.

Hal Elrod:

Brett. It is good to be here, man, like you and I were just speaking that we’ve both been around a long time, man, so it took a while to connect, but better late than never.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you wrote this book called The Miracle Morning back in 2012. It’s all about setting up a morning routine for yourself to set yourself up for a day’s success. And you’ve been blogging about it. You’ve built up this community around the Miracle Morning, and then recently, a couple years ago, you released an updated version of The Miracle Morning where you’ve expanded and added some things you’ve learned over the past decade on how to amplify someone’s morning routine. But let’s talk about the origin of the Miracle Morning. It was two personal setbacks that led to its development. The first was a near fatal car accident you had in your twenties. Tell us about that.

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, so when I was 20 years old, I was one of Cutco Cutler’s top sales rep. I had just finished my first year of college and I started a career because a friend pressured me into going into an interview and I just wanted him off my back. So I got hired to sell Cutco and I started doing pretty well with them. And so they had me giving speeches at their events. And one night after a speech, I was driving home when my car Ford Mustang was headed on by a drunk driver at 70 to 80 miles an hour, and I was found dead at the scene and my heart stopped for six minutes. They revived me on a helicopter, airlifted me to the hospital. I spent six days in a coma. When I came out of the coma, I was told by doctors that I had permanent brain damage and that I would never walk again.

And I had this dual mindset where I went, okay, if I never walk again and I’m in a wheelchair the rest of my life, and that is my reality, I’m not going to allow that to dictate my mental and emotional wellbeing. And I told my parents, I said, mom and dad, I know you’re worried about me. Don’t worry if the worst case scenario is the doctors are right and I never walk again. I’ve decided I’ll be the happiest, most grateful person you’ve ever seen in a wheelchair. And then on the flip side, I was like, but I’m not accepting that as my only option. I’m maintaining unwavering faith that I’m going to walk again while I simultaneously accept that I might not. It’s a lesson for a lot of us, right? It’s like, how do you expect the best? Go out there with faith, approach your life with this confidence and optimism, and then also be at peace with like, Hey, sometimes things go my way.

Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I’m down. Sometimes the down and out period lasts way longer than I want it to, so how can I be at peace and grateful and happy and keep moving toward the future that I want? And so I took my first step a few weeks later and then kind of the rest is history and how that tied in indirectly to the miracle mourning is in that experience in the hospital. I decided that I was going to use that experience to help other people. I thought, I’m going to write a book. I’m going to start speaking about this. Maybe that’s why God put me through this. There’s a bigger purpose. And so when the Miracle Morning became my morning routine, and it changed my life so profoundly that my wife called it a miracle, then I just felt like I have a responsibility to share this with other people.

Brett McKay:

That idea of where you’re holding those two different ideas in your head of, okay, I’m going to have faith that things will get better while at the same time accepting, maybe they won’t, and maybe this is my reality, reminds me of the Stockdale Paradox from Jim Stockdale. He was an admiral in the military in the Navy who was a prisoner of war during Vietnam at the Hanoi Hilton, one of the most brutal prisoner of war camps. And before he was a prisoner of war, he studied stoicism. And while he was there, he developed this paradox. He calls it the Stockdale Paradox, or it’s become known as the Stockdale Paradox of holding these two different ideas in your head. He’s like, well, maybe I’m going to hope I’m going to get out, but I’m also at the same time going to accept maybe I’m not going to get out. And that reminds me exactly what you did.

Hal Elrod:

Thank you for that. I just Googled it and I’m going to watch videos and read articles, and I’m going to start incorporating that because I had never heard of that before. But yeah, that’s exactly it.

Brett McKay:

So the Miracle Morning, it’s got six practices. It’s silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading and scribing. And that’s just another way of saying writing and you use the acronym SAVERS for this routine. Your recovery from the car accident laid the foundation for the Miracle Morning routine because it got you thinking about resilience and goal setting, but it was another personal setback that led you to actually creating this concrete morning routine for yourself. What was the story there and why did you end up choosing the Six Savers practices for your morning routine?

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, so the Miracle Morning specifically was born out of the 2008 financial crash, millions of entrepreneurs. My business started to fail and I couldn’t pay the bills, and my house was foreclosed on, and it was kind of a six month downward spiral. And then my wife gave me some advice. Actually, her advice was, call your friend John and get some advice. Because I was struggling, man. I couldn’t figure out how to turn it around and I’m drowning in debt. And then the house gets foreclosed on, and I call my friend John, and he essentially tells me to listen to a Jim Roan audio. He goes, this audio will change the way you think, Hal, and it will teach you to solve your own problems and turn your life around. I was like, all right, so I listen to the Jim Roan audio, and this one quote changes everything for me.

It stands out and it’s “Your level of success will seldom exceed your level of personal development.” And I went, well, okay. And if anybody’s listening, you can kind of take this and apply it to your life right now, which is on a scale of one to 10, if you’re measuring the level of success, fulfillment, happiness, success in every area, your finances, your relationships, your mental health, everyone wants level 10. I’ve never met anyone that’s like, well, I don’t want to be too happy or too financially secure, or it’s like, no, no, no. There’s this human drive and desire to self-actualize and be like, I want to be the happiest and healthiest and most financially secure and most harmonious in my relationships that I possibly can be. So I determined I want a level 10 in terms of my success. And then my question was, as Jim Roan is saying, your level of success won’t exceed your level of personal development.

It’s like, well, what’s my level of personal development? Am I developing myself to the degree that I need to become the level 10 version of me day in and day out so I can show up at a level 10 and create that success I want in my life? And when I was honest with myself, and again, if you’re listening to this, do this assessment right now, what’s my level of success? Do you want, on a scale of one to 10, probably a 10 or at least like an eight or a nine. You want to be up there. What level is your personal development at right now? And you can assess that based on your daily habits, your daily rituals, your daily routines. Are you doing things each day to develop your mindset, your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing and capacities to be at as close to level 10 as possible?

And for me, it was a no. It was like I’m like it a two or three. My personal development is all over the place. I start a book. I don’t finish it. I’ll try a journal. I don’t do anything consistently. And so I just Googled what do the world’s most successful people do for personal development? And that’s where these six practices, I had a list of six. I was looking for one. I’m like, oh, yeah, okay. The world’s most successful people, they swear by meditation. I found this article, fortune 500 CEOs who swear by meditation. They said, this is what gave us our biggest breakthroughs that took our companies and our revenue and our income to new heights. I was like, all right. I got to meditate for that clarity and that mental wellbeing. And then I read articles on affirmations and the world’s best athletes visualize, and a lot of people attribute the books they read.

And so I go, well, which of these is the best? And to keep a long story, not too long, it was, wait a minute, what if I did all of these? What if instead of picking one of the world’s most timeless proven personal development practices, what if I created a simple ritual that combined all six of them? And that would be the ultimate personal development routine. And so that was it. Day one, it was like I did 10 minutes of each of these practices, and most people do anywhere from five to 10 each. So it’s like a 30 to a 60 minute miracle morning. This isn’t like the 5:00 AM club where you have to wake up super, super early. It’s just starting your day with these practices whenever you do wake up. And so yeah, that’s how the SAVERS were born. And it was these six practices. I did all of them the next day, and I’ve done all of them more days than not for the last 17 years.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about these different components in detail, because in the book you go into detail on what these different parts of the SAVERS routine could look like and the benefits of it. The first one is silence. Why start with silence as the first thing in the routine?

Hal Elrod:

So you think about it, when do your greatest insights come to you? Is it when you’re busy, when your mind is racing with a million things on your to-do list when you’re checking emails or staring at a screen or scrolling your phone? And the answer is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Your greatest insights and ideas and breakthroughs and perspectives and realizations always come in moments of peaceful, purposeful silence. And that’s often unintentional where it’s like you’re in the shower or you’re falling asleep at night, or you just write the calmer and quieter your mind is, the more there is space for you to access your highest truth, your highest wisdom, depending on your belief system, the wisdom of God. And so because of that, and because our smartphones have robbed us of those periods of silence, that used to be part of our, inherently, if you’re waiting in line, if you’re riding on a bus, if you’re, we were with our thoughts a lot in the past, but now because that smartphone’s with us pretty close to 24/7, it’s like we’re not left alone with the benefits from silence.

So this is about starting your day with anywhere from one minute of peaceful, purposeful silence. It could be prayer, it could be meditation. For me, it’s both. It’s a little bit, I always start with a prayer to ask for guidance and really calm my mind and express gratitude. And then I’ll set my timer on my phone usually for five to 10 minutes, depending on what my schedule’s like and what the availability is. And I just sit there and I have my journal next to me. By the way, a lot of the savers, you combine them. So you can, for example, silence and scribe and all my journal right there, and as a thought emerges, I’m like, oh, that’s it. That’s what I need to do today. Or that’s the most important thing. I’ll open my journal, jot it down, close the journal, go back into silence. But again, that’s where my greatest breakthroughs come from, insights, realizations, clarity, peace of mind. And so to start your day with that every single day, the benefits are immeasurable.

Brett McKay:

Before reading your book, I’ve been doing this for years. First thing I do when I wake up, I’ll get out of my bedroom and go to my couch, and I just sit there and I pray, and I just sit there for a couple minutes in silence. That’s all it is. And it’s nice. And it is interesting. You do get these insights, I think particularly after you wake up, but not at the first thing you do is dive into your texts and emails on your phone.

Hal Elrod:

So my rule is that my smartphone, I don’t check it until after silence is done. Yeah. So that’s crucial because if as soon as you start checking notifications, your brain goes into reactive mode.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no, I remember a long time ago I’d get in the habit. The first thing I’d do is check my phone and it just ruins everything. You’re a big proponent of meditation, particularly this thing called emotional optimization meditation, what’s that?

Hal Elrod:

So it’s as simple as choosing your optimal mental and emotional state. And in the book, of course, it’s like four pages that walk you through how to do this, how to identify it, but you identify your optimal mental and emotional state, and then you essentially get yourself in that state. And I give different ways to do it. One is to remember, when was the last time I felt that way or what makes me feel this way? For example, let’s say you want to be in a state of gratitude. Well, it’s like, okay, so for me, I imagine my kids and I just smile. I mean, literally, I smiled as soon as I said my kids, and I pictured them right now, I just smile. And so you get yourself in the state, and then you set your timer and you cultivate that state. You meditate in that state, and what you’re doing is you’re creating neuro pathways in your brain so you can access your optimal mental and emotional states at will.

It’s kind of like exercise for your muscles, but it’s for your mind. And so that way as you do it day after day after day after day, and you continue to cultivate your optimal states, you hardwire them in your brain and your nervous system, and it literally changes your quality of life and gives you access to those states in the middle of the day or whenever you need them. So whether it’s the state being joy, happiness, peace of mind, confidence, love, empathy, whatever that state is, by hard wiring it in the morning through emotional optimization meditation, you gain access to it all day long. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

We’ve had a podcast guest, Dr. Rick Hanson on the show. He’s a psychologist and he does something similar. He calls it hard wiring, happiness, same sort of thing. You should just think about these optimal states that you want to be in. This is particularly useful if you have a tendency to be an ior, and you kind of have that negativity bias is to really sit with those positive emotions, really absorb them what it feels like, enrich them. And the idea is, like you said, you’ll hardwire yourself for those more optimal or positive emotions instead of just being a Negative Nelly all the time.

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

So the next part of the SAVERS routine is affirmations. Now, affirmations, I think they got a bad rap. I think most people think they’re cheesy. They think of Stuart Smalley from SNL saying, I’m good enough. I’m smart enough.

Hal Elrod:

I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Brett McKay:

Right? Well, you argue the reason why they might have a bad rap is because most self-help authors talk about affirmations in the wrong way. What do they get wrong?

Hal Elrod:

So I think there’s one of two problems. Number one is they tell you to affirm something that you don’t actually believe. So if you’re struggling, it’s something that’s not true. If you’re struggling financially, they’ll say, just affirm, I am wealthy. I am. And if you’re affirming something that is not factually true or doesn’t resonate as true for you, then you create an internal conflict as if we don’t have enough of them. And you go, I am wealthy. And then you’re like, no, I’m not. I’m struggling financially right now. This is bs. So that’s the first problem. The second problem is we’re taught to often create affirmations in this flowery passive language that makes us feel better in the moment, but is actually diluting us into thinking something is going to happen without our effort. I’ll give you an example. So we’ve all heard the affirmation, I am a money magnet.

Money flows to me effortlessly and in abundance. And if you’re affirming that and you’re struggling financially, that feels good in the moment you’re like, oh, wow, I’m a money magnet, and money is going to magically flow to me effortlessly and in abundance. That’s awesome. God, that feels so much better than my reality that I’m struggling financially. But that’s diluting yourself. And so I think those are the two biggest problems, is we’re taught to affirm something that we don’t believe in, and it’s cheesy and it’s not true, or we’re affirming some magical result that’s going to happen independent of our efforts to give us relief from our stress.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Is that kind of manifesting secret stuff?

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So what’s a better way to craft affirmations so they’re actually effective instead of cringey?

Hal Elrod:

So for me, I use three steps, and to me, they’ve got to be rooted in truth. They’ve got to be practical, and they’ve got to be actionable. So the three steps, number one, step one is affirm what you’re committed to. Step two is affirm why it is a must for you. And step three is affirm which actions you’re going to take and when. So this is a very, again, practical, actionable, results oriented. So it’s like you’re affirming what you’re committed to. So not I am wealthy, but I am committed to increasing my income by 30% this year, or what It’s like you’re committing to some sort of meaningful, measurable outcome. And then step two, why is it a must for me? Why is it important? Who’s this going to benefit? You’re getting clear on the why that is so compelling for you. And usually I have 2, 3, 4, 5 reasons why I’m willing to commit to this thing for me, for my kids, my wife, whatever the benefits are.

And then number three, okay, well, what am I going to do? When am I going to do it? Okay, Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM and it’s going to go to my schedule. I’m going to commit to focusing on business growth, period. I’m going to read books on it. I’m going to take action on it. I’m going to work with chat GPT to figure make a plan. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And so when you create affirmations that are following those three steps, really the only way you can fail is to live out of integrity with what you’re affirming every day because, hey, this is what I’m committed to. This is why, this is what I’m going to do. That to me, it’s my North star. It’s the anchor for the rest of my miracle morning. The other savers really support what I’m affirming every day.

Brett McKay:

And so I imagine you want to take some time before you start your miracle morning routine to write this affirmation out.

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, I always make ’em on a Microsoft Word or a Google sheet, because to me, affirmations are always a rough draft because as we continue to learn and grow and gain new insights and perspectives and strategies, I’m always editing and updating my affirmations. I’ll make my rough draft, I’ll print a copy, and then I’ll go in usually multiple times a week, often during silence or during reading, I’ll read something or I’ll think I’m like, Ooh, I need to remember that. So I’ll put in my affirmations. I always usually scribble on the sheet. And then after the sheet’s gotten messy enough, I go back into the word doc or the Google Doc, update the affirmations, print a new copy, and just kind of rinse and repeat. And I’ve been doing that for 17 years.

Brett McKay:

And then when you got your affirmation written out, do you read it to yourself? Is that what you do, or do you read it aloud?

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, I just read it to myself quietly. I’ve had people in the Miracle Morning community that go, it’s more powerful when I read it out loud. So I’m like, Hey, whatever works for you. And then I have another Honor a Quarter who is my co-creator of the Miracle Morning book series. She reads her affirmations, so she types ’em out, then she reads them into her voice, into her app, and then while she’s on the treadmill, she listens to them. So she’s handling, we’re going to get to the Ian Savers exercise, right? She’s doing exercise while she’s doing her affirmation, and she’s listening to affirmation. So it’s like she’s killing two birds with one stone. She doesn’t have to separate ’em. And there’s a lot of the savers that you can combine in that way where you’re doing ’em at the same time.

Brett McKay:

Something I did when I was a young man, this is back when I was in law school, and my goal was I wanted to do really well in law school, get on law review. And so I had these goals for myself. And every morning what I would do, I would read these goals out loud to myself, but I’d also write them out five times. So I had these old journals full of just pages of me writing out my affirmations slash goals over and over again. I guess it helped because law school went pretty well for me. I guess it was a way for me to reinforce what I was doing and why I was doing it.

Hal Elrod:

Nice, nice dude. Yeah, I always say in the simplest form, and affirmation is nothing more than a reminder of something that you have deemed so important that you want to remember it, that you want to integrate it into your thinking, into your belief system, et cetera.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s affirmations. The next part of the routine is V for visualization. This is, I think another thing that I think a lot of people think is hokey or cheesy. What does visualization look like?

Hal Elrod:

So visualization is, there’s two parts to it, I think for it to be effective, and most people leave out the second part, which in my mind is the most important. And the first part is see the ideal outcome, and that’s what they teach. Yeah, yeah. Make a vision board, put pictures of your ideal outcome and see it and feel it. That’s great because A, it’s a reminder like, oh, yeah, that’s important to me. I need to stay focused on that and not get distracted and not lose sight of that. So I’m going to visualize it, but more importantly, I’m going to see it in a way where it’s so compelling, where I’m creating, I’m literally generating a compelling emotional experience. Similar to that emotional optimization meditation, I’m now creating a compelling vision that makes me feel so inspired that fuels my motivation to do the things today that’ll get me there.

But the most important part of visualization, that second part is mentally rehearsing the things that are going to get you there that you must do today. And in the same way, compelling, seeing yourself following through with things that might be out of your comfort zone. They might be scary, they might be difficult, but they’re necessary. And so you use that visualization and only takes a minute or two to see yourself tying your shoes, heading out the front door, going on that run for that marathon, or opening the Word document, the Google Doc, and starting on your book, whatever it is, or having that difficult conversation with your coworker or picking up the phone and calling prospects. Whatever it is, you mentally rehearse doing the thing. And this is what world class athletes do on a regular basis. The best athletes in the world, one of their strategies is, I’m going to visualize, I’m going to mentally rehearse performing at my best, whether it’s Tiger Woods when he was at the top of the game on 18 holes or Michael Jordan on the basketball court. It was seeing themselves and mentally rehearsing doing the thing so that when it was time to actually swing that club or step onto that court, they had already been there in their mind. It wasn’t like the first time they had experienced it. They had felt it. They had seen it, and now it was just time to go do it in real time.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. The way you describe visualizations, it reminds me of the WOOP method of goal planning. Have you’ve heard about this?

Hal Elrod:

Sounds familiar, but I don’t know.

Brett McKay:

So it was developed by the psychologist named Gabriele Oettingen. WOOP is an acronym that stands for W is Wish. So you identify a desirable but achievable goal O. The first O is outcome. So it’s visualize the best possible outcome. I create a positive mental image of that, see what it looks like. Then this is the most important part. The second O in WOOP is obstacle. So you got to identify a significant internal obstacle or external obstacle that might prevent you from reaching that goal. And then P is plan, and then you create an if then plan to address the obstacle. So it’s positive thinking, but also adding in some negative thinking, but then coming up with a positive plan to overcome that obstacle.

Hal Elrod:

I love that. I love that man.

Brett McKay:

And then with these visualizations, I imagine they can change every day. So if you got a big thing going on that day, your visualization will be for that big, I don’t know, sales call or something.

Hal Elrod:

For me. I’ll actually, before I do my visualization, I will look over. Well, here’s the thing. I’m looking over my affirmations typically, and then that leads to the visualization. I have an affirmation for each one of my goals and each one of my roles. So my most important goals, I’ve got an affirmation for, here’s the financial goal I’m committed to as a father, here’s what I’m committed to as a dad, here’s what I’m committed to as a husband. So again, a goal or a role, an affirmation appropriate. And then once you’ve read the affirmation, now you’re just visualizing yourself doing the thing that step three of your affirmations was, which actions are you going to take and when? And that is the last thing you affirm before you go into visualization. Giving it a real life example, when I was a year into my Miracle morning, I decided that my level 10 fitness school was going to be to run a 52 mile ultra marathon because I hated running ironically.

And I thought, man, the person I’d have to become to run 52 consecutive miles when right now, I couldn’t even run one mile. At that point, I was like, I want to become that person, so I’m going to make this commitment publicly. It scares me, right? The Miracle Morning just got me thinking so big, and so I did. I committed to it. And what I would do is I would read my affirmations. I’m committed to running 52 miles on October 29th, 2009. No matter what, there’s no other option. This is a must for me because it’s such a fear and limitation that in order to overcome it, I will be able to overcome anything else in my life. And then the third step, which actions will I take and win? I will read the book, the Non-runners marathon trainer, and follow the training plan to a T, whether I feel like it or not.

So I just have affirm that now I go into visualization, part one, I visualize myself with the outcome. I see myself crossing the finish line of the alter marathon, and I see it. I imagine what it’ll feel like. I smile. I take a deep breath. I’m like, that’s going to be fricking awesome when I do that, even though I’m scared, even though part of me doesn’t even believe that I’m going to do it. I’m going to visualize it as if it were true. And then the second part, and the most important part is I would mentally rehearse my cell phone going off at 7:00 AM when it was time to run. I’d visualize myself reaching out, turning the phone off, walking into my bedroom, getting dressed in my running clothes, walking to the front door of my house. I can still see it today. It was yesterday.

Open the front door. I would see my driveway slanted down to the sidewalk, and then I would read my affirmations one more time in my head. I’d recite ’em one more time while I visualize the sidewalk. I am committed to running 52 miles, right? Yada, yada, yada. And then I would visualize myself running out the door with enthusiasm and energy and excitement. Now, think about how that impacted real life. When the alarm on my phone went off at 7:00 AM human nature, if I had not affirmed and visualized would be like, I don’t want to run. I’ll just do it tomorrow. Or I’m not even going to do the marathon, man, who was, I kidding? But that’s not what happened, Brett, because that’s not what I mentally rehearsed. It’s not what I visualized. So what would happen is I was a robot that I programmed that morning. The alarm would go off on my phone at 7:00 AM I would turn it off. I would get off the couch, walk into my closet, get dressed, go to the front door open. It was literally, it would play out exactly as I’d visualized it that morning. So you can apply that practice, that two-step practice of outcome, and then the mental rehearsal to any goal, any role, any aspect of your life. And again, the affirmations essentially lead right into the visualization.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the next part of the routine is E for exercise. Are we talking like a full-blown workout in the morning for this?

Hal Elrod:

No, and I mean, this is one of the simplest, this requires the least explanation. It’s move your body first thing in the morning or relatively quickly after you wake up because it wakes up your lymphatic system. It gets your blood and oxygen flowing, including flowing to your brain. So you think clearer, you feel better. And if you ever wake, there are days where I wake up and I’m like, I’ll even start meditating. And I’m like, oh my God, my brain is not on right now. I am falling asleep. It’s not working. I will stand up and do 60 seconds of jumping jacks, or I’ll just count to my age. I’m 46, so I’ll just do 46 jumping jacks usually. But here’s the thing, you go from, I’m so tired and lethargic to now you’re breathing heavy. After 60 seconds of jumping jacks, you’re breathing heavy, you’re alert, you’re awake, the blood is flowing, the oxygens flow, and you sit down and now your mental acuity is significantly improved then before you did that exercise. But then on an average day, it’ll be like five minutes of stretching. Sometimes it’s two or three minutes. I’ll do like 60 seconds of plank, 60 seconds of downward dog and 60 seconds of back bend and 60 seconds of jumping jacks. That’s actually my standard four minute workout that I do every morning. It’s 60 seconds of each of those four activities. But you can do whatever you want.

Brett McKay:

No full blown workout. Just the goal is to move your body.

Hal Elrod:

And then I go after my miracle morning and after I’ve got the kids ready for school, when I go into my, I have a home office with a little workout, like a little tiny mini gym in the back. The first thing I do is I do a 20, 30 minute full blown workout. So yeah, the Miracle Morning part of my exercise is just to get the blood and oxygen flowing and wake myself up.

Brett McKay:

For me, my routine is I wake up, I do the moment of silence, pray, and then I take a morning walk. It’s a mile. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes depending on how fast I go. And during that time, I’m thinking about what I got to do for the day. Maybe I’m unintentionally doing some affirmations and some visualization during that morning walk. 

Hal Elrod:

I love that. And you’re combining silence. You’re combining nature, you’re combining affirmation. You can go for a walk and while you’re on your walk, you can listen to your affirmations. If you record ’em, you can meditate and pray. For me, when I go on a walk or a jog around our property, that is almost always almost 10 out of 10 times, probably nine out of 10, I gain some sort of profound insight solution to my problem, and I go back and I implement it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re right. Taking that walk does wake me up.

Hal Elrod:

Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I’m good to go after that. Alright, so let’s move on to ours for reading. So in this reading part, what kind of reading are you doing? What kind of books are you reading?

Hal Elrod:

So I have a unique kind of self-imposed rule where family is my top priority. Well, health is my top priority, but I’ve got that pretty dialed in. I’ve read many, many books on optimizing health, and so I’ve got my health routines in place with diet and exercise and all of those things. So family is my number one priority or right behind health, and it’s the one that does require attention because with human beings, they’re never stagnant, they’re always growing, they’re changing, they’re evolving. You don’t just get in the same routine where it’s going to work. If I do the same thing every day for my wife and kids, nope. They need me to mix it up and adapt to them. So I have a self-imposed rule that I have to read what I call a family book, which essentially just means either a book on marriage or a book on parenting before I read any other book, which is usually a business book that I’m excited about. So right now I’m rereading the book Raising a Modern Day Knight. You heard of that book before?

Brett McKay:

I’ve heard of it, yeah.

Hal Elrod:

And so that’s a great book. My son just turned 13, so I’m reading it for him. And then after that book, the business book I read right now is called Wealthy and Well-Known by my good buddies, Rory and AJ Vaden. So that’s it. So first I read at least a few pages out of a family book so I can learn one thing, so I can apply to my family, and then I go into the business book.

Brett McKay:

So you’re doing a lot of nonfiction reading during this time?

Hal Elrod:

It’s all nonfiction for me, all nonfiction. In the evening, sometimes I’ll do fiction, but during the morning it’s all nonfiction. I’m trying to optimize my mindset and learn something that I can actually apply to improve my marriage, my family, my business, et cetera.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, lately I’ve been reading fiction in the morning. I love reading nonfiction books, but I’ve been doing a lot more fiction reading.

Hal Elrod:

Interesting. How come?

Brett McKay:

Well, first, because I just want to, I read plenty of nonfiction. It’s like I need to do some more fiction. It’s enjoyable, but something that I’ve found as a unintended side effect of this, you actually pick up a lot of cool personal development insights while reading fiction. Interesting. Right now, my son and I are reading The Count of Monte Cristo together, the unabridged version. It’s like 1200 pages. Crazy story, but there’s a lot of cool insights just about patience, and these characters will drop these little insights about life, about business that I’ve been highlighting. I’m like, this is really good. I can use this in my day-to-day life. So I know you’re big on nonfiction, but fiction, I think you can find some really cool insights.

Hal Elrod:

How old is your son, by the way?

Brett McKay:

He will be 15 here next or this month.

Hal Elrod:

Okay, sorry. So I’m wondering if I’m already on Amazon adding Count and Monte Crito to my cart, so great. You think at 13, is that appropriate or?

Brett McKay:

Well, I think there’s some 13 year olds who could do it. It’s a beast of a book, but he’ll feel awesome once he finishes it, he’ll feel cool. Alright, so you’re going to spend some time reading. The final part of the SAVERS is the final S, and that is scribing or writing. What’s the purpose of writing in the morning and what are you writing?

Hal Elrod:

Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting, I think this is the one that I hear from people that they find the most challenging. And for me, and I find it visualizations my most challenging, this one’s pretty easy. The reason why to do it is that there’s multiple reasons. One of them is that when you put pin to paper or typing, either way, you are forcing yourself to qualify your thinking. When you’re just sitting there thinking, if you’re just letting your mind race, you could think about 10 things in the span of a minute. You could be thinking about this challenge in your business, and then all of a sudden you’re thinking of, oh wait, I got to remember to do this at the grocery store today. And then you’re thinking about, oh man, my wife was mad because I didn’t. Your mind just goes all over the place.

You can’t write like that. Nobody, when you put pen to paper, you’re forced to be coherent, to qualify your thoughts and determine, discern those that are most important to articulate. So that’s one of the benefits is you are focusing your thoughts and qualifying them in a way that is worthy of putting them in writing. So you’re basically improving your quality of thinking. Also, you’re keeping a record of your thinking and of your life. Right now, I’m going through my journals from 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, which were my first four years of Miracle Morning. It is so profoundly beneficial for me to one, it’s enjoyable. Like, wow, this is so cool to revisit. I am writing like, man, Ursula’s the one for me. I’m going to marry her someday. I have no doubt in my mind. And I’m literally texting her pictures of my journal entries, like, Hey sweetie, check out this journal entry.

And same thing with ones with my friends and stuff. So it’s this beautiful record of my life and of where I was at the time, and there’s so many parts of my mindset that when I was in a beginner’s mindset that I’ve actually lost sight of. I’ve lost sight of a lot of the basics and the things that got me to where I am, and now I’m like, man, I’m not thinking the way I used to, that I actually need to get back to where I was thinking in certain ways in 2008, my mindset back then when I was young and hungry and still learning and growing in that way. Not that I’m not still learning and growing, but it’s invaluable. So those are just a couple of benefits. And the last one I’ll share is going back to that emotional optimization meditation. I believe that gratitude is one of the most important keys to optimizing your mental and emotional wellbeing.

There’s a million things that are going wrong in our lives, and there’s a million things that we could be grateful for. And so I write those things down every day, one, two or three of ’em, and then it’s important. My hand goes on my heart and I look at each of them, and then I close my eyes and I’ll spend 30 to 60 seconds in silence, smiling and feeling deeply grateful for whatever I wrote down. It might be my wife or my son or my daughter, or that conversation I had yesterday, or I helped my friend move yesterday, for example. I wrote that down, that was on my gratitude list today, is that I got the opportunity to help my friend move into his new house last night and we connected and he felt so grateful and it was right. And so when you do that, you’re again, going back to hard wiring, these emotions of gratitude and joy and feeling like, oh wait, my life’s not totally, it’s not all lack. I have so much in my life, it’s so rich. But if I don’t actually pause and take time to think about it and even better write it down and solidify it, then look at it, then contemplate it. It’s one thing to have gratitude on a checklist. Yeah, yeah, I’m grateful for my house and my kids and my wife and my money and whatever. That’s intellectual gratitude. But having heartfelt, soulful gratitude that you ponder for a moment, that’s where gratitude has a meaningful impact in your life.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so journaling can help you with your thinking. It can help you see a record of your thinking so you can get some new insights, and then you can also do the gratitude work in that journal. Do you write by hand? Is that your preference?

Hal Elrod:

Yes, and I’ve done both, and I actually still do both. The Miracle Morning has a journaling app, so I’ll write there when I’m on the road. I don’t always have my journal with me, so I’ll write there, but then I do prefer to journal by hand because there’s something about putting pen to paper and that isn’t there, the visceral experience when you’re just typing away on a keyboard.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, something I’ve thought about experimenting with. I haven’t been a regular journal keeper in a long time. I was, then I kind of gave it up because I wasn’t getting much out of it, I didn’t think at the time. But if I decided to start up again, I’ve thought about doing it on a Google Doc and then using chat GPT to look for insights, tell me, find insights about myself based on my journal entry. Have you found anyone in your community doing that?

Hal Elrod:

I’m sure there are many. We have millions of people that are doing their Miracle Mourning and using, in fact, I just did an AI survey for our community. I was curious. I was like, I don’t know where they stand. Are they into ai? Are they anti ai? And it was something like 93%, I think give or take, said like, oh yeah, we are using ai not necessarily during their Miracle Morning, but just in general. So yeah, I’d imagine. I like that. I like that as a very strategic way to optimize your journaling.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so we’ve talked about the six practices of the Miracle Morning. We got silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing. If someone were to implement these practices, how long would the routine take?

Hal Elrod:

One thing with the Miracle Morning, it’s completely customizable, and I talk about starting with whatever time you have allotted and then dividing that equally by the savers for the start to keep it simple, put a lot of thought into it, so it’s like, all right, I got 60 minutes. I’ll do 10 minutes each. That’s how I started My Miracle Morning in 2008, 30 minutes, five minutes each, six minutes, one minute each. Just keep it simple and try all the savers. And so for me, I always do a one hour miracle morning. I’ll usually do five to 10 minutes of silence, depending. Affirmations takes me usually five minutes. Visualization usually takes me between zero and five minutes, meaning that’s the one saver that I personally do not do every single day. It resonates with me. The least exercise takes me under five minutes. I’ll usually read for 15 to 20.

So my reading is the longest of my savers because I want to go as deep as I can, and I have so many books that I want to read, and then journaling takes me about five minutes. So it’s totally customizable to fit your needs, and it can change on any given day, but by starting with a really simple, let’s just keep it simple, divide it by six. Okay, great. And then as you do the savers, you find which of them you want to allocate more time to and which it’s okay to allocate less time to.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so depending on how much time you allot each practice, the routine could take 30 minutes to an hour, and you even mentioned you can give each practice a minute and make it a six minute routine.

Hal Elrod:

That’s not hyperbole. It’s not like six minute abs or whatever. On days where we’re pressed for time, we often have this all or nothing mentality, which is, let’s say you like to go to the gym for an hour and you only have 20 minutes. You’re like, well, I’m not even going to make the drive or I’m not going to go. There’s no point. And I love the quote, the philosophy, don’t let what you can do get in the way of what you can’t do. I can’t do an hour, but I can do six minutes. I can sit for one minute in silence and I can say a prayer of gratitude and God for guidance, and I can just calm my mind and feel at peace. Then I can pull up my affirmations. I might not get through the full page in a minute, but I might get through half of it, and that’ll remind me, oh yeah, these are some of the most important things in my life that I’m committed to. Now I’m reminded of why I’m committed and I’m reminded which actions I’ve clarified that will ensure that I follow through. Then you go into visualization. You visualize yourself. You mentally rehearse yourself doing the things for a minute, 60 seconds of jumping Jack, 60 seconds of reading one page out of a book in six minutes. The amount of growth you can experience when you do this, it’s pretty profound.

Brett McKay:

So this is something that’s adjustable. It can be shortened, but let’s say there’s someone listening out there who thinks, okay, this sounds awesome, and they want to do the long version, the full version of the Miracle Morning, but they’re like, I’ve got kids, so if I’m going to do this, I need to wake up before them, or I got a job that I got to get to in the morning, so I’d have to wake up earlier. They’re not sure about doing it because they feel like they’re just not a morning person. Any advice on waking up earlier to do this if you’re not a morning person?

Hal Elrod:

Yeah, and I’ll say that when I was writing The Miracle Morning, I mean the original edition back in I was writing in 2009, 10, 11, that was my number one fear, or you could say insecurity is how am I going to convince there’s a large part of the world? I don’t know the exact stat if it’s half, but let’s just say it’s half. If half the people that pick up this book have a lifelong belief that says, I am not a morning person. Actually, I do have a stat. What am I talking about? It’s 72% of Miracle Morning practitioners that we have surveyed over and over and over again over the last 17 years. That’s the average. 72% say they had never in their life been or believed they could become a morning person. When they read The Miracle Morning. Usually it was a friend that convinced them to read it, and now they do the Miracle Morning every day, so 72%.

It’s like, join the club if you’re not a morning person, and because that was my biggest fear and insecurity is that how am I going to convince people? Yes, I know they’ll be convinced that the way I can explain starting your day in a peak physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual state with the six most timeless practices that the world’s most successful people have swarmed by for centuries. It’s a compelling case that would definitely benefit my life. How could I argue that starting my day in a peak way and then going off into the day at my best self got it, but I’m not a morning person. You don’t understand. I’ve tried. You don’t understand. I can’t wake up. So because that was my fear. The entire book is holding someone’s hand mentally, emotionally, psychologically, overcoming the limiting belief of not being a morning person from start to, Hey, okay, I could do this.

Okay, what’s the first baby step? So it’s not overwhelming. Okay, so I always tell people, don’t start with all six SAVERS. Your first Miracle Morning should be waking up just like 10 minutes earlier, not an hour, 10 minutes earlier, and doing one of the SAVERS, and if you’ve never read The Miracle Morning, people will just do the R. They’re like, all right, I got the book on Kindle, or I ordered it, or it’s on audio book, and they go, I’m going to wake up 10 minutes earlier. I’m just going to listen to the audio book for 10 minutes. That takes next to zero effort, and they do that every day, and they’re like, all right, it’s easy. It’s 10 minutes. I’m listening to the book. It’s changing my mindset. And then they get to the chapter on silence, and then they integrate silence into their next Miracle Morning, which again, super easy. They wake up, maybe it’s 15 minutes earlier, and for five minutes they do silence. They do nothing, and then they listen to the audiobook, and then they get to their chapter on affirmations, and then they integrate that. So it’s like you’re just baby stepping your way and all of a sudden a few weeks into it and you’re like, dude, I’m getting up 30 minutes before I used to. It’s effortless now, and I’m doing all six of my savers. So that’s the way that I would kind of lay this out for somebody.

Brett McKay:

I like that. Something that had been useful for me for my own morning routine. I have these things I want to do in the morning, but sometimes I can’t do them for whatever reason. Going back to the idea of don’t let what you can’t do, get in the way of what you can do, I

Hal Elrod:

Love that. 

Brett McKay:

If I can get something done later on in the day, I’ll break it up. Okay. If I can do my silence, not first thing in the morning, but while I’m in the car, I’ll do that. If I can’t get my walk in first thing in the morning, well, I’ll do it at lunch, but as long as I get it done, it feels good. Again, I think the same sort of thing you’ve been talking about, this is adaptable. You don’t have to say, you have to do this thing, and if you don’t do it, then you’re toast.

Hal Elrod:

Yeah. No, that’s exactly it. It’s not all or nothing, and that mentality is what stops us from doing or even starting anything, right? It’s like we have this perfectionist mind, and I do too, and we all suffer from this perfectionist mindset of if I can’t do it perfectly, I’m not even going to try.

Brett McKay:

For someone who doesn’t currently have this kind of morning routine, how would you summarize the benefit of implementing one? How does it set up your day in life for success?

Hal Elrod:

The way that I look at it, it’s kind of like hitting the reset button every day. We all have bad days. Life throws stuff at us that we’re not prepared for. We don’t even know if we can handle it, and it affects our mental health. We’re all human beings, but for most people, if you go to bed going, oh my God, I’ve got this problem in my life and I can’t sleep. I’m stressed out. I got to wake up tomorrow. I got to deal with it. People go to bed with heightened levels of cortisol and stress and inner turmoil, and then they don’t sleep well because their mind is replaying and racing. It was when they went to bed. Then they wake up in the morning and their first thought as their eyes open is, oh my God, I’ve got to face the problems that I’m dealing with in my life.

I don’t wake up that way. If you’re a Miracle Morning practitioner, like you go to bed, you’re like, all right, I got problems, but there’s no benefit in worrying about them right now. I’m going to think peaceful, grateful thoughts. I’m going to think about the things in my life that I’m grateful for, so I fall asleep in a state of bliss that feels good, and then you sleep better. Then when you wake up in the morning, you’re not waking up going, oh my God, it’s 8:00 AM I’ve got to get out the door and get to work and deal with my stressful life. Now you’re like, ah, I’ve got to wake up and I’ve got to meditate and pray, and then read my affirmations that make me feel empowered, then visualize, then I’m going to read. Then I’m going to journal what I’m grateful for. Oh, that’s a really nice way to start my day. So it’s like hitting the reset button every day and creating this, it’s a self-care routine, right? Self-op optimization. So that to me, yes, is why it’s so important.

Brett McKay:

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

Hal Elrod:

You need the book. Audible, if you’re an audiobook person, Amazon, Kindle, et cetera, the best spot for everything, the book, there’s a movie. There’s a 90 minute documentary that features Mel Robbins and Brendan Burchard and Robin Sharma and Robert Kiyosaki and Louis Howes and me. But miraclemorning.com is a great hub because that’ll point you to the book. It’ll point you to the app. It’ll point you to the movie, and you can watch the movie for free on YouTube or again, miraclemorning.com is a great hub.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Hal Elrod, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure,

Hal Elrod:

Brett, man. I am so grateful, dude. Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay:

My guest here is Hal Elrod. He’s the author of the book, The Miracle Morning. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, halelrod.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/morningroutine where you can find links to resources to 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. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,088: The Classical Code of Manhood https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/knowledge-of-men/podcast-1088-the-classical-code-of-manhood/ Tue, 07 Oct 2025 13:55:10 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=191140   What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was virtus — the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence. Waller Newell takes up that […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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Book cover of "The Code of Man" by Waller R. Newell, featuring a black and white photo of a seated, shirtless man with arms crossed, evoking the classical code of manliness in front of a building.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. What does it mean to be a man? It’s a timeless question that’s been answered in different ways across the ages. For the ancient Romans, the word for manliness was the root of our word virtue. To be a man meant living a life of virtuous excellence. Waller Newell takes up that same definition in his book, The Code of Man. First published 20 years ago and now released in the new edition. Newell, a professor of political science, argues that we need to recover an older vision of manhood rooted in the traditions of Western antiquity. He shares the five paths that in his view form the classical code of Manliness and how they can continue to be lived out today. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman. 

Waller Newell, welcome back to the show. 

Waller Newell: 

Good to be with you. 

Brett McKay: 

So you published the book, The Code of Man 20 years ago. We had you on the show to discuss it a decade back. It’s been 10 years. You’ve recently released an updated version of the book. What first prompted you to write this book 20 years ago? And then what do you think has changed in the cultural conversation about manhood in the 20 years since it’s been published that you thought it warranted an update?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think the minor reason in a way to republish it was simply that it had been out of print, and I had dozens and dozens of people asking me how can I get hold of it? So for that reason alone, I thought it was worth relaunching. But the more important thing is that in the intervening years, the whole debate over the meaning of masculinity and the distinction between true manliness and toxic masculinity as it’s called, has grown ever more intense. In the last election, for example, it was a very hot topic, and so I thought, well, this really is a good time to revisit what I think the true meaning of manliness is in contrast with toxic masculinity.

Brett McKay:

And you’re coming at this, you’re a political philosophy professor, political scientist. That’s what you do. So you’re coming at it through that angle, looking at classical culture and how it can give us insights about masculinity and manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. In fact, I really began my interest in this topic because my scholarship had been very much concerned with the notion of honor seeking what it means to pursue honor. And a journalist friend of mine actually said, a lot of people out there are interested in these sorts of topics, not just academics or scholars. Why don’t you try and branch out and reach a general audience? And so that’s what I did.

Brett McKay:

So let’s start off with a Socratic question. We’re going to do definitions. Socrates always said you got to start with definitions. How do you define manliness?

Waller Newell:

Would you mind me if I quote myself from the book? 

Brett McKay:

Go right ahead.

Waller Newell:

I think I can sum it up in a few lines. My view of this debate is that what is now called toxic masculinity is a perverse and destructive force that is in fact the direct opposite of the traditional western classical and biblical understanding of true manliness, which is premised on the need for virtuous behavior that could never violate anyone’s rights of freedom, least of all that of women, and instead defined manly virtue as the moderate gentlemanly and gallant treatment of others. That’s about the best I can do. That’s sort of my whole argument really is there in that few sentences.

Brett McKay:

And why do you go back to the ancient Greeks and the Romans and even the Bible for your idea of manliness?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think we have to begin with those moorings in tradition, however shaky they may have become. To the extent that we can fashion a new way of approaching manliness in the present, I think it’s got to at least begin in those older roots. It might not rest content with those older roots, but I think that’s your starting point. And I think we should also bear in mind that these classical teachings, although there are thousands of years old, have really been widespread in their influence in the West, I would say certainly up until the 19th century, even into the 20th century, I was thinking for example of Winston Churchill, he never went to a university, which I think by the way was one of the key ingredients to his success as a statesman, that he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, but he was interested in the classics and he read them in translation.

So he too had that appetite for the older way of looking at things. As for the biblical approach, I think again, that those roots are so deep in us still even today, that we really have to explore what the biblical understanding of manliness is. And of course, the extent to which it isn’t simply harmonious with the classical philosophical understanding. That’s why I treated the issue of revelation in the section on pride, because in a way, the difference between the biblical approach and the classical approach can be summed up in the fact that for the classics, pride was one of the supreme human manly virtues. Whereas in the biblical tradition, of course, that’s very much called into question. Christianity, I think would argue that compassion is really, the chief virtue should be the chief virtue of a true man. And pride is actually something to be avoided. And I think out of that tension, something creative can emerge. I’m not sure that those alternatives can ultimately even be reconciled, but we have to sort of face them even to the extent to which they conflict with one another.

Brett McKay:

Something I’ve noticed in my own readings of the classics and also the biblical tradition, is that there’s a lot of insights there on what to do about what we call toxic masculinity. You see a lot of people talking about what can we do about this issue of these young men who are just unmoored and acting in incredibly inappropriate ways? And I’m like, just read the Iliad. I mean, you can make a case. It’s about toxic masculinity. You’re dealing with hubris and rage and unbridled ambition. If you look at the life of Alcibiades, there’s a case study in what unbridled ambition can do. The Bible is constantly talking about what can we do to harness or bridle those masculine passions and use them in a productive way instead of them becoming destructive.

Waller Newell:

That’s right. A lot of my other scholarship has been on the theme of tyranny and the history of tyranny, ancient and modern as a theme in political thought. And the way that goes together with manliness is that for the classics and for later traditions as well, tyranny in a way is the deepest perversion of manliness. It’s a distortion of what true manliness should be, and its derailment into a kind of lust for power and domination over others. Whereas I think the whole point of the traditional approach to manliness would be that those potentially tyrannical energies should be sublimated and redirected toward the honorable service of the common good. So you want to nip people like Alcibiades in the bud and turn them in a more constructive direction. And yes, I think I agree with you completely about Homer. If you look at the contrast between Achilles and Odysseus as they’re presented by Homer, in a way, Achilles is everything that you should not emulate because he is terribly narcissistic.

He’s totally self-absorbed, even though he in fact has a family back home, a wife and children. I think Homer deliberately presents him in the Iliad as if he is always by himself. He’s always isolated from others and angry at them. Odysseus by contrast, is very much enveloped in his love of family life. His whole voyage is the desire to get back home to his wife and son. And I think in Homer’s view, Odysseus is meant to be the more admirable character. He isn’t simply ambitious. He doesn’t simply use brute force. Homer says that he is the ultimate prudent man, the Fran Moss, and that he uses his mind whenever he can rather than brute strength. And so I think of the two models, Homer himself is pointing us toward Odysseus and really not so much toward Achilles. As you know, the very first word of the Iliad is rage, and it’s the rage of Achilles that sets the whole Iliad in motion.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned for the Greeks and the Romans, manliness seemed to be about the development of certain virtues. What were some of those virtues that they thought a man had to develop to become a manly man?

Waller Newell:

Well, in a way, I was trying to suggest that with my own five headings of love, courage, pride, family, country, I think those comprehend a lot of the virtues that were important to the classical thinkers for living a kind of integrated life. The notion of virtue that the classics had was very much one of integrity, meaning a sort of unity of strength devoted to living a good life, serving the common good.

Brett McKay:

How has the biblical tradition, what was their idea? What were the virtues that they thought you needed to develop in order to become this integrated man you’re talking about?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, to me, that really all comes down to the difference between say Aristotle and Saint Augustine. On the question of pride versus humility. It’s a very striking contrast because for Aristotle, humility is actually a vice in the sense that a man who does not lay claim to honors to which he’s entitled, actually has a flawed character For Augustine, I think it’s the exact opposite, that he would say that humility is necessary to live a happy life, meaning to live a godly life. So there is a real divergence there. And I think that with a lot of these problems with time and age, I’ve come to realize that they just might not be ultimately harmonious, if you know what I mean. We might just have to live with the possibility that they can’t be reconciled with one another.

Brett McKay:

We will talk more about that tension between the biblical tradition and the classical tradition when we go more into detail about pride. But yeah, I agree with you. For the Art of manliness, one of the guiding principles is to bring back this classical idea of manliness, where it meant becoming a man of virtue in the development of these different positive virtues. And one thing people often push back against, and I understand the pushback is, okay, well if manliness is about the development of virtue, what does that mean for women who also develop these virtues? Yeah, these virtues that we’re talking about, courage, pride, family, humility, these are universal. So what does that mean for women who develop these virtues? Is that womanliness, is that what you’d call it?

Waller Newell:

I agree with you completely that men and women share the same aims and that my suggestion of what those should be would apply both to men and women. That said, though, I think that although men and women are pursuing the same aims, they do so along somewhat different paths. We know from, I think pretty solidly established empirical research that men and women tend to lean towards certain occupations more than others. And so I think we can combine the universalism of those goals with a recognition of the fact that temperamentally and psychologically men and women may be pursuing different roots to that same outcome.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d agree with you. We all have the same aims, but we’ll get through different ways based on our temperaments or natural proclivities. I’ve always thought of it as in terms of music, so like a tuba and a flute can play the same notes of music, but they make different sounds. So men and women both pursue virtue, but the result makes different kinds of music and we need both.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

One thing you write in this book, and it struck me when I first read it 10 plus years ago, and I was really hit by it when I read it again, is that Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, men who lived a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, they had more in common with Homer than they do with us. What do you mean by that?

Waller Newell:

I think what I mainly meant was simply that their life had a kind of grandeur of scope that we would associate with ancient heroism. They really were truly towering figures. And so in that sense, I think it’s apt to compare them to heroic heroes out of the pages of Homer.

Brett McKay:

And also too, I think you mentioned earlier Churchill, even though he didn’t go to college, he was steeped in this classical education that gave him this notion of classical manhood that you’re talking about in this book. Same with Theodore Roosevelt, and same with the founding fathers. And today that education doesn’t really exist in our schools or even our universities.

Waller Newell:

No, that’s very true. I mean, in the case of Churchill, as I said, he sort of came to this on his own. His comment about reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for instance, was that this simply described the people that he knew in his own social circle. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt had a superb formal education, which included reading Latin and Greek in the original. And so he drew directly upon the wellspring of these classical teachings about the virtues. And as you know from his writings, he is a superb interpreter of those virtues and how they should contribute to democratic manhood in the present. Think two of the American founders, by the way, the American founders who attended university like Jefferson, they were deeply steeped in the classics. They read all of the great ancient thinkers, historians, poets, and they also read important modern thinkers like Montesquieu and Locke. So even though they were in a way servants of an egalitarian society, they believed, if anything, that the ruling class of that society must be made up of liberally educated gentlemen.

Brett McKay:

Something I’m struck by when I read books or letters from the founding era, particularly when they’re describing George Washington, they always talk about the manliness of George Washington. And if you were to read that in the 21st century in 2025, not knowing about this classical notion of masculinity or manhood, you think manliness of George. What did that mean? Was he big and burly and did he just tear stuff up? And he was a great fighter, but for those individuals who lived during that time, when they said the manliness of George Washington, they knew that actually had some deeper, broader significance. It meant that this was a man who was, as you said, integrated. He developed the whole man.

Waller Newell:

Yes, that’s right. He had the refinement of a gentleman, and yet he was also courageous without limit, really, and self-reliant and encouraged those same qualities in others. One of my favorite references to Washington was by the great English wig leader, Charles James Fox, who wrote a wonderful encomium to Washington saying that this is a man who seems to have den right out of the pages of Plutarch. I think we all know that the American founding was very much caught up in a kind of Roman spirit, that in a way they thought they were reviving a new order of the ages that previously it had been Rome, now it was going to be America and the United States. Another anecdote that I think is very revealing about Washington is that when his troops were camping at Valley Forge under very difficult conditions, Washington actually had a troop stage, a very famous play about the life of Cato and how Cato committed suicide rather than give into the offer of clemency by Julius Caesar. In other words, even under the terrible conditions of Valley Forge, Washington in effect staged the civics lesson for his own troops.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned in your book you focus on five particular virtues, and each of these virtues have sub virtues that you might need to develop to develop that virtue, and you picked love, courage, pride, family and country or patriotism. We’re going to talk more about these virtues in detail here in a moment, but one thing I want to talk about in the beginning of the book, you make the case that another part of manliness in this classical notion is that it’s the balance of reason and passion, and you use Plato’s allegory of the chariot to describe that balance. For those who aren’t familiar with the allegory, can you walk us through it?

Waller Newell:

Yes. Basically, it’s an image based on a chariot with a charioteer and two powerful horses. And in the analogy, the chariot here represents the mind or the intellect, which has to guide the chariot in its celestial ride through the heavens. The horses represent the power of human passion, both erotic and ambitious, vicious. And if the horses get out of the control of the charioteer, they’re going to plunge the chariot downward into the world of chaos below. So that’s why the mind has to govern the passions, but by the same token, without the energy and power of those horses, the chariot isn’t going anywhere. The chariot here by himself is not enough. The mind is not enough. There has to be a symbiotic interaction between the mind and the passions in which the passions are sublimated and placed at the service of reason. So that’s what I was trying to convey there. There has to be this harmony of the mind and the passions, even though the mind in a certain way has to be in the driver’s seat.

Brett McKay:

How do you think we’ve lost sight of that balance in our discourse about manhood today?

Waller Newell:

Well, this takes me to one of my favorite comparisons, which is Fight Club, the novel and the movie. Because I think what you see there is the tension between what I call the wimp and the beast, which sums up the modern dilemma of masculinity. On the one hand, you’ve got the character played by Ed Norton, who is a kind of pouch carrying IKEA furniture, buying self-help group, attending mail. He wants to be the new male that he thinks is required of him by feminism, but then he takes all of the energies that he thereby represses natural masculine energies, and they get shifted to his alter ego, the character played by Brad Pitt, who is a kind of macho fascist. And I think that I’ve observed, and others have confirmed this to me, teachers I know young men today when faced between the choice between the wimp and the beast, believe that in order to be manly, they have to act out the Brad Pitt side of the coin, meaning that they identify manliness with macho aggressiveness. And I think that really sums up the dilemma because rather than a harmony between the mind of the passions, you’ve got a complete contradiction between the mind, which has now been turned into something wan and weak. On the other hand, the passions have been left to become monstrous.

Brett McKay:

I think it’s interesting in 2025 with digital technology, I’m talking social media, YouTube, video games, I think you see instances of those passions of unbridled masculine passion. You see it in the real world in the terms of violence and sexual violence, but you also see it online as well, like some of the discourse you see in some of these internet subcultures that are populated by young men. It can be very pornographic, very violent, it’s very aggressive, but not in a healthy way. And so you’re seeing different outlets for that unbridled beast type you’re talking about.

Waller Newell:

Yes. And some video games, of course, are incredibly violent and simply blood drenched in violence. And I think that people are coming to think that living online is just an unhealthy experience for people in general, and particularly young men, because in a way it isolates them from any kind of wider human context. They think they’re in touch with other people, but they’re really just shouting into a void, and that tempts them to simply abandon all self-restraint and prudence and indulge themselves in really the most wicked of sentiments.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think there’s something about embodying those passions. Those passions are part of the body, and if you don’t keep them there, they’re going and you kind of let ’em out in the digital ether. It’s like almost they get distorted somehow. We’re going to take a quick break for you word from our sponsors and now back to the show. So let’s dig into the virtues that you highlight in the Code of Man. So again, those are love, courage, pride, family and country. And you started with love first. Why start with love?

Waller Newell:

I began with love because it’s the most deeply personal of the virtues and getting to know my students, my male students, their quandaries about manliness, things like ancient virtue were rather distant from them, but love was something that touched them right now immediately in the present. And so I felt that beginning with the theme of love was a way that young men could be drawn in at a level that they could already relate to, whereas as I said, notions about civic virtue and civic freedom, citizenship, those were rather more remote concerns. But I thought that starting with the personal one could then branch out into these more public other regarding virtues.

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting is your approach of using love as an entry point into manliness or philosophy or virtue. This isn’t new. Plato did the same thing, or Socrates did the same thing in the symposium.

Waller Newell:

That’s right.

Brett McKay:

So what can Plato’s Symposium teach us about how love can lead us to true manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think two things. First of all, the symposium teaches that when we love another person, it isn’t simply a bodily love. What we’re truly in love with is the nobility in their character. And that means that we have a motivation to perfect ourselves. We want to earn the admiration of the beloved by displaying our own capacity to strive for nobility. I think that’s the core of Plato’s teaching there. You can find a similar version of this in Castile, the courtier. He makes essentially the same argument that love is a matter of longing for the nobility in the beloved and wishing to win the beloveds affection in return by showing that your are capable of striving for that nobility yourself.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve always really liked Plato’s idea of love as a ladder. So your love for a particular person can lead to a love of beauty overall, and then to loving knowledge and then to loving truth so it can point your perspective higher. So yeah, so loving a particular person can lead to loving virtue. How do you think our idea of love has changed in the modern West, and then how do you think that change has made it harder for love to be an on-ramp into noble manhood?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think as has frequently been observed that the divorce culture in a way whose duration is considerable at this point, made love about what was immediately satisfying for me and encouraged the notion of no fault divorce, meaning that if you as an individual were somehow not satisfied for whatever reason, then you should move on. And I think that this really undermined the notion that previous generations had, like my parents, for example, that even if you are not entirely happy in your married life, that you had a duty to your children to keep things together. Hopefully in the long run, you might reach some kind of better accommodation with your partner. So I think that’s had a big effect on why we can no longer make these appeals to duty when it comes to marital life. Although we’re told that the divorce rate is slowly but surely beginning to decline, and it appears as if people have taken a second look at the institution of marriage and thought maybe it is worth persevering and not expecting every single one of our own demands or desires to be satisfied.

Brett McKay:

The Greek word for love is eros or eros, however you want to pronounce it. And there’s different types of eros. There’s a carnal eros, like the bodily pleasures. You’re attracted to the person physically, but then as you said, there’s an eros that’s more noble you care about and love the person the other that inspires you to live up to a nobility. And I think you make the case that our version of eros in the 21st century has shifted more towards that more carnal eros. And again, the Greeks say carnal eros is fine. You need that. It’s a part of being human, but you don’t want to make it the soul thing in your erotic arsenal. And also, I think something that’s happened too in the 20th and 21st century is that we’ve kind of turned eros on ourselves. It’s a self-love. What can I do for myself? How can I make myself good. And instead of it being directed towards the other.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s right. And it’s interesting that in colloquial Greek aeros isn’t necessarily even restricted to love between two people. For instance, Dima in the symposium says that the most distinctive human trait is the aeros for honor. This is what sets human beings apart. And for instance, there is an ancient Greek statue of aeros, which depicts it as a warrior. So it’s a word that’s almost untranslatable because it has all of these nuances, and you just have to consider what context you’re in to try and fill that with content.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like part of helping young men use love as a step into noble manhood. It seems like we have to kind of educate the moral sense of love, I think, is it Augustine that talked about getting your loves in order? You have to know what are the good things to love?

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s certainly true. And I think you could look at Jane Austin’s novel Pride and Prejudice, where it’s fair to say that Mr. Darcy comes to believe that he must perfect himself in order to deserve the love of Elizabeth. And that’s a lesson that he doesn’t take too readily. But he does realize that he does have to, in a way, make himself admirable in her eyes, that it’s not just automatic that everyone admires him. And so I think that literature can be another way in which people are educated to understand love as something more than physical desire.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I love reading Jane Austen. We did a podcast a long time ago, with a Jane Austen scholar about why men should read Jane Austen, and that’s one of the reasons. It’s to educate your moral sense and how you can learn to balance the passion of love, but also learning to love with reason as well. You don’t want to go too far into passion, but you also don’t want to be too heady about it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, that’s right. Like the novel Sense and Sensibility. Sensibility means the romantic kind of love inspired by Rousseau and Sir Walter Scott as opposed to a more old fashioned levelheaded approach to love and marriage. Like many men, I used to dismiss Jane Austen as just a woman’s writer, but my wife convinced me to read her, and I just love her novels. For one thing, she is just uproariously funny. She is such a comical genius, right? Every page, there’s a laugh.

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. And I think she is an Aristotelian virtue ethicist, if you read closely enough.

Waller Newell:

Oh, very much so. Yes. Leo Strauss, the great political theory scholar, once remarked that if you wanted a taste for the classics, you’d be fortunate to be born with a taste for Jane Austin, because that would open the door for you back to ancient writers like Aristotle and Xenophon.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s love. Love is the step into noble manhood. It can inspire us to develop these more public facing virtues. The virtue you talk about next is courage. How did the ancients define courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, they defined it in many different ways. Of course, the baseline definition would be physical courage in combat. Aristotle, for example. Interestingly remarks that in order to be courageous, you must possess fear. If you are not full of fear at the prospect of bodily harm in battle, then you’re never going to be able to rise above that and experience the virtue of courage. But then of course, there’s courage for the sake of the common good, the courage of the citizen. If you think of a classical work like the dream of Skipio by Cicero, he very much makes the point that yes, physical courage is the important baseline meaning of courage. Battlefield courage is very important too. But higher than that is public service and the life of the mind.

Brett McKay:

One thing you talk about that the ancients believed in order to develop courage, one of these sub virtues you had to develop or maybe a characteristic is thumos. What is thumos and how does it relate to the cultivation of courage?

Waller Newell:

Well, Plato is really the most illuminating here about Thumos. Thumos is really the seat in the soul of all aggressive, belligerent passions. And it can therefore be very destructive. It can culminate in the desire to exploit other people. That’s why as republic is it’s almost, its central theme, is the need to educate thumos and shape it, draw it away from those temptations, and turn it into a vigorous pursuit of serving the common good, whose reward is the honor you receive from your fellow citizens.

Brett McKay:

So thumos is this sort of aggression that can be used for good or bad. It depends on how you harness it.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. Anger is a facet of thumos.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something that I’ve noticed with the young men that I’ve worked with for the past over 10 years, there are some young men who are very thematic. They play sports, and they’re kind of directing it towards a positive end. They’re very active in their academics. They’re using that drive to do well in school. And then you see these extremes where you have these young men who are very thematic, but they’re not directing it towards anything, and it becomes chaotic. But then I see a lot of young men who just, they lack thumos. They just seem listless and just almost anesthetized. Have you noticed that as well?

Waller Newell:

I certainly have noticed it.

Brett McKay:

So how do you think we can help nurture healthy thumos and young men, and even men who are in their thirties, forties, and fifties?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, I think that we should not attempt to extend to boys the same kind of learning that is extended to women and girls. In other words, frequently now in education, girls are encouraged to express themselves in whatever way they wish. And that’s good. They should be encouraged to do that. But boys are often encouraged to not express themselves in the ways that come naturally to them. Girls, for example, there’s evidence that shows this are better team players. They work more harmoniously in groups than boys do. So I think that we ought to encourage boys to express that natural energy, that natural competitive energy, even a degree of aggressiveness in competition. And that would mean we have to really rethink the way that education is being done.

Brett McKay:

And I also think it’s helpful to give young men books, films where you see healthy thumos in play, and a lot of young men, they’re not getting that in schools. Like I said, that sort of classical education is not there anymore. They’re not reading the Odyssey, they’re not reading The Count of Monte Cristo. They’re not reading these books where you see this thumos and how it can play out in both positive and negative ways.

Waller Newell:

I think so too. And one way in which I’ve changed my approach to teaching over the years is that I now encourage not only the best books or the great books, but what I call the next best books, meaning to say history, biography, literature, art, dealing with the themes of civic virtue, honor, ambition, that people need to know something about the history of statesmanship, the history of honor seeking. So as I said, I think the more that young people can be steeped in the biographies of great statesmen in narrative history about great conflicts, that this is all to the good, but as to how this is going to be institutionalized in the formal education system, in a way I’m at a loss. I think some of it’s got to come through informal educational circles, reading groups, online discussions, programs like the Tocqueville Project in the United States that deliberately do not offer courses for university credit, but simply give students an away year in which they can steep themselves in the classics and in these books about history, biography, culture, and so on. The hope is that when they then return to the university to resume their formal education, they will somehow choose courses that are most likely to give this kind of education or encourage their own professors to teach these kinds of subjects.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a parent of a young man, encourage them to read those classics that you’re talking about. Biographies and things like that. I mean, I’m doing that with my own son. He just finished the Iliad and the Odyssey, and he’s moving on to the count of Monte Cristo, and he loves it. And I think young men, they’re hungry for it. And if you just present it to them in a way that’s palatable, they’ll just eat it up.

Waller Newell:

I find that when I teach these books that the average young person almost take to it spontaneously. I mean, all you have to do is facilitate. They’re being able to read those books. They kind of sell themselves. You don’t really have to sell them. They sell themselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright. So is that drive, that aggression that allows you to be courageous. So whenever you’re feeling fear, you can call upon your thumos to overcome that fear, but then you’re going to want to balance that with reason, because you don’t want to be reckless with your courage. How do courage and love work together as virtues?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think at the most fundamental level, that if you love another person, then you are going to be courageous on their behalf. You’re going to want to protect them and to help them bring about their own self-fulfillment.

Brett McKay:

Right? And so then I think the argument that you make is that using that courage because you love someone else, like your family that’s close to you, you can then extend that in your social circle to family, to community, to state to country.

Waller Newell:

Yeah. I think that was one of Aristotle’s great teachings in the Nicomachean ethics, that people have to begin feeling affection for their fellow family members. This was his criticism of Plato’s Republic for abolishing the family for Aristotle. All of us learn to feel affection first for our fellow family members. Then we can extend that feeling of friendliness outward to our fellow citizens. So the family in a way, is an incubator for the wider political and civic virtues.

Brett McKay:

It’s a school of virtue.

Waller Newell:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned that these virtues can be perverted, love can be perverted. How have you seen courage be perverted in the modern day?

Waller Newell:

Well, I mean, again, to refer to Aristotle, courage is a mean between cowardice and mad daring and all of those virtues, it’s closer to one extreme than the other. Courage is actually closer to mad daring than it is to coward us. So one always has to be aware or on guard against the fact that your own virtue could actually be taken too far and become something harmful to others and to yourself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s move on to pride. We mentioned earlier that there’s a lot of tension between the classical view and the biblical view. In the chapter on pride, you say that pride is the central issue in the search for a code of man. Why is that?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a way, as Aristotle says, it’s the ornament of all the virtues that in a certain sense, being able to exercise the virtues of love and courage and family life would be a kind of as scent to the position that he describes as greatness of soul. Megalopsychia often gets translated as pride that for him is the crown of all the moral virtues. They all sort of come together and reach that pinnacle.

Brett McKay:

So what does a classical, virtuous, prideful man look like? How do they carry themselves? What do they think of themselves?

Waller Newell:

Well, for one thing, they never deed to treat inferiors cruelly because that would be beneath them. It would show that they needed the recognition of people not on their own level. And so they would not dene to do that. They reserved their sense of outrage to people on their own level who offend them. The other thing that he says is characteristic of pride is that people who serve in public life who possess this virtue only want to deal with truly great affairs matters of life and death for a country, national emergencies. That’s why I think you could say someone like Winston Churchill was really the embodiment of what the classical thinkers meant by pride. Because without World War II, Churchill’s political career would’ve been rather spotty. I’m not sure that absent the great challenge of the war that he would be remembered as a particularly outstanding politician. The same is true of Abraham Lincoln. His record before the Civil War in the minds of many people, was somewhat open to question, open to accusations of dishonor or being a kind of for sale type politician for sale to others. It was only the grand struggle of the Civil War in which he was able to find himself and operate on a scale that brought out everything that was best in him.

Brett McKay:

One thing too, that you notice with these prideful men in the classical sense, they’re also extremely ambitious. I think Abraham Lincoln even said, I’m very ambitious. He said, I want public office. Same with Churchill. He wanted to be the guy in charge of World War II, and he believed he was destined to be in that role. George Patton, same sort of thing. I think he actually thought he was reincarnated. He lived another life where he was a Greek general. But yeah, he was incredibly ambitious as well. Yeah.

Waller Newell:

Again, I mean they really only flower when placed in a position to be in charge of the greatest affairs of state during times of national app peril. There’s a great passage in Churchill’s memoirs of World War II where he talks about the day he was appointed Prime Minister to succeed Chamberlain. And he basically said that that night I slept soundly for the first time in years because I knew the situation pretty well, and I was pretty sure that I was up to dealing with it.

Brett McKay:

So not all of us are going to be Lincoln’s or Washington’s or Churchills. So what does a manly, virtuous pride look like for just a regular guy?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, I think in everyday life, not to treat other people with disdain, particularly people who are in a less advantageous situation than oneself, that one should avoid at all costs. Any display of cruelty or sort of cheap hottiness toward others, gloating over oneself in the eyes of others. Pride has a lot to do with self-restraint, not boasting, not demanding that other people praise you. Just let your works and thoughts speak for themselves.

Brett McKay:

Another part of healthy pride for Aristotle was striving for excellence in accordance with virtue. So healthy pride was only justified if it rested on real achievements. So if you wanted to be a great sold man, you had to continually be aiming at noble deeds worthy of honor. But in the modern world, and particularly the modern West, we’re pretty ambivalent about pride. It’s like do aim for great things, but don’t get too big for your britches. Why are we so conflicted about pride?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think again, it really is a fundamental conflict of values between religious revelation and a kind of secular approach to secular, political and civic psychology. That anyone who has been raised with a religious background, which is certainly true of me, it’s drilled into you from very early on, that pride is a vice that should be avoided. I think somewhat unreasonably, theologians like Saint Augustine immediately equate pride with vainglory and oppressive treatment of others. I don’t think that’s warranted, but it’s also a very, very strong content in all three of the major monotheistic faiths and not merely them that pride is something to be avoided. Humility is to be preferred.

Brett McKay:

So I think you mentioned earlier that we’re probably not going to be able to square this, but do you think there is a way we can live with that tension

Waller Newell:

Only just by living with it? I mean, I’m happy to let the contradiction reign within me. I don’t think there’s a synthesis whereby we can say we’ve got the best of both worlds. It’s just a tension. And I think a lot of psychological depth comes from recognizing those tensions and accepting the fact that there may not be a magic solution.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about the family as a path to manhood. Why do you think family is a path to manhood?

Waller Newell:

I think because in a certain way, family life draws on the other virtues that I discussed previously, that to have a successful family life, you need those qualities of love, courage, and a sense of honor. So the family in a way, draws upon all of those virtues of character, I think.

Brett McKay:

And then you can practice them. As we said, the family’s a school of virtue. 

Waller Newell:

That’s right. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

And then you gave examples and counter examples from the classical tradition of what a good family man can look like. You did. The contrast between Achilles and Odysseus. Odysseus is that family man who he’s just trying to get back to his family. And then Hector and Achilles is another one. You also talk about insights that Aristotle has about being a husband and a father. What does he tell us about those roles?

Waller Newell:

Well, again, it’s often a kind of veiled or open critique of Plato, but he does say that the relationship between a husband and a wife should never be one of simply commanding obedience from the wife that a marriage should be a partnership between the husband and the wife, one in which they cooperate to raise their children to be virtuous. So I think this notion of marriage as friendship was very much shaped by Aristotle. And so by the time you get to say the Roman Republic, you find famous couples like Brutus and his wife Porsche, who embodied this kind of friendship. It’s not simply her serving him, he philosophizes, but so does she. They’re both stoic philosophers. When he embarks upon his perilous journey against Julius Caesar, she wants to join him. She wants to share his dangers. So I think that Aristotle did a great deal toward humanizing the concept of marriage and family life, making the marriage a kind of equal partnership.

Brett McKay:

And you see that a bit in the Odyssey with Penelope. Odysseus. Homer describes them as being of one mind. They think the same. They see the world as the same. They’re both sneaky Odysseus with his different tricks, and Penelope with the trick of weaving the funeral cloak, they’re of one mind. They had that really close friendship.

Waller Newell:

Well, and I find it interesting too, that on his way home, Odysseus is accompanied by Athena, who is not only the goddess of wisdom, but a woman. I think part of what Homer is implying there is that there’s a way in which a man’s character has to tap into some female traits. The fact that Odysseus is characterized more by his mental prudence, by his reliance on rhetoric and craft, trying to avoid open physical conflict when he can. I think that’s why there’s a sort of partnership from the very beginning between him and Athena. And then as you said, when he gets back and in the course of his journey home, we also find that his wife back in Ithaca has a number of the same traits that he does.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the last path to manliness is country. And this is where you talk about patriotism. Patriotism gets a bad rap these days, but I think it’s because our idea of patriotism has been bastardized. It’s been perverted. So let’s talk about what the ancients thought about patriotism. How did they define it?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think they define it, and this I think would be something we would still recognize immediately, that patriotism is not uncritical and unswerving loyalty to your country. No matter what it does, there has to be a built in capacity for dissent and freedom of expression. So I think that would be the first thing that citizenship has to be responsible. It can’t just be blind patriotism or conformity.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you love your country, but you love it enough where you’ll push back and criticize it when it’s warranted. What’s interesting too, for the classical thinkers to be a man, Aristotle talks about this, to be a man, you had to be active in public life. You couldn’t just retreat to your home. You had to take part in political life. And that might not mean you run for office necessarily, but you’re aware of what’s going on. You’re active in your community, you’re voting, and also you have to think about politics. I mean, not just in terms of partisan politics, but political life embraces the volunteer groups. You belong to your church, those sorts of things too. So you need to be active in that as well.

Waller Newell:

Yeah, and I just want to add, if I may, that I think that any version of globalization, whether of the left or the right, the globalization of the right, which sees the world as one single economy or the globalization of the left, which sees a kind of postmodernist society perhaps without private property. To me, this is really the death of patriotism in any constructive sense. I think that patriotism requires the nation state, and the nation states differ from one another. In many ways. You can say that modern nation states have the same general institutional frameworks, the same kinds of constitution, independent judiciary rights, division of powers. But on another level, each nation state is pursuing its own historical pathway. Americans, Frenchmen, British Italians, including newcomers in their midst, they are pursuing their own distinct pathway. And I think that patriotism has to be grounded in the context of the particular nation state in which you have grown up or in which you live. So I’m totally against the notion that there’s something unethical about borders. I think there have to be borders.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So some people will say, well, borders are arbitrary. This idea of a nation state, it’s a 17th century creation, and we’re beyond that now because we’re all connected via the internet. So maybe we don’t need that anymore. It sounds like in order for you to have a patriotism and really love your fellow countrymen or the people around you, it sounds like you need a nation state.

Waller Newell:

I think so. Again, not in a narrow, totally inward looking way. I think at its best, the nation state should be a window on the whole world, especially through its educational institutions. But I still think at the end of the day, you can’t be loyal to the globe. I think that you have to be loyal to a particular society with its own traditions.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned Tocqueville in this section on patriotism or love of country as providing some insights, maybe particularly for Americans on what healthy patriotism looks like. What can we learn from Tocqueville?

Waller Newell:

Well, I think Tocqueville shared the concern that Rousseau had originally expressed that the problem with modern democratization and the spread of modern economic prosperity would be that it might undermine the individual’s feeling of obligation to participate in civic life and just fall back on endless material pleasures. So I think Tocqueville was trying to find tendencies in America as he experienced it, that would somehow slow down or halt that process of total economic homogenization. And so he praised local self-government, the different states, the local townships that these were, in a way, incubators of citizenship in the more old fashioned sense, where your citizenship is primarily about a local community.

Brett McKay:

So anything that men can do to develop a virtuous patriotism today,

Waller Newell:

Again, I think it’s a matter of somehow being exposed or finding a way of being exposed to this pedigree of writings about the virtues and about the manly virtues, the traditional meaning of manly virtue. There are books available on this as to how one finds that in one’s own formal educational experience. While there are of course, places like the University of Austin, the University of Texas at Austin, where they are attempting to create institutes that combine liberal education with civics education. And so I think there is hope for the future here. Clemson College is another, Mercer Colleges another. These programs are beginning to spring up where you combine an interest in the canon of the great books with an interest in what you might call applied citizenship, the history of civics, and the need to know something about the founding principles of your regime. So I guess the most promising thing on the horizon would be that those institutions continue to proliferate and offer an alternative to the more conventional educational approach.

Brett McKay:

And I think another thing too is to just start practicing noble patriotism. Like I said earlier, just get involved in your community. Start small. Tocqueville talked about this. Just get involved with your kids’ school. Get involved with the booster club of your kids’ sports teams, because it’s where you learn how to work with other people. You learn how to deal with the frustrations of dealing with other people. They’re like these sort of little laboratories of democracy, and maybe that leads to getting involved in higher levels of governance, but you got to start small. You got to start somewhere.

Waller Newell:

I think that’s especially true of education. I mean, I know a lot of teachers, and I think sometimes we tend to put everything on them or expect them to do everything as far as educating their children, but they can’t assume sole responsibility for that. Most of them are very conscientious in my experience. But the parents really do need to be in the driver’s seat about guiding their children in cooperation with their teachers through school.

Brett McKay:

So after decades of studying and writing about manliness and thinking about it, is there one particular lesson from that tradition that has most shaped your life?

Waller Newell:

I would say that I’m not pessimistic about the future of manliness, if that’s an answer, because in my view, human nature does not change. And the yearning of young men for a satisfying way of living does not go away. If anything, I think it’s possibly intensifying at the present time. So I guess what I’ve learned is to be hopeful and to be persevering because I don’t think there are grounds for despair.

Brett McKay:

I love that how you’re not pessimistic, because there’s a lot of pessimism today about masculinity, and I think what we need more of is some thumotic optimism about masculinity or manhood.

Waller Newell:

Yes, I do too. I mean, Theo certainly has a rule in civic spiritedness, and we shouldn’t be afraid to display that.

Brett McKay:

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

Waller Newell:

I’ve had a great time as far as your question goes. The best place would be my website, which is www.wallernewell.com, all lowercase. That’s basically got links to all of my books, reviews of my books, my own publications, my whole cv. So if anyone wants to know more about me and what I do, that would be the place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Waller Newell, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Waller Newell:

Thanks very much, Brett. I really enjoyed it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Waller Newell, he’s the author of the book, The Code of Man. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, wallernewell.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/codeofman, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives and sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,087: Why You Need the Good Stress of Socializing https://www.artofmanliness.com/people/social-skills/podcast-1087-why-you-need-the-good-stress-of-socializing/ Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:38:50 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190976   You may have heard of hormesis — the idea that intentionally embracing small stressors activates the body’s repair and defense systems, building resilience, improving how the body and even the microbiome function, and ultimately protecting against the harms of chronic stress. We typically think of these hormetic stressors in terms of things like exercising, […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

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Book cover for "The Social Biome" by Andy J. Merolla and Jeffrey A. Hall, with colorful text on a dark background and the subtitle "How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us"—exploring how socializing can ease stress in our daily lives.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

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

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

So how can we socially exercise?

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

Me neither.

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.

Jeffrey Hall:

You got it.

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

That’s awesome.

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

Do it anyway.

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

]]> Podcast #1,086: Build Muscle Without the B.S. — A Straightforward Guide to Size and Strength https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/fitness/podcast-1086-build-muscle-without-the-b-s-a-straightforward-guide-to-size-and-strength/ Tue, 23 Sep 2025 13:15:27 +0000 https://www.artofmanliness.com/?p=190784   Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works. Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a […]

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong, and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works.

Today on the show, Paul Horn offers a grounded, field-tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular — without burning out. Paul is a strength coach and the author of Radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why Paul modified the classic Starting Strength program, the strength benchmarks men should be able to hit, when to shift from powerlifting to bodybuilding-style training, why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape, the body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life, and more.

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Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Whether you’ve never stepped foot in a weight room, or you’ve been lifting for years without seeing significant results, figuring out how to get big, strong and jacked can feel overwhelming. There are endless programs, conflicting opinions, and a lot of noise about what actually works today on the show. Paul Horn offers a grounded field tested take on what really helps average guys get stronger and more muscular without burning out. Paul’s a strength coach and the author of radically Simple strength and radically Simple Muscle. We discuss why you need to get strong before you get shredded, how and why. Paul modified the classic Starting strength program. The strength benchmarks men should be able to hit when to shift from power lifting to bodybuilding style training. Why you should train your lower body like a powerlifter and your upper body like a bodybuilder, the physique signal that shows you’re in shape. The body fat percentage every man should get down to at least once in his life and more after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle.

All right, Paul Horn, welcome to the show.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you are a barbell coach. We’ve met at a Starting Strength conference a long, long time ago. You’ve actually helped me with some, when I was doing the low bar squat, I was having some issues with shoulder tightness getting under the bar, and you were very kind to give me a tutorial on a stretch on how to make that happen. 

Paul Horn:

For myself, that is my biggest contribution to the literature. I figured out a shoulder stretch and made a YouTube video, and to this day it’s my most popular YouTube video I’ve ever put up. 

Brett McKay:

It’s important information. Well, let’s talk about your background a bit. You’ve been training for decades and you’ve been a coach for a long time too. How did you get started with barbell training? What were you doing before that? When did you decide I got to pick up the iron?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, I was wasting a lot of time in the gym. Most young guys are when they start lifting. The short version is I was a vegan in college and I’m six one. I weighed about 160 pounds and I was a camp counselor and some of the other coaches were older and kind of bros and thought, we’re going to take you to the gym and try and bulk you up a little bit. And I went and absolutely loved it. Got hooked on the training, but my muscles were seizing up. I was cramping a lot and my buddy in his bro frat boy wisdom was like, Hey man, I think maybe you need some protein.

And so it went from being a vegan to eating tuna fish and then chicken and then full carnivore now. And so that was great. Towards the end of college I had bulked up quite a bit and just again, doing bro workouts and things that you find on the old bodybuilding.com and T Nation and all the websites that we used to go to. And then I got hurt and I ended up having my first shoulder surgery from bench pressing. So I was out for three months for the first time since I had started lifting. And I thought I should try and figure out why that happened and maybe if there’s a right way to bench press because when you’re a college guy and you’re just screwing around in the gym, you just look at what the other bigger guys are doing and copy them and they don’t know what they’re doing.

So in that hiatus, I stumbled across this book called Starting Strength. And since I couldn’t lift, I just read about lifting and it was, as you know, the best book on how to do the basic barbell lifts and why you should do them that I’ve ever read. And it blew me away. I was like, I’ve never heard it explained this clearly. So I went back to my college gym after I recovered from surgery and I started doing the Starting Strength program. And this was a time when the gym had one squat rack and no one was ever in it and no one had seen a pair of weightlifting shoes, belts were Velcro and nylon. And I just started doing this thing where you squat three times a week, which was crazy. We’d squatted maybe if we squatted, it was like once a week and you did seven other leg exercises.

And so I started doing this simple starting strength program and all of my gym buddies were like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You’re squatting three days a week. And I was like, I don’t know, this crazy guy in Texas told me that I should do this. And within about three months I was probably one of the strongest guys in the gym, which wasn’t saying much at the time. But then people started asking, okay, what is this program? What are you doing? Started asking me questions about lifting shoes and technique, and then I got really into it and my girlfriend at the time as a gift sent me to the Starting Strengths seminar in Wichita Falls just to, I just wanted to meet Rippetoe and he was like my hero. I had been reading all of his books. And so I went to that and back at that, in those days, they just kind of pulled you aside and said, we think that you should take the test for coaching.

We’ve been watching you and we think you might be a good coach and do you want to take this coaching certification test? Which was a very difficult test, but I thought, yeah, sure, what the hell? And ended up passing, I was one of two guys from that group that passed and came back to LA and thought, well, that was cool. And they emailed me and said, your name’s going on a coaching registry. I was like, okay, whatever. And I went back to my, at that time I was working a marketing job for a tech company and then within about a month I started getting emails. The book started gaining more popularity. People were buying it on Amazon, seeing how dense and technical it was, and then going to the coaching registry. And I was the only starting strength coach in Los Angeles. And so I just would get these emails all day like, Hey, I see you’re a coach.

Can you help me out? Can you help me out? And I’m like, I mean, I’m not really a coach, but I know a little more than you do. And so it just became so frequent that I asked my wife then at the time, if I could convert the garage into a personal training studio a little put two racks in there. And I just started training people before and after work and it just kept growing. And within about a year of that, I quit my job and opened up Horn Strength and Conditioning, which was the first starting Strength affiliate gym on the West coast. And it just blew up from there. I ran that gym for about eight years and then the pandemic happened, and the rest of the story is me moving to Idaho and all that stuff, but that’s my little bio.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, you’re starting Strength Coach, and while you’re coaching, of course you continued to train. You did some competitions, some amateur stuff, I believe.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I was what we would call a recreational power lifter.

Brett McKay:

Recreational power lifter. So you’re doing the main lifts and then you talk about in your books we’re going to talk about today, it’s radically simple muscle and radically simple strength. You reached a point with your training journey as people say, where you started shifting goals for a long time, and I had the same sort of thing. It was just chasing numbers. How much more can I squat? How much more can I deadlift? And then you reached a point it’s like, man, this isn’t doing it for me anymore. And you kind of became a bodybuilder. Tell us about that.

Paul Horn:

I mean, that is, in my experience, the evolution of most lifters. Most guys get into it, they want to get laid and they want to look good with their shirt off and they just want muscles. And then a lot of it had to do with changing trends. CrossFit came out around this time at the same time starting Strength came out and there was this push away from machines and bro splits to like, Hey man, how much can you deadlift? And it became a thing. Strength training became real popular. And so a lot of us got into it and realized that, oh, this is now I have a real goal. It’s like a tangible concrete number, and it keeps going up. If I keep training and maybe you do a power lifting competition and you’re like, who cares about how big my arms are? How much can you squat?

But then there’s this point where when you start strength training as a novice, it’s fun. Every time you go to the gym, you put more weight on the bar and the stronger you get, the harder it becomes to put more weight on the bar. And so you reach this point where you’re like, you know what? I am not really enjoying this. What it would take for me to put two and a half more pounds on my press, it might not be worth it. And who cares? It’s two and a half pounds. It’s not a motivating training goal anymore. On top of that, again, as you may have experienced, most of us who were pursuing the strength thing got fat and we got hurt. 

So you get older and the weights are heavier, they’re beating the crap out of you, and it’s not fun. And you put on all this body weight, everyone’s telling you, you got to weigh 275, and you just don’t feel good. You don’t feel like you look good, you’re hurting and you’re like, what am I doing? And we all seem to have the same epiphany around that moment in your training journey, as you said, where you look at the machines and the Hammer strength bench presses and the lap pull downs and the cable and you’re like, those look pretty fun.

Maybe I should mix it up a little bit. And then you sort of move back into bodybuilding. And if you look at the history of the trend in fitness culture, that’s how it went. The nineties was all about the bodybuilding, and then the two thousands was CrossFit and strength training and starting strength. And then everybody started shifting back to a little bit more bodybuilding. And now if you go on fitness Twitter, it’s just threads of guys posting, no one’s doing a squat at all anymore. It’s all leg extensions and rows and isolation work. And so I like to, I think what I landed on with my books and what works for me now as an older lifter is a mix of hypertrophy, training, bodybuilding stuff, but you still, there’s a part of me deep, it’s an intrinsic thing of I still have to squat and deadlift. It’s not a real workout. You’re not on a real program unless at least once a week you’re getting under the bar and picking something heavy up off the ground. So I assume that your fitness journey was very similar to that.

Brett McKay:

Very similar. So back in the 2010s I got really into barbell training, Starting Strength, did recreational competitions like yourself and just chasing numbers. And it was great. It was fun. It gave me direction. I enjoyed it. But yeah, I reached this point. It was probably 2021, 2022 where I just started hurting. It was like tendon stuff. It was just like the tendons, it’s just really hard, the tendons. And then I was just looking haggard and I was fat. And my wife, I remember she looked at me, she’s like, what’s the point of this? You’re like, Sisyphus just pushing up that boulder. You just go down to the garage gym and just go up and down. That’s all you do.

Paul Horn:

You come in and you tell your wife like, honey, I pulled 505 today. And she’s like, okay, is that good? You’re fat.

Brett McKay:

Right? And I was just tired and beat up. And then also I just started not enjoying lifting. As you said, once you get really strong, there’s diminishing returns on your training. It just takes a lot more effort to just add five pounds to the bar.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, the commitment, it is just you have to say, is it worth it? Okay, my last squat PR was 465. I went on vacation, I got sick. I’m at 405 now. Do I want to do what it takes to get to 470? Is that going to be fun? And a lot of times it’s not. And that’s okay. We hammered people so hard back in the day on, the only thing that matters is the number on the bar. It doesn’t matter how fat you are, it doesn’t matter if you’re having fun. It just matters that you put five more pounds on that bar. And I can tell you what changed my mind was owning a gym and relying on paying clients to keep coming back and paying me. And you lose a lot of clients if you’re like, look, I don’t care about your goals because my goal for you is that you lift more weight. And they’re like, great, I’m going to go to someone else. So yeah, it’s a balance. And that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So what I hope we can do this conversation is talk about your philosophy towards strength training and then muscle building. It seems like you’ve landed in a nice happy medium. That’s kind where I’ve landed as well with my training. And I think this conversation will be useful for people who maybe have been lifting for a long time doing the barbell lifts, but I really hope we can get these guys who haven’t started strength training or weightlifting at all and get them into it. Because what you talk about in your books, it’s all about your goal with your clients is getting a little bit stronger, getting a little bit more jacked, more muscle, and then leaning out. And that is possible with barbells, along with some hypertrophy stuff, some bodybuilding stuff with a few dumbbells and a few machine exercise. And I’m going to talk about that. Let’s talk about for the rank beginner, when someone comes to you and they’re like, I want to get strong. I want to start strength training, I’ve never really done it before. I might’ve messed around with some program that I saw. People don’t read muscle magazines anymore on Instagram. What are the common misconceptions guys have about strength and muscle building when they first start working with you?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, well, there’s a couple. One is that, I mean, I tell them all the time, you are not going to look like you take steroids unless you take steroids. I mean, I don’t care how good you are at this. There is a difference between the guys. The Instagram influencers, like you said, are back in our day, it was the guys on the covers of the magazines and the bodybuilders drugs work. And there’s a reason that those guys are on the cover of that magazine. So one of the misconceptions is like, oh, I just have to lift some weights and I’m just going to be 250 pounds at 4% body fat. It’s like, it’s not going to happen. So there is that layer of misconception, but I think the big one, the practical one that most guys have to accept and they’re going to learn it one way or the other, is that you can’t get big and strong and lean at the same time.

You have to do them in order. And if you’re not big and strong yet, you got to get big and strong first. You have to build a foundation so that when you go into a fat loss phase, you actually have something to show off. And so many times I’ll get a young guy who’s a buck 50 and he’s talking to me about wanting to cut and wanting to see his abs. And I was like, and it’s just like, dude, you’re going to look like you’re sick if you cut anything off of your frame right now, you don’t have any muscle mass, so you have to spend a period of time, I use the word bulking cautiously because you can definitely get too fat and you don’t have to do that, but you do have to get bigger in order to get stronger. And that comes with a little bit of body fat hopefully.

And if you do it, you can skew it. So most of every new pound you put on is muscle. And so you still look bigger, you don’t look fat because you’re kind of filling out your frame. And then after you’ve spent a year, two years maybe working on your form, learning how to lift, adding muscle mass, all that stuff, then you’ve sort of earned the right to cut. You’ve earned the right to say, okay, I’ve hit some benchmarks with barbell training and I’ve put in my time and now I feel like I’m getting a little chubby and I want to spend six months trying to take as much fat off as I can while preserving the muscle mass. And that understanding the order and the importance of the order is like that’s the number one thing that most guys who haven’t done it think they can do it all at the same time and it never works. So they either figure that out or they never make any progress. They just kind of don’t look really jacked and they don’t look really lean and they’re not very strong.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine too, I had to learn this. That stuff takes time. You can’t expect this stuff to happen in less than a year, do the putting on mass and then cutting. I mean, you can make significant gains if you’re first starting out with your strength and your muscle mass, but really the secret sauce to getting stronger, getting more jacked, it takes time. You’re not going to see instant results after you after your first couple sessions.

Paul Horn:

No, it does take time. You’re literally building tissue. It’s a biological process that it does take time. The cool part is it’s persistent. And as you add on those layers, and then with intelligent bulking and cutting strategies, the first run in both the bulking phase and the cutting phase is the longest because you want to get as much out of your novice phase as you can in terms of strength and size. And so if you’re a true novice, that can take six months a year just to run out the novice phase, maybe early intermediate phase. And then the first time you cut, especially if you’re 25, 30% body fat. And if you’re going to try and cut down to where you can see your abs, which is around 10%, you got a lot of fat to lose. So that first block, their cycle of bulking and cutting is the longest one.

But then once you get through that, the cycles get shorter because you don’t put on as much fat, so you don’t have as much fat to take off. And the cycles get more fun because, or your training overall gets more fun because you see a light at the end of the tunnel for each phase and okay, a couple more weeks of this and then I can do something different. But yeah, it’s getting people through that first phase. And I’ll tell you, in my gym, it was the end of the novice phase, usually around the six month mark where they’ve been focusing on just driving up the numbers on squats and deadlifts and presses. And at that point it starts to get hard. They start laying awake at night thinking about their next workout. It’s a grind every session. It scares the hell out of you. And if they can make it through that and keep coming and not quit and get to the intermediate phase, they’re lifters for life. But I’ve lost a lot of clients where they’re just like, I don’t dunno, man, this isn’t fun anymore. And it’s grindy and then that’s it. They go sign up for jujitsu or something and we never see ’em again.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So for someone who’s first starting out lifting, they want to get bigger, they want to get jacked, they want to get awesome, those death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:Is that a thing?

Brett McKay:

I think I’ve heard that somewhere. Death star deltoids. I think a lot of guys, that’s their goal. They’ll immediately go to sort of a bodybuilder hypertrophy program where they’re doing four day splits, six day splits where they’re working one body part a day. You take a different approach. It seems like your first priority, someone who’s first starting out is just to get generally strong in big first. So what is the best programming for that?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, I mean the idea here is we’re going to spend some time laying down a foundation. We’re going to build a foundation of just strength and size. You’re going to learn how to lift. You’re going to be doing these basic barbell lifts for your entire training career. They’re always a part of the program. You may add other stuff, but this is really what’s causing the most stress and doing the most work is squats, deadlifts, benches, presses, stuff like that. So we need to spend some time getting proficient at those lifts. You need to learn how to push yourself. You need to learn how to unrack a weight that scares you and try it anyway, and then learn that you can do things that scare you and all of that. So you need a lot of reps. You need a lot of practice time under the bar.

And so a basic linear progression where you’re just, you come in and you lift one day and then you try and beat it the next time. So it’s five pounds, it’s two and a half pounds, but the program is very boring and very repetitive. It’s just a couple lifts. And the only variable we’re manipulating is how much weight’s on the bar. So very, this is why software developers love programs like this. They get it. They can wrap their head around it. It’s like, oh, I came in. I could bench press 95 pounds. Now I can bench press 185. I guess it’s working

And we want to keep it simple. You don’t need all that stuff. You don’t need six different chest exercises and you don’t need to be in the gym six days a week. You just need a simple program where you’re getting better at the compound lifts and just driving the weight up. And so the Starting Strength Program is a fantastic beginner program, novice program. My version that I put in my book, A Radically Simple Strength, was just a modification of that program based on training real clients in the gym and needing to get them in out in an hour, keep them excited, keep them interested in training, not to beat up, not dreading their workouts. So I mean, do you want me to get into the details of my Novice program?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, let’s talk about the general programming. Let’s talk about Starting Strength first. It’s really easy to explain whenever someone comes to me like, Hey, Brett, I want to get strong and bigger and jacked. I’m like, you need to start with Starting Strength.

The reason I tell ’em that, because it’s literally, it’s the best weightlifting program for a beginner, and I’ll tell you why first, because it’s just so simple. There’s just four lifts you have to do. That’s it. It’s just deadlift, it’s squat, it’s bench press and shoulder press. You’re only going to train three times a week. Anyone can do that. And then the workouts are easy. It’s just like you’re going to squat at the beginning of your workout three times a week, and then one workout you’re going to do bench press and then the deadlift, and then the next workout you’re going to do press. And then the next work you do bench press and deadlift, and then it just kind of alternate. You alternate between the bench and the press and you’re getting a full body workout. You’re going to get really strong. And it’s just so simple. It’s fast, especially when you’re first starting out. You’re going to be in and out of the gym in 45 minutes even. I mean, I’ve got my kids doing Starting Strength. They’re like teenagers, for them the weight’s really light so they can get done in 30 minutes.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

And for a person who’s first starting out, I think one thing that keeps people from being consistent is just workouts can be too complex. They’re doing too many lifts and it just takes forever because doing seven different exercises with three sets of 10 with Starting Strength, you’re doing three exercises in your workout and it’s three sets of five. So the simplicity of it, I think is one of its virtues. And then also with the linear progressions where you’re just adding weight to the bar, incredibly motivating. I remember when I first started my novice linear progression, I was excited every workout, I was like, man, I’m going to add more weight to the bar. This is exciting. So you get that dopamine rush and that dopamine rush gets you motivated, and it just helps build that consistency for training. I was not someone who trained consistently before I started starting Strength after that. I am a guy, I am a guy who trains. Even though my training has changed, I’m doing different stuff now. Starting Strength helped establish that foundation because motivating and it’s super simple, and I think that’s really important for a beginning lifter. 

Paul Horn:

As you said, this is something that takes time. And so you need quick wins. If you’re not going to be satisfied or excited about your training until you can deadlift 4 0 5, you’re going to be miserable. But it is a long journey. And so you need those little victories, those small victories of like, Hey, you know what? Today I might not be where I want to be. I might not be at my ultimate goal, but I’m better than I was last time and I can see it. And so you’re right, you get those little daily workout victories of lifting five more pounds than you did last time are enough to keep you going. And then by the time, for me, the big shift, what got me hooked was you do it long enough and then you look in the mirror or you look at your training log and you go, damn, I just went into the gym for an hour three times a week and I picked up some heavy stuff and my physical body has changed. I mean, it gives people agency. You realize, look, I might not be where I want to be in life, but I’m not useless. I have a say in how I present myself to the world, and it’s very motivating. And if you can get the guy to that point where you have this realization that I can actually change my own reality just with work, just with effort, it’s a part of you. You’re in the brotherhood of Iron for Life. It’s very powerful.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so starting Strength, it’s three sets of five. You’re doing three workouts with these four different lifts, you’ve modified it. What is your version of sort of a novice program?

Paul Horn:

So my take on the novice program, the main difference with how Starting Strength approaches it and how I approach it just again from it was a more practical strategy for running clients through a commercial gym. And that was starting. Strength is like the novice phase is your most productive phase. You eek out every little bit of progress that you can for as long as you possibly can. No matter how hard and grueling and grindy it is, if you can press two and a half more pounds, you do it. I look at my novice phase as the way that we’re going to get you to the intermediate phase because if we can get you to the intermediate phase of training, that’s when we get more variety. That’s when things get more fun. Everything becomes less grueling. You space out your workouts, you maybe have upper and lower workouts.

So my novice phase was like, let’s just learn how to lift. Let’s get a lot of reps in a lot of practice. Let’s build a reasonable foundation of size and strength, and then let’s move on. So I do ascending sets of five instead of three sets of five. So this is an old Bill Star thing. Rather than do all your warmups, take a five minute break and then do three sets of five at the same weight with a five minute break in between each one, we just do the bar and then we do a set of five at 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%, a hundred percent done. So your warmups kind of count as sets

And it’s real fast. And is it as productive for as long as the Starting Strength novice program? Probably not because at some point those ramping sets tax you a little too much, and so you’re kind of tired for your heavyset, but it’s good enough to keep the workout really short and make a lot of really good progress and build that foundation. And it’ll take you, you’ll be able to run that for about three to six months before it kind of stops working and you have to make some modifications. But every guy I’ve switched over to that program after running the Starting Strength Program was like, God, this is so much faster. It’s just like, I like going to the gym just, and again, if that keeps you training that little modification, then great, you’re going to end up in the same place eventually down the road. So that’s really the big one is we start out squatting, benching, and deadlifting, but we’re just doing ascending sets of five.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. That makes sense. 

Paul Horn:

And then we move on in the second month of workouts, we start adding in some chin-ups and lap pull downs, so we’re not deadlifting every time. And then in the third phase of the novice program, which is like workout 25 till it stops working, I start adding in some curls and tricep extensions just because curls are awesome, guys want to curl. So by that point, I think you’ve earned the right to curl, to throw a couple sets of curls in at the end of the workout. And again, just to keep it, you give people a lot of what they need and a little of what they want and they’re happy. So that’s really the difference between my novice program and the starting strength. And again, Starting Strength is a fantastic program and it works really well. I’ve used it for decades.

Brett McKay:

And so again, the goal here is just getting bigger and stronger, putting on muscle mass, full body, the focus isn’t hypertrophy per se. There will be hypertrophy, your muscles will get bigger, but it’s not like that’s your main focus, just get bigger and stronger. 

Paul Horn:

Learning again, and learning the technique, like five sets of five ascending is that you get a lot of reps in there, you get a lot of practice, and we need that early on. And then again, it’s also learning how to grind, learning how to push yourself, and you have to learn how to do that. And so you need a lot of time under the bar and exposure to those sets that scare you towards the end of that novice phase.

Brett McKay:

For a guy that first year when they’re just starting out, they’re doing that novice phase, they’re learning the lifts, getting bigger and stronger. What are some good goals a guy could get to? What should they be going after? Are there any specific numbers you found?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, yeah. I mean the first tier of goals in my book are what we call plate goals, a 45 pound plate. So you want to be able to press 135, bench 225, squat 315, and deadlift 405. So it’s one plate, two plate, three plates, four plates, and that’s for one rep. So that’s the first benchmark that any guy can hit.

Brett McKay:

And if you do that, you’re going to be stronger than a lot of people.

Paul Horn:

Oh yeah. I mean the bar is so low, and especially now with the influencer trend away from heavy lifting and back to the machines and stuff, there was a period in probably 2010 where if you went to a gym, those numbers weren’t that impressive. And to competitive lifters, they’re not impressive. But to the average gen pop gym goer, especially these days when all the machines are coming back, if you could squat 405, you’re in the 1% of people at that gym and they’re very reasonable goals. They’re not hard to do.

Brett McKay:

And I think what it also, it makes you generally strong for life, generally strong and healthy for life. If you get those numbers, you’re not going to be beat up, you’re not going to hurt, but you’ll be able to help move your buddy on the weekend. And it’s not hard because you’re stronger.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, it’s a solid respectable foundation of strength and it’s attainable to anyone. And the thing is that, as you know, the numbers don’t matter. I don’t care if you can squat 315. I care that you’re doing a program and you’re trying to get a little better every time and you’re pushing yourself, but you do have to have a target. Guys need to have a goal because if you’re just training and you don’t have a, there’s no lighthouse you’re sailing towards, it’s hard to stay motivated. So that’s the starting point. And then once they hit those, we can either move on to what in the book, I call ’em hundo goals. So two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred. Lately what I’ve been doing is just saying, let’s take those plate goals, one plate, two plates, three plates, and let’s just, instead of your goal being to do ’em for one rep, let’s try and do ’em for five reps. So you’re going to end up you deadlift 405 for five. That’s your sort of phase two target. And then from there, there’s more goals, but most people never even get there. And that’s okay when as we talked about, start asking about more bodybuilding stuff, right?

Brett McKay:

We’re going to get to that in a second before we do. We’ll stick on this mass phase, getting generally strong, getting bigger when you’re first starting out, nutrition plays an important role. And the thing I noticed with a lot of guys that start training is they’re doing the program, but they’re not eating to fuel the gains. And what’s interesting, people have a lot of misconceptions about diet. I think people have more misconceptions about nutrition when it comes to training. Then the programming itself, because there’s just so much stuff out there. But really simply, what does a good diet plan look like when you’re in this beginning phase?

Paul Horn:

Well, the high level concepts is protein is the biggest thing. And you’re right, the hardest thing to do is not the lifting, it’s the eating because you have to eat three or four times a day every day, even if you don’t want to, especially if you’re a skinny guy, you got to eat more food than you want to. And when you get into a cutting phase, you got to eat less food than you want to. Diet is the hardest part of this whole thing. But the number one mistake guys make is they don’t eat enough protein. And it’s just if you’re not, I used to tell my guys all the time, if you’re not eating enough protein, then you are wasting your time in the gym because the protein literally builds your muscle tissue. So you’re doing all the hard work, you’re busting your ass in the gym, and then your body’s trying to rebuild, repair and add more contractile tissue, and you’re not supplying it with the bricks it needs to build.

So undereating protein and then undereating calories, if we’re talking about the novice sort of bulking phase for an underweight male lifter, they don’t eat enough food and specifically they don’t even eat enough protein. So carbs and fat, I try and keep this as simple as possible, just hit your protein goal. And at this point in my coaching career, I just tell everybody, your goal is 200 grams of protein a day more is better. If you’re 200 pound guy, fine, 220. If you’re 185 pound guy, 200’s, great. So for most guys, just hit 200 grams a day and then with those meals will come carbs and fat. And then just check your weight. If you get on the scale every morning after you go to the bathroom naked and look at the number, and if we’re in the novice phase or we’re in a bulking phase, that number needs to be going up every week.

So total it up over the course of the week. And if you’re a pound heavier than you were last week, you’re doing great. If you’re not and you go two weeks in a row, you need more food, it’s a math problem. You’re not eating enough calories. So the mistake that they make is usually it’s gaining too much weight too fast. So when you first start training, if you’ve never lifted, I always tell people in the first two, three weeks, don’t worry about the weight on the scale. Because a lot of times when a guy starts picking up a barbell, he’ll gain like 5, 10 pounds within a matter of weeks after the first month. That should start to slow down. And you want to hit an average of about a pound a week. If you’re a little fluffy coming into it, maybe you’re going to maintain depending on how much body fat you have, but if your body fat’s a little high, maybe shoot for half a pound a week while you’re trying to build this foundation of strength. But if guys, if you’re six weeks into the program and you’re gaining three pounds a week, you’re just getting fat, unnecessarily fat, and you’re going to end up getting to the end of your novice phase and thinking, well, this strength training just makes me fat. It’s like, you don’t have to do that. It’s a very, very modest amount of weight gain that you need to build that muscle tissue. Only so much muscle tissue you can build in a month, unless you’re taking drugs and it’s like two pounds of actual lean tissue. So that comes with other stuff. So at most, you’re looking at four pounds a month. Anything beyond that besides a rank, novice, underweight, 17-year-old. It’s like if you’re gaining more than four pounds a month, you’re getting fat.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, the trick is you want to gain weight, but keep fat gain to a minimum. You’re going to gain fat as you put on mass. There’s no escaping that. But the goal is make sure it leans more towards muscle tissue and less towards body fat. And I think, I know back in the day, starting strength, got a lot of flack for the goad gallon milk a day and all these guys just getting really fat and eating sheet cake.

Paul Horn:

Dude, we were so fat, we were so fat. 

Brett McKay:

You don’t need to do that. You don’t have to get fat to get big and strong. You can get slightly bigger week to week.

Paul Horn:

So my first, I looked around at, I remember being at the Starting Strength Coaches conference and looking around and we had some real strong guys there. I mean real good lifters. And Matt was one of ’em, Jordan was one of ’em. And I looked around and I thought, I’m trying to make a little niche for myself in this community, and I’m not going to be the strongest guy. In fact, someone had totaled up all the training logs on the starting strength forms and ranked all of us coaches. And I was like, my strength was dead center. I was totally like mediocre. And I thought, okay, I’m 252 pounds. I’m fat. I mean, I feel fat. I’m never going to be the strongest coach, so let me see if I can just lose, lemme see if I can get down to 10% body fat. I’ve never done it. Lemme see if I can see my abs. And so I did and it took, but I think I was the first coach in our community to do that. And I remember texting Grant Brogue, a fellow coach, and I had just hit 10% body fat, and I took a picture in the bathroom mirror and I sent it to him. I was like, I’m thinking about putting this on Instagram and it feels kind of lame. It’s a picture of me shirtless. And he just texted me back, he’s like, dude, post it. And I did. And within a matter of a year, all these other coaches and lifters started just shedding body fat. And that became starting strength. As we’ve said, it’s fantastic for lifting. It is a horrible book for nutrition unless your goal is to be a 275 pound fat lifter. 

Brett McKay:

Power lifter. Yeah,

Paul Horn:

Because a gallon of milk a day works. I’ve done it and it works, man. It’ll put weight on you real quick. But most guys, my average client is like, he doesn’t want to be a power lifter. He doesn’t want to be a bodybuilder. Just like I said, he wants to be a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger, not fat and not hurt. And so that first time through of learning how to manipulate my diet to actually get down to 10% body fat was sort of what I thought I could contribute aside from the more abbreviated novice program and stuff to fill the hole in sort of the starting strength community of like, Hey, if you guys want to really talk about strategies for getting lean, maybe I have something to offer. Done it. And then I did it a couple more times and I’ve gotten a lot better at it. 

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. So if you’re first starting out, put on some mass and if you’re underweight, make it your goal to put on one to two pounds a week maybe. And then if you’re already coming into it heavy, there’s a lot of guys who they’re starting out but they’re overweight, they’ve got a lot of fat tissue. You just reduce your calories, so you’re losing about a pound during that strength phase. If you’re bigger, you can get away with some recomposition, so you can put on some muscle mass while losing body fat at the same time. So yeah, you can get put on muscle mass while reducing body fat as well, but it’s going to be a gradual thing. You don’t want be no severe cuts where you’re reducing calories way low. You just want to lose a pound to a 0.5 pounds a week.

Paul Horn:

In my book, I sort of break the novice lifter into three categories. The underweight guy, the sort of fluffy untrained guy, and then the overweight guy. So if you’re coming in and you’re just a rail, you have a high metabolism, you’re a skinny dude for the novice phase, for the first couple months of the program, your goal should be to gain 20 pounds. And then if you’re kind of in the middle, maybe it’s gained 10 pounds, slow it down, go half a pound a week instead of a pound a week. And then if you’re coming in carrying a lot of body fat, what I say is just maintain, don’t try and gain weight. And because you will be able to recompose, so the only time you can add muscle and loose fat at the same time, there’s three scenarios. You are a brand new lifter, you’re already carrying a lot of body fat or you’re taking drugs.

So outside of those three states, you’re doing one or the other, you’re building muscle or you’re losing body fat. But so yes, for the guys who are coming in who have a high body fat percentage, just eat enough to kind of maintain, if the scale goes down a little bit, that’s okay. If it stays the same, that’s okay because if your weight stays the same but you put a hundred pounds on your deadlift, you obviously gained muscle and lost fat. And that happens all the time. Every time I have my guys do body scans at the beginning, like body composition scans at the beginning of their training when we start and maybe at the six month mark and so many guys are able to just recompose and it’s amazing and then it goes away.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you got to do something different. Alright, so we’ve been talking about just getting for first guy, starting out, you’re going to do the basic barbell lifts, squat, bench, deadlifts, shoulder press. You’re going to work out three times a week. You’ve got your version of what a linear progression looks like, sending sets of five on the lifts, and the goal is to add weight each workout. Let’s say you’ve been doing this for a while, and then you have to kind of modify your programs. You can keep driving weight at the bar. Let’s say a client reaches the point is like, you know what, Paul, I’m happy with how strong I am. I’m generally strong. I can deadlift 4 0 5, I can squat three 15. I’m not going to do any recreational power lifting meets. I want to start getting jacked. I want to get those death star deltoids. What does your programming look like for these guys? Because it sounds like you’re going to keep doing these barbell lists, but you’re going to add in some other stuff. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so like I said, the intermediate program is where things get more fun. There’s more variety and it’s less grueling. You have hard workouts, but you’re not squatting heavy, benching heavy and lifting heavy in the same workout. So my go-to intermediate program in the book, it’s called the Intermediate B program, and it’s four workouts and I have my guys run ’em over a three day week. We’re staying consistent with the three day training schedule that they’re used to, but we move from full body to upper lower splits. Now on Monday you’re going to bench press and then you’ll do a light overhead press, and then you’ll do some arm work, tricep extensions. On Wednesday you’re going to squat and deadlift. So I have you squatting heavy and deadlifting light, and then some chin-ups or something. And then the Friday you’ll flip Monday’s workout. So you’re going to press heavy and bench light and then do some curls and bro stuff just for fun.

And then the following Monday, so the fourth workout would be deadlifting heavy and squatting light. So it’s upper, lower, upper, and then the next week is lower, upper, lower. So you have one hard week where you have two lower body workouts, and then you have one easy week where you have two upper body workouts and one lower body workout. And so we’re spreading out the frequency. You’re not hammering yourself all the time. And the beauty of that is it’s flexible. So with upper lower splits, you can train two days in a row. You don’t need a day off in between upper and lower, which is nice. It’s a lot more flexible that way. And then the other thing I start incorporating, and this is where I sort of branch off from starting strength, but it’s something that I am very passionate about, is introducing rep ranges.

So before when you were a novice lifter, it was like, no, you get five reps. Your goal is five reps. If you don’t get five reps, you failed. Okay? And that’s okay. We all fail. You’re going to fail, but you have that target and you need to push yourself really hard. If you want to add more weight next time you got to get that fifth rep. When we get into the intermediate phase, I like to pump the brakes a little bit on the intensity of the live and die by the fifth rep mentality because guys are burnt out by that. And it’s like you don’t want to hate your workout. You work all day, your boss is yelling at you, your kids are running around screaming, you go to the gym and then you get four reps instead of five, and you’re like, can I do anything?

Right? It’s demoralizing. And so the rep range, what we’ll say is, for example, you’re going to squat. So you’re going to go in and you’re going to warm up, and then you’re going to do one set of squats and the rep range is three to five reps. So you have a minimum and a max, your goal is five. But hey, look, today, if you only have three or four, that’s okay. You’re in the range, you still had a good workout. The next time you just try again. What you’ll find is we all have bad days. Doesn’t mean your training isn’t working, doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. Maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, whatever. But you walk out of the gym going, look, at least I got three, so that’s okay. And the mental shift of taking that pressure off, it’s like one of the things I get emailed about most when guys switch from the Texas method where it’s like five sets of five rigid to this flexibility, it’s a mental, it takes a lot of pressure off and it keeps them really enjoying their training more and pushing.

If I tell you like, Hey man, let’s see what you got. Maybe you only have three today. That’s okay. A lot of times guys will, when they know that that pressure’s off, they’ll push themselves harder for five. It’s a surprising psychological thing. So we work up, you do one set of three to five, and then we do a back off set. So instead of doing sets across, we’re going to do one heavy set and then we’re going to take some weight off about 15%. And then you do another set for if it’s the squat, it might be five reps or five to eight reps or something like that. But if it’s the upper body stuff, maybe you push for as many reps as you can, but that other shift of you have one hard set, okay, you’re going to warm up and you have one hard thing to do today, especially on those lower body days where it’s like the deadlift.

Okay, look dude, you got one set of three to five today, and then after that we’re going to pull a little weight off and then you squat light, everything gets easier. And so just giving guys that everybody can do one hard thing. I don’t care how tired you are, I don’t care. Can you just get it together to do this one hard set? And then you move on. And those two things, the rep ranges and the one hard set, and then a back set is what I’ve found kept my clients and my current clients training with me. They’re not constantly failing.

Brett McKay:

So you’re going to shift to a four day split. That means you’re going to train upper body one day, lower body, upper body and lower body, something you’ve set in radically simple muscle. If your goal hypertrophy is like we’re not just working on getting generally big and strong, we’re actually going to do some bodybuilder stuff. You talk about your philosophy is train your lower body like a powerlifter and train your upper body like a bodybuilder. What does that look like?

Paul Horn:

So we’re talking about a trainee who’s gotten to the point, like we said, where they’ve established that foundation of strength, so they’re moving heavy weight. So these workouts can be stressful and a lot of them are like, okay, I did the boring workouts, I built this foundation. I’m strong and I want to mix it up. I’m feeling beat up. I’ve accumulated some injuries. And so the radically simple muscle program, which was just supposed to be A PDF, but ended up turning into my second book, I have guys shift to, especially if their goal is now like aesthetics. I’ve got this mass that I’ve built, but now I want to kind of shape it. So training your upper body like a bodybuilder and your lower body like a power lifter. There’s a number of reasons for that. One of them is exercise variety. So bodybuilding typically uses lots of different exercises, isolation movements, and that’s primarily because your upper body muscles can be segmented into basically pushers and pulls.

You’ve got your lats and your pecs and they do opposite things. So if you do a bunch of seated cable rows that doesn’t build your chest, you have to do some type of pressing variation, and those presses don’t really build your back and the upper body demands that there’s a reason for it. If we contrast that to the lower body, you can think of hamstrings and quads as pushers or pulls and pushers, but they’re both covered by the squat and the deadlift. Both of those functions happen in both of those lifts. So let’s just squat and deadlift. I don’t want to do seven leg exercises when squats and deadlifts work everything all at the same time versus, like I said, I can’t just have you curl because it’s not going to train your triceps. So that’s one part of it. The other part of it is aesthetics. When you size a guy up and we all do it, you see a guy and he’s like, that guy’s jacked. You’re looking at his upper body, right? You’re looking at those landmarks, those desirable aesthetic features, cap shoulders, a vein in the bicep, things like that. Okay, that shaping that is a bodybuilding. If you just focus on overhead presses, I promise you, you will not have shoulders. Would you say death star?

Brett McKay:

Death star deltoids.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. I mean, my shoulders never looked worse than when I was just pressing 200 pounds over my head. It just didn’t fill out the deltoids the way that something like very light lateral raises do. So there’s a bunch of different examples of that with the upper body. You need to do some curls. Chin ups are great, but curls, tricep stuff, it makes those muscles pop. And that’s what we want when we talk about an aesthetic physique versus the lower body. Unless you’re walking around with your pants off, your lower body just needs to be big, right? You need to have big legs and a big butt. And you could do that with just squats and deadlifts. So again, that will just squat and deadlift for the lower body and we’ll spend some time doing bodybuilding stuff for the upper body. And then finally it comes down to high reps versus low reps.

Bodybuilders use high reps. Traditionally power lifters use low reps. Your upper body joints are much smaller and much more sensitive. They don’t have as much structural integrity as the lower body. If you think about your hip joint, it’s like a sturdy ball and socket, your G glenohumeral joint in the shoulder. It’s like a shallow cup. And I’ve had three shoulder surgery, so I can tell you that is a very unstable joint, just banging out, grinding out heavy triples with bench presses and stuff like that, your wrists are going to hurt. Your upper body joints are not as tolerant of heavy weights as your lower body where you have more sturdy joints and a lot more muscle mass helping move the weight. So when you get into that phase of like, do I really care? Am I a powerlifter or do I just want to look good and feel good? Then maybe you spend some time bumping up the rep range in the upper body, taking the stress off a little bit with loads that are less likely to sort of fall out of the groove and end up tweaking something. And then the lower body, I dunno about you, I do not want to do high rep deadlifts.

Brett McKay:

No, that’s not fun. 

Paul Horn:

They’re miserable and you don’t have to, could just do a set of five, a set of three. So squatting sets of eight is just, I mean it’s brutal and I use it sometimes for cardio development, but ultimately I have a hard time counting past five for lower body stuff. So that’s the philosophy is we’ll do the bodybuilder stuff for the upper body. It works better for the requirements and the demands of that and the lower body, we just take care of by training like a powerlifter. And at that point in my training, one of the biggest shifts that I’ve made is squatting and deadlifting heavy every other week, which I thought would be counterproductive, but it’s actually been, I mean, my lips have never been better with only squatting heavier every 14 days, but you’ve got to get to the point where you can make that work and we can talk about that another time. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I mean, it’s interesting. My programming has kind shifted to that train your lower body, like a powerlifter upper body, like a bodybuilder. So my current split that Matt Reynolds has me on, it’s Monday is a lower body day, and I start off with a heavy set of deadlifts, and then I do accessory work after that for the quads. So I’ve got a leg extension machine in my garage gym. So I do some leg, not high rep, it’s like 10 reps, but going on heavy, do some calf raises, and then my upper body day on Tuesday, I start off with heavy bench press, just typical bench press workout. And then after that I’m just doing bodybuilder stuff. So I’ll do some shoulder work. So I do shoulder dumbbell presses, maybe some lateral raises. So the assessor work is more shoulder heavy. And then I’ll throw in the curls, tricep extensions, lap pull down, and then Thursdays is my next lower body day. I’m squatting, I got my first lifts to the squat. Then after that I do assessor work for the hamstrings. So I’m doing a RDL, and then I’ll do some leg curls for the hamstrings. And then Friday it’s upper body start off with the press. So I’m doing barbell press and I’m not doing a lot of sets. I do one heavy set and then two back off sets that are as many reps as possible. And then my bodybuilder stuff, it’s more chest focused, so I’m doing an incline dumbbell bench press,

And then some cable flies or maybe some dumbbell flies, and then I’m doing a curl. 

Paul Horn:

Great exercise. 

Brett McKay:

Then a curl variation, and then another tricep exercise variation and then a row for the back, just get a different, and that’s it. And yeah, my lower body days are fast because really there’s not much there. The upper body days take a little bit longer because like you said, you can do a little bit more variety on the upper body.

Paul Horn:

I’ll have to send you my, so at the end of, I added a program after radically simple muscle came out because I did an experiment. I was at a point with my training that I was just, I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time. As my buddy says, my training partner, he says, man, I hate training. I just hate not training more that feeling when you haven’t worked, but it’s like training just got after decades, just I just hate it. So I was like, how can I make this fun? Let me try something. And so I decided to see how little I could get away with. So I just picked a couple bang for your buck exercises. I think I did a bench press, a row, a squat, a deadlift, a pull up, overhead press, curl lateral. I just one exercise for each thing. And then I just started doing one set and I was like, I’m going to try and hit eight reps. If I hit eight, that’s it. I’m done for the day with that exercise.

Then my rule was if I don’t hit eight, two workouts in a row, then I’ll do a second set. I’ll do a back off set. I’ll go in thinking one set, and it worked for a couple weeks. It was like, I’m getting eight every time it’s going up. This is great. And then I’d stick for two weeks. And so I’d do a back off set, and then the week after that it would move and so cut the back off set. And so I’m just literally, the workouts are like 30 minutes. It’s one set, and man, I’m having a great time in the gym again. 

Again, it’s that mental thing of like, look, I’m only doing one set, so I got to make it work. But that type of program, and I always tell guys who email me about the book, the reason that it works is because I’ve put in the time to figure, to learn how to grind, to learn how to really push yourself, and it just takes time to understand what you’re capable of, that you have a lot more in you than you think. But if you’re a novice lifter, you don’t know how to push. So one set isn’t going to work because that one set isn’t going to be very stressful. But if you get to the point that you’re at where I’ve seen your deadlifts and stuff like that, and you’re like, look, Brett, you have one set, that’s it. That will be a very stressful set for your body. And it was totally an experiment. I put up a YouTube video about my new training experiment, and I’m never going back. It’s so fun. And the programming is so simple. Programming people make programming so complicated. It’s like, look, here’s the weight. Did you get all the reps you were supposed to? Great go up. Next time you didn’t. Okay, well, you need to add a little bit more stress. Then do a second set. Did it go up next time? Good. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, no. Okay. So once you get to that point where you’re working, hypertrophy, workouts can become a lot of fun and it can also become really fast. Sounds like you’re kind of doing some Mike Metzner heavy duty type stuff there with the one rep or one set workouts with the exercises. I’m curious, guys, if their goals now physique at this point in their training when you’re lifting for strength, the goals are pretty easy. It’s like, well, if I just get more weight. If you’re working on physique, what are some good physique goals or benchmarks to hit for the average dude.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, so there’s two in my book, I talk about getting your bicep vein, getting arm vein lean.

Everybody always talks about abs, but you’re walking around with a shirt on most of the time, but you see a dude at the coffee shop and he’s got a big snake running down his bicep. You know that guy’s in good shape. It’s cool. So I much prefer that metric, and that’s just reaching a certain level of body fat. So numbers wise, I always tell guys that your first goal when you cut is 10%. You want to get down to 10% body fat. You should get down to 10% body fat once in your life to figure out how to do it right, because hard, I mean, for some guys, they walk around at 8% body fat, whatever. I hate you, not me, it’s not you. Most of us are very happy. Our bodies are very happy to not be 10% body fat. So you cut down to 10% and that’s usually where you can see your abs and your lean, but you’re going to look kind of skinny with your clothes on. You look pretty ripped at the beach, but once you get down there, now when you bulk back up, you’re going to skew more towards muscle gain than fat gain because the nutrient partitioning changes once you get that lean. So your body, it’s much easier to put on muscle and not as much fat once you strip it off. So the first goal is 10%, and then once you get sick of restricting of being miserable and dieting for that long, because getting to 15% is not hard, but as you start getting close to 10, your brain starts messing with you. So that last 3% is can be brutal. Of course, now we have these miracle GLP drugs that just make this whole process super easy. But yeah, my goal is you get down to 10% body fat, you can see the veins in your arms. That’s a good measure and pay attention to when that comes, mind pops up around 13%.

So that’s kind of my gauge. Do DEXA scans. So you want to get good at understanding your visual cues of your level of leanness, and then you’re tired of that. You want to go back, start moving weight again, setting prs, bulking back up. So we’re going to bulk back up until we hit 15%. That’s sort of my cap. Of course, I’m saying that to you right now at like 18% because I have not been taking my own advice, but traditionally you want to just cycle between 10 and 15%. That’s my approach to this. 15. You still look good. You still look athletic. You could still see maybe your top abs and it’s a healthy athletic physique. You’ll look good with a shirt on. You’ll look like a big dude. And then every so often you got a vacation coming up or a high school reunion or something. Maybe you use that as motivation to try and cut back down to 10 or 12% or something like that. And then you just keep cycling as you want to. But hitting that first 10 is hitting those first barbell goals, those tier one goals.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I did a pretty big cut in 2023.

Paul Horn:

How lean? Did you get to 10?

Brett McKay:

I don’t think I got to 10. I probably got down to 11.

Paul Horn:

Okay. It’s fun, right? Yeah,

Brett McKay:

No, it was awful. It was terrible. And then after that, I’ve just been bouncing back between, I’ve been hanging around like 15 to 12 is where I’ve been hanging out at.

Paul Horn:

That’s great. That’s great.

Brett McKay:

It seems to work for me. And the physique part, you got to to keep training hard because you want to maintain muscle mass, but a lot of it’s just nutrition. It’s just learning how to learn to reduce calories and be okay with being hungry and things like that. But again, it’s a skill that you develop and once you develop it, it’s pretty easy.

Paul Horn:

Yeah. You learn how to deal with the cravings, that you don’t eliminate foods, you replace them if you have a, I mean, have a habit of having a cocktail at the end of the night. It’s like you don’t just try and sit on the couch and stare at the wall, get a sparkling water and put lime juice in it and make it, there’s little psychological hacks for that last part, but man, yeah, it, it’s no fun. Your training, a big misconception guys have is, well, if I’m cutting then I’m going to get weaker. That is not true. I find that most guys can hang on to their strength in the gym. I mean, at least maintain. I’ve had plenty of guys set PRS during a cut, but it’s usually once it gets below 15%, 14, 13, then all of a sudden your strength just falls off a cliff and you feel like you’re a hundred years old and then you just got to ride it out and do the best you can to finish the cut and then get back to eating like a normal human.

Brett McKay:

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

Paul Horn:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun. I’m glad we got to reconnect. Everything is on horn strength.com. That’s my website, and you can find links to books and all my stuff there. 

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Paul Horn, thanks for time’s. Been a pleasure.

Paul Horn:

Yeah, same. Thanks for doing what you do, man. I appreciate it.

Brett McKay:

My guest today is Paul Horn. He’s the author of the book’s, radically Simple Strength and Radically Simple Muscle, both available on amazon.com. Check out it website@hornstrength.com and also check out our show notes at aom.is/SimpleMuscle. Find links to resources we candel deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. Find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for a free newsletter. We have a daily option and a weekly option. They’re free. The best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. Take one minute to give 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 was something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support. Until next time this is Brett McKay. And remember, don’t just listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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