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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

A few months ago, psychologist Jean Twenge released 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. Twenge has spent decades studying generational shifts in behavior (check out the podcast we did with her about differences between generations), and her message with this book is simple: today’s kids are growing up in a world of constant connection — smartphones, social media, gaming — and it’s not going well for them. For nearly a decade, she’s been sounding the alarm about what increased time on screens is doing to kids. Depression, anxiety, and sleep issues have all climbed, while dating, hanging out with friends, and even driving have decreased as screen time has gone up.

Her book offers a practical roadmap for parents on how to raise kids in today’s digital environment. What I like about her advice is that it’s realistic. She doesn’t pretend that we can go back to 1988 when kids just had access to a television and a landline. She shows parents how they can help their kids use technology without it using them.

Below are rules inspired by Twenge’s book, along with how Kate and I have tried to apply them in our own home.

1. You’re in Charge

Twenge’s first rule is the foundation for all the others: parents — not kids, not peers, not tech companies — set the terms for how technology enters the home. Don’t default to giving your kid a screen just because everyone else is.

Our kids have been using iPads since they were little, but we’ve always set clear boundaries and rules regarding what apps they could use, how long they could be on the devices, etc. We didn’t just hand them a screen and say, “Have at it!” From day one, we’ve made it clear that using a device is a privilege, not a right. When you start from that assumption, the rest follows naturally.

2. Delay Smartphones and Social Media

If Twenge had her way, no kid would get a smartphone before mid-high school. Her research shows that the later a child gets one, the better their mental health tends to be.

Our son Gus is a high school freshman and still doesn’t have a smartphone. It hasn’t been a big issue. We tell him, “You’ll get one when we can see a demonstrable need for it.” So far, we haven’t. When he starts driving, that’ll probably change. Until then, he can message friends on his iPad (which stays at home), and if he needs to call us, there are still these things called landline phones at school.

We also delay social media. Our 12-year-old daughter Scout doesn’t have any accounts, and Gus just has a teen account on Instagram.

For more advice on when to give your kid a smartphone, check out our article where we asked tech experts for their take on the right age to take this step.

3. Create Tech-Free Zones and Times

According to Twenge, boundaries aren’t just about how much tech your kids use but where and when they use it. Bedrooms, mealtimes, and family gatherings should be screen-free.

We’ve stuck to that pretty closely. No devices in bedrooms. No devices at the dinner table. One screen at a time — no using your iPad while you’re also watching television by yourself or we’re watching a movie as a family. Devices live in shared spaces, and can only be used in designated time windows. Once those windows expire, that’s it. Predictability kills potential arguments.

4. Use Parental Controls and Clear Rules

Twenge argues that monitoring your kids’ tech use isn’t snooping. It’s appropriate oversight.

We use Apple’s Family Sharing tools, which let us approve app downloads, set screen time limits, and view activity reports. My kids can only iMessage approved contacts. When they want to add someone else to their contacts, we have a conversation: “Tell me about this kid. How do you know her? What’s she like?”

But as I discussed on the podcast with family tech expert Emily Cherkin, you can’t rely solely on a device’s built-in parental control apps to keep your kids safe. There are things you can do to get around those, and they’re not fail-proof. That’s why we do random check-ins with our kids where we sit with them and look through their iPad to see what they’ve been doing online — the sites they’ve been visiting, the YouTube channels they’ve been watching, the kids they’ve been messaging.

If we see something that breaks our family’s rules about what’s an appropriate use of the iPad, the consequence is straightforward: use of the device is rescinded for a period. No yelling, no debate.

Once our kids get their own smartphones, we’ll continue to know their passwords. We’ll tell them, “We won’t ever read your texts — unless your behavior gives us a reason to.”

5. Encourage Real-World Freedom and Independence

One of Twenge’s key points is that real-world play builds confidence in ways digital life never can. So while you’re telling your kids to get off the iPad, encourage them to get out into the real world, touch grass, and be independent.

We’ve been doing that with Gus and Scout during the summers. We’ll occasionally just kick them out of the house and say, “Don’t come back inside for a few hours.” What do they do? They go on long treks through suburbia, maybe walking to Maverick to get a snack, then to PetSmart to look at hamsters. They’ve learned to handle themselves by being by themselves.

6. Talk About Online Behavior, Risk, and Self-Control

Twenge urges parents to talk about the internet the way previous generations talked about cars. Like cars, the internet is useful and fun, but dangerous if misused.

We’ve had countless conversations with our kids about digital self-control. “Don’t text anything you wouldn’t want someone to screenshot.” “Don’t assume messages disappear.”

When we see stories about scams or sextortion, we talk about them with our kids. I’ll show them an article about a teen caught in a phishing scheme or a news clip about a social media challenge gone wrong. I’m not trying to scare them; I’m just trying to make the risks of being online concrete.

7. Model Good Tech Habits

Kids learn tech behavior from their parents. If you’re glued to your phone, they’ll be glued to theirs.

This rule . . . I’m not always very good at this rule. My job lives online, which makes this tricky. I’m constantly checking my email for work. So I’ve had to set non-negotiable rules for myself: no phone at dinner; no scrolling during family time; no sneaking peeks at my phone while my kids are trying to talk to me. Gus and Scout know I struggle with it, and that’s actually helpful. They’ll call me out when I’m sliding, and they can see how dopey you look when you’re staring at a black rectangle.

8. Recognize That Time Is Limited

Twenge’s research shows that screen time doesn’t just eat hours — it replaces them. Every hour online is an hour not spent sleeping, reading, playing, or developing real-world skills.

The solution isn’t simply to take screens away; it’s to fill that space with something better — sports, reading, hobbies, music — anything that creates real memories. Twenge asks a good question: What will your kid remember doing? They won’t remember scrolling YouTube, but they will remember hitting a game-winning shot, building a fort, or laughing with friends until they couldn’t breathe.

Make sure, as you reduce screen time in your kid’s life, that you encourage them to fill it with something positive.

9. Be Consistent and Clear About Consequences

Rules are only as good as their follow-through.

Our kids know the tech rules and what happens when they break them. There’s no negotiation and no “just this once.” Parent like a video game.

10. Stay Flexible but Firm

Twenge ends with balance. Rules are important, but rigidity backfires.

We loosen up on things like long drives — screens are fine in moderation. But even then, they have to oscillate between spending an hour on screens and then two hours off. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s balance. When your daughter is home sick from school? Well, she can play Roblox more than usual.

There’s no escaping the digital world our kids inhabit. But we can shape how they move through it. What I like about Twenge’s 10 Rules is that it’s not an anti-tech manifesto. It’s a reasonable and realistic guide to helping your kids thrive in this digital world.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

Independence and Dependence

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

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

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

Mostly.

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

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

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

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

Gus gives Woodrow the gift of dependence.

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

Woodrow gives Gus the gift of independence.

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

Affection and Instrumentality

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

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

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

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

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

Judgment and Acceptance

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

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

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

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

Expressiveness and Protectiveness

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

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

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

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

The Fruitful Tension of Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

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

Connect With Jeffrey Hall

• KU’s Relationships and Technology Lab
• Jeffrey’s faculty page
• Jeffrey on LinkedIn
• Jeffrey on IG

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Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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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.

For generations, the path to adulthood was straightforward: go to college, get a job, build a life. But many young men are beginning to question the college component of that path; tuition keeps rising, A.I. has made the professional landscape more uncertain, and there’s just a sense that after four years at college, guys graduate feeling like they haven’t been very challenged, haven’t much changed, and haven’t gained a lot of real confidence, competence, and concrete know-how.

My guest today, Matt Smith, has created an alternative to college — a 4-year, 16-cycle curriculum designed to shape participants into Renaissance Men: skilled, self-reliant, and grounded in character. Matt co-authored The Preparation with his son Maxim, who is currently working his way through the program.

In the first half of our conversation, Matt shares what kickstarted this idea and what’s lacking in the education model for young men today. We then turn to the nuts and bolts of The Preparation, and Matt walks us through several of the program’s hands-on cycles — including earning EMT certification, building a house, and training as a fighter in Thailand — and how gaining these real-world skills prepares a young man for whatever is next in life.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast with Luke Burgis on mimetic desire
• AoM Podcast #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man
• Leon Battista Alberti
• AoM Podcast #1,025: The Life and Legacy of Louis L’Amour
• Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour
• AoM Article: The Pros and Cons of a 4-Year College
• AoM Article: 11 Alternatives to a Traditional 4-Year College

Connect With Matt and Maxim Smith

• The Preparation Substack
• Maxim’s Substack

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For generations, the path to adulthood was straightforward. Go to college, get a job, build a life. But many young men are beginning to question the college component of that path. Tuition keeps rising. AI has made the professional landscape more uncertain, and there’s just a sense that after four years at college, guys graduate, feeling like they haven’t been very challenged, haven’t much changed, and haven’t gained a lot of real confidence. Confidence and concrete know-how. My guest today, Matt Smith, has created an alternative to college, a four year, 16 cycle curriculum designed to shape participants into Renaissance men, skilled, self-reliant and grounded in character. Matt co-authored The Preparation with his son Maxim, who is currently working his way through the program. In the first half of our conversation, Matt shares what kickstarted this idea and what’s lacking the education model for young men today. We then turn to the nuts and bolts of The Preparation and Matt walks us through several of the program’s hands-on cycles, including earning EMT certification, building a house, and training as a fighter in Thailand, and how gaining these real world skills prepares young man for whatever is next in life. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at AoM.is/ThePreparation.

All right, Matt Smith, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Real pleasure to be here. So co-authored a book with your son Maxim and then also Doug Casey. It’s called The Preparation in which you lay out a curriculum as an alternative to college for young men, and it’s kind of an alternative to college as a rite of passage for young men, what was the impetus behind the development of The Preparation?

Matt Smith:

Well, my other co-author, Doug Casey, he actually has been trying to get me to write this book for 12 years with him, but he called it Renaissance Man, is what he called it. He’s been trying over various times to get me to do it with him. It never made sense because he’s written a number of books and he always said, they’re total brain damage to write. You don’t make any money doing him. And then he is trying to sell me at the same time to write this book with him. But when my son turned 17, or my son was in his 17th year, so he’s almost turning 18, and I could see in him this consternation, this anxiety about the future, and I’m a college dropout and I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life. So he didn’t grow up in an environment where I was propagandizing him one way or the other.

You should go to college or you should not go to college. But he, I guess always assumed that he wouldn’t because I didn’t. And I think that I even made the path feel more uncertain to him than normal, but I think all 17 year olds probably feel this way. So I could see this anxiety in him and I had a lot of worry. And also, this is all in the COVID era too, so you’re thinking about what would make sense. And then I thought back about the book that Doug had talked to me about many years before and over and over again about writing with him. And I said, maybe we can make something like that work. I didn’t really think about writing a book at that stage. I was really just thinking of seeing if we can turn this into a program that he could follow to help your son. That was the only motivation. There’s no way I would’ve done it without that. Yeah.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about in the book that college these days, there was a time when college was a great way to segue into adult life. You learned knowledge that you could apply to a career that would last your entire life. Why do you think that model doesn’t work anymore for so many young men? Well,

Matt Smith:

There’s a whole bunch of reasons, but I mean, you could argue on one side of it, economy is changing dramatically. So with AI and automation, we’ve already started to see a lot of job cuts around that. We’ve seen people that have specialized in the fields. They were told to go into computer science, come out and not be able to find a job when they get out of school. There’s like two weeks ago in the New York Times, there was a long article about this. Somebody had applied to 5,000 jobs, had 13 interviews I think, and no offers, computer science. So there’s a question of what that future looks like without the problems of college. So one thing is the future AI and the future that might cause, and the other thing is just it’s extremely expensive and it’s no longer rare. Now 53% of people graduate high school go to college.

So you’re not among the, of course you can go to more elite schools and then the track is different of course, but people are graduating with this huge debt around this burden that they’re carrying around with them. And totally, if they find out that job that they’d specialized in, they really, they feel it’s totally soul crushing. They now no longer have options because they have to service that debt from college. They pay their rent, and so they’re kind of trapped and they find themselves, I think totally different than when even 20 years ago when costs were so much lower than now

Brett McKay:

Going back to that idea of how AI is changing the career landscape. I had this conversation with my son a couple months ago. He’s 14, he’ll be 15 next month, and we were on a walk and he said something pretty incisive for a 14-year-old. I was surprised he caught onto this. He said, dad, I think what worked for you and mom and even my grandparents as far as transitioning adulthood like college. He says, I don’t think that’s going to work for me. And I said, I think you’re right. It’s a completely different world. And he said, what do I do then? What should I major in? Where should my career be? And I said, but I don’t really know, to be honest.

Matt Smith:

That’s amazing. A 14-year-old is asking these questions

Brett McKay:

And I think a lot of young people have that anxiety like your son did. What am I supposed to do? Because it used to be you could pick out your career, even if you worked in a factory, let’s say 60 years ago, you knew you’d have a job for six years because nothing really changed all that much. Or you went to college and you decided to become an accountant or an attorney, not much change. You knew what the game would look like for your career. That’s no longer the case. And I can see that just causing so much stress and anxiety for young people.

Matt Smith:

Yeah, I think so. Even if we were wrong when we went to college, like I said, I’m a dropout, but I did go for 18 months anyway, even if we were wrong, but we believed that accounting job would be available for us even if we were wrong, it still gave us something to pursue some clarity. Today it’s clear to everybody that the future is going to be vastly different. So knowing that just increases people’s uncertainty so dramatically. And yeah, it’s a tough position for these kids. They’ve been through the ringer with all the COVID stuff and then it’s uncertain future. It’s a really tough time to be a teenager.

Brett McKay:

This book is geared towards young men. We’ll talk about the curriculum and The Preparation. I think a young woman could do it and it’d be awesome for them, but it’s geared more towards young men. But you talk about one of the things that young men, they have this anxiety, they don’t know what to do. And so what they typically do is they just default to drifting and looking at what their peers are doing, whether in person or online. And you talk about the role mimetic desire plays in this drift. So we’ve had Luke Burgess on the podcast before who’s written about mimetic desire. But for those who aren’t familiar with it, can you briefly describe it and then how does this mimetic desire contribute to dissatisfaction in a young man’s life?

Matt Smith:

Happy to. I mean, Luke does a great job. I think the book’s called Wanting, I think of the name of it, but it’s based upon Renee Gerard’s work, which essentially he says that humans are unusual animals and that basically our drives are shaped by those around us. And this doesn’t just apply to young men or young women, it applies to you and I we’re subject to, we can be subject to things if we’re not aware of them. And this is why you see things become really popular, whether it be a fashion trend or something, how they just take off you as like, why do humans follow these trends like that? It’s kind of programmed into us. And so we look to others for what they appear to want, and then it becomes our own want. It feels legitimate. It feels like we really truly desire that thing too, because we’re taking the cues from the people around us. But it’s not genuine, it’s not really authentic. And I really believe, again, this is not a young person problem. This is a every person problem. You have to be aware of it, the effect of others on you and what they desire. I mean, it’s like keeping up with the Jones’ idea. That’s that concept in a nutshell.

Brett McKay:

And I think for a lot of young men, they don’t really have good models anymore. So mimetic desire can be a positive force if your model is noble and good and positive, but a lot of young men don’t have that.

Matt Smith:

Well, I would say if anything, the great role models that might even exist even in literature are taken out of the classroom for young men especially. So I think they’re gone and there’s been an attack on masculinity in the culture, and that’s certainly made it worse. And then the counter reaction to that, the bros is also negative. It’s just not really the right thing either. It’s not real masculinity. So there aren’t heroic figures for them to look up to except I guess superheroes, which is nonsense. So yeah, I think it is a real struggle for young people to have good models and to then know where to go and what to do.

Brett McKay:

So what you do, let’s talk about The Preparation. So the goal of The Preparation is, the original idea was to help young men turn into Renaissance. Men who are competent, confident, and dangerous, basically turn ’em into the most interesting man in the world from those Dos Equis commercials. Tell us more about this renaissance man model that you’re trying to follow. So basically the Renaissance man ideal is the model that you’re hoping young men will use their mimetic desire to become like. So tell us about that. What is this renaissance man model that you’re trying to create with The Preparation?

Matt Smith:

So fundamentally, instead of the focus being on what kind of job do you want to have? The question that confronts young men at this stage in life, it’s like what kind of job you want to have or the three main choices, of course, college, military, or a trade school, nothing really wrong necessarily with any of them, but all of them are simply designed to get you a job that gets you economic viability so that you can be hopefully reasonably prosperous and have some economic security. But none of them address the most important question, which is what kind of man do you want to become? And what we try and do is get them to think about that early in the book and we focus on this, the idea of the Renaissance man, essentially as a person who’s able to, who not only knows a lot about broad range of topics, from music to art, to building a house and milking a cow, anything you can imagine, just a broad range of knowledge, but also knows how to shape the world around him, knows how to put it into action, knows how to create with it.

And that’s the difference between a polymath and a real renaissance man is a polymath, knows a lot, but a renaissance man uses that knowledge to create, to shape the world around them. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I think we have this kind of a distorted idea of what a renaissance man is. When we think of like, oh, he’s a Renaissance man. It’s like, well, he just knows a lot. Basically we’re describing a polymath, the actual Renaissance man from the Renaissance era, as you said, they not only knew a lot of stuff, but they could do a lot of stuff and they were actively engaged in trying to shape the public sphere. So use this example of Leon Batista Alberti, who was this guy,

Matt Smith:

He was a badass, obviously a guy. He lived in the 15th century in Italy, and he is one of the central figures really of that renaissance period. He was a painter and architect, a photographer, a philosopher, mathematician, and he was also quite an athlete. He was a great horseman apparently too, and a mountaineer. I mean, he was quite accomplished in every walk of life. And he thought that the only thing that limited what you could do was your will, this renaissance area. What it did is it combined these classical virtues that were sort of rediscovered in the Renaissance from ancient Greece and Rome, and with this new life that was sort of fed into the period once actually the Renaissance period fundamentally was about revitalization by a rediscovery of these ancient virtues where a man could shape themselves and ought to shape themselves. So that that’s what life’s about, is that pursuit of shaping yourself into something great. And so he’s kind of the iconic figure of that period really, who really proved it true.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Going back, one of their goals was they wanted not only shape themselves, but they wanted to shape themselves so they could shape the world, have an impact on the world, and I think all humans crave that. We crave that desire to mold our outside environment. Nietzsche said, joy is the feeling of power increasing and for Nietzsche power was like creativity. It’s like, yeah, you had an impact. I think all humans have that desire, but I think particularly in young men, young men really want to feel like their actions have an impact on the world around them. I think that’s one of the reasons why video games are so seductive. It gives you the feeling that you’re doing something but you’re really not. So I really love this idea of the renaissance model of someone who acquires knowledge and skills to act in the world.

Matt Smith:

And these are, I think with young men, what they really want is they want to be somebody. So they have this angst to do something meaningful. They know that by doing something meaningful, they’ll become something meaningful, but there’s so little that they can do. They’re so restrained. It’s like so little freedom on kids. I say they’re the most surveilled group of people that have ever existed on the face of the earth. Everything’s scheduled and organized for them and almost infantalized because of it.

Brett McKay:

Any other fictional or historical characters besides Alberti that you think are examples of this Renaissance man who not only knows a lot but can do a lot and have an impact on the world?

Matt Smith:

You can look at a lot of the founding fathers, frankly, like Ben Franklin. That man knew a lot and did a lot. It’s actually quite impressive of his accomplishments. You go through the founding fathers and you’ll find at least half a dozen that I think would qualify as Renaissance man amongst them. I’ll say for my son what was particularly motivating for whatever reason, and you never know why certain characters connect with you or don’t, but he really loved Edmund Dantes from the Count of Monte Cristo. I really made him watch one of the versions of the movie with me when he was younger, and I said, you’ll like it, trust me. He never really liked movies, but it or not. And he loved it. He loved that idea. And then he read the book and then he read the Under bridge book and he’s now read it a couple times. And this idea of this guy’s like a good virtuous guy, but really innocent and got basically everything that mattered to him, completely taken away from him all of a sudden and was at the total bottom of a, well, essentially in prison and really couldn’t get any lower, but built himself up and to become quite a remarkable man who absolutely did have the ability to shape the world around him.

Brett McKay:

Another one, as I was reading the curriculum for The Preparation, which we’re going to talk about here in a bit, another person that reminded me of this sort of renaissance man ideal that’s more modern. Louis L’Amour, the Western author, a hundred percent. You like him? Oh, I love Louie L’Amour.

Matt Smith:

Oh, oh, good. That’s good. That’s a good sign. Yeah, no, he’s great.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ve had his son on the podcast to talk about his work, but also his book Education of a Wandering Man, which is basically an education of a renaissance man.

Matt Smith:

Yeah, my son has read that book three times. It’s a really good book going through this process. It’s been, he said, it’s been interesting going back and my son has been the beta tester for this program for the book. What ended up being the book, he’s been doing it in real life for the last two years. And so as he goes through different stages of it, he’s read it at different points and he’s like, I see different things at each stage. So it is quite an inspiration for him as well. And Lou, the More absolutely was a renaissance man,

Brett McKay:

And I would even say a lot of actors from the golden age of Hollywood, I’m talking Steve McQueen, even writers like Jack London, Ralph Ellison, if you look at their lives, they didn’t follow. They didn’t, a lot of ’em didn’t go to college or if they did go to college, they dropped out and they just did weird stuff. Like Steve McQueen, he was in the Marines and then he labored on a chain gang in the deep south because he got arrested for vagrancy. He was a lumberjack. He joined the circus, I think Ralph Ellison before he became a rider, he tried to become a professional trumpet player in New York City and he was living in A-Y-M-C-A trying to be a trumpet player. And that’s where he met Langston Hughes and he got kind of brought into that circle of the Harlem Renaissance there in New York City. Sean Connery, I mean he served in the Royal Navy. He was a milk man, he was a lifeguard. He was like a bodybuilder for a little while. And what stands out to all of these guys? They were just doing stuff. They’re just trying different stuff, increasing their surface area of luck and just these opportunities came up where they found something they really were good at and passionate about and the rest was history.

Matt Smith:

They did it their own way too. I think they were able to, in all those cases, I think they were able to devote their time and energy to the things that drew them in more because they had this broad exposure to many things and broad exposure to lots of different people and different things. It just increases their total decision set. So like their optionality in life increases dramatically. The more like the way I guess you put it surface area they touch, but I have to include people they touch within that as well because you build this weird networks that connect you with weird people. If you do unusual things

Brett McKay:

And if you just go to college like, well, you go to college and you might learn some interesting things, but your experiences aren’t going to be as varied as these guys.

Matt Smith:

And today you can learn anything. You can learn in college without going to college. That’s the thing. It’s available to us now in a way that it was not before. There is some advantage if you happen to have a great professor who can take whatever the subject matter you’re studying and they can bring it to life in a way that you would not catch without them. There are those rare instances, but most of it is not like that, at least in my experience.

Brett McKay:

So before you talk about the specific skills a young man should develop and that your son Maxim is developing with The Preparation, you spend a lot of time in the beginning of the book talking about developing a personal code. Why start with that?

Matt Smith:

I think it’s because it’s the only thing that matters in the end. And so you got to start at the end, I guess, Doug, when he originally pitched me on the book 12 years ago, he was very vague about it. He says, I want to write a book about becoming a Renaissance man. And I said, tell me more. And he said, well, the three most important verbs in the English or didn’t really any language are be and do. And and I didn’t get it. It took me a long time to really understand what he meant by that. But essentially, if you think about it have is what everyone is oriented to generally. It’s certainly a part of this mimetic desire that people have. They look around, they see what other people want, they want to have things, they want to have a beautiful wife or they want to have a new car or they want to have a travel experience.

They basically are oriented almost only toward have. And in our consumer culture, this has been amplified, like the dial’s been turned up to 11. It’s really intense and it’s almost hard to avoid it if you don’t understand this framework. So the problem with focusing on have is that have is a byproduct. You don’t get it directly, you get it indirectly. By doing so, do is the operative, do is what matters. What you do will determine what you have. But the only thing that actually matters is be and be is who you are. What is your substance? What is the thing that differentiates you from the other 10,000 people standing in line? What is the difference? And this is the thing that this essence, a bee is the thing that I find is very motivating to young men. Actually, it’s motivating to men of any age because the bee, the substance, the thing that makes you solid.

And so we had to focus on that. So what is the, the way we think of it is that with this personal code, we ask them to go through this exercise, it seems kind of trivial. I understand at first it can seem trivial. The first part of it, is a set of rules for yourself that you don’t expect anyone else to follow, but they’re just rules for your own conduct. And that requires a little self-reflection. And it’s like when you do things that make you feel small or that make you feel a little ashamed. One example, if a friend invites me out to dinner on Friday, I could say, I’m busy little white lie. Or I could say, I don’t really feel like it this Friday. Maybe we could do it another time. The path of least resistance is simply to just actually say, oh, I’m busy, I just can’t do it.

But every time, personally, when I would do something like that, it made me feel small, made me feel not good. And it’s not real deception, like a really bad lie, but it’s still not good. It didn’t make me feel good. And so we asked them to look at those things that they do that make them feel small and write ’em down and just decide not to do those things anymore. Just set up these rules for yourself. It might sound again trivial, but this is the formation of self-esteem. This is the formation of the self itself because this is how you are separating yourself from going with the flow, from just doing what everyone else is doing because you’re deciding, no, I’m not going to do these things. It’s only a negative thing first. I’m not going to do these things under these conditions. And that’s where it starts though.

It’s like you develop this beachhead where a young person, anybody can build from a real self from that, just a little bit of self-control around I’m not going to do the things that make me feel small. That’s the first part. The second part is things to aspire to, and this goes back to the virtues. So we introduce ’em to the same virtues that inspired the Renaissance from Greece and Rome and we just basically share a list with them and say, which ones do these speak to? You pick five or whatever, six that feel good to you. That’d be awesome. Courage. That’s cool. Yeah, I would like to be somebody who’s known as courageous or maybe it’s that you’ve got what they call the gravitas, which is actually just dignity. I mean virtue, the core of the word is vir, which means man. So the pursuit of virtues is the pursuit of being a man in general.

So anyway, we tell ’em to identify those virtues that they voluntarily decide to aspire to. And unlike the rules which are binary, it’s like, oh, I messed that up. I failed. Or I did the right thing by my own standards. Virtue is something you never get there. It’s always just something you’re trying harder to get. You can always be more courageous, you could always be more disciplined if that’s a virtue you choose, you could always be more steadfast. So it’s something you pursue constantly and this is inspiring to people to be because what kind of man do you want to be? What kind of man do you want to be known as? So that’s the second part. The third part is where we tell them to start to list their stack of accomplishments, which will grow as they get into the book because we actually later on tell them exactly what they should do.

Brett McKay:

So it sounds like it’s all about helping these young men develop a sense of self.

Matt Smith:

It is the most important thing. Be is the thing, and this is what when you see people who are even gainfully employed, having gone to college feeling quite lost, why? Because they still don’t know who they are. They still don’t know what differentiates them specifically. Is it what makes them? So the beginning of that starts with this. I think it’s totally core to, I mean, I would much rather spend time. I like people who have done a lot of stuff. They’re very interesting and I like people who have a lot of stuff. I have a lot of stuff. Stuff is nice. But if the person is not a good person, I mean if they don’t have virtue, if they aren’t pursuing virtue, they’re not people I want to be around. And certainly I don’t want to be someone like that. So it’s a constant barometer for me as well.

And I just think it’s never discussed with young men, they never hear it, they never even hear this. So I think it had to be there first because most of the book is about what to do, but doing for what reason? Because some of these things are hard and when you’re doing them, you don’t like Louis Morris running around doing a lot of weird stuff. Everybody’s doing these weird things, they look weird. And so to everyone around them it might’ve looked like they’re failing. So in that you have to be able to come back to something like a higher purpose than that. And that is the being that is what kind of man do you want to become.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s get into the brass tacks of the curriculum of The Preparation. I think what everyone’s probably like, okay, what’s in this thing? What is my young son going to be doing? So you break the curriculum into cycles. How long do the cycles last and what are the components of a cycle? Alright,

Matt Smith:

So again, we’re competing with college is the way we think about it. And so we imagine four years, my son is through two of them now each year is broken up into four quarters. Obviously we call each quarter a cycle. So there’s 16 cycles and each cycle basically has a few key components. The most important one we call the anchor course, that’s the main event. Sometimes there’ll be a couple weeks long, sometimes they can be a couple months long of that tire cycle, three month cycle. But that’s the main thing. And everything else is built around that because these are hard to schedule so you have to plan everything around it. So you plant the big rock, you put the big rocks in first in the jar, that kind of idea. It starts with that. And then related to it, Doug especially is a strong advocate for academics.

He thinks they’re super important. So every cycle has academic courses as a component to it. As much as possible we try and make it so that they’re related to the subject matter, that they’re anchor course that they’re actually going through at the time as much as possible. So there’s the academic portion, there’s a set of activities that we encourage people to do and they could choose the things that are interesting to them. But we encourage diversity by trying a lot of different things and they could be from learning a musical instrument and it’s a good thing for sure. Definitely learning to play chess is a good thing for sure. But scuba diving and skydiving and well, we have a whole list, a whole bunch of ’em in there of different activities and there’s some time that’s set aside each week for those kinds of things. And other than that, there’s a reading list of course too.

So we have books that we recommend and then it’s reflection. So in total we actually, unlike college, which you can be considered a full-time student if you’re taking 12 credit hours now supposedly there’s a lot more outside of that than that. But I came from the army as I had to pay for my college, I had to go to join the National Guard. So I came from the army to college and I couldn’t believe how much free time everybody had. It was so shocking to me. The difference between high school and college, it’s a huge difference. You’re so much free time. This basically assumes you’re putting 40 productive hours in every week. Now these could be some of these hours. Are you at the gym that counts lifting weights, that’s good for you, that’s one of your activities. But there are required things in there too that we have. But we’re assuming 40 hours a week, which definitely prepares somebody that in and of itself more for the real world frankly, than a heavy course load would.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so each cycle has an anchor course and this is the more intensive hands-on component of a cycle. Then there’s some related academics that you’re going to do and then there’s some activities you can choose from. And then you’re supposed to do a written reflection at the end of a cycle. And as you said, you’re pitching this as an alternative college. And as we talked about earlier, college is just really expensive these days. I think doing four years at an in-state university is something like a hundred thousand dollars in total and then it just goes up from there. So the academics with The Preparation, that’s like online courses you can take for free, but stuff like the anchor courses cost money. So how much does The Preparation cost to do altogether?

Matt Smith:

Yeah, so if you did the exact 16 ones that we have, and there are two that are really expensive in here, the total cost of that over four years is about $70,000. About $70,000 basically. That’s one year to prestigious college in the US today, but it’s a lot of money. 70,000 even that I understand. But the difference, the thing is, is that you can work your way through it. And I have some evidence I’ll share with you. There are two, I don’t know if you want me to get into the anchor courses now, but there are two that are really expensive. You don’t have to do those and saves a lot of money. One of ’em is becoming a private pilot. You don’t have to do that one, but it is, my son went through it, it’s very interesting. It’s a good skill for him to have. And the other one is learning to operate heavy machinery, but you get certified in it. And that could be, you could always fall back on that and do that for work. That pays pretty well. But those two things are pretty expensive courses.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. Well let’s talk about some of these specific cycles. This is a lot of fun. The first one that you talk about, I think this is the first one your son did is the medic. Let’s talk about the medic. What’s the anchor course of this cycle and then why did you even pick this? You set this out for your son. So

Matt Smith:

Basically the anchor course is just getting your EMT certification. So if you ever unfortunately are in an ambulance, you’ll be there with probably one paramedic in one EMT. EMT is like the base level, the reason that he started with it. And I think the reason why a lot of people should start with it or why we placed it. The first one is simply because it’s the most accessible. It requires wherever you are, wherever you live, somewhere around you, there is an EMT school not too far away that you can attend. And it’s very low cost. I mean some of ’em $1,200 sometimes maybe up to $2,000, depends upon exactly where you are in the country. But basically what it does, it qualifies you to work on it like an ambulance obviously. And that pays basically minimum wage, just not a great job, but it does give you some economic viability.

I mean it does qualify you for a job that you couldn’t have if you didn’t have it. But it also is an amazingly useful skill that actually can be parlayed into quite a bit more as Maxim did. Specifically Maxim because of his part of this is that weekly reflection and accountability we talked about earlier as part of it. So he published, he started publishing a substack just basically at first he was simply listing what he’d done that week. It was like a way to hold himself accountable, just they had to put it out there and no one reading it didn’t matter over time. There’s a few thousand people that have read it now, they’re just subscribed to it. So it’s a little harder for him, but I mean it’s a little harder in that he knows that there’s an audience. But through that someone reached out to him and said, Hey, you’ve got this working on an ambulances and a fund, you don’t want to do that.

I don’t know. It was wildfire fighting business basically where the contracts with the western states during the summers when they have these terrible fires and as an EMT. So he spent one of his cycles, a work cycle. He spent one summer last summer fighting fires in Oregon making $600 a day, no expenses, which for me when I was 18, I know money isn’t worth what it was was worth, but I think that was roughly my take home pay for a month in the army was $600. So through things like that, unique opportunities show up for you and there’s different ways to leverage it, but for him ultimately if there is a emergency trauma type situation, he’s qualified and skilled to be able to be the person who can step up and do something about it, to know how to handle the situation, to assess what’s going on and to take action. And that skill gives you walk into the world differently. You encounter the world differently when you know that if something like that happens, you will know what to do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a big confidence booster. I think it’s really powerful. And after I read that section like man, I’m going to have my son, he needs to get EMT certified, I want to get MT certified after reading about it. And so along with the EMT certification, there’s an academic component and as you said, you try to keep the academics related to the anchor course. What kind of academic stuff was your son doing?

Matt Smith:

I mean this one, it’s like anatomy, biology and there’s some practical chemistry in there too actually, which is kind of fun. But yeah, it’s as much as possible related to it. And then there’s part of it that is just like in college there’s required and then there’s room for electives. We have this whole, in the back of the book, there’s basically they could choose, they could fill in electives with things that they’re just curious about. So there’s plenty of options beyond for the elective section, but in the required it’s anatomy, biology and practical chemistry.

Brett McKay:

Another cycle that really piqued my interest, I was like, I wish I could have done this. The builder walk us through the builder cycle.

Matt Smith:

There’s this awesome place in Maine called the Shelter Institute where over three weeks, if you do the three week version, there’s a two week version and a three week version. The three week version you design and build a home and you don’t build it to completion, but you actually just, you put up the timber frame structure in the third week, but the first two weeks are really the most important ones. They really, you go through the entire process of exactly understanding how do you handle plumbing and electrical and how do I choose the site and how do I begin to even start with this? So you learn to design a home. Now you don’t necessarily want to be a home builder, but you can’t understand the benefit of this. And they’re mostly the people that go to this are adults by the way. They’re not children that go, there are people like you and I are like, Hey, this would be cool to know.

But when you have this skill, you see the world differently. You encounter it differently. And also it could expose you to creative outlets that might draw you in deeper. But the whole point of all of this, and there are lots of the 16 we picked, we could have picked another 16 that I think would’ve been just as valuable. But the key thing is that they all build upon one another. Helping being, helping this person have a list of accomplishments that impresses them that is impressive to others and that makes them see the world from what they could do instead of what they can’t do because things are a mystery to them. They don’t understand how anything works. So I order food on Uber Eats, that’s how I eat. Milk comes from a carton, I don’t know. You want to expose them as much as possible to as many of these things as you can. And so their framework and understanding of how the world works and how they can effectively create and it becomes clear to them.

Brett McKay:

After I read about the builder and I learned about this school you could go to, I was like, I’m doing a two week vacation where I’m going to go to this thing. I think a lot of guys have that dream of I’m going to buy some property somewhere and I’m going to build myself a little a-frame cabin. I couldn’t do that. I had no clue what it would look awful and I wouldn’t even know where to start. So I’d love to have that skill. I also think it’s just a useful skill knowing how to build a house just as a homeowner.

So many times where I’ve had something broken into my house and he needs a repair and I bring a contractor and he’s explaining it to me and I’m like, is this guy ripping? Is this actually a problem? Maybe this isn’t a problem. And he’s just saying it is. But I don’t know

Matt Smith:

Exactly. This is the problem with specialization in a way. It’s allowed us to become a prosperous society like this specialization. It’s been good in that way, but on an individual basis, what it does to us is bad. It has a real negative effect where our basic understanding of how basic things around us function are totally outside of our awareness or understanding. And if you think back maybe our parents’ age and if not absolutely their parents’ age, they knew all of this stuff. I mean not necessarily all of these different things, but they basically understood the world around them way better than people do today.

Brett McKay:

The academic component, I imagine it’s a lot of architecture. Yeah, history. There’s some literature in there. That one too. Yeah. Yeah. Another one that intrigued me, the cowboy, again, I think this reminded me of Louis L’Amour. That’s why I liked it. What’s the cowboy cycle? 

Matt Smith:

Maybe it’s because I’m such a Louis Lamore fan too. There’s a lot of benefits. Well, there’s two parts to it actually. For this one, basically there’s this place called this cowboy academy you go to and they teach you all the basics of working with horses and on a ranch. And it’s a pretty short course. I believe it’s five days. That’s a pretty short one. And then there’s a longer one where you actually go on or you do horse and mule packing in Idaho. But learning to deal with these animals and to feel comfortable around them is really important. I think it teaches, it’s humbling in some ways. I mean if for an adult, even if you haven’t been around horses, that could absolutely destroy you if they wanted to and learn how to work them well and work cooperatively with them. And plus it’s so much fun and I think it taps into some of these things will absolutely tap into this wanderlust side of the hero’s journey, the rite of passage.

These things that I really think are totally missing from our culture today that we have to, if you’re a really involved parent, you try and construct these things if you can for them, but they’re limited in that they don’t get to experience it on their own fully. And through these cycles, they do some things that don’t make sense. There’s no rational reason to do it. There’s no obvious benefit you’re going to get out of it. It’s just a journey. And this is definitely one of those I think that comes out of that. I mean, handling a horse teaches patients and discipline, even leadership, believe it or not, it’s weird. I don’t know if you spend a lot of time around horses, but they’re beautiful, amazing. In that time we spent a lot of time focusing on the academics and the academic portion of this cycle. It’s a lot of US history, western history, western literature to give ’em cultural context, including of course the Sackett series.

We encourage them to start reading and get into that because I think virtues are present in the characters of the Old West and certainly in all of Louis L’Amour’s books. But also learning about Kit Carson, I mean his life, just things he accomplished in his life. So you read this biography of him as well during that cycle. And I think these do give these models for when you look at what’s possible, if you’re like a 17, 18 and 20-year-old, hell, if you’re even 50 years old, and you look at these examples of these people who totally break the Overton window of possibility of what you can do with your life, it helps motivate you, inspire you. And so there’s a lot of focus on that in this cycle. A lot of wanderlust in this cycle.

Brett McKay:

So another cycle, the fighter cycle. I think your son’s about to start this one, is that correct? Or is he doing it?

Matt Smith:

January he starts that. Yeah, he’s in the entrepreneurship cycle right now.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So tell us about the fighter cycle.

Matt Smith:

Alright, so fighter cycle, basically you go to Thailand and there’s several different schools, but we recommend one in particular. It’s got two locations where you basically enroll in Moy camp and it’s pretty intense. It’s pretty intense, but most of it’s just basic physical training, basic sparring. Of course, at the end of it, the hope to actually do a real bite. And it’s not required of course, but it’s the hope that they would do that I think is good. And that one fundamentally the truth is that we encourage the study of martial arts anyway. So the question is whether or not you make a cycle out of it because a lot of the activities we talk about could have honestly many of them could be turned into cycles that are worth it. So my son was doing BJJ, that’s Brazilian jiu jitsu, almost wherever he was.

There’s almost always a place he could go to do that. So we encourage it anyway, but we decided to make it part of his cycle because that hero’s journey arc — get away going somewhere totally different. Where the world functions in a totally different way, where everything is exotic to you gives you a better sense of the entire, I mean most Americans don’t really see how the rest of the world functions, so we want them to get out and see the world a bit. And this gives them a way to do that in an environment where they’re not just traveling for the sake of traveling, but they’re traveling with the sense of purpose and learning and where they’re going to walk away a different person, they will come out of that not being the same person

Brett McKay:

In the academic portion are you doing Asian Studies?

Matt Smith:

Yeah, pretty much. I mean a lot of, let’s say martial history, part of it too, philosophy of combat. We have the Book of Five Rings for instance, is one of the things they read during that. But yeah, it’s mostly oriented toward while they’re there to learn about the history of the brand.

Brett McKay:

I mean if you did just the cycles we’ve talked about, so the the cowboy, the builder and the fighter, if a young man did just that, he would be head and shoulders above his peers. One of the most interesting young men out there, he would have, as my son would say, aura. He’d have infinite aura if he did these things. And these are just four of the possible cycles. I mean there’s other ones like we’ve talked about. So your son’s doing an entrepreneurial one right now. He basically has to start a business in three months and make money.

Matt Smith:

Well, he doesn’t have to make money. He could fail. I mean I’m not an entrepreneur, I’ve started many businesses and some have succeeded, some have failed. But the things you learn along that process is quite good. And the cycle starts off very hands-on, very specific and structured. And then it gets more into the abstract things like entrepreneurship, investing, the things that I think are very important but don’t give you a sense of self in the same way that these hands-on hardcore recognized skills do. And the four we’ve gone through, basically imagine just if someone just took a gap year before college just did those four in the gap year, different person, they would be going into college. If they still chose to go that route, they’d go there knowing a sense of self and a sense of where they want to take their life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean so other ones you talk about, and we won’t talk about ’em in detail, but there’s like survivalist cycle where you go to a primitive living intensive school for two weeks. You mentioned the pilot cycle where you get your pilot’s license. There’s a sailor cycle where you’re going to learn how to, you’re going to go to South America and learn how to sail, which would be awesome.

Matt Smith:

My son did that basically around the Falin Islands and then through the Strait of Magellan. And he learned how he’s a certified crewman on a sailboat. And so that’s also an economically viable job actually.

Brett McKay:

For sure. Yeah, the welder cycle, that’s another economically viable job. And it comes in handy. I’ve got a friend who started a farm after selling his business and he had to learn how to weld. He had to go to trade school, learn how to weld. There’s a lot of welding you do as a farmer, surprisingly, the heavy equipment operator obviously. And I mean I think that your big takeaway, all these things you’re going to learn, these skills you’re going to develop that contributes to the do of character and then that leads to the being of character. So it just gives you this sense of self that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. But what’s after The Preparation, after your son finishes all these things, what do you going to happen? What do you think he’s going to do with himself? So he’s got this awesome resume. He’s a renaissance man. I think you can make the case that with this diversity of real experience, I can give you the confidence and the capacity to pursue a variety of paths more so than college. But I can imagine that there are people out there listening, dads who are listening that are thinking, okay, well now what

Matt Smith:

I think that’s again the wrong question. I mean I get the question, but when have we known for sure where anything we did was going to take us in reality? Maybe we had a general direction to move toward, but we never really knew exactly what is the question basically cancels out because of the uncertainty of it, it can cancel out the desire to strive to become because it seems impractical because you want to know the practical answer. The truth is I can’t imagine what he’s going to be doing after two more years. I really can’t. I mean the changes I as a father saw where he started with this kid who had a lot of anxiety, he was basically super like I’m an introvert. I trained my kids maybe to be introverts. I don’t know. My daughter’s not so much, but my son certainly reflects that he did.

He’s completely gotten over that. He would never feel comfortable going and interacting with a lot of people, but it’s no issue for him whatsoever. He’s totally got that under control. I dunno if he manages it or if it’s dissolved away. But he’s gone from being basically a boy into being already after two years, every qualification I would say of being a man except for the fact he’s not yet a father. Shouldn’t be a father yet. I want to be a father yet. But I mean that’s the last step where I would differentiate between a boy and a man and after two years he’s already there. The world is full of opportunity for him already. He says no to things, opportunities all the time. So I can’t imagine, I can really can’t imagine what he’ll be doing.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mentioned earlier, I think doing all this stuff increases your surface area of opportunities and I think your son’s a testament to that. I mean, he got that job offer to work wildfires, and I’m sure he’ll have other opportunities that pop up just exposing himself to different people in different situations.

Matt Smith:

And lemme explain one more thing I forgot to say earlier about how expensive this is, and I said he could finance your way through it. Now I saved for him. A lot of people might be thinking again, it’s not economically possible for me so I can’t do it. I grew up very poor. My son did not. Okay. But I saved an irresponsibly low amount of money in his Vanguard account. Not enough for that one year at a prestigious university, that’s for sure. And he started with that two years ago and he’s never asked me for money. Today he’s got a little bit more money than he did when he started after two years. So you can work your way through it. And that’s what he’s done along the way. I just don’t want people to be scared off by that because, and the fact that he can work his way through doing this, he is at a level of economic survivability already. It’s like somehow he’s making it work. Of course he’s sleeping with extra bedrooms of family or friends when he is in different places. He is really thrifty with his money. But it works. It works. It does produce somebody who is independent and not just financially independent, but independent and they make sound decisions.

Brett McKay:

I mentioned earlier as I was reading through this book, I was thinking, man, I want to do some of this stuff. Do you know any middle-aged men who are doing some of these cycles for themselves?

Matt Smith:

Well, the book just came out two and a half weeks ago. So the formal structure of these has not been out there. But I could definitely tell you a lot of these anchor courses are not done by kids. I mean, they’re done by adults. I mean on this sailing thing that Max did through the straight of Magellan, he was by far the youngest person there by far. Yeah, I would say it’s the same thing with the Shelter Institute. I mean, that is not young people that are doing that. So certainly these are all things that draw in people like our age to do and older. And most of the readers of the book so far, their parents, their parents like you and I who want to help make sure their kids are pointed in the right direction and they have the same response that you did, which is like, this is stuff I want to do.

And I have to tell you, to be honest, writing the book was a challenge to do and to construct it so that it tells people exactly what to do. It took a lot out of me to do it, but I mean, I was just looking for things that sounded like that I wanted to do. Also, things that I knew would inspire my son and other boys around the world. And it tends, I guess it’s true of men my age and older. I mean, we had a 71-year-old write to us the other day. He said, I’m starting, I’m going to start doing this. So, well, I don’t have any examples yet of them doing it, but I have a lot of, if you read the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see a lot of parents saying echoing the same thing they want to do.

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

Well go to Amazon to buy the book and currently there’s an audio version coming out, but this is a very physical thing. So even the audio book comes with a PDF that you’ll need or do it because kind of like a workbook in many ways. And there’s a hardcover edition, which if you’re trying to persuade a teen that maybe is unlikely to, sounds like your boy would read a book. He said, this is good for you. And luckily my son is at that stage too. But if you have one who might be a little more reluctant or something like that, the hardcover is designed to be as beautiful as possible within Amazon’s limitations. So it’s full color. And when they hold it in their hands, just open the book a little bit. They’ll know that they’ve not held a book like that before, that there’s something different about it right away.

And I think that it’s designed to be lure for the young man to pay attention a little bit differently to it. So the hard cover is $99. It’s way more expensive than the paperback is just 29. But if you’re looking for good lure, I would definitely get the hard back that’s on Amazon. And then you can go to The Preparation.com, which is a substack that we set up about the book. But also as people go through it, young people start doing, we encourage them to again, put this reflection and accountability to publish it like my son did, and then kind of amplify and connect the people who are doing it. So that, and I have to talk about my son’s substack too, just so you see. It’s maxim smith.com, M-A-X-I-M smith.com because you can see the stuff that he’s done for the last two years. This kind of a proof of work.

Brett McKay:

This is awesome. Well, Matt Smith, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Matt Smith:

Oh yeah. Thank you very much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Matt Smith. He’s the co-author of the book, The Preparation. It’s available on amazon.com. You can find more information about The Preparation@thepreparation.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/ThePreparation 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 where you find our podcast archives. And make sure to sign up for a new newsletters called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you’re a busy dad, the first day of school can sneak up on you.

One day you’re taking your family on a road trip through the American West, and then — BAM!— it’s the night before the first day of school, and your kids are still going to bed at midnight and you and your wife just realized that all the kids have different school start times, and you haven’t coordinated rides yet.

Kate and I have been sending our kids off to their first day of school after summer vacation for over a decade now. We’ve learned some things along the way to make the transition from vacation mode to school mode a bit smoother. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

Have a Back-to-School Marriage Meeting Two Weeks Before School Starts

We’re big proponents of the weekly marriage meeting. A couple of weeks before school starts, Kate and I will have a longer marriage meeting that’s dedicated to getting us both on the same page for back to school.

In the “To-Dos” section of your marriage meeting, discuss the following:

• Drop-off and pick-up schedules
• Back-to-school forms that need filling out
• School supplies and clothes shopping
• New upcoming bedtimes
• Extracurricular activities that kids need to sign up for
• Calendar sync-up
  • Add all known school events: back-to-school night, parent-teacher conferences, etc.
  • Map out sports practices, music lessons, tutoring, and activity overlaps
• Homework routines for kids
• Any concerns about your kid and the school year ahead

After you discuss this stuff as a couple, have a family meeting where you sync up with your kids and make sure everyone is on the same page regarding schedules and expectations.

Get the School Sleep Schedule Back on Track

When it comes to shifting from a feral, let-it-all-hang-out summer sleep/wake schedule to a structured school-year sleep/wake schedule, there are two philosophies.

You either work to move your kids’ schedules back before school starts so by the time the first day rolls around, they’re on the school schedule, or you don’t do any adjusting and just rip the band-aid off when the alarm clock starts blaring on the first day of the semester.

There is merit to both approaches: one is gentler on the body and mind. The other maximizes the fun summer vibes.

I take something of a moderate tack, having my kids start to push their bedtimes back before school, but not going all the way to the school-year bedtime until school actually begins.

You probably know this already, but kids generally don’t do well with abrupt transitions. Neither do adults, really — we just have more socially acceptable ways to melt down.

So a week before school starts, we gradually move our kids’ bedtimes earlier by around 15 minutes a night until they’re about an hour off from their school-year bedtime. We let them go to bed at that later-than-usual time the night before school starts, since they’re not going to be able to fall asleep earlier. They’ll be a bit more tired on the first day, but that helps them fall asleep at their new school-year bedtime the next night.

Create a Get-Out-the-Door Checklist for Your Kids

One of the recurring friction points we experienced with our kids when they were younger was that they’d forget items they needed to bring to school: snack, water bottle, homework folder. That sort of thing. Because they were six, they’d sometimes have a meltdown in the car about this right when we were dropping them off.

To prevent those 8 AM crashouts from occurring, we wrote a morning checklist on our kitchen whiteboard that our kids had to go through before we got in the car:

• Eat breakfast
• Brush teeth
• Homework folder signed and in backpack
• Snack in backpack
• Water bottle

Meltdowns averted.

When your kids get older, nudge them to create their own morning routines.

Establish a Confidence-Inspiring Back-to-School Ritual

Kids can get a little nervous as they contemplate embarking on the uncertain adventure that is the year to come. So establish a ritual that helps them feel more grounded as they go back to school.

We like to talk to our kids about any concerns they have and what their goals are for the year. Then I say a father’s blessing (a prayer) over them. Create a ritual that works for your family.

There’s a lot going on during back-to-school season. With a bit of planning and gradual, proactive ramp-up efforts, you can create a smoother transition for everyone in the family.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you own a car, you know the importance of regular maintenance. Rather than waiting for your vehicle to break down and paying for costly repairs, you take it in for oil changes, tire rotations, and filter swaps. Sure, this upkeep requires time and money, but it keeps your car running smoothly, extends its lifespan, and helps you avoid breakdowns before they happen.

If we’re willing to maintain our cars, why not give the same kind of preventative attention to something even more important, like, say, our marriage?

A growing body of research shows that even happy couples benefit from proactive care, and clinical psychologist James Cordova has developed a once-a-year “Marriage Checkup” that helps couples stay connected and resilient. It’s been shown to improve marriage satisfaction, increasing intimacy, fostering emotional acceptance, and reducing relationship distress — with benefits lasting up to two years. Unlike traditional therapy where the focus is on fixing a broken marriage, the Marriage Checkup is designed to celebrate wins and look for ways to improve a marriage before it goes off the rails.

Cordova takes readers through this relationship review in his book The Marriage Checkup: A Scientific Program for Sustaining and Strengthening Marital Health. The book is aimed primarily at practitioners, but couples can get a lot out of it. I highly recommend picking up a copy. It contains a ton of good, actionable information and is one of the best marriage books I’ve read. 

Here’s how to prepare for and carry out a Marriage Checkup inspired by Cordova’s recommendations. 

The Check-In Before the Checkup

Schedule it and make it special. Choose a consistent month to do your marriage checkup. It could be on (or right before) your anniversary or every January. You might go someplace special for the checkup, like a bed and breakfast or a local hotel. If time or money are tight, simply block off two uninterrupted hours at home.

Agree on communication ground rules. To keep the checkup productive and positive, agree on some ground rules that you’ll uphold during your discussion. Only one person speaks at a time. No interrupting. Speak for yourself, and don’t assume or judge your spouse’s thoughts or intentions. If you’re the listener, just listen. Don’t argue or rebut. Ask clarifying questions if needed. Avoid John Gottman’s Four Horsemen of the relational apocalypse: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling. If these interpersonal saboteurs make an appearance, agree ahead of time to take a two-minute break.

The Marriage Checkup

Cordova created a thorough, pages-long survey that he has couples fill out before they meet with him for the Marriage Checkup that he facilitates. I think a lot of couples might find this too clinical or customer-service-y to do, though.

For an average couple doing a Marriage Checkup on their own, I think you can get away with informally discussing the areas of the relationship that Cordova highlights in his detailed survey.

Below are conversation-starting questions, based on Cordova’s survey, that cover each area explored in his Marriage Checkup. You don’t have to ask all of them and feel free to come up with your own. It’s just about prompting a discussion about where you’re at and want to go relationally.

Big Picture

• How do you think our marriage is going overall?
• What were our biggest marriage successes this past year?
• What were our biggest challenges?

Communication

• Do we express our emotions in healthy ways with each other?
• How’s our fighting? Anything we can do to make disagreements more productive? Do we get defensive with each other?
• Do we feel comfortable bringing up things that are bothering each other?
• Do we feel like we listen and understand each other?
• Do we engage in enough chit-chat and conversation that’s not just about kids and running the house?

Time Together

• Are we spending enough time together where it’s just us and not the kids?
• Do we need to do more date nights? Husband and wife only vacations?
• What are the small rituals that help us feel connected? What’s stopping us from doing them more regularly?
• Do our screens/devices ever get in the way of being present with each other?
• Are we doing things together that feel fun, or mostly just things we have to do?

Money

• Are we on the same page financially?
• Are there any money-related topics we tend to avoid?
• What financial goals matter most to you right now?
• What’s stressing you out about money right now?
• Do we ever feel guilt or resentment about how we each spend money?
• Do you feel like we have equal say and responsibility when it comes to money?

Sex

• Are you happy with our sex life overall?
• Are you happy with the frequency of sex?  
• Anything you’d change about our sex life?

Parenting

• How do you think we’re doing as parents lately? What are we doing well? Poorly?
• Are there things about being a dad/mom that you’re struggling with but haven’t brought up?
• Do we back each other up when one of us has had to enforce rules or boundaries?
• What kinds of character traits or values are we actively trying to pass on to our kids?
• Do you feel like we’re on the same team when it comes to parenting? Where do we align? Where do we clash?
• What’s one parenting practice we admire in others that we could try out?

Household Management

• Is there anything about how we divide chores or responsibilities that’s feeling unfair or unbalanced right now?
• How often do you feel like we’re reacting to chaos vs. planning proactively?
• Are there any systems or rhythms we’ve outgrown — and need to rethink?
• What’s one routine or habit in our house that’s become a stressor instead of a help?
• What’s one thing that would make our home life run more smoothly?
• Do you feel like we have a good system for staying on top of things — like bills, schedules, errands, etc.?
• What could we each do to show a little more appreciation for the respective efforts we put in to running our home?

Intimacy

• Do you feel like I know and understand you?
• Were there moments during the past year when you felt like I did a good job of trying to understand you? Any moments when you felt misunderstood?
• Do you feel like we’re still continuing to turn toward each other or are we slowly drifting into parallel lives?
• When we’re together, do you feel like I’m fully present with you — or often distracted or elsewhere?
• What’s something I used to do — like listening, affirming, noticing — that you miss?
• What are small things we could do to help us feel closer?

Spirituality

• What’s our telos as a family? What do you think we’re ultimately here for — and how can we help each other live that out?
• What kind of spiritual legacy do you want to leave for our kids or community?
• What does spirituality mean to you right now — and has that changed over the years?
• How do our beliefs show up (or not show up) in our everyday decisions — like parenting, money, or time?
• Do you think we live according to our values? What helps us stay aligned — and what throws us off?
• Are there any spiritual practices — like prayer, meditation, or Sabbath rest — that we could do together more regularly?
• What’s been hardest for you spiritually this past year?
• Is there anything you’re wrestling with that you wish we talked about more openly?

Friendship

• What’s something we’ve done together recently that made you laugh or feel joy?
• Are there hobbies or activities we used to enjoy that we’ve let go of?
• What’s one new thing we could try together just for fun?
• Do you feel like I take an interest in the things that matter to you — even if they’re not my thing?
• How good are we at cheering each other on when one of us has a win or a big day?
• What do you genuinely admire about me — not as a spouse, but just as a person?
• What’s one memory that makes you smile when you think about us as friends?

Make a Simple Action Plan

Hopefully, these questions prompted some productive conversation and drew you and your wife closer together.

Based on your conversation, list out the following as you wrap up your Marriage Checkup:

• 3 wins to keep doing. Celebrate your strengths.
• 3 things you’re going to do to improve a weak point. Come up with some concrete steps to take/habits to adopt.

Schedule a 30-day check-in to see if you’re following through on your plan. If you’re doing a weekly marriage meeting, this is something you can talk about then.

Consider establishing a yearly tradition where you revisit your checkup notes before your anniversary to see how you’ve grown.

We maintain the things we value. Our homes, our cars, our teeth. Why not our marriage? A yearly Marriage Checkup can be a tool for keeping your relationship strong and fixing vulnerabilities before they become big problems. Remember, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

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

Connect With Rick Burgess

• The Man Church

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Read the Transcript

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

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

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

All right, Rick Burgess, welcome to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Let’s bring them back.

Rick Burgess: Could we bring them back?

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: Oh, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: That’s good.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: That really is helpful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rick Burgess: I have.

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

Rick Burgess: Sure, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad’s Outward Orientation

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

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

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

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

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

The Younger Years: Father-Child Roughhousing Prepares Kids for the Outside World

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

The Teenage Era: Dads Build the Scaffolding to Independence

As children grow into teenagers, Dad’s role as a bridge builder to the outside world becomes even more critical.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fatherly Art of Launching Kids

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

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

Connect With William Hanson

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

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

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

William Hanson: Thank you very much for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Okay.

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

Brett McKay: Okay.

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yes

Brett McKay: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Exactly.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yeah, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Are they still used today?

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

Brett McKay: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: You can get quite territorial.

Brett McKay: Yeah

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Hanson: Thank you so much, Brett.

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.