Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

Podcast #903: The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Action Heroes

Brett & Kate McKay — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 15:25:04 +0000

In 1980s America, gritty streets were filled with crime, the threat of Cold War hovered in the air, and action movies starring tough guy heroes dominated the box office. This was a time in cinema when muscle, martial arts, and the perfect weapon were the keys to saving the day; when the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the silver screen and their on-screen carnage was only rivaled by their off-screen competition.

Why did this golden age of action movies emerge when it did, and why don’t they make films like that anymore? Here to chart the rise and fall of the golden age of action movies is Nick de Semlyen, author of The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage. Today on the show, Nick shares the stories behind the larger-than-life stars of the action genre — including Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal — and the iconic films they starred in. He also discusses why the action genre fell out of favor in the early 90s, why its movies nonetheless continue to endure in popularity, and the three action films he most recommends watching.

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Podcast #902: How to Survive Any Worst Case Scenario

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:04:04 +0000

When people think about survival and preparedness, they tend to think of dealing with an end-of-the-world kind of scenario. But lots of bad things can happen, and are more likely to happen, that fall short of the apocalypse. My guest can help you prepare for any worst case scenario, whether it’s the worst thing to happen to mankind or just the worst thing to happen to you this year. His name is Mike Glover, and he’s a former Green Beret, the founder of Fieldcraft Survival, and the author of Prepared.

Today on the show, Mike and I first talk about the softer skills of preparedness. We discuss how to create plans using military concepts like war gaming and the PACE methodology, build your tolerance to stress, and develop your situational awareness so you don’t freeze in a crisis or let one catch you by surprise. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss the harder skills of preparing for worst case scenarios. Mike outlines what capabilities every man should develop. He shares his own EDC and what he recommends you carry and wear on a day-to-day basis. We talk about how to stock your home and car for emergencies and more.

Related Resources From AoM’s Extensive Survival and Preparedness Archives

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Podcast #901: A Magician’s Secrets for Becoming More Commanding, Convincing, And Charismatic

Brett & Kate McKay — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:10:00 +0000

To be successful at their craft, magicians must possess the well-honed technical skills to pull off their mystifying tricks and clever sleights of hand. But as magician Steve Cohen observes, they must also be “masters at attracting interest, holding attention, and leaving audiences with fond memories of their time together” — skills that everyone can use to persuade audiences, charm dates, own a room, and influence others.

Steve, also known as the Millionaires’ Magician, is the author Win the Crowd: Unlock the Secrets of Influence, Charisma, and Showmanship. Today on the show, Steve shares the insights he and his fellow magicians know on everything from taking command of a room to creating a compelling character to making a magical entrance. Steve shares how to build your boldness through “put pocketing,” develop “spontaneous resourcefulness,” get people wrapped up in the magic of your message by suggesting rather than stating, increase your confidence by having a place for everything and everything in its place, and much more. At the end of our conversation, he shares two of his most interesting tips and explains how to influence people to do what you want by using “layered commands” and the “trailing or.”

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Podcast #900: The Myths and Truths Around Suicide

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 31 May 2023 15:08:14 +0000

You might think we’re heading into a low time of year for suicides because they peak during the cold, dark months of winter. But, in fact, suicide peaks during the spring and early summer.

This is just one example of the popular beliefs around suicide that turn out to be myths. Here to unpack more of these myths, as well as the truths around this poorly understood subject, is Rory O’Connor, the leader of the Suicidal Behaviour Research Laboratory and the author of When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It. Today on the show, Rory discusses possible reasons for why suicides go up in the warmer months and why men die by suicide more often than women. He explains that suicide doesn’t happen without some warning signs and why someone’s improved mood might be one of them. In the second half of the show, Rory walks us through the real reasons people move from having suicidal thoughts to acting on them, and what works to prevent suicide.

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Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You might think we are heading into a low time of year for suicides because they peak during the cold, dark months of winter but in fact, suicide peaks during the spring and early summer, this is just one example of the popular beliefs around suicide that turn out to be myths. Here to unpack more of these myths, as well as the truths around this poorly understood subject is Rory O’Connor, the leader of the Suicidal Behavior Research Laboratory and the author of When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It. Today in the show, Rory discusses possible reasons for why suicides go up in the warmer months and why men die by suicide more often than women. He explains that suicide doesn’t happen without some warning signs and why someone’s improved mood might be one of them. In the second half of the show, Rory walks us through the real reasons people move from having suicidal thoughts to acting on them and what works to prevent suicide. After the show’s over, check out the show notes at aom.is/suicide.

Alright, Rory O’Connor, welcome to the show.

Rory O’Connor: Thank you, I’m delighted to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay: You are a professor of psychology who researches suicide and suicide prevention. I’m curious, what led you down this career path?

Rory O’Connor: Well, that’s an interesting question. Like many things in life, this path was serendipitous. As an undergraduate student in Belfast in Northern Ireland, I’d been studying depression, and I thought I was going to continue my undergraduate work into looking at depression rather than suicide itself. But then as things happen, I got a call in the summer of… I think it must have been the summer of 1994, so quite a while ago, and the person who turned out to be my PhD supervisor told me that there was an opportunity for a funded scholarship PhD program on suicide, and so that’s where it all began, just that phone call and I decided that that’s the direction I would go. And I suppose what’s quite interesting to my point of view is that, well, clearly suicide is the most devastating of outcomes from depression and other mental health problems. But I suppose I didn’t quite envisage where that journey would take me, and in particular, that man, that phone call, my PhD supervisor, the person without whom I wouldn’t have done the research on suicide, sadly, some years later, he took his own life. And I often think back to that phone call and really, I often wonder what was in his mind at that time, why did he ask me? He wasn’t a suicide researcher. So it’s just funny how these things happen. But I’m incredibly grateful to him because it genuinely was like a sliding doors moment which changed my life.

Brett McKay: What did your family think when you told them, “I’m gonna do my PhD in suicide?”

Rory O’Connor: Well, my mother in particular, she was quite concerned because she knows me as a person and she just knew that everything I would do, I would put me heart and soul into, and so her big concern was the impact on me, on my own mental health. And yeah, one of the first questions she asked me was, “My God, you’re not gonna kill yourself. Are you?” That was her genuine fear that if I was so immersed in this… And I suppose that question was really an important question to ask and something I remind myself of daily, of reminding myself to look after my own mental health, as well as now the mental health of the people I work with here in my team in Glasgow.

Brett McKay: You’ve written a book called When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide, and What We can do to Prevent It, which is a book where you’ve taken the research you’ve done on suicide and suicide prevention and presented it for a lay audience. We’re gonna talk about this book but before we do, I think it’s important to talk about how to talk about suicide. I’m sure a lot of people have noticed maybe in the past decade or so, when we talk about suicide or someone who has taken their own life, you hear people say, “He died by suicide,” instead of, “He committed suicide,” why that shift?

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, it really has been a marked shift I would say in the last 20 years, and the reason for the shift is because the term “committing suicide,” it harks back to a time in many countries where suicide was illegal. And so it harks back to that criminal undertone, that it was seen as a criminal offense. And indeed in the United States and in the UK, thankfully, suicide is no longer a criminal offense but there are still many countries in the world in which it is a criminal offense. And I just know from speaking to countless people who are bereaved by suicide or people who’ve been suicidal themselves, they often are quite upset about that criminal over undertone. So for that reason, I think we shifted and been much more careful in our language because to my mind, we can talk about people dying by suicide, it conveys the same message and it’s not going to cause distress to those who are bereaved. So in all the work that I do, I avoid the term “committing suicide” for that reason.

Brett McKay: What’s the state of suicide in the West today? Are rates increasing or decreasing?

Rory O’Connor: In some sense, there’s no simple answer to that question, so maybe I’ll try and answer it in a couple of ways. If I look at the suicide rates, say, over the last 40 years… Now, if I take a global perspective first. So on a global perspective, the suicide rates have decreased by about 30% or thereabouts over the last 40 years or so. However, if you try and disentangle then where the decreases have happened, you see that much of the decline in suicides happened in Asian countries, in India and in China and other Asian countries, largely in China. And so that tells you a pattern, yes, on a global context, in those lower, middle income countries historically, the suicide rates have been decreasing. Now, if I take then the last 20 years and focus in on, say, the United States or the United Kingdom, you see a different pattern. Indeed in the United States, you’ve seen this upward trend in suicides. And then if I look in the UK, say over three or four years before the pandemic hit, similar to the United States, the suicide rates were increasing. And in Australia, New Zealand, other western countries, in those recent years, suicide rates have been on the increase.

Now, when the pandemic hit, many of us working in the field of suicide research and suicide prevention were really, really concerned about the potential impact of Covid 19 on the suicide rates. Now, thankfully, our concerns were not realized because the suicide rates broadly speaking did not increase basically in a global context. And indeed with a colleague, Jane Pirkis from Melbourne University, she led this big international initiative of 33 countries across the globe, and it covered the first, I think it was 15 months of the pandemic, and within those first 15 months, broadly speaking, the suicide rates did not increase. Now, there were some exceptions. For example, Japan, there are some signals now that the suicide rates might be increasing in Japan but the broad picture is that the pandemic did not see the increase that we feared. But now my concern is, and we’re starting to see this in the United States, in the UK, and in other countries, is now with the cost of living crisis and the potential economic turmoil and the Ukraine crisis and other things going on in the world, our concern is that suicide rates are starting to go up again. So we had this period when they didn’t increase during the pandemic, we need to be really, really vigilant moving forward.

Brett McKay: Are there demographics, groups that are more susceptible to suicide, say, by age or sex?

Rory O’Connor: Yes, well, if we just focus on Western countries or high-income countries, suicide rates are significantly higher in men than a women. In the United States and in the UK, about three quarters of all suicides are by men, but then if you look to other countries to lower middle income countries, you see less of a disparity between males and females. But I think in every single country in the world, men outnumber women in suicide. Now, if you look down at age profiles, again, you have the nuances, there’s slightly different patterns in different countries but broadly speaking, suicide is rare before puberty, and then when puberty hits and those periods through from puberty right up to your mid-20s, you see this increase in suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and deaths by suicide. And again, there are slight differences in countries, but in the UK, for example, the leading middle-aged men are the group most at risk of suicide.

And in other countries, older-age men are at increased risk or the highest risk group but the concern many of us have is that we are starting to see this increase in young or youth suicides again. And that really reminds me of when I first started researching this field in the 1990s, the biggest risk group were young men. And if we think back to the 1990s, we had just all emerged from a recession or real economic turmoil. And my concern now here is we’ve a similar pattern, we’ve gone through a recession a few years ago, we now have this cost of living crisis and the broader uncertainty in the world, and my concern is that young people are being maybe even more at risk and that their suicide rates may start to increase faster. So we need to be so, so careful and protect our young people.

Brett McKay: Speaking to the sex breakdown, something that I’ve read, and I want to see if this is true. Is it true that women attempt suicide more often than men but men are more likely to actually take their lives because they use more lethal means?

Rory O’Connor: Yes, broadly speaking, that’s a correct statement, I agree with that, is that yes, women are more likely to engage in nonfatal suicidal behavior. However, the explanation for that differential isn’t as straightforward as saying it’s all down to the method that has been used. That’s certainly part of it, we know that men are more likely to use more lethal methods and obviously therefore more likely to die, say, on a first attempt but it is more complicated than that. And I think we need to look at issues around masculinity, what it means to be a man in today’s society, issues around the way we structure and tailor treatment. So the question I often ask is, “We know there are effective treatments, psychological treatments, which reduce risk of suicidal behavior but the question is, do they work for men, and are they tailored for men?” And that is linked to the fact that the way men help-seek is perhaps different from women.

And we know that men are less likely to seek help for mental health problems. And so what we should be asking is… Instead of blaming men for not seeking help, which sometimes is part of the narrative, we should be saying, “Actually, perhaps the treatments and support coupled with the stigma around help-seeking, mental health, masculinity, these are all contributing to a situation, and like a perfect storm of factors, together with the increased use of more lethal methods of suicide. And that’s really, the complexity, is the answer to the question of why there are more male suicides than female suicides.

Brett McKay: What are some of the biggest myths around suicide, and how can those myths get in the way of helping people who are susceptible to suicide?

Rory O’Connor: To my mind, probably the single most common myth that I have come across is that if you ask somebody whether they’re suicidal, it will plant the idea in their head, and it’s really important that we squash that myth because there is no evidence at all that by asking somebody whether they’re suicidal that it actually will make them suicidal, there’s just no evidence. However, there’s now quite a bit of evidence showing the opposite, showing that actually if you ask somebody that question, and I agree it’s a difficult question to ask, but if you ask that question, ask somebody directly whether they’re suicidal, there’s evidence showing that actually it can get them the help that they need. And I often describe that question as being potentially the start of a life-saving conversation. So that would be myth number one.

Then another myth I often think is important to highlight, Brett, and that is this idea that… And it comes from a place of real sadness and heartbreak, is that the number of people that I have encountered over the years, both loved ones as well as health professionals, who have come up and told me the story that the person who they’ve lost to suicide had seemed okay, had seemed well in the days and weeks before they died. And so the myth is that if there’s this improvement in mood that’s associated with reduced risk, that’s a myth because it’s the opposite in too many cases. And I suppose to clarify it, I’ll make it clear what I mean in a second. What the work or the research and evidence suggest is that if there is an unexplained improvement in mood, it could mean that the person has resolved to end their life, and because they’ve resolved to end their life as a way of dealing with their pain, their mood lifts because they found a solution to their pain, a solution to their problems.

And the reason it’s concerning is, as a person’s mood lifts, their cognitive capacity, their motivation, their ability to plan and carry out the suicidal act increases. So the message on that myth is, if there is any unexplained improvement in mood, if somebody has been in a depressive episode, please check in with them to try and understand why their mood is lifted. Now, of course it could be their mood has lifted because their treatment has kicked in, either their medication or their psychosocial treatment has kicked in or their crisis has abated but the concern is if somebody seemingly improves in mood, in emotional wellbeing and you don’t know why, always, always check in to ensure they’re doing okay.

Brett McKay: Okay. So if someone’s mood improves, it can actually be a danger sign because they may just be feeling relieved that they’ve made the decision to stop struggling and take their own life. And another related myth is that someone will always be depressed before they die by suicide. Mental illness is correlated with suicide but sometimes someone hasn’t been depressed, and we’re gonna talk more about this later, but they haven’t been depressed but then they experienced some sort of a big setback or humiliation that leads them into this spiral of suicidal thoughts. And these things relate to another myth, which is that there aren’t any warning signs before a suicide. A lot of times, when someone takes their own life, their friends and family, they’re shocked and they say they didn’t see any signs it was coming, but your research shows that there are typically signs, they can just be hard to recognize.

Rory O’Connor: The sad reality is that warning signs for suicide are difficult to spot, but there are warning signs. And so the things I would often highlight are changes in behavior, that could be changes in eating, sleeping, drinking. Like sleeping in particular, because we know that disrupted sleep, sleep problems are associated with suicide risk because obviously if your sleep is interrupted, that’s a basic… In biological terms, we would describe it as a basic homeostatic function. You don’t sleep well, your problem-solving is affected, your mood is affected, your self-regulation is affected. So changes in these basic processes are important to look out for. But other things like… And this certainly only probably applies to some cases, people who are starting to get their life in order, their life affairs in order, that would be another warning sign that the person may have resolved to die by suicide.

And then obviously if somebody has been bereaved by suicide themselves or they’ve experienced a marked loss either in status or in relationships, things like that, those marked changes can have an impact. So again, I would be checking in with somebody as well. Also, people who are talking about feeling trapped and hopeless and feeling a burden on those around them because we know that sense of burdensomeness is at the heart of the suicidal thinking. The person feels, “Actually, if I end my life, the people around me would be better off if I was dead.” And so those are the sorts of things I would highlight as warning signs, but the reality sadly is our ability to predict suicide is no better than chance, it’s no better than the toss of a coin, it’s really difficult to predict who will die by suicide, but we should be still checking in with people if we are concerned, of course.

Brett McKay: Is there a seasonality to suicide? Because I think maybe there’s a common belief out there that a lot of suicides happen in the winter because it’s dark and cold, maybe the holidays make people feel sad. Is that true?

Rory O’Connor: Well, the holidays bit is probably true but not necessarily the winter bit. Again, the best evidence… If you try and bring together all the evidence from across the world, the best evidence suggests that suicides actually peak in spring, summertime, so the increase in that period… And actually in December, they’re actually lowest on Christmas day, but then they peak on new year’s day. And so the question is, Well, why do you see this seasonal effect? And the short answer is, we don’t know for certain. Part of it could be due with, as we move seasons, there’s a change in our sleeping patterns and our physical activity, it could be maybe linked to… If we look at occupations at risk of suicide, as you move into spring, perhaps there’s increased work-related stress, say, if you’re working in the agricultural sector, if you’re a farmer or whatever it may be, so you can see increased stress and risk there. But it could also be the fact that as we move into spring and summer and the brightness and vitality of spring and summer, if you’re struggling with your mood, there’s that mismatch or that dissonance between your internal world and your external world, and perhaps that’s part of the explanation as well. So yes, there are seasonality effects but we need to do more research to understand why they persist.

Brett McKay: I saw this article in the Atlantic, this is speculative, but a factor that might contribute that seasonality is… In the spring, there’s allergies, and inflammation can potentially contribute to depression and mental illness. Again, this is speculative but I thought that was interesting, I saw that a couple months ago.

Rory O’Connor: No, absolutely. And I may have read that same article in the Atlantic actually. No, I think we need to look at the allergens and the role of allergens because, as you say, there’s growing evidence that the impact on how they can activate some of the obviously biological systems which are associated with mental health problems like depression. So I think that’s an area we need to look at in much more detail because remember, one of the things certainly I’ve recognized more and more as I’ve studied suicide and suicide prevention is… And I often describe it as, historically, we’ve either been too focused on the individual or too focused on the context in which an individual lives without bringing those together. Those people who do work on brain imaging and biology, that’s all great. And those people who do work on social contexts and cultural factors, that’s brilliant as well. But ultimately, as John Donne said… That idea of “no man is an island,” we need to recognize it each… If we’re to understand suicide risk, we have to understand the individual in their context, and that context includes these wider environmental factors that you’ve mentioned, as well as of course things closer to home, like obviously relationship crises, mental health problems, bullying, unemployment and on. We need to look at the environmental context as well.

Brett McKay: And we’ll talk about some of these factors ’cause you’ve developed this model, the integrated motivational volitional model of suicide behavior. Maybe we can talk about some of those factors in that model but just broadly speaking, big picture, why do most people decide to take their own life?

Rory O’Connor: Well, the answer to that question I often give is, people end their life as a way of managing unbearable pain. And so for whatever it is, 703,000 people who die by suicide each year, there’s a whole complex set of reasons which will lead to each one of those individuals dying by suicide. But I think the common thread is that those people feel trapped by unbearable pain, which can be caused by a whole range of factors, it could be caused by the fact that your relationship ended or the fact that you had experienced trauma as a child or the fact that your mental health problems are really, really unbearable, but the key driver is seeing suicide as the ultimate solution to your pain. And for Edwin Shneidman, who’s a founding father of suicide prevention from the United States, often talked about this idea of seeing suicide as a permanent solution to our often temporary problems. And so for me to answer the question of why people die by suicide, the answer to that question is, we need to understand, What are the drivers to the mental pain by which an individual feels trapped by? And they see no alternative, no way to end their pain, no solution to that pain, and the only solution is the ultimate solution, that is, to take their own life. So it’s like the person in essence doesn’t want to die, they just want the pain to stop, they just can’t bear the pain.

And maybe we’re gonna go on to talk about my model of suicide, that’s at the heart of my model, that sense of entrapment. And then just say the key premise of the model is that suicidal thoughts emerge, they come out of this sense of entrapment but that sense of entrapment is triggered by feelings of defeat and humiliation. And those feelings of defeat and humiliation are often triggered by loss, by shame, or by rejection. And although that’s the common spine to understand the emergence of suicidal thoughts, then the question goes, For every one of us who become suicidal, the pathways to defeat, the pathways to entrapment are unique.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. Let’s dig into the integrated motivational volitional model of suicide behavior that you developed that can help practitioners but also other people, loved ones or even individuals who might be experiencing suicidal ideation, help them figure out where they are in that path towards suicidal behavior. And the first part of the model is the premotivational phase. What are the factors there that can influence whether someone decides to take their own life?

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, the premotivational phase is part one. There are three parts to the model: The premotivational phase, the motivational phase, and the volitional phase. The premotivational phase is like the background context in which suicidal thoughts or behaviors may emerge, the motivational phase is a central… The middle bit of the model, and that’s really trying to understand the emergence of suicidal thoughts, and then the third bit of the model is called the volitional phase, and that’s trying to understand who is more likely to cross a precipice, from thinking about suicide to acting on their thoughts. Going back then to the premotivational phase, the premotivational phase is really trying to understand, What vulnerabilities do we all carry? For example, we all have different vulnerabilities, they could be biological vulnerabilities, for example, there’s evidence that people with low levels of serotonin and other metabolites. And [0:26:14.8] ____ metabolites and other neurotransmitters are associated with suicide risk, that’s a potential vulnerability factor but it’s never an inevitability, it is just a vulnerability factor.

Another vulnerability factor we’ve done quite a lot of work on is on different types of perfectionism, and there’s one type of perfectionism which is described as socially prescribed or just simply social perfectionism. And what that is is if you’re high on social perfectionism, and I speak as somebody who is also high on social perfectionism, is that we’re overly concerned about the expectations of others such that we continually live our life thinking that we’re letting others, important people in our lives down. And I describe it in the book When It’s Darkest, I describe people who have this high social perfectionism as basically having thin psychological skin such that when the bows and arrows of life come at us, when negative events occur, our skin is much more likely to be pierced metaphorically. And so let’s say it’s our premotivational phase because the concern is that people who are high in social perfectionism are much more likely to feel defeated or humiliated when stuff happens to them.

Brett McKay: The social perfectionism is interesting. Will Store, we had him on the podcast talk about his book about social status. He wrote an article about male suicide and he talked a lot about this social perfectionism and the role that plays, as well as status defeat in men can play in a man susceptibility to suicide.

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, no, absolutely, I know Will, Will’s a good guy, and actually Will Store interviewed me as part of that article, and then obviously initially, it was an article in the book or one of his books. And he’s exactly right, which is, that social perfectionism is a really useful framework for us to try and understand as Will has done, understand male suicide. But the way I’ve tried to conceptualize it is, try to understand, Well, how does it increase risk, in my case from a psychological perspective? And I think that idea of the thin skin-ness is a useful way to think about that. So we’ve got that vulnerability aspect, and then the other two bits are environmental influences and negative life events, they’re the last two parts of that premotivational phase. And the environmental influences are really recognizing that this idea that we know that there’s a socioeconomic gradient to suicide and that basically people from more socially disadvantaged backgrounds are much more likely to die by suicide. Some estimates are you’re three times more likely to die by suicide if you’re from a socially disadvantaged background compared to a more affluent background. And now, that’s not to say that people from more affluent backgrounds don’t take their own lives, because they do, but the risk is higher when there’s more social disadvantage.

And then the last bit on the premotivational phase is we know that people who die by suicide or attempt suicide have experienced a disproportionate number of negative life events, and that’s both in childhood as well as across their lifespan. And actually, when you look at the psychophysiology of suicide risk, we also know that people who attempt suicide or die by suicide, their stress system, their cortisol system… Remember cortisol is like the fight or flight hormone we need to help us either defend ourselves or flee a threatening situation. The people who are suicidal, their cortisol system is dysregulated, it’s not working as well, so it adds to the vulnerability.

Brett McKay: Okay. So the premotivational face, these are just the background factors that are already in place in someone’s life that could make them more vulnerable to suicidal thoughts, they won’t necessarily lead to suicide but they’re potential vulnerabilities. You move into the motivational phase of this, this is when ideation and intention formulation occurs. And I think you said what usually kickstarts the ideation is some sort of defeat, whether you lose a relationship, you lose a job, etcetera.

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve touched on the motivational phase when I was answering one of the previous questions, that central idea that suicidal thinking is driven by or it grows out of feelings of defeat and humiliation from which you cannot escape. And it’s that sense of mental pain and entrapment which drives the emergence of suicidal thoughts. And again, when we think about what then drives or causes defeat or humiliation, that’ll be unique for all of us, it’ll be different for every one of us. And defeat and humiliation, again, are often also driven by loss, rejection, or shame. So I think when we’re trying to understand risk at an individual level, that’s a really helpful way to think about it, is asking ourselves, Well, what are the potential drivers to somebody feeling defeated or humiliated? And ultimately, what are the drivers to them feeling trapped? And then if we can identify those drivers, the causes of defeat, the causes of humiliation, we can hopefully intervene either to change the thing that’s leading to the defeat or humiliation. Or if we can’t change that, thinking of ways to support the individual through that crisis time.

Brett McKay: Well, in this part of the model, you have this idea of, I think it’s a threat to self-moderators and motivational moderators. What are those?

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, they are psychological factors. We’re trying to understand… If we think about the model as a horizontal line going from… On the left-hand side, you’ve got defeat and humiliation, and then if you move from left to right, you move from feeling defeated to feeling trapped. And then you move from feeling trapped to suicidal. The threat to self moderators and motivational moderators are psychological factors which we hypothesize facilitate or impede the movement from left to right. That includes things like if you’re a really good problem solver, social problem solver, and you’re feeling defeated… Well, actually if I’m feeling defeated and I can solve the problem, I’m less likely to feel trapped. So let’s take an example of where good problem solving will arrest or stop the movement from left, from defeat to entrapment. Or for example, if you’re feeling trapped, what increases the likelihood that you might become suicidal? Well, if I’m feeling trapped and I’m really socially isolated or I feel that I’m a burden on those around me or if I feel disconnected, I’m much more likely to feel suicidal.

And so that sense of being a burden, that sense of support or isolation, they are these motivational moderators which help us understand who is more likely to move from feeling trapped to suicidal. And although often in the model, we frame it as risk, the presence of all these factors lead to risk, the motivational moderators and the threat to self-moderators help us identify what we describe in psychological terms as targets that we could focus on which will hopefully protect somebody from moving from defeat to entrapment to suicidal thinking.

Brett McKay: There’s the motivational phase, you have the defeat or humiliation which leads to entrapment, which then could lead to suicidal ideation and intent. What causes someone to start shifting over from just ideation to, “I’m actually gonna do something?” We’re moving to the volitional part of this.

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, the volitional phase is the third part of the model, and it’s our attempt to try to identify what we think is about 30% of people who have thoughts about suicide, we think about 30% move from thoughts to suicidal acts, and that includes fatal as well as nonfatal suicidal behaviour. According to the model, there are eight key factors, which I call “volitional moderators” or “volitional factors” which increase the likelihood that you make that transition, you act on your thoughts. And they include things like having access to the means of suicide.

It stands to reason, if I’m suicidal and I’ve ready access to the means of suicide, well, I’m more likely then to act on my thoughts because if it’s ready access, it means that the environmental constraints on you accessing that method are reduced or low, then anything which leads to reduced constraints on access to means increases the likelihood that you’ll engage in that behaviour. And indeed, if you look at the evidence for what works at a public health level to prevent suicide, it is interventions which are focused on restricting access to the means of suicide. That’s like for example having barriers in places of concern, not having ready access to medication and so on. That’s one of the volitional factors.

Others include exposure to suicide. What we mean by “exposure” is that if you know somebody else who’s died by suicide. And again, it stands to reason that if I have having thoughts of suicide and I know somebody who’s died by suicide, I’m more likely to act on my thoughts. And that’s because the mechanism could be that if somebody close to you has died by suicide, that method of death is potentially more cognitively accessible. Or it could be that if that person is like you, you’re modeling their behavior or it could be that it legitimizes the behavior for you because if a loved one uses that method of coping with a distressing situation, well, maybe that’s something you would consider. That’s one of the volitional moderators.

I’ll just say there’s eight of them but I won’t go through all eight, I’ll do a couple more. Impulsivity is one of the volitional moderators. Again, the idea that if you’re having thoughts of suicide and you’re impulsive, it stands to reason you’re more likely to act on your thoughts. And then just maybe two last ones. Second last one in the list, if you read the model, is basically this idea that having mental imagery around dying or death. What we think happens is, if somebody is having thoughts of suicide and they’re picturing themselves either dying or dead, that’s perhaps like a rehearsal mechanism or it could act as a habituation of making death less scary. So then the presence of both thinking about suicide and imagery around death increase the likelihood that you’ll act on your thoughts.

And then one very last one is past behavior. The single best predictor of any future behaviour is whether you’ve engaged in that behaviour in the past, it’s exactly the same for suicidal behaviour. The evidence shows that if you’ve engaged in suicidal behaviour in the past, you’re statistically more likely to engage in suicidal behaviour in the future or sadly die by suicide. It’s important to put that in context because although past behaviour is one of the strongest predictors of future suicidal behaviour, the majority of people who say are suicidal or have attempted suicide in the past won’t do again in the future and will never die by suicide.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s the integrated motivational volitional model of suicide behaviour. And what this allows you to do as a practitioner or anybody, there’s points where you can see where you can start doing some preventative things. I’m going to start working here in the motivational part… Or I’m going to start working here in the volitional part. So based on your research, not only do you research suicide, but you research suicide prevention. What’s the best thing that works in suicide prevention?

Rory O’Connor: I’ll answer that in two ways. Large-scale public health interventions have been shown to be effective, that’s things, as I mentioned earlier on the restricting access to the means of suicide, anything which restricts access to the means of suicide has been shown to be effective in reducing suicide. So that’s good news, that’s really good news. Now, that’s challenging, for example, in the United States, that’s challenging when we think about firearms, that’s a really complicated topic to address, given the constitutional implications and so on. That’s a big public health-type example. But if I focus in on the individual level, over the last 20 years, there’s been growing evidence that psychosocial interventions, these are like talking therapies, things like cognitive behavior therapy have been shown to be effective in reducing suicidal behavior over time. So that’s good news. There’s a growth in the evidence base for those sorts of talking therapies.

There also has been a lot of interest and focus on brief interventions, things like safety planning. And safety planning is an intervention that we’ve done some work with ourselves over here in the UK, but safety planning was developed by Barbara Stanley and Greg Brown in the United States. It’s an effective intervention, but it’s a simple intervention, and it really focuses in on the volitional phase. If you think about cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT, it’s more focused on the motivational phase, it’s trying to understand the complex factors that lead to defeat and entrapment and suicidal thinking and so on. But a volitional phase intervention like safety planning is trying to interrupt suicidal thoughts so that somebody doesn’t cross the precipice from suicidal thoughts to suicidal acts.

And it’s very, very simple, the intervention basically has six steps. Step one is you work collaboratively with somebody who’s suicidal to try to identify the warning signs that a suicidal crisis might be escalating. So hopefully, if you can identify in advance, you can intervene and do something to keep yourself safe. And then in steps two, three, four, and five, it helps the individual identify people or places or organizations that they can go to either to distract themselves as the suicidal thoughts might be escalating, or if they feel they cannot keep themselves safe, somewhere to go in crisis or somebody to contact in crisis.

And then step six is the last step of this intervention, and it’s working again collaboratively with the person to help them keep their environment safe, and by keeping their environment safe, what we mean is basically to increase the distance between them and a method of suicide. If they thought about how they might end their life, what can we do to ensure that when that crisis escalates again, they do not have ready access to the means of suicide. So something like that I would really focus in on, that safety planning, it’s only one example as a brief intervention, but a really important one because it’s something which intuitively makes sense, Brett, but something we can all be thinking about.

Brett McKay: And then also on an individual level, if you know someone who you’re worried about, we talked about this earlier, don’t be afraid to ask them if they thought about taking their own life because it’s not going to implant that idea in their head to do it, it’s just that could actually be the thing that could kickstart them getting the help they need.

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, absolutely. And really, we cannot emphasise that enough, if you are concerned, please ask somebody directly whether they’re suicidal. But I appreciate that that’s a difficult thing to do, and again, I describe some tips in the book. But in essence, if the person answers “yes,” that I am suicidal, in many respects, that’s your biggest fear… If you ask that question, and somebody says, “Well, yes, I am suicidal.” Your biggest fear is, “Well, what do I do next?” What you do next is you just validate how they’re feeling and say, “That must be really difficult for you.” That’s all we mean by “validation.” “That must be really difficult for you.”

It’s not about trying to solve their problems, it’s trying to acknowledge, be alongside them in their distress and then encourage them to think about how they might be able to get support if they think they cannot keep themselves safe. And that sense of common humanity, that sense of connection and treating an individual as worthwhile, as somebody who’s valued in this world, because many people who are suicidal don’t think that they have a role in society anymore and feel that they are a burden. So anything which promotes connectedness and then encourages them to maybe reach out, speak to their physician, their general practitioner, somebody else in their life who can help keep themselves safe. I would really encourage people to do that. Please, please reach out.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk a little bit… You talk about this in the book, about those who are bereaved by suicide, so family members who had a loved one that took their own life. How does their grief differ from someone who might have just experienced someone who died by other causes? And any advice for them on how they can navigate that? And I guess the other question there too would be, What can people do to help those who are bereaved by suicide?

Rory O’Connor: Yeah, again, really important questions. The grief associated with a suicide is complicated because, of course, any sudden death is devastating, but on top of the sudden death, there’s often shame and guilt and, “What could I have done differently?” And again, I speak as somebody who’s twice bereaved by suicide, and in particular, with a close friend of mine who took her own life. I still ask myself today what I could have done differently and I felt in part responsible for not being able to save her life. And many people bereaved by suicide feel the same. So part of it is trying to be more self-compassionate. No one of us should ever be held or can ever be held responsible for the actions of another person. Recognizing that the prediction of suicide is so, so difficult, and as I said earlier, it’s no better than chance, our ability to predict suicide. And so recognize that every day is different, every day is different and it’s the pain, anger, the steps of bereavement, that people go through them differently. And probably the only certainty about bereavement by suicide is its uncertainty, is its unpredictability, some days you might feel okay and other days not, and it can come on such unpredictably obviously.

And I suppose it’s also recognizing that although as days become weeks and weeks become months, it’s all about moving forward, it’s not forgetting, it’s just you’re moving, step forward, step forward, step forward. You’re changed as an individual, of course, you are, and it’s just trying to recognize that, and things do become a bit easier.

In terms of advice for those who are around those who have been bereaved, again, it’s just recognizing that the person is going through unbearable pain. Don’t be frightened because one of the big fears, again, is, “I’ll say the wrong thing.” And again, the advice that I would certainly give, and I know from speaking to countless others who have been bereaved, is as long as somebody treats you with humanity and compassion, you’re unlikely to say the wrong thing. And don’t judge. It’s nonjudgmental. Don’t try and tell the person how they’re feeling, just be alongside the person and let them know that you’ll be with them, you’re there if they need them at any stage. And please don’t cross the road because that still happens, that idea of people who are bereaved by suicide and people cross the road instead of speaking to them, and that’s often out of fear of saying the wrong thing. Please, please support each other.

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

Rory O’Connor: To find out more about our work, we have a website, the website is www.suicideresearch.info that’s suicideresearch.info, and the book is available I think everywhere, so wherever you tend to get your books, in Amazon or wherever, or other obviously booksellers, the book’s widely available.

Brett McKay: Well, Rory O’Connor, thanks for your time, it’s been a pleasure.

Rory O’Connor: Thanks so much, Brett, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Rory O’Connor. He’s the author of the book, When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide, and What We Can Do to Prevent It, it’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/suicide, where you can find links to resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you do so on Stitcher premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “manliness” to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #900: The Myths and Truths Around Suicide appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #899: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted

Brett & Kate McKay — Mon, 29 May 2023 23:00:01 +0000

Have you been languishing in the same role at work, frustrated that you haven’t been promoted to a higher position with more pay and different responsibilities?

My guest can help you level up in your career. His name is Randy Ornstein, and he’s the author of Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. Today on the show, Randy explains why getting promoted is more beneficial to your paycheck than getting a raise and his case for why you should stick with working for the same company for a long time. We then talk about the things you need to do so that management thinks of you the next time a higher position opens up. We discuss how promotable employees participate in meetings, execute their communication, study their work, and develop best practices. We also talk about when to bring up the idea of being promoted to your boss and a couple of the challenges that can come with advancing up the ranks.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Have you been languishing in the same role at work, frustrated that you haven’t been promoted to a higher position with more pay and different responsibilities? My guest can help you level up in your career. His name is Randy Ornstein, and he’s the author of Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. Today on the show, Randy explains why getting promoted is more beneficial to your paycheck than getting a raise, and his case for why you should stick with working for the same company for a long time. We then talk about the things you need to do so that management thinks of you the next time a higher position opens up. We discuss how promotable employees participate in meetings, execute their communication, study their work, and develop best practices. We also talk about when to bring up the idea of being promoted to your boss and a couple of the challenges that can come with advancing up the ranks. After the show’s over, check out show notes at aom.is/getpromoted.

Alright, Randy Ornstein, welcome to the show.

Randy Ornstein: Thank you, Brett, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a new book out, it’s called Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. What led you to write a book about getting promotions at work?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, it’s been a very exciting, process writing this book, but throughout my career, mainly in beverages, I was promoted nine times over my career, and seven of those times at Anheuser-Busch within a 15-year period. And for me, after a few of those promotions when I was younger, it became a game to me of like how could I continue to grow up the corporate ladder and be successful at this amazing company, and earlier on in my career and when I was low 20s, I would see that the vice presidents had their own offices and even gold plates that had their names on it, and I was like, “Oh my God, how could I ever get to that level?” I didn’t think I had it in me, and I think I kept getting more confidence when I got promotions early on. I don’t think I was doing anything spectacular, but I guess I was doing enough to wow my boss and be the best person for the next position. And so as I’ve moved up the corporate ladder at Anheuser-Busch and people started to notice, I was periodically asked by this guy who led this program, where he hired roughly 30 college graduates every year to join Anheuser-Busch.

They would go through a six month training program, and at the end of the program there was a graduation, and I was asked to give the keynote speech to talk about how I moved up and got promoted at Anheuser-Busch and some tips to succeed, and I did this speech a few times throughout my career. I would usually have just five tips. I’d have one slide with like, “Here’s five tips I learned at Anheuser-Busch to get promoted,” and one would be, data is power, and I would talk about how I use data effectively with my time working with Walmart, or Kroger, or Target. And one would be, be persistent, and I talk about how I was very persistent with the people that I worked with. And years later, those individuals would come up to me at different meetings or happy hours and say, Randy, “I still remember those five tips that you gave me and they’ve really helped me throughout my career,” and it happened over and over again, and it just stuck, and it got me thinking I should formalize this much better and write a book about them and share them with the world.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no, I think it’s interesting, you point out at the beginning of your book, a lot of career books and business how-to books and articles they focus on how to get raises at work, which that’s good. But you make the case that there’s a benefit to thinking about how to get a promotion instead of just thinking about how to get a raise. So what are the benefits of thinking about and pursuing promotions within your company instead of just thinking about how can I get a raise?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah. Well, first of all, promotions are more monetarily valued at, so usually a promotion means that you get in the range of a 10%, 15%, 20% raise, versus your annual raise that you might get is usually between 2% and 4%. So think about it, if you were to just get a raise in your current job, it would take you like four, five years to get to the same value, had you moved up one level in your company. Plus, when you get a promotion and you move up you’re typically getting a bigger bonus and more equity in that company, as well, and so a promotion means moving up a level, getting more responsibility, potentially managing people, as well. And if money is one of those factors that you’re looking to do, you’re gonna make a lot more money in a promotion than just a regular annual raise.

Brett McKay: And I imagine too, it gives you new opportunities for growth, you get to do things you didn’t get to do at your previous level, and there’s value in that as well for some people.

Randy Ornstein: Exactly. You wanna understand more aspects of your business versus just maybe the niche that you’re in today and so typically as you are promoted more responsibility, maybe more hours but you’re also working with more leadership, and when you work with more leadership that are also not just in your department but different departments, that gives you more opportunities to grow as new jobs open up.

Brett McKay: So I’ve seen these articles, and I’m sure other people have seen these articles too, about how employees should switch employers more often because it’ll increase their chances of making more money. So the idea is if you switch employers, you’ll usually get a pay bump, but you highlight there are benefits of sticking with a single company and climbing up the corporate ladder. What are those benefits, do you think?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I definitely disagree with those articles that you should continue to move to different companies and get more money, and while maybe that’s true that you could get a bigger salary, you’re building no loyalty with the companies that you work with, and when you constantly switch companies every two three years, you’re not even getting enough knowledge in that current company to really deep dive and figure out everything you need to do to be successful. When I interview people for different jobs and I look at their resume, and I see that they had a job every two years, and maybe five jobs over 10 years with five different companies, I’m not gonna hire that person because why should I bring on a person for just two years knowing that after two years they’re gonna get bored and move somewhere else?

And one aspect is maybe they’re moving to different companies because they can’t get promoted in the current company, and their only way to grow is to switch companies, which is not what I look for in a team member or someone to join my team, so I’m looking for loyalty. When I’m looking to hire someone I’m thinking, in five, 10 years, could they eventually take my role? You’re always trying to find better talent, and you do build, in the end, long-term money, because the longer you stay with the existing company the more equity stock options that you would build within that company. If you left ever a few years most likely the equity that you potentially would have got would not be worth anything because they have not vested in time or worth anything, and so definitely value building your career, staying with one, two companies throughout.

Brett McKay: What would you say to the argument. I’ve seen, too, I’ve read of people like, “Well, I’m not gonna be loyal to a company because that company would just laid me off if they had to, so why should I have that?” What would you say to that? What Would you be a response to that?

Randy Ornstein: Yes, layoffs have been frequent, but I think it’s… Not everyone gets laid off, and there’s always strategies of… I’m not gonna be laying off my best talent, and so if you are a strong worker, you’re building good relationships, the chances of you getting laid off are gonna be much slimmer than others, and so if you believe in the company that you work for, which you need to do, and you think there’s a good career mobility for you, then I would stick it out. But if you’re joining a company and you’re just not excited then, yeah, maybe there’s an opportunity to move somewhere else, but to move to companies every two to three years, it’s just not a recipe for success.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine it could take five, 10 years to really understand what the company is doing for you to actually have success. It’s like you see this with… I get really frustrated with sports teams, they’ll hire a coach, and then if the coach doesn’t produce results in a year, they fire them, and I’m like, man, you need two, three, maybe even more than that to establish a system, introduced the system through all of the levels, not just the players, but with the rest of the staff. It could take five years before you can turn a team around. I hate how it’s just like, “Well, you didn’t give us results right away, you’re done,” but it takes time to get results.

Randy Ornstein: Exactly, and it’s the same in business. I’m building a team right now at Gopuff where I work, and I brought in some really good talent back in the end of 2021, and it takes them six months plus to get used to the systems that we have and the changes versus their prior company. And so now the bulk of my team has been here a year, a year and a half, we’re just getting our groove, and now we’re having a really good year. And so in business it takes time too, you gotta build the team, you gotta train them. There’s always gonna be a little bit of turnover where you’re constantly training, but it takes time, but not everyone thinks that way, and they’re just reacting quicker than they want, and that just is not a recipe for success.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about what someone can do to increase their chances of getting a promotion. You cite research that job performance is one of the factors most associated with moving up in a job. So in the first part of your book, you give tips on better performance, doing the everyday things of your job excellently. So let’s talk about some of the areas of work you can get better in, starting with meetings. A lot of people, they hate meetings, but they’re sometimes a necessary part of corporate life, so what can you do to get more out of your meetings, so you can get promotions?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I’m in meetings all day. It’s like straight. Sometimes I don’t even have a break to eat lunch, it’s the way we live, the world we live. We’re half virtual, half in person, and so I could be sitting on Zoom calls throughout the day, and it’s important that, number one, you speak up. You’re not just like another person on that Zoom call or in-person, that’s half listening, half working, and you’re adding no value. So it’s really important that if you’re in a meeting, you’re paying attention, you’re listening to the speaker, you’re asking questions, or giving comments, or providing feedback on how to improve. So the people know that you’re there, you’re adding value, you’re listening, you’re learning, you’re changing processes. I have many team meetings with my team, usually a Monday and Friday team meeting and then sporadic ones throughout the week, and I know which people speak up every time because they do it, and I also notice which people haven’t said a thing in six weeks, eight weeks. And that’s in my head as we do employee reviews in the next cycle, I’m asking why aren’t they speaking up, are they even listening to what I say? And so I think it’s a pretty easy thing.

You’ll get noticed as you add value in meetings, and so you gotta pay attention, you get off, stop working, think of questions to ask. Even if you can’t get a question out if you’re on Zoom, tap it into the chat, or even send a note to the organizer after the meeting, and same in person, raise your hand and speak up. Don’t be afraid and just do it.

Brett McKay: And of course, you wanna speak up and provide value, just don’t wanna speak up just to take up air space.

Randy Ornstein: Right.

Brett McKay: That can get annoyed if you do that, yeah.

Randy Ornstein: It could be, I think, do it once in a while, that’s fine. Even if you’re agreeing with something, but you also don’t need to agree every time to everything that people say. You could push back. I value the people that don’t agree with what I say, but they also then provide a better solution to what I said, and I appreciate that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about in the book, one of the frustrating things you have when you have a meeting where you’re looking for feedback, you’re looking for devil’s advocates saying, “What’s wrong with this thing?” And no one says anything. You’re like, “Oh jeez, this is not helpful guys, I need you to push back against me.”

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I think it’s okay. I’m not all knowing nor is anyone all knowing. We all have diverse backgrounds, we all have unique experiences that we could add, I’m usually giving my perspective which could completely be wrong, and I own that, and I’m expecting the team to challenge me if I have something that I’m presenting that’s incorrect or inaccurate, or if they have a better way, like that’s the only way we’re gonna get better, is if the cross-functional or the diverse group comes together and builds together versus one person saying how it is and that’s it.

Brett McKay: I think a lot of people might be afraid of speaking up or being contradictory because, “Well, I don’t wanna cause a scene, or it might upset my boss,” but I think you just gotta kind of throw caution to the wind and just go for it. And you can do this in a collegial way you don’t have to be a jerk about it. Like you said, point out the issue and then propose a solution.

Randy Ornstein: I think the younger people are less apt to speaking up because usually they’re in lower roles and they might think that only the more senior people need to speak up. That’s 100% not true. I have different age groups, different genders on my team, different experiences, and I wanna hear from all types, because even the younger consumer or the younger person on our team has a completely different experience than someone that’s 20 years older with kids and a family and versus the single. When we deal with my line of business where I manage the alcohol business at Gopuff, our core consumers are lot younger than the average, and so it’s important to hear from anyone, no matter their level, no matter their age. And you just gotta do it. It’s just… Yeah, even if you’re shy, it’s important. If you truly wanna get noticed and move up the ladder, you can’t be a silent person, just sitting in meetings, half paying attention and not adding value.

Brett McKay: Okay, so meetings, you might hate them, but they’re a necessary part of your job, so get the most out of them. Another part of people’s job that they hate is communications, sort of like email, phone calls, Slack, texts, but you said you gotta excel at this stuff. So what’s your advice on managing work communication?

Randy Ornstein: I think it’s like staying on top of your messages. And we all get a lot of emails… I think we get less phone calls than ever, it’s now Tech, Slack and Email. I know Walmart had a rule of thumb called The Sundown Rule, where every buyer was requested to respond to their suppliers by the end of the day, so there was like a 24-hour rule. I’ve never operated with the rule, nor has any company I worked with. I think it’s common courtesy though, that when a supplier or an internal person is contacting you for something or asking you for something, even if it’s a no, you should respond back in 24 or 48 hours versus that person constantly re-emailing them every few days and you’re just deleting it or not responding. To me, it’s common courtesy. I would expect the same if I’m trying to sell to someone or sending an email to someone, I wanna make sure that I get a response back in a timely manner.

Certainly, there’s always issues where someone’s on vacation or someone’s really working on a busy project. But one way to get around this, if you do have a very busy schedule is schedule a meeting with yourself for 30 minutes a day or every two days where you’re literally focused on responding to the communications that you got. I think Slack is a little bit more instantaneous. We use Slack for internal, and so if you hadn’t respond to a Slack message from your boss in 24 hours, that would be a no-no. You’re expected to have Slack up on your screen and responding all the time. It doesn’t mean you need to respond within a minute, but you just gotta stay on top of it, and that’s how we get business done. If you’re not communicative and you’re not following up, it’s very hard, and so it’s gotta be part of the way that you work, and you have to manage that responsibly.

Brett McKay: And you give some advice on how to manage this stuff, so there’s tips on putting acronyms in the headlines, so that people know, “Well, this is just for information, you don’t have to respond.” You don’t wanna do the thing where it’s like a one-word response, “Thanks.” You just wasted everyone’s time with that and you’re wasting your time responding with things.

Randy Ornstein: I’m not a fan of someone responding thanks or one word as a response, and then like five other people then do it, and now you have like six emails that are just wasting your time. And so if you are gonna respond to an email where you’re writing, “Thank you for the information,” explain why you’re thanking them. Go a little bit more in depth. Or if you do have an important email that you’re sending to a client or your boss, make sure that in the header it says, “Action, I need a response,” and then highlight in the email exactly which question, just so you could cut through a little bit of the clutter, especially if you need something urgent. So definitely, the way you write your emails, don’t write a whole novel, bullet point them better, and if you need something urgently responded to put a note in the header.

Brett McKay: Yeah, the bullet points. I do that with emails and I keep the bullet points, if it’s like more than three, it’s probably, I need to get on the phone and discuss this. ‘Cause it’d solve the problem a lot faster just getting on the phone, and just hashing it out instead of having the person respond to like 10 different bullet points. And you’re a big proponent of the telephone too, if you need something right away or the problem is too complex for Slack or email, don’t be afraid of the telephone. And that might be hard for younger workers who aren’t, it’s not something they do a lot, but the phone can be really powerful.

Randy Ornstein: Yeah. You sort of just said it a minute ago, why would you need to waste time writing a long email, it’ll take you an hour to write it versus just picking up the phone and talking for five minutes. You just saved yourself a bunch of time. And in Slack, and we use it internally but we could quickly Zoom or huddle with internal people, external people a little tougher. You got to text or call. But yeah, definitely, I’ve noticed that over the years, the people that, at least from my suppliers that call me are on the older side because that’s like what they’re used to doing. And the younger suppliers, they’re more for email. So phone is not lost. It’s important, it’s important to build relationships and you just gotta do it.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. So be good at communication, that will make your boss’s job easier. Staying on top of your communication will get you noticed. Another thing you talk about is studying, you have to study a lot. On the job studying. What do you mean by that and how will that help someone get a promotion?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, definitely knowing your numbers is point number one. So if you’re in a sales role, let’s pretend I’m a supplier selling an ice tea brand. I wanna make sure that I know all of the numbers of my performance. So what are my weekly sales? Which metro is growing the most? Which of the retailers am I in have the best performance? If I’ve been selling for a few years how’s my performance versus last year? What is my distribution? What is my price point? How is it compared versus competition? And these are numbers that you should know. If you’re in an elevator with your boss and they’re like, how’s your performance or how’s your business? You should be able to recite that in 30 seconds a minute without saying, oh, let me get back to you. And if you say that, that’s like a telltale sign that you don’t know your business.

You should be an expert on what you sell or what you manage. In my work, as I mentioned, I manage the alcohol business at Gopuff, I need to understand how does beer perform versus wine versus spirits. And then every week, which of those three is growing faster than the others? And then if spirits is growing faster, is it coming from vodka or tequila? And then if vodka’s growing the most, then which brands is growing it? Is it Tito’s or SVEDKA? And then you keep going down and then which market? And so every company that I’ve been a part of has had like a weekly performance review where you’re usually reporting back to your management or boss about your performance, where are your gaps and how you can improve them. And it’s an, it’s really important that you understand the business that you work in.

And so by doing that, you need to study. You should have, depending on the systems that you have, we have a tool called Looker where we have all these automated reports that we could pull up and I could see all of my weekly sales. I could look at syndicated data like IRI or Nielsen to understand how my business is performing versus competition. And I set aside time every week to review those reports to make sure that I’m familiar because I’m constantly getting questions from management on what happened. And I wanna be able to answer them. And I’m also constantly asking my team what happened as they even get more into the weeds, the beer team’s gonna even get deeper into beer and they’re gonna provide me insights as well so that I could then be able to provide management if those questions are asked. So it’s a huge for me, number one, it’s knowing your business, but you gotta study to know your business and you just gotta take the time to do it.

Brett McKay: Okay, so this could apply if you’re in sales, if you’re a project manager, know the numbers, what’s the status of your project? If a boss asks what’s going on, you don’t wanna say, well, I don’t know, you gotta know that stuff. So study what’s going on inside your company. But then also you talk about, you mentioned study what’s going outside, what are trends that are happening in your area of expertise. And how can you utilize that for your division or what you’re in charge of.

Randy Ornstein: 100%. It’s not even just looking at data, but if I use the example of selling an iced tea brand, I gotta go to Whole Foods or Publix or Kroger or different grocery stores or convenience stores when I have time just to see what are they doing, what different brands are out there. I’m going on social media and seeing what people are drinking. The syndicated data helps you look at actual data to see which brands are growing faster than the average. And so it’s really important not just to know your own business, but then what are your competitors doing if you have competitors as well. Because in the end, we all wanna be the best. And so it’s important that you understand what they’re doing so you can beat them at their own game.

Brett McKay: So the second half of your book you talk about, going above and beyond the everyday stuff to get a promotion. And one of those ways you can go above and beyond is developing best practices for your company. So what do you mean by a best practice?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, a best practice is something that saves you time, saves you money, or brings in more dollars. And it could be anything. It could be as simple as combining two Excel reports into one. It could be more complex as developing, working with your IT department to develop a new process that your suppliers use that makes things move faster. One example that I could think of on the team that I manage is a cost collection process that we have with our wholesalers for alcohol, where an individual on my team developed like this monthly cost collection process through this Jotform where suppliers now could go in monthly and update costs and it comes to us in the same manner every single time. Versus just telling our wholesalers to give us costs changes when something increases. And we have all these different formats and it takes time to put it all together.

And so we condensed the process and it was a free thing. You don’t have to add, you don’t have to create or put a budget together. It was just something that we put together and now it reduces the time that it takes to accept these costs in half. And so a best practice is not always given to you. I expect the team to come up with best practices that will help make their job easier. Sometimes it’s given to you, there could be a project given where we like, hey, we need to reduce our budget by a $1 million, but grow our sales by a $1 million how would you do that? And then that’s a session, but I expect that you’re constantly thinking of ways to make your job better, easier, smarter, so that you could work on new things to drive results. And I call that a best practice.

Brett McKay: So find problems within your company and solve them. Do you need a wait around, should you ask for permission to start or sometimes you just like, I see this issue, I’m just gonna solve it right now and create a best practice for it.

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I think most of the times you don’t need permission assuming that it’s a no budget best practice. If the practice that you’re putting together requires a budget that definitely would need to get your management involved as that has to go through a budget review process and there needs to be checks and balances as well and checkpoints to ensure that you’re working through it and that money that you received, you’re actually putting to good use. But most of the times and what I appreciate the most, if I’m meeting with someone on my team, they’ve already showed me, they’re like, hey, I saw this issue. Here’s what I did and here’s the result. Versus even the reverse, they’re telling me of an issue but they’re not giving me a solution how to fix it. And so the person that was proactive they actually developed it, they already met with the team, they put it together and here’s the results. To me, that’s a person that is desired to moved up the ladder.

Brett McKay: You also talk about it’s important for employees to get better at asking for things in order to get a promotion. Why is that?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I think you need to constantly be open with your boss. I would recommend that you have a weekly touchpoint with them where you’re typically going over projects that you’re working on. That’s usually what you would do in that meeting. But then maybe once a month you’re talking more about your own individual performance and if there’s an issue, what do you need to fix that issue? And quite frankly, a lot of times it’s something that requires more funding. Maybe it’s more IT help, maybe it’s a headcount, if you don’t ask for those things, it’s hard for your management to know what you actually need and by asking and saying, here’s what I need to be successful, and yes it might cost money, but here’s what I need. It makes you think, okay, this person really is trying to improve this process and you need to ask for it.

Don’t just sit there, do your job and say, oh, I can’t do that project or initiative because I don’t have the resources. You need to speak up and ask for it. You might not get it every time. There’s always things going on in the company that is tougher. But if you’re vocal about it and you explain why you need it, the benefit from it, the ROI from it, I would say more than often you’ll get the yes to get those resources and you would expect the same when you’re in that same position as well from your people under you.

Brett McKay: You talk about the role of mentors can play in helping secure promotions. What does that look like?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, I think mentors are very important and I think less and less companies today have a true mentorship program. So it’s really on you to find that mentor to help guide you. It’s definitely not your boss. It’s either someone that you’ve looked up to throughout your career or maybe it’s someone that’s moved to a different company but maybe was your boss at the time. I think they will help you, especially if the mentor’s in your own company, they could help open doors for you. So you could be probably a lot more open with them than your current line manager of like, this is what I really wanted to try and join the supply chain or operations team, but I’m on sales and it’s hard for me to make the shift. And maybe that person could help introduce you to people or find connections for you or introduce you to people outside of different organizations. I just think that they could open up a lot more doors assuming that they value the mentor/mentee relationship.

They’ve also most likely built very strong relationships with other people. And I’ve had three or four mentors throughout my career that nothing was a formal process where I would meet with them monthly. It was just like they were a mentor of mine when I needed anything I could call them or text them, hey, do you have 15 minutes to talk about this? And they would give me advice and I valued that advice and now I’m able to pay it back. And I have different mentees, you could call it, some in my current company but some throughout prior companies that I’ve worked for that do the same thing. They ask me questions, they’re like, hey I’m thinking of leaving my current company and here’s the jobs I’m looking at. Or I’ve been in my role for three years. I wanna get a promotion. What do I need to do to move up the ladder? And so I think it helps tone your skills, whether you’re a mentor or a mentee and then helps you in your career as now I manage people, I’m giving employer reviews, I’m able to use some of the skills I have of how I’m mentoring people in the same way.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you don’t want your boss to be your mentor, but how do you know or how do you figure out that someone could be a good mentor? Are there traits or characteristics you’re looking for in a potential mentor?

Randy Ornstein: Well, I think it’s gotta be someone that you have a good relationship with that is not someone that maybe you think could be a good mentor, but every time you try and talk to them, they have no time for you. They need to make the time, they need to value the mentor/mentee partnership. Who do you connect with? Maybe you’re at a team function out traveling and you just connect some with someone. Maybe you’re both runners and you happen to run together in the mornings before meetings when you’re traveling. It depends, you gotta build a connection and I think they should always be a level or two higher than you ’cause you wanna, certainly you’re trying to aspire to move up. You wanna have someone that’s got a little bit more experience that also knows more of the leadership because when you’re trying to get a new job or you’re applying for a new position within your company, that mentor could hopefully help you as well by talking to the hiring manager if they know them and putting in a good word for you, even though that person might not have directly worked with you every day.

Brett McKay: You also talk about the importance of being flexible about where you live to increase your chances of getting promotion. How can that help you get a promotion?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, it certainly depends on your company. If your company only has one office and everyone lives in that one office, then usually relocating is not an option. But for a company like Anheuser-Busch that I worked for in the past where we sell Anheuser-Busch products basically throughout the world, you need to be able to move sometimes to move to get promoted. I had to move to Bentonville, Arkansas to work with Walmart, the largest retailer out there. I could not have worked with that retailer if I didn’t live in Arkansas. That was a demand by the retailer that their suppliers need to live there. And that was probably the best decision I’ve ever made on my career moving to a town I’d never been to, but working with this amazing retailer that while stressful at times is the leader and I gain so much experience from it.

And so you also gain a lot more experiences moving to different towns, whether they’re small or large. You’re building more relationships as well with different people. Yeah, it’s tough. I moved a lot more when I was younger. I think I’ve moved seven times now, but now I live outside of Philadelphia. I have two kids that are in elementary school and it would be tougher in my career right now to move for a job unless it really meant a significant increase in role, monetary value to make it worth it. It’s not for everyone but the companies that are national or global that have offices throughout the country, if you wanna gain new experiences, the one way to do that is to relocate where the office is.

Brett McKay: Okay. Let’s say you’ve been doing all this stuff. You’ve been making the everyday excellent going above and beyond by establishing best practices, getting the mentor, things like that. At what point do you bring up the idea of a promotion to your boss?

Randy Ornstein: Well, it’s definitely not after three months in that role. And quite frankly that happens all too often. The person thinks, oh, I’ve been in the role three months, I’m crushing it, I’m ready for the next step. But you have to be strategic. So, every company I’ve worked for has had an annual performance review. So certainly during that annual performance review you should be talking about what you need to do to move to the next level. But periodically during your one-on-ones with bosses, you should also be bringing that up because you don’t need to talk about this just once a year, but you also don’t need to be talking about it once a week. So depending on the style of your boss and how you work, every one, two months you should be gauging how am I doing? Am I doing all the right things?

And then if you’ve been in role two, three years and you see no signs that you’re gonna be promoted, you need to be vocal and what am I doing that is not causing me to move up or what should I be doing to help? Especially if you see other people moving up that have been in a role less than you. So you don’t wanna be that person that’s every week, when am I getting promoted? When I’m be getting promoted? ‘Cause then it gets annoying and then you get turned off. But it needs to be an ongoing discussion. But excel on your job first after three, six months is not the time. That’s too soon.

Brett McKay: Okay. And also be having these check-ins periodically throughout the year so your boss is aware of what you’re doing. Is there documentation that you should be keeping track of just on a daily basis so that when you go to that performance review you can say, well, here are the things that I’ve done.

Randy Ornstein: I think everyone does it differently. What I would advise is, and I just did this a month ago. We had our performance review process and you have to write down all of your accomplishments that you had. It’s very hard to think of everything you did in 2022. And so yes, if you wanna have your own document that you’re constantly updating with a best practice you implemented or a success that you had or something that you think would be valuable for that employee review, it would be helpful if you document it or saved an email where you had a very good response from your boss on, so that when you do write your employee review you’re basically copying, pasting the information versus trying to think and most likely you will forget things. And so I’ve never seen it as a formal process. It’s up to you depending on if you think you can remember or not. But I would definitely do that.

Brett McKay: I know you didn’t discuss this in the book, but I just thought about this. Let’s say you get the promotion, in your experience of getting promotions and then overseeing the promotions of employees that you oversaw, what are the biggest challenges you have when you first start off in your new position, in your new role in that promotion? What have you seen?

Randy Ornstein: One big challenge is the transition from old job to new job. Typically when you’re in the new job, you’re still doing work of the old job until they’ve hired a replacement and then when they’ve hired the replacement, it’s your responsibility to usually train that person and start moving your old work to that person. ‘Cause if you never do that then your workload’s just gonna continue to grow. And so you need to do that. You need to, again, depending on what type of role you’re moving into, you gotta shift and as you move up you gotta start delegating. So when I give workout to employees, especially my senior employees, I might give them a project but I’m not expecting them to do 100% of that project. I’m expecting them to then work with their team to do the project together. And I do see some people that have delegation issues where they like to take full ownership and not delegate and the people that delegate are the people that have more time to do other things. So it’s definitely making sure you transition properly your old job to hopefully the new person that got hired and then properly delegating work that you might get.

Brett McKay: Have you had any problems with, let’s say you were in a role and you had colleagues who were on equal footing. In the hierarchy, then you get the promotion and now you’re overseeing this person that was once your colleague and maybe you’re even friends. Was there any friction there? Does that dynamic can that throw you off?

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, it’s happened many times throughout my career for sure. And I would say it’s a little awkward in the beginning but once you get past the awkward phase, let it be known that yes we are friends but now this is a manager/employee relationship, you just gotta make it work and if that person can’t make it work, then they’ll find another job or they’ll leave the company. It doesn’t mean that you can’t still be friends with that person outside of work and do things, but you have to accept the role that now the two people are in and just live with it. And I’ve had a scenario where I used to be a direct report of my boss and then later on I then was the boss of that person and yeah, it’s awkward for a week or two but you get past it and you get down to business just like it really never existed. [chuckle]

Brett McKay: Right. You gotta be professional, keep it professional.

Randy Ornstein: You gotta be professional. Exactly.

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

Randy Ornstein: Yeah, well, definitely my wife, Hayley and I wrote, the book, Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. It’s on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com. You can look at Walmart and Target.com, we have all three formats, so paperback, e-book and now audio version. So depending on how you like to read, we have a version for you. You could find me randy.ornstein@gmail.com or just LinkedIn. I don’t have a personal website but LinkedIn is usually where I share information. It’s been a long road to write this book but the feedback has been amazing and if any of the listeners out there wanna learn more, I’m happy to talk. I’ve done lunch and learns with suppliers to share more about the book. I’ll be talking to different universities in the fall, especially in the Philly area to students that are gonna graduate soon. So it’s a perfect book for those people that are about to enter the workforce. It’s a book for people that maybe they’re stuck in their current job, they haven’t been promoted and they need an extra edge or it’s managers that are trying to get their team stronger. And there’s a lot of insights in the book that will make you a better employee, which in and then will make your company a stronger company.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Randy Ornstein, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Randy Ornstein: Oh, it’s been great, Brett, thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Randy Ornstein, he’s the co-author of the book Grow: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted. It’s available on amazon.com. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/getpromoted, 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 can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android, iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing this show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support, until next time this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #899: The Essential Guide to Getting Promoted appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #898: The Heroic Exploits of WWII’s Pacific Paratroopers

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 24 May 2023 14:13:49 +0000

When people think of the paratroopers of World War II, they tend to think of the European theater — the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers.

But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific, and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon, a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood. Today on the show, James tells us about the formation, leadership, and training of the 11th Airborne Division, the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific — which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” — how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units, and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation, James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When people think of the paratroopers of World War II they tend to think of The European theatre, the 101st Airborne Division and the Band of Brothers. But paratroopers were also deployed in the Pacific and here to unpack their lesser-known but equally epic and heroic story is James Fenelon a former paratrooper himself and the author of Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts Grit and Brotherhood. Today on the show James tells us about the formation leadership and training of the 11th Airborne Division the role they played in the campaigns of the Pacific which included being dropped one by one out of a tiny plane described as a “lawnmower with wings” how they built a reputation as one of the war’s most lethal units and the division’s surprising connection to the creation of The Twilight Zone. At the end of our conversation James shares what lessons we all can take away from the exploits and spirit of the 11th Airborne. After the show’s over check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers.

James Fenelon welcome to the show.

James Fenelon: Thanks Brett I appreciate it. As a fan it’s a privilege to be here.

Brett McKay: Well you are a historian that has written two books about paratroopers during World War II. Your first book was Four Hours of Fury which is about the largest airborne operation in Europe that’s with the 17th Airborne Division. You got a new book out about paratroopers and that is called Angels Against the Sun which is about the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific. What’s interesting about you as a historian of paratroopers you were a paratrooper yourself before you started writing about paratroopers. So tell us about your career as a paratrooper and at what point in your career did you start getting interested in the history of airborne operations?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s actually a little bit flipped. I think it was my interest in history as a kid that kind of got me interested in enlisting in the service actually. My uncle was a paratrooper in Vietnam and his stories of his service and my own natural interest in history led me down that path and I enlisted in the Army right out of high school. I went to Jump School in 1988. I served for the vast majority of my time in what used to be called Long Range Surveillance units which are kind of like small reconnaissance teams or maybe LRRPs is another concept that kind of came out of the Vietnam era of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols. And so that’s kind of what I did during my service small airborne operations six-man teams. That capability of course nowadays by and large has been replaced by drones. I still think they have some of those teams but not nearly as many as they used to. But it was during that time I got to go to jump master school and several other schools in the army and it was during a conversation with a sergeant I think I was a corporal at the time we were looking at a picture of some guys who had their picture taken right before their jump into Normandy and they were all standing outside of their plane all kitted up.

And the sergeant said to me he said “Wow the names change but the faces stay the same don’t they?” And that comment really stuck with me and that’s kind of what’s driven my mission if you will to document some of these stories is to tell their story and to have us all connect to the fact that these are all ordinary guys put in extraordinary circumstances.

Brett McKay: And how have you leveraged your first-hand experience into your history writing?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think one of the things that again struck me with that comment about the faces never changing looking at those pictures of those young men in their late teens or early 20s was… I think one of the things that makes the greatest generation great is that it’s not a magic formula per se. It’s that those guys in particular recognized that you can’t choose what happens to you but you can choose how you respond to it. And so I think I kind of leverage my service in and my writing as a way to kind of initially introduce readers to the normality of these guys in their late teens. Their future is uncertain. In most cases before they even get to the war zone their primary mission in life is to escape the mundaneness of Army life of service life. A lot of these guys have left home for the first time. They find themselves in the army. Every minute of their day is being directed by somebody else as to what to do and where to go and how to do it and all that kind of stuff and so I really kind of wanted to… I use my services as someone who was in that circumstance as a way to kind of bring the humanity out if you will and I know that may be overstating it but…

Brett McKay: No I think you did a good job with that. You’re able to really… The transition from your training life which was just boring and mundane to I’m suddenly thrown in the jungles and we’ll talk about that. It was jarring and you did a good job capturing that. So Angels Against the Sun it follows the 11th Airborne Division in their campaign in the Philippines and then eventually into Japan during World War II. And I think when most Americans think of airborne troops they typically think Band of Brothers and the European Theater and I think when most people think about the Pacific Theater. They think like amphibious landings. So what role did paratroopers play in the Pacific during the World War II?

James Fenelon: Yeah I think it’s a great question and it’s a great point of comparison. And I think we’ll use that familiarity of band of brothers as a kind of way to explore the topic because I think when we first talk about the Pacific and lean in to answer that question I think the first thing to understand is just the vast differences in the Pacific theater versus Europe and of course the Pacific is characterized by immense stretches of ocean between islands. The island-hopping campaign is of course this concept of starting basically in Australia and island-hopping our way closer to the home islands of Japan using those islands to build up logistical bases and airfields to then fuel and feed the campaign onto the next island. So that means a couple of things. First the Pacific Theater was dealing with this concept of scarcity. Resources are finite just like they are in any circumstance we never have enough of what we want and so you’re dealing with… How do you navigate that? And in the Pacific that meant of course scarcity in that supplies took a long time to get from point A to point B because they were always invariably traveling by ship sometimes those ships started as far away as San Francisco and so aircraft were limited and so that had an impact on the use of paratroopers and parachute operations in the Pacific theater.

And then you also had this idea that Europe had the priority at the time when the 11th arrived in the Pacific Theater it was still very much a Germany first strategy. And so that also had an impact on the scarcity of men and material. And so it’s interesting when we look at the European conflict and we compare airborne operations. Certainly the band of brothers… They jumped into Normandy and then later Holland and in these massive strategic use of airborne forces almost to lay either security on the flanks or seize bridges in advance as the armies advanced into Holland whereas in the Pacific what you see is a much more tactical use of parachute operations. And so I’m sure we’ll get into some of these more explicitly but you go from these massive division-sized jumps in Europe to in some cases down to individual guys jumping out of observation planes into the jungles in the Philippines and it’s really a great contrast to kind of understand the full range of capabilities of our airborne forces in World War II.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you wouldn’t have those scenes that you’d think Band of Brothers were just like hundreds or maybe thousands of parachutes falling down it be maybe just a few dozen in the Pacific?

James Fenelon: Yeah there were some regimental-sized drops in Lausanne in the Philippines and those were certainly larger but even then when one regiment jump you see the aircraft having to go back to the airfield multiple times to pick up the rest of the troops and bring them in so when you see a regimental jump in the Philippines and a regiment’s about 2000 guys the aircraft are going back to make multiple trips to pick them up and drop them so it’s taking three round trips essentially to drop 2000 guys where in Europe you see to your point it’s a one lift operation, thousands of chutes in the sky at the same time so it’s again that concept of scarcity and having to make do if you will.

Brett McKay: So when was the 11th Airborne Division created?

James Fenelon: Yeah so the 11th was created in February of 1943 at Camp Mackall, North Carolina. They were commanded by a guy named General Swing and by Airborne Division again using the kind of band of brothers example an Airborne Division was intended to be delivered into combat via glider and parachute so you had two types of units in an Airborne Division you had the glider troops which were guys that were assigned to these units so imagine if you will for a minute. You’re a kid coming out of the Great Depression you’ve never been in an airplane. You’re assigned to the element Airborne Division and a glider unit so your first ride in an aircraft is an engine-less glider you don’t get any additional hazardous duty pay like the parachute troops and you don’t get a parachute like Aircrew do right? So if you think of Aircrew and Bombers or fighters they all had the safety net if you will of a parachute whereas glider troops didn’t have any of that. And then the other units of course were the parachute units. And in the case of the 11th Airborne that was the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment. These guys were all volunteers one of the more notable volunteers in that unit was Rod Serling the creator of The Twilight Zone television series of course that was after the war.

And these guys like Rod Serling were attracted to volunteer to the parachute troops because of the tough nature of their training in many cases Rod Serling wrote home to his parents after he volunteered that he thought going through the tough training would make him a better soldier and make him a better man and so he was looking forward to that challenge other guys were motivated because they liked the uniform and then of course they also all got paid $50 more a month for hazardous duty pay and that of course attracted a wide share of recruits as well.

Brett McKay: I came across all socio-economic there’s people from the country, rural, city, rich, poor, just it attracted a certain type of person. Of course there’s guys who wanted the money but a lot of guys they just liked the prestige and the toughness of it.

James Fenelon: That’s right I think it’s a great observation because of that wide appeal of that elite status if you will it did attract every walk of life you had some guys that were rodeo clowns all the way up to Harvard graduates who wanted to test themselves and join the ranks of these elite soldiers.

Brett McKay: So when it was initially formed in 1943 did they know they’re gonna be going to the Pacific or was it just like okay we’re gonna use you somewhere we’re just gonna get you prepared for wherever you’re gonna go.

James Fenelon: Yeah so the short answer to that question is no. They did not know that they were going to the Pacific. Of course one of the favorite topics of conversation when guys were sitting around with time on their hands was where are we gonna be deployed and there was raging rumors and debates on which direction they were gonna go but it wasn’t really until they were leaving Louisiana they did a series of training exercises at Camp Polk and it was when the train started veering left meaning they were going west towards the west coast that that was when it dawned on them that they were in fact headed to the Pacific Theater.

Brett McKay: So this was led by a guy named General Joseph Swing. Tell us about this guy. What was his military career like before he was put in charge of the 11th Airborne and what was his personality like?

James Fenelon: Yeah Swing was an interesting character. I really enjoyed learning a lot more about his military career and I would say that where we start to see his leadership style kind of emerge was not long after he graduated from West Point he graduated… He earned his commission rather as an artillery officer in 1915 not long after that he was assigned as a young lieutenant into the Punitive Expedition or Black Jack Pershing’s expedition into Mexico. And this was really the Army’s first experiment with mechanization. So this is right before World War I. The Army at that point was… You’re either moving on your feet or on the back of a horse and the expedition into Mexico was really the first time the army started integrating in things like vehicles cargo trucks to move troops they had some very rudimentary armored cars they were using motorcycles to deliver messages and for scouting they had a handful of biplanes that they were using and so what you see is this Swing is really exposed to this concept of modernization early in his career and probably the biggest impact that had on him was that there was no doctrine at this time so these guys are getting all this new equipment nobody really knows how to incorporate it into their scheme of maneuver or how they’re gonna actually conduct their campaign.

And what came along with that of course was a series of cautionary tales these things broke down or they didn’t arrange to have enough fuel for them in the field and so they were waiting on guys to bring gasoline forward and so all of these things were kind of witnessed by Swing and in my opinion and I think I’ve tried to make the point in the book you start to see later in World War II where he becomes very comfortable with for lack of a better word making things up as he goes along and I think that that flexibility of mindset was developed in this early part of his career and then from there of course he went on to serve in World War I with the First Infantry Division and then worked his way up the ranks until he became the commander of the 11th Airborne Division in early 1943.

Brett McKay: Another leader of the 11th Airborne that had a big impact on the division as a whole was this guy named Colonel Orin Haugen who was this guy and what was he like as a leader?

James Fenelon: Yeah Haugen was another interesting character he’s kind of what I call an OG parachute guy so he… As a captain in 1940 he was a company commander in the Army’s first organized unit of paratroopers the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion. And he kind of came at things parachute operations and airborne from a very different perspective than Swing did so Swing… You can almost use the term kind of big army he viewed parachuting as simply a means to get to work a commute a unique commute to get to the battlefield whereas Haugen had come up through the ranks and like I said as a captain in this initial parachute unit where it was drilled into these guys that they were elite… At that point the parachute battalions were very similar to the early days of the range of battalion so they were elite infantry rating units that were intended to be used to jump behind the lines and blow up bridges and railroad lines and seize airfields and things like that.

So Haugen really leaned into this concept of self-reliance and again if we use the band of brothers as a comparison point their motto of, We stand alone together well Haugen in the 511th trained right there at Camp Toccoa and run Currahee just like the guys from Band of Brothers did and so Haugen really embraced this concept of self reliance and relying on the guy next to you and not being the weak link so to speak and he really led by example he led all of the runs of the unit up Mount Currahee. He would yell at them You are the best you are the best and encourage them to run faster but he was a very strict task master and so that his men’s nickname for him was hard rock and that was kind of in reference to his hard core way that he viewed their training he was extremely competitive he wanted to win and be the first at everything so he formed a regimental boxing team a regimental football team and was constantly relieving coaches and players to make sure that he got the best guys in there to win at whatever they were doing.

And he also… I think one of the important things about Haugen was that he recognized early on that the time for his leadership his officers to establish trust with his men was there during the training and that was the time to establish trust with the enlisted men if you waited till you got into combat to establish that trust it was too late and so he was really a hard taskmaster on his junior officers to get them to again lead by example put their men first and establish that trust.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned some of the training they did before they got shipped out I always love reading about the training of the paratroopers in World War II tell us more about their training. What was it like?

James Fenelon: Yeah So Jump School at Fort Benning at the time in World War II was four weeks long and so that was kind of the individual training or the individual skills to jump out of an airplane was done at Fort Benning four weeks long there was some ground training where they did… Going through mock aircraft doors and learning how to perform in the aircraft and then there was a tower week where they were learning how to do parachute landing falls.

And one of the things again that’s important to remember at this time is that the vast majority of these guys had never been in an airplane and so for most of the recruits at this point the first time they’re in an airplane is the same day that they’re going to jump out of it. And so the Army spent three weeks and in some cases four weeks getting these guys ready for that event through a series of the crawl walk run kind of strategy if you will of building them up over a period of weeks to then the final week being jump Week where they spend that week making five jumps culminating and then their graduation from that event where they earn their jump wings the Jump School today is very similar. The big difference is in World War II you spend a week learning how to pack your own parachute which is not something that they do anymore they now have a dedicated group of professionals fortunately whose job is to pack those parachutes because as you can imagine packing a parachute is a perishable skill and it’s something that you wanna be a expert in so they leave that to experts to do that and then units would get together and then start going through a series of unit exercises to where then they started to learn how to perform as squads and platoons and maneuver in those larger elements as a team.

Brett McKay: And so as you said, they didn’t learn, they are going to the Pacific till they were on the train and they started going west. When they got to San Francisco, or where they shipped… Did they get shipped out of San Francisco? I think it was San Francisco.

James Fenelon: Yes, that’s right.

Brett McKay: Shipped out of San Francisco. Where did they go initially to the Pacific?

James Fenelon: So their first destination was to New Guinea, just north of Australia. At that point, New Guinea had largely been secured. There were still some Japanese holdouts on the far side of the island, but the 11th Airborne did not see combat on New Guinea. They went into a training regimen there and took advantage of the fact that they were now in an environment in the terrain, very similar to what they would be fighting as they moved into the Pacific, and so again, you start to see here Swing and Haugen’s personalities really start to influence how the division would fight. They started going through a series of fairly elaborate live fire exercises, incorporating live ammunition, mortar fire, artillery fire, and we know that it was realistic training because, unfortunately, several guys were killed by friendly fire in those exercises. So it was very demanding. They also had the benefit of being trained by several Australian soldiers who had already been fighting the Japanese, so they incorporated those lessons learned, and it was really a time of development for the division as they started figuring out how to operate in this jungle environment.

Brett McKay: What year was this? Is this 1943 still, 1944?

James Fenelon: This is middle of 1944. So they had just arrived in May of 1944.

Brett McKay: And what was the state of the war in Pacific at this time?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so at this point, the allies were pushing their way across the Pacific, working their way, again, as in line with that island hopping campaign. New Guinea had largely been secured, so this was when MacArthur was in the process of fulfilling his famous I shall return promise that he made to the Philippine people, and the Americans invaded the Philippines in October of 1944. The 11th initially sat out the invasion, and it wasn’t until November of 1944, that the 11th Airborne landed on the island of Leyte, initially in an administrative capacity, so they were just kind of, if you can imagine following along that island-hopping campaign and landing on a secure beach after the invasion had already started, But pretty quickly into that campaign, MacArthur and his ground commander, a guy named Walter Kruger, had started realizing that they were suffering higher than expected casualties, and so the 11th was kind of then pushed up into the line to fill in as replacements and start moving into combat.

Brett McKay: So what was the objective on Leyte? Was it just to take back the island? Was that what it was?

James Fenelon: Leyte offered what they thought at the time was going to be access to a number of land-based air strips, which would put the allies in a great position to then use those airstrips to extend their air power to the other islands in the Philippines, specifically the main island of Luzon, as well as use them as bases to cut off Japanese sea lanes where they were bringing in the raw materials to still feed their war machine, if you will. Now, there was some assumptions that went into that initially, which failed to take into account the horrific torrential rains on Leyte. So these airfields that MacArthur and his staff had planned use turned out to be muddy quagmires at the time that they landed in October, so things didn’t quite work out that way initially. And the 11th Airborne was brought in and then pushed up into the central mountain range to cut off Japanese reinforcements that were working their way from the west side of the island over these mountains to try to come down into the valley where those airfields were located.

Brett McKay: So these guys were trained as paratroopers and gliders. Did they do any para trooping and gliding at Leyte?

James Fenelon: So yes, kind of. No gliding, but this is where we start to see Swing’s, flexibility, and improvisation is the way that I like to think of it. So as these guys started moving up into the mountains… This is basically like light infantry tactics at its finest. There’s no roads going up into the mountains, so there’s no jeeps can get up there, no trucks can get up there. All the supplies that are going up into the mountains are man-packed, and so if you think about it, these guys are going up like these little trails. You got a division going up into the mountains, and you’ve gotta keep them supplied with both food and ammunition as they’re engaging the Japanese. And so at some point, they get up to this plateau, and this is where Swing starts to utilize the unique airborne capability of his division.

Of course, aircraft being in short supply, as I mentioned earlier, what he did have access to was a handful of these small single-engine observation aircraft. One guy described them as a lawnmower with wings, so think as the smallest airplane you can imagine. They literally bring it ashore and then bolt the wings onto it, and so Swing tapped a platoon of his airborne engineer, so 30-some-odd guys of his combat engineering unit, and one by one, they climbed into the back of one of these aircraft and then jumped into the jungle with their shovels and demolition charges to expand and create a drop zone in the middle of the jungle. So these guys were literally climbing in, wrapping the static line of their parachute around the spars of the chair in the back seat of this airplane and parachuting in.

So those guys, 30 of them soon landed one at a time, they started chopping down trees, using demolitions, and expanding the footprint of that drop zone, so that Swing could then start dropping in supplies, additional men and material into that forward base, and using that as a way to then keep his men supplied. Surgeons jumped in there as well, parachuted in, which allowed the rest of the unit to then keep pushing forward up into the mountains.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.

And now back to the show. And what was the fighting like at Leyte?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think when we think about the fighting on Leyte, I always like to begin with just the elements themselves, and so I mentioned it had been raining for a number of weeks on Leyte. So the first enemy that the troopers actually engaged was just the mud. They’re hacking up into these mountains, the mud in some cases is shin-deep, everything you own is wet, you’ve got disease, you’ve got the heat and humidity. So they hiked their way up and then that’s when as they’re in the mountains, that’s when they start to engage with Japanese patrols and as there up in these mountains, it’s really… The whole advantage in the way that the American army had geared itself around technology advantages and firepower advantage were really negated by the mountains because you couldn’t get any of that stuff up into the mountains.

You couldn’t get artillery pieces up into the mountains. You couldn’t get a lot of these larger radios. The mountains were covered in clouds, so air support was difficult. The maps were horrible, so nobody actually ever really knew where they were. These maps that they had were often hand-drawn and had villages mislabeled and entire ridge lines or mountain peaks were missing from them. That was kind of the conditions under which these guys moved up into the mountains, and then of course, on top of that, they had the enemy, the Japanese, which started almost kind of imagine this head-to-head collision up in the mountains as you had squads of the American paratroopers going forward, and in these very close combat conditions bumping into squads of Japanese who were heading in opposite direction.

Brett McKay: And the Japanese, they were just formidable opponents, and at this point, for the Japanese, they kind of understood… The generals and the leaders there, they understood that their backs were against the wall. So it was kind of turning into a fight to the death for these guys.

James Fenelon: Yeah, I think a fight to the death is a great way to describe it. At that point in the war, the Japanese leadership was really… Their strategy was to win just one massive campaign, right? The strategic concept kind of was like, “Well, if we can bring the Americans to their knees in just one battle, hit them with heavy, heavy casualties, maybe we can approach a treaty on equal terms” And of course, the Americans had already made their unconditional surrender kind of demand, but that was the idea of the Japanese, and so they were throwing in troops seeking a decisive victory, if you will. And one of the things…

One of the traits of the Japanese soldier was this concept of Yamato de Machi, and I hope I’m pronouncing that right, but it’s this idea of an unwavering belief in the righteousness of their cause, and these guys were kind of steeped in that ethos, if you will, that kind of involved equal parts Bushido Shinto religion, and of course, honor played an important component of that, but it was this idea of, “Well, if we’re brave enough and if we fight hard enough, our spirit can overcome technological advantages that the enemy has.” And it was interesting because up in the mountains of Leyte when those two elements came together, and at this point in the war, of course, all of the Americans understood that the Japanese were not gonna surrender. They understood from the news that had leaked out about the Bataan Death March that they could expect to be treated very poorly as prisoners themselves, and so it really devolved into this battle of attrition because neither side was willing to give up. The Americans weren’t gonna give up, they’re not gonna put themselves in the position to where they’re gonna be taken prisoner.

Japanese units were fighting to sometimes 96-97% of casualties, and so you really get this head-to-head, no-holds-barred combat up in the mountains of Leyte, and honestly, all the Pacific campaigns were very similar to that.

Brett McKay: You also talk about these reports from American soldiers that the Japanese at some points, they would just attack with a samurai sword and it was terrifying. Usually, they got gunned down, but it was terrifying to see some guy coming at you with just a sword.

James Fenelon: Absolutely, yeah, that’s one of those things that’s just really… It’s kind of hard to comprehend the terror of that when you’ve got guys, human wave attacks coming at you with swords over their heads. The Japanese bayonets were extremely long, so that’s intimidating, as well. There was one veteran I interviewed remembered, he shot a guy that was running towards them in a bonsai attack and all he was armed with was a fountain pen. He had a fountain pen raised up over his shoulder like a dagger. That’s how fanatical some of these attacks were.

Brett McKay: Alright, so they took Leyte. It took a month, and then you talk about after they finally to control the island, they had to do this mopping up, like, “Oh, let’s go mop up,” and basically that was to go find Japanese forces that were still there in hiding. But you talk about the mopping up was actually more dangerous than the actual assault. What made mopping up “More difficult or dangerous”?

James Fenelon: Yeah, I’m glad you put the mopping up in quotes, ’cause it’s one of those terms that is easy to overlook. I think what you had there was even a bigger level of desperation. When you’re dealing with these Japanese units that have been, in many cases, overrun or bypassed, so imagine a group of Japanese on a hill top where the Japanese have kind of, the Sun Tzu kind of way of just going around that hill top, isolated it, we’ll come back for it later type of thing. When you come back for it later, you’ve now got Japanese who are cut off, they’re viewing their mission now is to take as many Americans with them as possible, and so there’s just no real easy way to go about doing that. Again, at one point, Swing did utilize the unique capabilities of his division and dropped in four small artillery pieces, so they did have some heavier firepower at that time up in the mountains to kind of help them in these situations where they’re trying to winkle out these holdouts, but they’re in caves, they’re not gonna come out. You have to bring the mountain down around them, basically. I mean, Swing was very good about using flanking attacks, and he despised frontal assaults that some other army commanders were very comfortable with, but it was just very nasty, dirty work to go up there and try to get into these fortified positions and get these guys out of there.

Brett McKay: So what was the result of Leyte? So apart from, we took control the island, what were casualties like? And how did this… I mean, this is the 11th’s first… I mean, it was like baptism by fire. How did this affect them for the rest of the war.

James Fenelon: Yeah, so I think the Hard Rock Haugen’s unit came out of Leyte. It took them a month of tracking from one side to get to the other side of the island coming down out of the mountains on Christmas day, essentially, is when they started to emerge, on the far side of the island. They had a number of casualties, some of which they had left buried up in the mountains, so there was efforts to go get those guys. They had, I wanna say, right around 500 casualties from that fighting. They had just as many, if not more, guys that were suffering from disease up in those conditions, but Haugen did the math when they came out of the mountains, and he and his men were boasting of a 45 to one kill ratio of their time up in the mountain. And so again, this is where you start to see the real aggressive nature of Haugen and Swing both really always wanting to maintain contact with the enemy, always wanting to move forward, and so they kind of boasted of this kill ratio, if you will, as a way to set expectations for the unit, for the division, as to how they were gonna continue to lean into the fight.

Brett McKay: Did that give them a reputation amongst the Allies and the Japanese?

James Fenelon: Absolutely. One of the interesting things about the 11th Airborne Division is that I use the term punch above their weight. So both the 101st and the other Airborne divisions that were fielded during World War II were only 8500 men in the division, and so this made them, in most cases, a little bit more than half the size of a regular infantry division. So regular Infantry Division was anywhere between 14 and 15000 guys, and again, the 11th Airborne was 8500. So to kind of develop this reputation of doing so much damage with about half of what they had to a regular division, and the course that also included having far less artillery than a regular infantry division did, it really bolstered their reputation and you see them, particularly with General Eichelberger, one of MacArthur’s field commanders, really leaned on the 11th Airborne for their aggressive spirit.

Brett McKay: So what happened to the 11th after Leyte?

James Fenelon: So after Leyte, MacArthur had moved on and moved his invasion next to Luzon, which was the main island in the Philippines. Of course, the main prize of that campaign was to be Manilla, which was the capital city. Before the war, it was known as the Pearl of the Orient, and I think it’s important to kinda get a good idea of what that city was like. It had just under a million people living in it, so it was a massive urban area. Many of the boulevards along the bay there, the reason it was called Pearl of the Orient was these beautiful wide boulevards where people could stroll to watch the sunset. Many of the government buildings rivaled anything that you would see in Washington DC with these massive white marble columns. MacArthur had hoped that the Japanese were going to declare Manila an open city, meaning that they would withdraw their forces out of the city to avoid what would become massive bloodshed in an urban battle.

The Germans did that in Paris. They declared Paris an open city and left so that it wouldn’t turn into the blood bath that it could have. That didn’t happen unfortunately, in Manilla. And so as MacArthur campaign was slowing down, he had landed several divisions to the north, was pushing down towards Manilla, he decided to launch several other landings, if you will, south of Manila as a way to kind of divide Japanese forces. The 11th Airborne Division was assigned to one of these landings. General Swing really advocated for air dropping the division in total. So again, using gliders and aircraft to land them south of Manilla. Unfortunately, again, we see a lack of aircraft, so there just wasn’t enough aircraft at that point to be able to lift his division, and so they ended up going in kind of what he described as half a loaf, meaning that half a loaf went in amphibious-ly, meaning he landed his glider units along the shore, and then further inland, he air dropped Haugen and his men south of Manilla to where the two units then linked up on the ground, his glider units and the parachute units linked up and then started pushing their way north up into the city limits of Manilla.

Brett McKay: So how did the fighting differ in the city compared to the jungle? What were the unique challenges?

James Fenelon: The main thing was just the urban nature of it. So as the 11th was moving up, the Japanese had anticipated the Americans returning to the Philippines and that they would be attacking Manilla, so they had built a belt of defenses along the southern edge of the city. Their initial thought was that MacArthur was gonna attack from the south. He didn’t. He attacked from the north, but the 11th did attack from the south, so they ran into this belt line of defenses, which the Japanese had labeled the Genko line. Think about this as a series of pillboxes, machine gun nests, these are built out of brick, these are built out of bamboo tree trunks, they have taken aerial bombs and buried them in the ground as mines across the road.

They’ve overturned bulldozers and city buses across the roads to create blocking positions, and so it really just becomes this brick-by-brick concrete battle as the 11th start pushing their way up into the city. They’re swarming through the city, they’re finding Japanese holdouts in attics and in basements, behind them in areas they thought they’ve already cleared, they start to… The 11th and Swing start to really work with Filipino gorillas, who are really important in this battle for the 11th because of course, they know the terrain, they know the layout of the city, they know a lot about the Japanese defenses because, of course, they watch them being built, and so Swing really starts to leverage several battalions worth of Filipino gorillas in his scheme of battle.

Brett McKay: There were some pretty epic exploits by the individual members of the 11th airborne. I think at this point, there’s a guy named Manny Perez who… Basically, he won the Medal of honor for this, what he did. Can you talk about what he did at this point in the war?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so Perez was a member of Haugen’s parachute infantry regiment. He was 21 years old at the time of this attack. So they were working their way up through this Genko Line at this point. They had pushed their way north and were now kind of maneuvering east, if you will, trying to hook around some of these defenses. His unit had been engaged all morning in attacking several pillboxes. The counts vary, but the general consensus is they had taken out his squad and platoon had worked their way through 11 Japanese pillboxes. And the 12th one really had the squad pinned down. It was a dual twin-mounted machine gun that had a pretty good field of fire over some open terrain. The squad had gone to ground in front of this.

And as the story goes from lieutenant who was up front trying to figure out how they were going to attack this position, he looked over and all of a sudden, Perez and his nickname, his buddies called him Manny, was sprinting forward towards the gun position and they yelled for him to get down, he kept going. He threw himself down on the side of the gun position within hand grenade range. He threw a couple of hand grenades into the machine gun position. Right as they exploded, he’s jumping up and following them in, find several Japanese guys that have been wounded, he quickly shoots them.

Japanese soldier approaches him and attacks him with his bayonet on the end of his rifle. Perez ends up taking the rifle away from him, killing the guy with his own rifle, and then at one point beating three Japanese guys to death with that rifle, ends up breaking that rifle, grabbing another one. It’s really one of those stories that if you put it in a movie, it would be hard to believe, but at the end of it, Perez had taken the machine gun nest and his Medal of Honor citation cites that he had killed single-handedly, 23 of the enemy in that action. He was, to your point, awarded the Medal of Honor. That was interesting because several of his comrades that witnessed the event actually disputed the citation, wanting to amend it because by their count, during the entirety of that morning, Perez had actually taken out anywhere from 70 to 75 Japanese during the assault on all those other previous pillboxes. So he was quite a one-man machine. Sadly, even though he survived that event that he was awarded the Medal of Honor for it, it was awarded posthumously because he was killed later on in the campaign.

Brett McKay: So the 11th… They take Manila, the 11th with other divisions as well. What happened to the 11th after that?

James Fenelon: So one of the more interesting exploits of the 11th’s campaign while they were on Luzon was their liberation of the Los Banos prison camp. So when the Japanese had invaded the Philippines, they had taken prisoner several thousand civilians. So think of Americans, French, British, these were engineers who worked on the island, entrepreneurs who own businesses, clergy, on missions, things like that. And the Japanese had put them in a number of prison camps, some of which were in Manila proper. Los Banos was a couple of miles, maybe 20 miles outside of the city limits. It was a camp that held a little over 2,000 of these civilian prisoners. And MacArthur and his staff were worried that as the Japanese were being pushed across the island that rather than evacuate these prisoners or just simply release them, that they would execute the prisoners.

And so MacArthur put Swing in charge of figuring out how to rescue these guys. And this again is where you see Swing’s kind of flexible approach to his war fighting. The plan that his unit came up with was a kind of a multi-pronged attack that started with a ground assault by his reconnaissance scouts. They worked in conjunction with the Filipino guerrillas to sneak up to the outskirts of the camp. They timed their assault to be launched simultaneously as the Japanese were conducting their morning calisthenics. So the only armed Japanese were the guys that were around the perimeter of the camp. Everybody else was in there doing their morning exercises. Right as that happened, a company of guys parachuted in on the far side of the camp. So about 120 men parachuted in and they joined in the assault. While that was happening, the rest of that battalion came across the lake in amphibious tracked vehicles that then made their way into the camp, knocked down the gates of the camp with those tracked vehicles, and they loaded all of the prisoners onto those tracked vehicles to evacuate them.

It was a raid, meaning that they were just going in to rescue these guys and then get out. And so it was stunningly successful. None of the prisoners were killed in the crossfire. A couple of them were wounded, but nothing serious. Unfortunately, two of the guerrillas were killed in the firefight, but all of the American rescuers were evacuated unharmed as well.

Brett McKay: So this is about February 1945 when that prison liberation happened. And then the next couple of months, the 11th Airborne along with the other divisions there, they eventually secured the Philippines. Was it pretty easy after that point, if they got Manila, or was it hard fighting even then?

James Fenelon: It was pretty much hard fighting all the way across the island. Again, I think one of the things that’s interesting to note, I think, to just provide some additional context, the last Japanese soldier to surrender in the Philippines took place in 1974, and so that gives you kind of an idea as to the tenacity of these guys and their willingness to stay in the fight. And so, again, we use that term in quotes, “mopping up”. There was a lot of mopping up in Luzon. Swing kept pushing his division east across the island as an attempt to cut the island in half, if you will, as other units were both to the north and the south of them as they made that cut across. And it was similar combat, pushing through, sweeping past some of these more heavily defended areas, cutting them off so that they couldn’t get resupplied with food or reinforcements, and then coming back and dealing with them later.

At one point, Swing had a garrison of something like 300-some-odd Japanese kind of cornered on this mountain fortress that they had built, and they sent a guy up to try to get the Japanese to surrender, the Japanese shot at the guy who was bringing up the surrender terms. And so Swing was content just to sit back. And I think something like, they launched a thousand artillery shells a day at this place until they finally just reduced it to rubble. And that again was just kind of that battle of attrition that took place all across the Philippines.

Brett McKay: They finally took it towards the middle of 1945, and at this point, the military was getting ready for just an all-out invasion of Japan. What was the 11th Division’s role gonna be in that land invasion of Japan?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so everybody… All the troopers in the 11th were convinced that they were going to be dropped into the Japanese main island as part of MacArthur’s invasion. If you go look at the actual plans that were drawn up, the 11th Airborne was gonna be used in that invasion, but as far as I can find, they weren’t actually going to air drop them in. Again, maybe that was due to a lack of aircraft. The plans that I’ve seen indicate that they were gonna be landed amphibiously. But the guys at the time didn’t know that. The guys at the time all assumed that they would finally be used in one of these massive air drops that we’ve already compared Europe to. But of course, that didn’t happen. The United States dropped two atomic bombs, which then brought about the surrender, negotiations and ultimately, the end of the war.

Brett McKay: Did they occupy Japan? Did they play any role in that?

James Fenelon: Yeah, so this is where you finally start to see the small size of the 11th Airborne Division play into their favor. So they were the first troops to be air landed in Japan. They had flown from airfields in Manila initially to Okinawa, where they stayed for several weeks. And it’s kind of a misconception that the war ended immediately after the atomic bombs were dropped. There were several weeks there where there was internal debate going on in Japan about how to respond to the bombs, how to approach the surrender terms. Those were ironed out. And then several…

After the division had sat on Okinawa for several weeks, they then flew from Okinawa to a small airfield outside of Tokyo. They secured that. All of the guys from the 11th flew in fully armed, expecting a trap. One of the troopers commented that while the Japanese surrendered as hard as they fought. And so there weren’t any incidents once they landed fortunately. There was compliance with the surrender terms. And a couple of days after they got there, MacArthur landed at that airfield for the eventual signing of the surrender documents on the Missouri.

Brett McKay: When did these guys go home? Did they go home in 1945?

James Fenelon: Some of them did. It’s an interesting kind of return, if you will. So similar to what we saw in Europe, there was the point system of when these… You earn points for how long you’ve been in the service, if you were wounded, things like that. The 11th itself stayed in Japan for a number of years as an occupation force. So their initial mission, once they landed in Japan and secured that airfield was disarming the populace. So the Japanese had armed millions of civilians for this big fight that was anticipated to occur on the home islands. And so occupation troops were responsible for patrolling, conducting inspections and overseeing weapons turn in. And so the 11th kinda came home in drips and drabs and one’s and two’s as these guys would get on ships and make their way back to the States.

Brett McKay: What happened to some of these guys when they came home? Did they… Did a lot of these guys have a hard time processing what they went through?

James Fenelon: Yeah, of course, we know a lot more now about post-traumatic stress than we did back then. It was largely undiagnosed. Interestingly enough, I think one of the most vocal guys on that topic was Rod Serling who… He certainly didn’t call it post-traumatic stress, but he certainly knew what was going on. And he talked about himself and his friends who did come back and there was those that had been physically wounded, and then of course, those who had suffered mentally from their experience. And he talked pretty freely about that and some of the challenges he had and that’s really where he turned to writing. He found that as an outlet. Of course, now we know that writing and talking about it is a great way to kind of excise those demons, if you will, but that was kind of his way of going about it. And of course, I think if we look at the Twilight Zone, you can certainly see some of the themes in those episodes that he wrote of trying to kind of explore humanity and the perception of what the human experience entails.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you can see that definitely in the episodes, the themes like war is bad, that was a theme you see in Twilight Zone. Also, the Twilight Zone, there’s like an empathy for people dealing with mental illness that I don’t think you saw in other shows, but you saw that on the Twilight Zone.

James Fenelon: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most horrific events of the war took place right in front of Rod Serling ‘s eyes. When they were up in that forward base that I was talking about, they were dropping supplies into them and sometimes those supplies were just literally thrown out the side of the airplane. And one point in that campaign, they had gone five days without food because the clouds had socked in the mountain where they couldn’t get aircraft up there. So the clouds finally broke, the planes are flying over to push out these crates. One of Rod Serling ‘s best friends jumps up and is impromptu singing a song about food, getting a laugh out of everybody, when all of a sudden one of these crates falling out of the sky crushes his skull and kills him right in front of everybody who’s sitting there watching him in this moment of glee that he’s getting ready to get some food.

And again, I think… So you can imagine yourself sitting there as a 19, 20-year-old, and all of a sudden this moment your best friend’s head has caved in. And I think Rod spent a lot of his life trying to process those kinds of things through the exploration of his writing in his show.

Brett McKay: What lessons about life and being a man do you hope readers take away after reading about the 11th Airborne Division?

James Fenelon: It’s a great question. I think there’s so many interesting lessons to learn from both Swing and Haugen and the way that the unit comported themselves during the war. But I would say one of them was this concept of flexibility or imagination. It’s the idea of… When we see that in Swing’s comfortable take on how to not stick to doctrine or not stick to a plan when it wasn’t working, I think that’s something we could all benefit from, right? We gotta be comfortable and objective enough with ourselves and our approach to understand when we might have to pivot and attack something from a different direction to make it work. I think also the idea of initiative in the 11th Airborne, that meant always taking the initiative, always pushing forward, always keeping the enemy off-balance. Whereas I think in our daily life, always looking for opportunities to stay on the initiative, there’s always something that we can do to help ourselves, to help others, and that’s certainly within the spirit of that, always leaning into a scenario or a task. And then finally, I would say endurance is another big lesson that I certainly understood from learning more about these guys. And by endurance, I mean both physically and mentally.

I think one of the things that got them through some of that horrible jungle fighting was both their physical and their mental endurance, right? So staying in shape, staying in the game. And certainly, your podcast gives us lots of tools as far as mental and physical endurance.

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

James Fenelon: Yeah, so the book is available at all the usual suspects. You can order it online on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. If you wanna learn more about me and my work, you can go to jamesfenelon.com.

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

James Fenelon: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was James Fenelon. He’s the author of the book, Angels Against the Sun. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jamesfenelon.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/pacificparatroopers where you can find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so at Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up and use the code Manliness at checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think 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 AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #898: The Heroic Exploits of WWII’s Pacific Paratroopers appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette

Brett & Kate McKay — Mon, 22 May 2023 16:09:44 +0000

The charge to be well-mannered, to treat others with civility, kindness, and respect, is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette, change over time.

Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mr. Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “no problem” is an appropriate response to “thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever-proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. The charge to be well-mannered. To treat others with civility, kindness, and respect is perennial. But the rules for how to carry those manners into action, the rules of good etiquette change over time. Given all the cultural and technological changes modern society has experienced, it’s not always easy to know the best practices for a contemporary gentleman. Here to offer some guidance on that front is Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. Today on the show, Thomas offers some answers to the frequently asked questions around modern etiquette, including when to send a handwritten thank you note, whether “No problem” is an appropriate response to “Thank you,” if it’s okay to ghost someone, how to deal with our ever proliferating and out-of-control tipping culture, whether it’s okay to exclude kids from your wedding, if you should still open a door for a woman, and more. After show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ.

Alright. Thomas Farley, welcome to the show.

Thomas Farley: Brett, thanks so much for having me. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: So you are Mister Manners, you’re an etiquette expert, a communication expert, you do trainings for businesses around the world and around the country, and I wanted to bring you on to talk about manners and etiquette in general, but also hopefully we can answer some common questions that people have about etiquette and manners, ’cause it seems like it’s constantly changing, especially with the introduction of new technologies that we have. So I think this will be a fun conversation. Let’s talk about manners in general. I think a lot of people listening might think, well, manners, it’s contrived, it’s artificial, it’s phony, it’s not authentic. Why do you think it’s still important to know and follow rules of etiquette?

Thomas Farley: Sure. And I think just for the listener’s benefit, it’s really important for us to distinguish between manners and etiquette because they actually, they’re used often interchangeably but they do mean different things. So etiquette, it derives from the French word for ticket. So think about etiquette as your ticket to getting more and better interactions. So when you’re speaking with someone, when you’re in an unfamiliar situation, by following the rules of etiquette, you’re guaranteed less embarrassment and more satisfaction for both parties to the interaction. That’s etiquette. And etiquette changes. It evolves over time. So people think, oh, etiquette, they immediately go to someone drinking out of a teacup where they’ve got their pinky raised in the air or they think about dining etiquette. But the fact is there’s etiquette that governs just about everything we do throughout the day. So etiquette in an elevator, etiquette for who steps to the right when you’re on a sidewalk, and so on.

And so without rules of etiquette similar to the rules of driving, we’d have more accidents, we’d have more upsetting situations. So etiquette really is valuable and important, and it evolves. Manners on the other hand is a general sense of kindness and consideration toward others, which of course can incorporate etiquette. But manners doesn’t come so much with rules, it’s more just a general sense of empathy and kindness and consideration towards others around us. So they’re both important, and I’m so glad to be able to spend this time with you because this idea that etiquette is some crusty old thing that only your grandma still cares about, couldn’t be farther from the truth. Without etiquette, we would have no civilized society. So it’s really important.

Brett McKay: I like that distinction between manners and etiquette. So manners is just thinking about making the other person feel good and comfortable.

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: And that might require some, the Greeks will call it phronesis or practical wisdom, kind of judgment. It might differ from person to person. Etiquette is more like the rules of the road. I really like that analogy of traffic rules. If there were no traffic laws, there’d just be chaos. The same goes for our social interaction. If there aren’t any guidelines to follow, then it would just… Everything would just be friction filled and not fun.

Thomas Farley: That’s exactly right. And sometimes the rules of etiquette can seem a little bit arbitrary, and in fact, in some cases they are very arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important. So in the same way that in the US, we drive on the right-hand-side of the road, and in most situations that works quite well. Whereas in the UK, they drive on the left side of the road, and in most situations, that works perfectly well. The fact is that there is a set of guidelines that everyone is aware of so that we can all interact and focus on far more important things than what side of the road do you drive on or what side of the table setting your fork is. So etiquette really does play that vital role, although it can seem quite arbitrary.

Brett McKay: Well, I think everyone’s experienced social interactions where etiquette isn’t practiced. And you see these videos on the internet a lot now, just people just yelling at each other, and it’s like if they just would have practiced a little bit of etiquette, they could’ve avoided all that.

Thomas Farley: Yes, it’s true. And I think there are a lot of reasons for what we’re seeing, and literally seeing, and I think one of the primary drivers of it is the fact that we all have an independent television studio in our pockets wherever we go. So an interaction that might not have been caught on camera, that happens on an airplane between somebody who wants to take more than their share of an armrest can easily go viral in ways that it wouldn’t have before. So there’s definitely this perception that etiquette is worse than ever, that manners are worse than ever. But frankly you can read news accounts and textbooks from a hundred years ago, 600 years ago, where you hear people saying, “Gosh, people have no etiquette anymore, people have no manners anymore.” I think there were definitely throughout recorded history, there are times where if you think etiquette is bad today, boy, it was really horrific in the Middle Ages when for example, no one was able to afford their own napkin, and if you were at a banquet, there was a towel that hung on the wall, and that was the napkin for everyone to use for throughout the meal, so you didn’t even have an individual napkin.

Or where something as seemingly simple as a fork was seen as an affectation, and the only utensils that were used up until even pre-colonial times in the United States were a spoon and a knife, and anything else that required more dexterity than that, you were using your hands. So we might think etiquette is really at all-time lows right now, but the fact is we’re more refined than we sometimes give ourselves credit for, and history is certainly a guide to the fact that times have not always been so mannerly, despite what our memories or our history books might say otherwise.

Brett McKay: Alright. So let’s get into some specific etiquette and manners questions. Let’s talk about thank-you notes. When do you think a handwritten thank-you note is appropriate?

Thomas Farley: I would say a handwritten thank-you note is never inappropriate. So I get this question quite a lot. Is it okay if I send a thank-you note? And to that question, I say it is so much more than okay. In an age where everything is digital, we’re texting, we’re sending DMs on Snapchat or TikTok, the idea that someone actually took the time to remark on a courtesy or something that we did for them that was a kind gesture with a handwritten note that they licked the envelope and they put a stamp on it and put it in the mail, I think it’s a wonderful way of expressing thanks. So I would say there is… Frankly, there is no… The only occasion I would say a thank-you note is just kind of ridiculous is to send someone a thank-you note for sending you a thank-you note. But all other instances, the job interview, the dinner party that you were invited to, certainly the birthday gift or the holiday gift that someone gave you, I’m fond of saying, text messages don’t get pinned up to refrigerators or cork boards, thank-you notes do, they get saved. And if you wanna be that person who shows that you truly appreciated the gesture of the individual, no matter how small, a thank-you note is a wonderful way of doing so.

Brett McKay: So you still recommend a handwritten thank-you note after a job interview? ‘Cause I remember that was the advice that I got 15 years ago, but is that still applicable today, you think?

Thomas Farley: Yeah, I would highly recommend it if you care about getting the job. And here’s the reason. Think about it, you may be up against five, six, seven other candidates. If all things are equal, and one of those candidates actually sends a thank-you note, I guarantee you, it’s gonna help you to be set apart. The person is gonna see that you’re detail-oriented, especially if you send it out quickly. So for a job interview, what I recommend if you’re going for… And it’s harder, frankly, Brett in the age of virtual where you may not be interviewing with someone in person, that person may be a half-a-world away and they’re not even working in an office because they’re 100% remote. So there it gets trickier for a job interview thank-you note. But if you are going to a traditional job interview in a corporate office building, you have the address of the person who’s there five days a week or even three days a week, I would bring a thank-you note, blank one to the interview.

I would immediately after the interview, I’d write it out, have your stamp ready to go and pop it in the nearest mailbox. And fingers crossed, the USPS does what it’s supposed to do, that thank-you note is there with the person who interviewed you within a day or two of your interview. It shows you to be on top of your game, it shows you to be grateful, and it shows that you’re really passionate about getting the position. So I think it’s a great practice to have.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned the thank you to a thank you. You don’t wanna do that generally, but my wife and I, we do that ’cause sometimes readers and listeners, they send us nice notes thanking us for AoM’s content saying how it’s changed their life. And so we often… We just write back and just say, “Hey, we appreciate the appreciation.” We really do. It is nice to hear from our listeners that they’re getting something out of this stuff.

Thomas Farley: Yes, and I would draw the distinction. So I think if someone’s taken the trouble to send you, to write you a handwritten thank-you note, I would absolutely acknowledge the receipt of the thank-you note, but to write them a thank-you note as a thank you for them sending you a thank-you note, it starts this cascade effect of, okay, when do the thank-you notes end? It starts to get a little bit silly. But I would absolutely acknowledge it, and I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. Because if someone takes the time to write a thank-you note and they never hear from the recipient, “Oh my gosh, I just got your thank-you note. That was so thoughtful. Thank you,” then they may be discouraged from doing it the next time because they feel like their gesture didn’t really have any kind of an impact. So I would absolutely acknowledge it, but you don’t need to acknowledge it with a thank-you note.

Brett McKay: Okay, so it’s nice to acknowledge a thank-you note, but you don’t need to send a thank-you note, like an actual… Like a thank-you card in response to someone’s thank-you card. So you mentioned writing thank-you notes to the host at a party you attended. I know this was common a couple of decades ago. My parents still do this, my in-laws do this too, but you think yeah, that that’s still an appropriate gesture.

Thomas Farley: If you’re hoping to be invited back, I would highly recommend that. And not just a generic thank-you note that doesn’t really say anything of value, but truly something that remarks on perhaps a dish that you particularly enjoy, the conversation that you had with the host that you particularly enjoyed, something that doesn’t sound like your AI writing the thank-you note, but that it’s truly got that human touch. And I would say, so dinner party, absolutely. You think about the amount of time that goes into cleaning and curating the table and cooking, and from start to finish, anyone who’s ever hosted a dinner party knows the amount of work that goes into it and how exhausting it can be. If you can’t take… Five minutes really is all it should take to write a thoughtful thank-you note, I think that’s really unfortunate. And people say, I’m too busy, I don’t have time. Well, you know what, you had time to go to the dinner party, had time to enjoy the meal, you had time to enjoy the present someone gave you. Five minutes to write a thank-you note, no matter how busy we all are, I don’t ever buy that excuse.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about just saying thank you in face-to-face interactions. What’s an appropriate response when someone says thank you? ‘Cause this causes a lot of debate, ’cause a lot of people, they say, “No problem,” and a lot of people do not like that. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: So Brett, this is fun because there are… From the time we’re small, we’re taught, “What’s the magic word? Say the magic word. You want a lollipop, you’ve gotta say ‘Please’. If someone give something to you, you’ve gotta say, ‘Thank-you.'” And somewhere along the way, some of those magic words, both generationally and through time have lost a little bit of their original true intent. So, thank you, I think is a perfect thing to say, and that really… That’s unassailable, saying thank you as gratitude for something, as long as you’re saying it genuinely and not in a sarcastic way. Or if you’re texting and it’s, “Thank you, period.” Well, now, you know what? Now you don’t sound so gracious anymore, now you sound like you’re being sarcastic. So taking the benefit of the doubt that someone’s genuinely saying thank you to someone for something that another person has done kind to them. Saying ‘No problem’ is almost like you’re swatting away the thanks, which I think is unfortunate. So some of the finest hotels in the world, they know to instruct their staff that ‘No problem’ as a response to thank you is simply not acceptable. And this is not something that’s unique to the English language. So in Spanish, it’s de nada, which means it’s nothing.

In French, it’s de rien, which similarly is it’s nothing. And that’s really… That’s to belittle the gratitude that’s coming from the person. So rather than simply saying, “No problem,” or if you’re Canadian, “No worries,” or if you’re a child of the 1950s, maybe you say, “No sweat,” these phrases really take a thank you and they push it down, they subjugate it, which I think is important. So rather than saying, “No problem,” I highly recommend something instead like, “Happy to do it,” or, “Any time,” or, “It’s my pleasure.” There is also, of course, the standard response of, “You’re welcome,” but that one has taken on a little bit of a generational taint, where pretty much anyone from Millennial on down through Gen Z tends to look at you’re welcome as a little bit smug, almost as if to say, “You’re welcome for the nice thing that I did and I’m glad that you appreciated it.” Perhaps owning the gratitude a little bit too much. Now, this is not something that older generations see in that phrase ‘You’re welcome’ but the way it’s parsed by younger generations, it can often have that taint. So I recommend as a great alternative, no matter how old you are, is simply, “It’s my pleasure.”

And for anyone who’s traveled through Costa Rica, as I have, what really struck me upon my first visit there was they do not say that de facto Spanish response of de nada. Everything… If you say gracias, they respond immediately with con gusto, with pleasure. And I think it’s such a nicer way of acknowledging someone’s gratitude.

Brett McKay: I think that’s an important point about how language evolves with generations. So I think you’re welcome, maybe for younger generations, you might not wanna use that with them. Maybe with an older person, yes. But I think, yeah, I tentily go to the Chick-fil-A route and just say, “My pleasure,” after someone says, “Thank you.” And then you see the same sort of dynamic with compliments. So you go up to somebody and you give them this compliment like, “Hey, you did a great job on that,” and they kind of swat it away by saying, “Oh, no worries,” or, “It was nothing.”

Thomas Farley: Yes.

Brett McKay: I think if you receive a compliment, be grateful for the compliment. Like someone’s putting themselves out there to say you did a great job, so recognize that.

Thomas Farley: Recognize it, own it. And I think the reason that phenomenon exists is people can tend to be a little bit shy about receiving and accepting a compliment. They don’t know what to say. “Oh, oh, I love your shirt. That’s a great shirt.” “Oh, this old thing?” You immediately… Your reaction is to just swat it away as if it’s not something that’s important and you don’t wanna be seen as egotistical. So I think a great fix for that is someone who really wants to be hyper-aware of how to be able to give a compliment without getting that particular reaction you just described is to immediately follow-up the compliment with a question. So instead of saying, “Hey, great haircut,” or, “Hey, great… I love your shirt,” where the person is maybe put in the position of having to diminish the compliment, “Oh no, this shirt’s nothing. It was $5.” Instead, emit following up with a question. So, “Hey, great shirt. Is that a color that you wear often?” or, “Hey, great haircut. Where do you go to get your haircuts by the way?” So you’ve instead of putting them to that awkward position of having to somehow think of a way to respond to your compliment, you’re immediately following up with a question which gives them something to talk about that doesn’t entail having to diminish the compliment.

Brett McKay: I was gonna say on the ‘No problem’ response to thank you, the other thing that I don’t like about that, it makes the person feel like, “Oh, what I asked you for was a problem, like I’m a problem for you.” So yeah, that’s another reason I don’t like the ‘No problem’. So let’s shift our focus to digital communication. Texting. A lot of our communication is done via text. What’s your take? Is there an appropriate timeframe for answering a text?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary widely. First of all, do you have read receipts on, on your phone? So if the other individual can see that you’ve received and read the text, then waiting hours to respond is not acceptable. If you have an established kind of unspoken time for responding amongst whether it’s your significant other, whether it’s your best friend, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s people who work for you, if you are someone who as a practice, generally responds within five minutes, within an hour, suddenly taking hours or days to respond, it’s out of character and out of practice for you, the other person is gonna think, “Oh no, what happened? Did I offend the person? Did I say something wrong?” So I think there are certainly conversations that are not best had over text by the same token. If this is a quick question, somebody needs a quick answer, and you traditionally respond quickly, you should follow suit.

Now, that being said… And I love texting because it is absence of so much of the formality that an email might require. It is asynchronous communication, so it can happen when it’s convenient for me and the recipient can respond when it’s perhaps more convenient for them, unlike a phone call or unlike a face-to-face conversation. But there are definitely conversations that are not appropriate for a text message. If you really want a thorough, detailed answer that has multiple layers.

Let’s face it, texting is not your friend, but if you say, what time are we meeting again, what’s the address of where the restaurant is, these are perfect opportunities for us to be able to text, so I would say, all things being equal, you should be certainly responding to a text within the hour, if it’s not a very nuanced conversation, and if it is, I would simply respond back, Hey, let’s catch up about this by phone, or it’s a little bit too much for text. When can we talk? And I think that would be the better way, but to wait hours or forget it, days not acceptable.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we had a digital communications expert on the show, Erica Dowan, and her recommendation for text is if you get a text and you can’t get to it right away, like within an hour, she recommends doing what she calls a manual read receipt. So if someone asks you something and it requires you to look into something, it’s a sensitive subject, and you don’t have the time to give them a full response at the moment, you just respond right away saying, Hey, I got your message, I’m really slammed right now, but I’ll check into it and let you know by tomorrow morning or something else can be like, Hey, it’s really crazy for me today, I wanna give your question some thought, I’ll get back to you tonight, and what that can do is it can help people who are… I don’t know, I think some people don’t care when they get their text answered, but for some people, an unanswered text, it creates this open loop in their mind and they’re wondering about what’s going on, or they worry that they said something wrong, so we can sit on their bandwidth, and you can help them with that by saying, Hey, I got your message, I’ll get back to you soon, so I’ve used that before. And it seems to be appreciated. So I like that one.

Thomas Farley: Very much. The idea of acknowledgement. It’s the same thing, brett we walk into a department store or a shop, a boutique, and we’re waiting to be waited upon by the person who is the sales clerk there, and they’re chatting with their co-worker, maybe they get a phone call from a customer and you’re thinking, here I am, a live person standing in your store wanting to transact business with you, and I haven’t even been acknowledged, you’ve made no eye contact with me, you haven’t given me the, I’ll be there in one second, finger gesture, this makes us feel like we’re not being seen, we’re not being acknowledged. And it can be annoying.

And so the same with whether it’s a text message that just goes unanswered, or frankly even email, which I think email is the larger culprit for feeling like our communications are being ignored, how many emails do we receive a day and send a day where there’s just simply no response, where response is being asked for, and because we’re swamped because we don’t have all the answers, we don’t respond or we take days or sometimes weeks to respond, I think that simple acknowledgement, if it’s something you can’t work on in that moment, Got it. I’ll have an answer for you by Friday, is far better than just not responding at all, we’re forcing the person to have to be constantly checking in with that infamous line, Hey, Brett, just checking in on such and such, which… How many of those emails do we write a week So I think the bit of acknowledgement really does go a long way, texting or emailing.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

Well, this kind of goes to my next question, what do you think about ghosting someone? So this happens in dating, it’s where you go on a date and the date wasn’t great and the person text you and you just ignore them, but this can happen also professionally or in other instances where someone emails you a request or something like that, and you just ignore them. It’s kind of ghosting. What’s your take on that?

Thomas Farley: I think there are certain instances where I would say ghosting is defensible. So maybe someone has even a good friend has done something to you that is highly offensive or highly insulting and they’re simply not apologizing for it, or they don’t see err of their ways, or you had a date with someone who was just someone who really frightened you in a lot of ways, and you’re not looking for any further engagement with that individual, I think in those cases, just for the sake of personal safety, if not your own sanity, ghosting might be the best way to go, or maybe it’s someone who just gets a little bit too text happy and is constantly texting you or maybe you’re on a group text thread, and every little thing is being said, Oh hey, everybody, here’s what I had for lunch this afternoon. And you’re thinking, My gosh, I’ve got work to do. So not responding to each and every interaction, I think in those instances is perfectly fine, if someone needs your feedback on something and there’s someone that you care about and you are the only stakeholder in this interaction who holds the cards, who holds the answer and they’re seeking an answer from you, whether it’s a co-worker, whether it’s a loved one, a sister or a parent, or a prospective spouse or significant other, to just completely ignore them for no explicable reason that I would not say is acceptable, like maybe you had a date and the date was just awful.

And someone texts you and says, Hey, I had a great time last night. Would love to see you again. I think if need be… I would still send that person a gentle text without being too harsh, in the way you phrase it, if someone is a sane individual who is looking to have an interaction with you that for some reason, you’re just not interested in continuing, far better to shut it down politely, rather than let the person wonder, Oh, did the person fall off a boat is maybe they lost their phone, maybe they’re traveling, they don’t have signal, they go through all these crazy scenarios, far better to dispel all of those conspiracy scenarios about why someone’s not responding to you and just be straight forward with an answer, but if it’s a question of personal safety or you’ve been genuinely aggrieved or offended by someone and they know it, then in those cases, I think ghosting would be completely acceptable and defensible, ettiquetewise.

Brett McKay: Okay, so ghosting, it depends. I think it’s interesting about The ghosting thing is hinge, the dating app, they did a survey and they found that 85% of dating app users say they like to be rejected directly, but I think sometimes people just say that I don’t oftentimes, I think people don’t really actually wanna be rejected directly, ’cause it hurts, but I think it’s gonna just depend on the person.

Thomas Farley: I think there are ways to make it sting less. And I think if this is a dating situation and you’ve had one date and there was not a love connection, ideally both parties feel the lack of love connection, and in that case, maybe you just ghost each other and that’s the best of all worlds, but of course, sometimes you do have those situations where one person is really into the other person and the other person is just not… I’d far rather as hurtful as it probably is in those initial days, that sting will subside versus just not hearing from the individual at all. I think it’s really… And especially if you’ve had multiple dates, then… I’m sorry, ghosting is not acceptable.

If this was a single date and in your eyes it was a complete disaster, but for some unknown reason to the other party, it was a roaring success. Well, that person maybe needs a reality check, but I still think that they would be deserving of if they’re really earnestly coming back to you. I had such a wonderful time, I can’t wait to see you again. That was terrific. To not respond at all, I think is really inconsiderate, so then it’s really all about how you respond and what do you say? And I think there are ways of letting someone down easy, and I think it could even be something as simple as, Hey, I enjoyed meeting you, I just don’t feel there’s a love connection, or I just… I can’t really commit to anything right now, wishing you the best. Will hurt. Sure. For someone who’s really into you, but far nicer to do that, than just disappear.

Brett McKay: Okay, let’s talk about continue this idea of technology, phones, everyone’s got a phone with them all the time, and a lot of people when they go to eat, they leave their phone on the table during dinner. Okay, not okay.

Thomas Farley: Not a fan. So whether you’re at dinner with your family in your kitchen or your dining room, or whether you’re out to dinner in a restaurant, when you think of how difficult it is to coordinate schedules for a family to sit down to dinner, to coordinate schedules for a family to be in a restaurant or a group of friends to be in a restaurant, it’s not easy, the fact that then we spend at least even a small percentage of our time looking at our phones, Instagramming our food, checking text messages, I think it takes us out of the moment. And I think it’s really unfortunate. So I think certainly there are times and they’re rare where you need to be contacted because there’s some impending massive news that you need to be available for, you’re at a business lunch, but your wife may be going into labor. You are a real estate agent who’s on the verge of closing a big, big deal that could be happening within the hour, in those cases, if you’re out to lunch with someone in a restaurant, I would own that information upfront. Brett, I’m so sorry, I’m not gonna be on my phone, I just do need to say, You know, there’s a chance my wife may be going into labor. The office is closing a huge deal, I may need to briefly step away from the table to take a quick call.

This is the way to handle that, but putting the phone out on the table has actually been proven in studies to create anxiety just literally the sight of a phone on the table makes us anxious, makes us distracted and takes us out of the moment, so I’d put that phone away if you’re wearing a blazer put it in the pocket, put it in the pocket of your pants, but keep it away from the table, absolutely on vibrate. And if you must must take a call, do so away from the table, not with all of your table mates sitting around, kept hostage to your conversation.

Brett McKay: Okay, so if you plan on receiving a text, let people know upfront, I have a friend who’s a anesthesiologist, so when he’s on call, he’ll let us know like, Hey guys, I’m on call, so I might have to text, I might get a text I might have to go away and that’s always appreciated. Another interesting dynamic I’ve noticed in the past couple of years is the smartwatch, so you might have the phone in your pocket, but you got this device on your wrist where you get notifications on your watch, is it okay to check the notifications that buzz on your smart watch during dinner.

Thomas Farley: What I like about the smart watch, in one sense, it’s a little bit more discrete than actually pulling out a cell phone and scrolling, by the same token, it’s still the same concept, you’re still being, your attention and your energy is being pulled away from the dynamic of the folks that you’re dining with and being directed towards your device, and so for that reason, whether it’s haptic feedback where it’s vibrating on your arm or pulsating or flashing, it’s still a distraction, and unless you’re an anesthesiologist, I would not recommend if you wanna be polite to your table mates I’d not recommend acknowledging, so I’d silence those notifications, or if you’re wearing a long sleeve shirt, maybe it’s even as simple as pulling the sleeve down so you’re not tempted to look at the watch.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, alright. Let’s talk about tipping. So there’s been a lot of articles over the last year about how tipping is out of control, every restaurant and service provider seems to ask for a tip these days, even when they’re just doing straight up, like it’s the cashier job and they just flip the screen around and you get that prompt asking if you wanna leave a tip and you feel like there’s pressure to do so, ’cause they turn around, they’re gonna see whether you gave them a tip or not, so what’s the state of tipping today? When Should you tip? And when should you not?

Thomas Farley: Sure, so this is something that there has been a sea change in our culture in the way we are interacting with service individuals, not only in that kind of what’s known as a quick serve restaurant type interaction, where you’re picking something up at a counter as opposed to sitting down in a restaurant. But the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading about airports where you were being prompted for a tip at a self-serve kiosk, where you’re getting food or you’re getting some sort of an airport Trinket where you’re actually being asked for a tip, so it’s exploded beyond our worst nightmares. And I think it’s a very concerning trend for me, it’s known in the popular press as either tip creep or Tipflation are the two terms you’ll hear quite a lot, I’m taking to calling this the tipping invasion, because I really feel that when we are living in a culture, we’re living in a society where you’re being expected to tip at absolutely every turn for absolutely every interaction, there’s really… The genie’s out of the bottle, and there is no line that’s being drawn any longer.

And I think that is really… It’s frightening because we’re rapidly marching toward a culture where I think you’ll be expected to tip your dental hygienist, you’ll be expected to tip your auto mechanic, and it’s diluted what a tip is really designed to do, which is to reward an individual who works in a service industry where, by the structure of the industry, their pay is actually less than minimum wage, so for example, a server in a sit-down restaurant often is being paid $2 and change an hour, not a livable wage, by any stretch, it’s only through the use of tips, which is part of the compact, we know when we enter a restaurant, we know when we sit down in a restaurant that we are going to be tipping, and that is something that we happily accept and happily do, but the idea that you picked up a bag of potato chips on a convenience store shelf at a gas station, and suddenly you’re being faced with a tip screen, how much would you like to tip for this interaction? It’s something… Because simply because the technology allows this to happen does not mean that culturally it is acceptable.

And so that feeling that people get when they suddenly see that screen and those amounts that are also increasing, so it’s not even that they’re asking for a 5% tip they might be asking for a 25% or 30% tip for these very basic interactions with individuals who are being paid a minimum wage or more, people are feeling what is called the guilt tip, so you’re tipping simply because you feel guilty, not just because they’re gonna see it when they flip the screen around, but everybody in line behind you is gonna be seeing how much you tip, you know they’re looking over your shoulder to see which box you tap, so it’s confusing. In a time of high inflation, consumers are really feeling their pocket books are being pinched at every turn, and this is a big part of that, and I find it to be a very, very concerning trend.

Brett McKay: So I think this is an interesting dynamic because I think a decade ago, the concern that people had was, maybe I’m not tipping enough, maybe I need to tip more. Because people were kinda confused about, Well, do I tip this person? Or that person. Now, it seems like the concern is like, I should tip less, I need to be tipping less because I’m being asked to tip in inappropriate situations.

Thomas Farley: Well, it’s true, and the simple fact is there’s only so much discretionary budget any one individual has no matter how well off they are, and if every single interaction… I live in New York City, and there is… We call this the departure tax, that every time you literally walk out your door in New York, there’s a $20 departure tax, there’s $20 that you simply don’t know where it went, it went somewhere, but you know you started $20 Richer before you walked out the door. I think it’s the same now happening across the country with tipping, you’re suddenly being asked to tip for just about everything you buy in every service store and shop and restaurant you walk into, and I think what’s going to happen, I really think it’s going to diminish the amount of money that any one individual has to tip to people who really rely on tipping income because they’re being asked to tip in so many other establishments.

And that, I think is really unfortunate. Let’s face it, stores restaurants had a very difficult time during the pandemic, and I think most consumers felt the need, and it was a wonderful thing to be extra generous, knowing that these individuals, these first responders in the service industries, were out there doing their thing while so many of us were working from home, the pandemic is over, and yet those tipping levels, those expectations and that guilt has remained and is even being amplified, and I think consumers are feeling rightfully resentful, and as I say, there is a limit to the discretionary income, any one individual has. So I see servers in sit down restaurants actually having their tips suffering because there’s simply not enough tipping income, tipping money to go around to everyone, if that’s the culture that we’re headed toward.

Brett McKay: Okay, so what would you say keep your tips for people in the food service industry, bartenders, these are the traditional staff, you would usually tip for 10 years ago, maybe keep tipping for that.

Thomas Farley: Sure, and we know what those are, where… Any consumer has tipped enough in their lifetime to know if you go for a haircut, you’re tipping on that, if you go for a massage, you’re tipping on that, if you get a cocktail in a bar, of course you’re tipping on that, and yes, the sit-down restaurant experiences. It’s all these new things tipping in those interactions, it’s discretionary. If you feel you are blessed and you feel you’ve had a wonderful experience and you wanna share that, that joy with the person who’s waited on you, all the power to you, nothing to say that you can’t do it, but you should not feel obligated. Etiquette does not dictate that you should be tipping those interactions, those individuals are being paid a minimum wage plus, and what really should be happening if the owners of the establishments feel that they can’t attract good employees without offering this as an option they really need to be doing, in my estimation, is paying higher wages, and in turn, if needed, charging higher prices in restaurants and quick serve establishments, but this idea that the burden is being shifted to the consumer and this very awkward, uncomfortable, clumsy interaction. I don’t like it, and I think it really, it bodes not good things for the service industry.

Brett McKay: And I think we should point out, this is probably just an American problem. Other countries, they don’t have the tipping culture that we do.

Thomas Farley: It’s true, and that extends not just for this type of quick serve tip where you have the tablet in front of you, but even a sit-down restaurant in various countries around the world, throughout Europe and Asia, some countries, they would actually look at you quite askance, maybe pleasantly surprised, but even shocked if you gave them a tip. So it’s baked into the equation in the United States. We do have this tradition of tipping. But you’re absolutely right, this is not a global situation, and I do hear from Europeans, but then they come to the United States, they are absolutely stupefied by the number of places where they’re being asked to tip and in the amounts that they’re being asked.

Brett McKay: When you do tip, what do you think should be the standard tip amount? Or does it depend?

Thomas Farley: So if we are in a restaurant and we’re sitting down and we’re having a meal, this old standard of 15% being kind of your nice little baseline, that has gotten pretty antiquated at this point. And I read these studies very regularly, the average tip across the United States in a sit-down restaurant is hovering just above 19% as your baseline tip. So if you wanna walk out of there feeling like you were Daddy Warbucks, super generous, and boy are they gonna be clicking their heels with joy at how much you gave them in a tip, 20% is not going to do that. 20% really is about the baseline that you’re looking to tip. And frankly, I like the math better with 20% tip. If you’re calculating it in your head, which you may not be but if you are, 20% is a lot easier to calculate than 15%. But if you want to be generous, you’re really looking at more in the neighborhood of 25%-30% on a tip, but if you wanna be doing the bare minimum, 20% so that… Will ensure you’re not getting dirty looks as you walk out of the restaurant, which you would likely get if you tip 10% or 15%.

Brett McKay: Let’s shift topics to weddings. Wedding season is upon us. I’m sure there’s lots of different questions we could discuss about weddings. But in general, what’s an area of wedding-related etiquette that people often neglect?

Thomas Farley: One of the biggest gripes I hear about is people who don’t RSVP. And if you think about it, Brett, could it be any easier? Not only do you get the invitation in the mail, but you get a reply card with a return address, reply envelope with a stamp already on it, all you have to do literally is filling your name and check a box that you are attending, and pop it in the mail and you are good to go. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to a wedding and you want to attend, you’re able to attend, get that RSVP and quickly, and no unpleasant surprises by doing a write-in ballot of someone’s name that you’re bringing when there was no guests invited. And certainly, you’re not doing any gorilla attack by bringing a guest on the day of. That’s gonna just cause havoc at the wedding. We don’t want that.

Brett McKay: That’s a good point about RSVPs. That’s for anything, whether wedding or any other type of… If there’s an RSVP, make sure you do, ’cause people are trying to figure out how much stuff they need to buy, and it makes it hard when you don’t do that.

Thomas Farley: We’re living in the age of maybe. I think it’s really unfortunate, but I think sites such as Evite and Facebook invitations, we’re now in this kind of funny time period where people feel like, well, they’ve got enough invitations that they don’t know if they can commit or don’t want to commit, so the response is either no response at all until the very last minute, or a “maybe” response. And I think that’s really unhelpful to anyone who’s hosting. It doesn’t have to be a wedding. As you say, it could be any sort of occasion. So if you’re invited to something waiting until you see if you get better offers, not acceptable. Simply not replying at all and then showing up, not acceptable. Or saying yes and then not showing up and not letting the host know you’re not coming, also not acceptable. So think about when the shoe is on the other foot, when you’re a host and you’re trying to plan something and you have no idea on numbers, it can really be very… It can convince you never wanna throw a party again. So if you’re lucky enough to be invited to something, let the host know. Even if it’s “No,” “No” is better than nothing, and “No” is better than an interminable “Maybe” that never turns into a “Yes” or a “No.”

Brett McKay: Let’s say it’s your wedding and you don’t wanna have kids there. Is it okay to say, you don’t want kids? This is a touchy, touchy one.

Thomas Farley: This is touchy. And it’s a question I get quite a lot. And what I’d say to that is, there are a lot of reasons why you might wanna have a wedding with no kids. It could be budget, it could be, this is a wedding in some kind of a night time, night-club-y type setting where it’s just not really a child-friendly environment, or simply you feel like the adults deserve and want a night off from their kids. And even parents who have two or three or four or five kids, I often hear from them, “Oh gosh, what a relief we’re able to tell our kids, ‘We’d love to bring you but we can’t. This is a wedding where children aren’t invited.'” Those parents get a night off. So I think that can be a wonderful thing.

The key as the couple, remember, this is your wedding, your rules. Whatever it is that you decide you wanna do, you follow that, but you’ve got to follow it consistently. So don’t say “No kids,” and then start making exceptions here and there, because then suddenly it looks like you’re playing favorites, and some of your guests who do have children who don’t get to bring their children, they’re gonna feel resentful. And so the only exception that you might consider if you are going to do a no-child policy at your wedding is perhaps there is a member of the bridal party like a junior bridesmaid or the ring bearer or the flower girl who typically are a close family member or relative. There you might make the exception, but if just ordinary guests you start making the exception because they couldn’t find a babysitter that night, you’re really gonna have some very other guests who are quite unhappy that they were told they couldn’t bring theirs, whereas others did.

Brett McKay: So destination weddings are becoming more popular. So you fly off to some exotic locale to get married. And they invite people and for the guest, that can be a lot of money to get to these places. If you get invited to a destination wedding, are you still obliged to get the couple a gift?

Thomas Farley: You are absolutely obliged. So your decision to attend a destination wedding, it’s based on a couple of factors, primarily, your budget. Can you afford to attend this destination wedding? Can you afford to fly there? Can you afford the babysitting perhaps that you need? Can you afford the hotel accommodations, the outfit that you might need that you don’t have, because it’s in a climate that you don’t normally have dress clothes for? All of those are factors that you need to consider. However, the travel budget, the cost that it takes for you to actually be there, that is not your gift. So your presence is not your present in this case. That needs to come from your own discretionary annual travel budget, not from your budget for wedding gifts. So you don’t scrimp on a gift for the couple simply because you feel you’ve spent a lot of money to be there. And if you feel you can’t afford both, then I would far rather see you decline the wedding invitation but still send a gift, particularly if this is someone who’s important to you.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about another topic I think a lot of men have questions about. Should you still hold the door open for a woman?

Thomas Farley: Sure. So this is gonna vary depending on the situation. And what I like to recommend to a man who strives to be a gentleman, which I think is a noble goal and something that’s still important in today’s culture, is that you’ve got to remember there’s a distinction between being out on a date and opening a door for a woman, holding a chair for a woman, standing at a table when a woman comes back to the table, gestures that many women, although not all, will find very gallant and chivalrous and very much appreciate. So know your audience. So if you’re on a date with a woman who is very progressive and feels that that sort of gesture is demeaning and insulting, then obviously you’re not going to do it. But I would say in my conversations with women who are all ages and modern to old-fashioned, most will at least appreciate the gesture behind that, the motivation behind that is a good one.

Where you’ve got to be a little bit more wary is this is now a business setting. So in a business setting, the idea that you’d be holding a door for a woman or holding a chair out for a woman, this is not something that would be traditionally done in the American workplace. We don’t recognize gender in workplace, ideally. What we do recognize is seniority, so if you’re gonna let someone go through the door first, let that be because that person is the boss, is the senior person, it’s the client, not because it’s a woman. However, I think a nice workaround for anyone who really… For a man who really strives to be a gentleman in all interactions is you just simply in those cases, you don’t make a distinguishing decision between, “Okay, this is a woman I work with, so I’m gonna hold the door for her, but here comes Charlie, my male colleague, and I’m gonna let the door slam in his face because he’s not a woman.” If you’re a gentleman, you hold the door for everyone. It doesn’t matter what gender they are.

You don’t rush to take the best seat in the restaurant when you’re going to a business dinner because that’s who you are. You let other people take the better seat. You are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to put other people before yourself, that’s truly what a gentleman does. And in a business setting, you don’t have to be worrying, “Is this a man or a woman?” You simply do it for everyone. In that way, if anyone ever accused you, “Well, gosh, why are you holding the door for me? I find that offensive and belittling,” you say, “This is simply who I am. I do this for everyone. I’m sorry to have offended you, but I assure you it’s not a gender-based decision, it’s something that I do as a matter of practice.” And I think there you’re on the best ground of all.

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

Thomas Farley: Brett, thank you so much, I’ve enjoyed it. And congrats on the podcast. I know you’re rapidly approaching your 1000th episode, so I can’t wait to see you achieve that milestone, but it’s been a great conversation. I am at on all social media, I’m Mister Manners, and that’s “mister” spelled out. And the website is mister-manners.com. And I pop up on TV and radio and newspaper around the country on a regular basis. I do a column for the NBC Today Show called “Mealtime with Mr. Manners” where I tackle everyday dining etiquette issues, so always happy to receive questions or if any of your listeners have a quandary, it would be my pleasure to fill it for them and answer it in a way that will help them be as mannerly and manly in the case of your listeners as possible.

Brett McKay: Well, Thomas Farley, thanks for your time. It has been a pleasure.

Thomas Farley: Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Thomas Farley, also known as Mister Manners. You can find more information about his work at his website mister-manners.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/etiquetteFAQ where you can find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

dWell, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtOfManliness.com where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #897: Answers to the FAQ of Modern Etiquette appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 17 May 2023 14:35:28 +0000

Do you feel stuck in life — that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job, or goal and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward? Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Alter, a social psychologist and professor of marketing, looked at the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs, he found that they all had passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.

Today on the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to Get Unstuck When It Matters Most, explains why getting stuck is an inevitability in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the goal gradient effect, and how the illusion of the creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it can be better to initially accept your stuckness than kick against the pricks. From there, we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a friction audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing when to move from exploring to exploiting, and vice versa. We end our conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is “action over all.”

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Do you feel stuck in life, that you aren’t making progress in a relationship, job or goal, and you don’t know how to fix the problem and move forward. Well, perhaps you can take a little solace in the fact that it’s a universal human experience, even amongst history’s highest achievers. Indeed, when Adam Altar a social psychologist and professor of Marketing looked in the lives of successful actors, musicians, writers, film makers and entrepreneurs, he found that they had all passed through times in their lives and careers when they felt totally stuck.

Today in the show, Adam, who’s the author of Anatomy of a Breakthrough: How to get unstuck when it matters most. Explains why getting stuck is inevitable in life, as well as mindset shifts and practices to escape from stuckness. We first talk about what contributes to getting stuck, including the Goal Gradient effect, and how the illusion of the Creative cliff can keep you from seeing that you may end up doing your best work later in life. We then talk about dealing with the emotional angst of feeling stuck, and how it could be better to initially accept your stuckness and kick against the prick. From there we turn to some tactics for getting unstuck, including doing a Friction Audit and copying the work of others. In my favorite part of the conversation, we discuss the importance of recognizing, when to move from exploring to exploiting and vice-versa. We end the conversation with why the mantra for getting unstuck is action over all. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.io/unstuck. Alright, Adam Alter welcome back to the show.

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me back again, Brett.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, Irresistible. You got a new book out called, Anatomy of a breakthrough: How To Get Unstuck when it matters most. You walk readers through on how to get unstuck, so let’s start with that, what you mean by getting stuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean it’s a good question because you can get stuck for 10 seconds and you can get stuck for a lifetime, and I’m much more interested in these bigger instances of being stuck across days, weeks, months, years, even decades, and those tend to be fairly common. I’ve been running a survey for a number of years now on thousands of people around the world, asking them about their experiences of being stuck, and everyone in some respect says, Yeah, when I think about it, there’s an area where I do feel stuck and I’d like to make some movement. And so I’m also not just interested in these big instances, but also instances where we have some control so, April 2020, we were all stuck in place because the government had mandated that we couldn’t travel, that’s not psychologically interesting to me, there’s not much you can do about that, you might feel stuck, but that’s just how it is for that period of time, but it turns out that far more common than that are these instances where we do have room to move, and that’s what this book is focused on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you give three things to define being stuck in life or in work, you’re temporarily unable to make progress in a domain that matters to you, you’ve been fixed in a place for long enough to feel psychological discomfort and your existing habits and strategies aren’t solving the problem, and you said being stuck can be caused by external forces or internal forces. In this book, you’re trying to focus on the internal, correct?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean sometimes you’re caused to be stuck by something external, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have the power to shape it or change it, so I’m interested in cases where we have some agency where there is room for a better way, and that’s really what this roadmap that I provide in the book is focused on.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about why getting stuck is inevitable and you highlight a few factors that contribute to getting stuck, the first one is this idea of the Goal Gradient effect, what is that and why does it contribute to stuckness?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so the basic idea is that when you do something that takes sustained effort across a period of time, there will be a lull in the middle, and if you think about it at the beginning of any goal, you have the energy of the excitement that comes from starting something new, you tend to do things fast and effectively and efficiently, and then as the goal is within sight as you approach it, you speed up again because you can see the finish line, either metaphorically or literally. In the middle though, there’s this long period of lull, a sort of quiet where you are in the middle and you don’t have a sense of that early push and you don’t have the sense of the goal finish line, and so there’s this midpoint lull, which happens in pretty much all goals, whether you’re a charity trying to attract money for a particular campaign, whether you’re an artist trying to create a work, whether you’re a business, it doesn’t really matter what it is, you will find this midpoint lull, and so that’s the Goal Gradient effect.

But it’s also made worse by the fact that in the middle of the goal, you tend to hit a plateau, so if you keep doing things the same way, let’s say you’re trying to become fit, you do the same exercise regime over and over again on your way to losing a certain amount of weight, putting on a certain amount of muscle that will stop working, and it depends on the person if there are some individual differences, but within six to 18 months, most people find that a regime that was working really well for them, stops working, it stops having a beneficial effect. Now humans like things that have worked in the past, they keep doing them until they absolutely can’t do them any longer, and so between this Goal Gradient, this mid-point lull and the fact that everything stops working and stops being effective in time, we really need to be nimble and to figure out ways to head off these instances of stuckness before they become major issues.

Brett McKay: So what are some things you can do to mitigate the goal gradient effect and the plateau effect.

Adam Alter: So with a gaol gradient effect, the best thing you can do is to shrink the middle, think about writing a book, if it’s… I wanna write 100,000 words. The day you start writing, you might have a head of steam, you might be doing fine, but there’ll be a point, and when you listen to writers, they’ll talk about this, and this explains a lot of writer’s block. There’ll be a point very soon thereafter that you say, this is hard, I’m struggling. And the idea of a 100,000 words is just completely overwhelming when you’ve written, say 500 or 1000 or 1500. So the best thing you can do is to shrink the goal, is to bracket it narrowly as they say, it’s about bracketing the goal in a new way, and so one thing you can do is you can break that 100,000 words into a 100 instances of a thousand words each, and if there’s something you like to do, that’s a small reward, you can do that each time you hit a new mark of a 1000 words. Now, the benefit of doing that is that you’ve shrunk the middle, and so when you shrink the middle or eliminate it all together, you don’t have that same lull, because you’ve reframed the way you think of the goal.

And this turns out to be very, very effective for writers. For the plateau effect, the solution is written into the problem. The problem is you keep doing the same thing, it stops working. The solution is to change things. If you’re running a race or training for a marathon, or training for an Iron Man or trying to… Whatever it might be, you hit a plateau because you’re… Learning a language is the same thing, you just need more than one technique, you can’t use the same training program all the time, or the same approach to learning all the time. And there’s just so much evidence of that across so many domains, so whenever you do anything, be prepared that within a few months, there’s a good chance you’re gonna need to do something new, so be on the hunt for another alternative.

Brett McKay: And we’ll talk about ways to hunt for new alternatives, when we talk about this idea of Explore versus Exploit, here in a bit. So you have a chapter about keeping going when you hit that low or that feeling of stuckness, and you use the band, the ’80s synth band, A-ha who wrote, Take On Me. What can they teach us about not quitting when we hit a wall.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I love these stories of colossal successes and you go back and you find out that, Hey, this thing that looks polished and beautiful and it worked exactly the way it should work, when you look back, it turns out it didn’t always look that way, it was much more complicated. And the song Take On Me by A-ha is one of the biggest selling songs of the ’80s, and in fact of all time, but it had several versions and iterations that came before it, and when the band was writing about what it was like to create the song they talked about how for several years they couldn’t get financial backing, once they got financial backing, the version of the song they created was just a little bit rusty, it didn’t have quite the same bounce that it ended up having in its final iteration.

They tried floating and releasing the song several times, and it just didn’t take off commercially, it took three or four bites at the cherry, and eventually the American arm of their recording Agency said, Hey, we gotta make a great video for this, and if you know the song, and you know the video, it’s this classic ’80s video that people will watch, I think it’s been viewed billions of times now on YouTube. That video launched the song and launched the band and made the song, and without that perseverance across a period of many years, that song wouldn’t have succeeded the way it did, and there are so many cultural products like that where what you see at the end is this end product that looks like it just sort of arrive fully formed, but that’s not where it began, there were instances of stuckness that came before it over and over again.

Brett McKay: And you have this idea, that talk about why it’s important to keep going even when things seem like it’s not going anywhere, and one of these ideas is the Serial Order Effect, what is that?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so this is based on the idea of the Creative Cliff, and what happens with the serial order effect is, some pieces of information are really accessible, they come to you really fast. Especially the first pieces of information. And so imagine that I say to you, try to come up with as many creative uses as you can for a paper clip, and what happens is early on, what’s top of mind, tumbles out, it feels like it’s really easy, you can start thinking of some ideas that just come to your mind without much trouble, and eventually what happens is you hit a wall that as you get deeper into the list and into some ideas that are perhaps a little bit further afield, it starts to feel hard and humans interpret that sort of mental difficulty that comes with struggling through a problem like that, as we’re on the verge of failure, we’re not doing a very good job, but it turns out that in the world of creativity, the good stuff happens once it starts getting hard, because the easy stuff everyone can do. There’s nothing interesting about what comes easily to you, because it probably comes easily to everyone else as well. And so the big idea is that you’ve really gotta persevere that those ideas that come later on are often the best ideas, even though we sort of perceive them as being less good, because they come to us with a bit more difficulty and trial.

Brett McKay: Gotcha, so the Creative Cliff is this idea, it’s an illusion that our best ideas come early and then after that, they’re not any good, but it’s actually the opposite, usually the better ideas come after that wall.

Adam Alter: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’s exactly right. So if you ask people, imagine that I’m gonna ask you to try to come up with ideas and you’re gonna do 10 ideas now and then we’ll do a second session of 10 ideas after that, when do you think your best ideas will come and almost everyone says my best ideas will come first, and then the ideas, ideas 11 to 20 later on are not gonna be as good, it’s gonna be harder and it’s just probably gonna be a bit stale by that point, but when you actually look, that’s an illusion that we all have or most of us have. The good stuff comes at the end, and that’s the Creative Cliff illusion, we think our creativity is gonna fall off a cliff, but actually it skyrockets, it takes off, and so as things get hard, interesting ideas tend to tumble out if you persevere it’s a mistake to quit at that point.

Brett McKay: So the idea to mitigate that is just to keep, when it feels hard, just you gotta keep going.

Adam Alter: It’s not working until it feels hard basically, so that’s your signal that you’re doing something right, and that doesn’t mean go on forever, right? There is a cottage industry of books now that say, You should quit, we don’t quit often enough, and I think that’s true. I think there are many times when you need to quit, but if you’re in a concerted period of trying to come up with creative ideas or solutions, do not think that because it gets hard, you failed or that you should stop, that’s the moment when you really gotta dig in and keep going for a bit longer.

Brett McKay: And I love this idea of the Creative Cliff ’cause I’m in middle age now, I’ve turned 40, and there’s this popular idea that people have that if you don’t… If you’re not a success in your 20s or 30s, you’ve pretty much… It’s over for you. But no, actually, as you get older, if you keep pushing beyond and keep producing, you can have… And still be prolific even in your 40s, 50s, 60s.

Adam Alter: Exactly, yeah, and actually, what we focus on in the media, in podcasts, in popular culture in general, is these cases of precocious talent, we’re very fascinated by people in their teens and 20s who come up with brilliant ideas and make huge amounts of money, are very successful, and young prodigies, talents like that, precocious talents are fascinating, but they’re also incredibly unusual, when you look at the people who start the most successful businesses in the world, they are on a average, between 40 and 50 years old, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not surprising, it’s only surprising against the backdrop of assuming that you have to be incredibly young to be a successful entrepreneur, but by 40 or 50, you’ve lived a bit, you’ve got a little bit more experience, you know what works and doesn’t, and you’ve refined your ideas and talents and yeah, using that same Creative Cliff idea across the longer period of decades, things have started to perhaps get hard, maybe your first ideas in your 20s and 30s weren’t perfect, but they came easily and then things might have got a little bit harder in your 30s, 40s, 50s, but that’s when they get good and interesting, and when you use that experience to great effect.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about the impact of luck in creative endeavors or in work endeavors, some businesses, some professions, some things are more prone to luck and that can be demoralizing, right? You put out good stuff and then nothing happens, but you have to keep going because maybe the next one that’ll be the thing that catapults you to success, like every time you do something it’s like buying a lottery ticket, in a sense.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. You sort of see the luck as this kind of mystical thing and it robs you of a sense of control, but the way to really think about luck is that it just is the thing that emerges after enough time, it may come soon, it may come later, but if you have enough attempts at whatever it is that you’re doing, or you do it for long enough, you can manufacture luck, it’s a little unpredictable, but regardless of which career you’re in, regardless of how much luck is attached to that particular career, by continuing on by pushing through, you do tend to stumble on it eventually.

Brett McKay: So in the second half of the book, you talk about how to deal with the depression and angst that can come with getting stuck, and one strategy is Radical Acceptance. What is that?

Adam Alter: Yeah Radical Acceptance, it’s this idea from eastern philosophy from Buddhism, that things kind of suck sometimes, things get hard, and you basically gotta take a couple of deep breaths and accept that that’s the way they are. And it’s more complicated than that. There’s quite a lot written about it and how it works, but the basic idea is the first thing you need to do is just take a pause and kind of accept where you are before you start making strategies to change, and there are sort of versions of this in the book that I talk about, that are much more down to earth than this philosophy, which is a little bit abstract, but when you look at how some of the most talented people in their fields respond to being stuck, a lot of them paradoxically do less, they slow down, they do the kind of Zen thing which is to say they don’t do anything, at least initially, and that turns out to be a tremendously beneficial way of at least initially coping with stuckness. I talk about Lionel Messi and Andre Agassi, and the jazz pianist, Herbie Hancock, there are a whole lot of examples in the book of these people who learned to do less to get more out of themselves.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, I think this idea of radical acceptance, I think people confuse it with having to… They confuse acceptance with putting a value judgment on it, so just because you accept something, doesn’t mean you think it’s good, you’re accepting the fact that you’re in a crappy situation, the same way you’d accept the fact that the sky is blue.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. And in a lot of the cases that I’m focusing on in the book, you can accept the things are the way they are right now, without having to accept it that they’ll always be like this. And so you accept it. You say, it sucks that I’m in this position, I’m gonna have to do something to get out of it. And very often, there is something you can do, but it’s okay to take a moment to just say, Hey, this is kind of painful, this is not working the way I’d like it to work, some change has been visited upon me in a way that I didn’t anticipate or invite, and now I have to figure out what to do next, but it’s okay to take a minute to strategize, slow things down, turn down the temperature, and that’s what these geniuses from you know Einstein did this, Mozart did this, Claude Monet did this, they all would spend long periods of time just kind of mired in what the situation was, before they tackled it, before they came up with a strategy to move forward.

Brett McKay: And you just said once they do the acceptance, one of the things they do is they take their foot off the gas and they might even start relaxing their definition of success, and it’s interesting ’cause you think when you’re stuck, you wanna push harder and that could be that maybe you need to do that in some situations, but often times if you just take your foot off the gas, that might help you get unstuck, it’s like the same thing when you’re trying to get a car unstuck, alright you wanna kind of rock it back and forth, so you’re gonna push on the gas, take it off, let it rock, push on the gas and that’ll get you unstuck.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean that’s exactly right. And the way I think about it is there’s a very big difference between being physically stuck and being stuck metaphorically or emotionally or psychologically, the way I’m interested in this book. Now there are all these cases of hysterical strength, where you read someone lifted a car off another person or something like that, humans are really well designed for instances of being physically entrapped, we have a lot of mechanisms, we have a rush of adrenaline, all of that sort of helps us get unstuck physically, but the same just hurts you when you’re trying to get unstuck mentally ’cause what you really gotta do is, as you said, turn down the temperature, slow things down. Your first instinct to just do anything to get unstuck in that case is just unhelpful, so I think that’s a really important insight that the first thing you gotta do as you say, is turn down the temperature.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and you mentioned Messi, he does this and he’s the greatest soccer player ever but he’s got really bad nerves or anxiety before a game, and the way he counters that, you need to go into detail about it, but basically he just says, I’m gonna take my time before I get going in a game, he’ll spend the first couple of minutes of game, just kinda walking around near the sideline, not being part of the action.

Adam Alter: It’s totally fascinating. Yeah, I agree with you. I think he’s the greatest player today, maybe of all time, and I was very, very surprised to learn this, that he is among the most anxious soccer players on the field, and in fact, in his early days, his coaches said, I don’t know that this guy is gonna make it, ’cause he’s got talent, but he doesn’t have the temperament for the game, and so Messi had to figure out a way to get unstuck, he would start games and sometimes he’d be physically sick, he just really couldn’t play at the beginning of those games, and sometimes he would be debilitated. They’d have to take him off the field. So that’s exactly right. What he does now is he spends the first roughly three or four minutes of the game ambling around the center circle of the field, he doesn’t really move around much, if you plot the movement of all the other players, they’re darting around the field trying to get into the game. And he’s barely moving, he walks, and he’s doing that for two reasons, one of them is because it helps him calm his nerves, gives him a few minutes to kind of get into the game, so he’s more effective for the remaining 85 plus minutes.

But the other thing it does is it makes them incredibly good as a strategic perceiver of the game, because he spends those few minutes saying, Oh, I see there’s an injury over there, that player is limping, these two players are not working particularly well together, I can exploit that later on. On his own team, he’ll see who’s playing well, who’s doing something strange. And so what he does is he kind of compiles this idiosyncratic list of features of that particular game that he can then bank away and use for the remaining time in the game, and so it makes him just unbelievably effective for the rest of the game. Now he’s never scored a goal in the first two minutes of a soccer match, but he scored in every minute from minute three on, which shows you that he really isn’t playing the game until that third minute.

Brett McKay: So another thing we need to learn how to do when we get stuck is learning how to fail well, because often times, we get stuck because we’ve had some sort of failure. We didn’t achieve a goal or something like that had happened, so we’re kind of, we’re stuck in this little plateau trying to figure what to do. So what can we do to fail better because failing doesn’t feel great?

Adam Alter: No, it doesn’t feel great. The first thing to do is to recognize that there is an optimal failure rate in general. There are some studies that have tried to look at this. How do you maximize growth? And how do you minimize getting stuck? And what you find is that about roughly one in six to one in four occasions when you’re practicing or trying something or learning something new, you should be failing. If you fail much less than that, you’re not gonna grow. You’re just gonna be doing the same thing over and over and again, like hitting your head against the wall. If you fail much more than that, you’re gonna become de-motivated and that means that whatever you’ve put in front of yourself is a little bit too advanced for the level that you’re at right now. And so that’s the first thing. Failing well involves, first of all, failing at all, you’ve gotta fail the right amount roughly. And to temper the practice sessions and the learning experiences so that you’re failing roughly the right amount. The second thing is to basically over-train is one thing you can do. That’s very effective. There are a lot of athletes who do this, but to inoculate yourself against the hardship that will come when the real experience arrive.

So there are golfers who will play three rounds of golf on a practice day, so that when they have to play a single round of golf, they are deeply focused for that 72 plus or minus shots. And so if you’re hitting 300 or 250 shots in a day and you can focus for all of those, it’s obviously gonna be easier to focus for 70 shots. And so over-training is a great thing you can do. And then the last thing I would say about failing well, is you wanna make sure that as you fail and you don’t quite reach your goals, the gap is getting smaller across time. So you’re learning to the point where you are converging on the goal, even if you haven’t quite got there yet. And honestly, if you’re not, and you’re not happy with that, and it looks like over time you’re diverging from the goal, you’re moving further away from it, you’re not getting closer, maybe it’s time to try something else.

Brett McKay: Well, it’s interesting, this idea of you need to fail in order to succeed, and failure close the gap to your goal. This reminds me, did you watch that video of Giannis, the basketball player from the Milwaukee Bucks?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I thought it was fantastic.

Brett McKay: He has that the same sort of… He’s had this great response to a reporter who asked him, it’s the season of failure, ’cause the Bucks, they lost to the Miami Heat. And his response was awesome. He just said, you asked me this question last year, it’s a dumb question. He said, Look, every time I fail, it’s a step towards success. He says, Michael Jordan played 15 seasons, he won six championships. He says, were the other nine years of failure? He’s like, No, those failures led to those successes. So I think that’s a great way to think about failures are steps to success.

Adam Alter: Yeah, I agree. And I thought you’ve captured the best parts of the video, that where he talks about Jordan’s 15 year career and says well, nine of the years is failure. I think one of the things that highlights as well is that we see failure as a kind of binary or failure or success as a kind of binary, you’re either failing or you’re succeeding. And the idea that you can break down a career and say, well, fail, fail, fail, success, fail, fail, fail, success. The way this reporter was trying to do with the Giannis telling him that because he hadn’t won a championship that year, it was a failure, is just, it’s, first of all, it’s deeply unproductive. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t make your life better. It doesn’t help you progress or persevere, but also it’s a, it’s just misguided. The world doesn’t operate on that particular binary because failures lead to the next thing. And the next thing is often better than what came before precisely because there was this, what that reporter would call failure.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break. Few words from our more sponsors. And now back to the show. Alright, so we’ve dealt with the emotional aspect of being stuck. So reframe how you think about failure, take your foot off the gas, practice radical acceptance. The next part is to start coming up with a plan to get unstuck. And one of these things you suggest doing is called a friction audit. What is that and how can it help us get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so this started, I do a fair amount of business consulting and consulting for charities and non-profit organizations. And the big question a lot of these organizations have is how can we spend less money to make more of an impact? Or how can we spend less money to do better sales or whatever it is they want? And so the technique that I’ve found with a great return on investment is known as a friction audit. And so what you do is, if you think about a company that’s making a product, you essentially have two ways to improve your bottom line. One way is to make the product better. And that’s expensive, sweeten the deal, make the carrot more attractive, get people in the door, get more people in the door, have them stay for longer. You can do that as a business, but it’s not cheap.

It’s hard. You’re gonna have competitors and so that’s not the road to go. The road to go is to say, one of the reasons we are not doing more or doing better is because there are friction points. People are getting stuck in interacting with our company or in the process of completing a sale or whatever it might be. So the best thing we can do is to remove some friction. So the friction audit is this process that I originally used in this business context where you say, where is the friction? How can we intervene on it? How can we sand it down? So we remove it or at least make it a little bit less friction filled. And then let’s confirm that it’s actually done some good. An example of this is I worked with a whole lot of shopping malls. They found that a lot of parents were coming and shopping and abandoning their carts without buying.

They figured out it was ’cause one of the kids they came with had a tantrum and they had to leave. So you put in these very inexpensive little play playgrounds and gyms and things, jungle gyms, they cost a few thousand dollars to install, and over the course of a year, you save a hundred thousand dollars of lost sales. And so that small investment, massive return. But this works in our lives as well. You can run a friction audit. I talk about this process in the book. You can run that process on any aspect of your life. Relationships, work, creativity, athletics, it doesn’t really matter what it is, it applies there as well.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah, imagine you could do this if you’re trying to lose weight, kinda look at your life, okay, what is causing me to maintain the weight that I’m at and preventing me from putting into action my intentions, right? So it could be, well the friction point… You actually, you can actually do this. You can actually increase friction, right? If it’s too easy to get to food that’s not good for you. The friction audit would say, well I can make this harder by just not even buying this stuff and putting in my house.

Adam Alter: Yeah, exactly. My last book on phones and screens and how much time we spend on them was about largely this idea that it is just too easy to start using these products. And so they end up sucking up a huge amount of our lives. Just as you might say, I won’t buy chocolate ’cause I don’t wanna eat chocolate, if you keep your phone far away from you, you create friction, you’re much less likely to use your phone. And so this, it’s an important general insight about humans that the things that are close to us or that are easy to access are the things we spend more time interacting with than doing, the things that are much further away tend to have a smaller impact on our lives. And so you’ve gotta sort of design your, the world around you, the way you design any other thing, the way an architect will design a building or a city, you’ve gotta do that for your own world. And so keep things around you that you wanna have around that’ll do good things for you and the things that you don’t wanna keep around you because you think they’re gonna make your life worse off. Make sure that they’re nowhere near you in physical space.

Brett McKay: So you also suggest when you’re in that stuck place in life or in work is try copying others to help you get unstuck. How can that help you get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, it’s funny that, we privileged this idea of radical originality. One of the things I teach my MBA students, we talk about innovations and we look at all the greatest products of the last 50 years. We talk about them and I ask my students, tell me a product that’s truly radically original that had no predecessor, there was, it wasn’t built on the ideas of someone else. And it’s very, very, very difficult to do that with products. And it’s just as difficult to do that with things like films or music or art. And the problem with privileging and putting on a pedestal radical originality is that it sets this unrealistic bar. And so I talk about the idea that a better way to go is to recombine old ideas. And actually, almost every instance of something that seems from the outside, like it’s new and radically different is just a new way of thinking of two things or meshing two or more things together.

I talk a little bit about, for example Dave Grohl, Bob Dylan, these musicians who, when people talk about them, they say they’re doing something that’s pretty new and pretty different. And even other musicians say about Bob Dylan in particular, he was a genuinely original voice of the 20th century. But when you go back and you look at where his origins began, he was combining folk, he was combining rock at the time, pop, he was combining blues. He put it all together in a new way. But the building blocks of all of that were not themselves new. And I think that’s, it’s an important insight because it makes the process of coming up with good ideas, with good products, with good whatever things you’re trying to create much more tractable. It means you’re much more likely to succeed.

Brett McKay: When I read this idea of copying others, it made me think of the idea of woodshedding. Do you know about this idea?

Adam Alter: No, I don’t.

Brett McKay: So Woodshedding comes from jazz. You’re supposed to go to the woodshed where it’s kind of far away and no one can hear you and practice. And the idea is you practice where no one can hear you so that you could come back later and then show off what you’ve learned. And I think woodshedding, you can copy the work of others in woodshed at the same time, right? Like you want to do this in private, you wouldn’t want to copy someone out in the public blatantly ’cause that’s just, that’s just copying, that’s like plagiarism. But what you can do is you can take the work of others and practice with it privately, remix it, try things, and then once you got something new, then you can bring it out.

Adam Alter: A 100%. Yeah. So no one would say that Dylan isn’t doing something that’s on some level different. I just think that the idea that these things that seem new are kind of mystical and just appear out of nowhere, that’s the nonsense, right? So I’m sure Dylan did something like woodshedding. He took these ideas that he liked and maybe he didn’t even do it explicitly, but they were infused in his music. And so he went and he practiced and he created the style that became Bob Dylan’s style. But that doesn’t mean that what he was doing was plagiarism or that it wasn’t on some level new and different. It just means that all that other stuff seeped into it. It was like a sort of tea that had been made with all the ideas that had come before. But you need time for it to steep and that’s that process of woodshedding or practicing or honing or whatever you wanna call it.

Brett McKay: So I know… Yeah, I know. What’s the guy’s name? He wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Oh, Hunter S. Thompson.

Adam Alter: Hunter S. Thompson, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He supposedly typed out, I think it was The Great Gatsby ’cause he just wanted, he wanted to see what it felt like to write a great novel. Who knows if that did anything, but maybe it did. But I also Austin Cleon has that idea of steal like an artist. All artists are just copying each other, but they’re, it’s not blatant like word exact copy. Like you said, you just kind of, you work with the previous people’s stuff until it seeps into what you do and then you come out with something original. That’s how creativity works. You also have this chapter about when you’re stuck about understanding the idea or the difference between exploring and exploiting. And I really like this chapter. So what’s the difference between exploring and exploiting?

Adam Alter: Yeah, this goes back to evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that you basically have essentially two ways to look for something new and fruitful and valuable. Let’s say you are hunting and gathering, you’re looking for fruit or food or whatever you’re doing it, you are roaming the Savannah, it’s thousands of years ago. You can roam far and wide, you can cover a lot of terrain, very shallowly. Or you can find an area that seems like it might be fruitful and really dig deeply into that area. But then you’re gonna be leaving a lot of the other pastures without your attention and so you might be missing something. And that’s really how we are as we navigate the world, as we figure out the best way forward. And so there’s a lot of research on these two. Exploring is basically a moment where you say yes to opportunities or options.

So if you think about, I, for me it was like the early days of college, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do. So anytime an opportunity came along. I was like, yes, I will try that, see what that’s like. Figure out if that particular career path might work for me. I might meet a person who’s interesting and shows me a new way of doing something. I’ll just say yes to any invitation that comes my way. That’s exploring, it’s being open to different approaches. Jackson Pollock, the Painter for example, before he was doing his drip paintings that he became very famous for, was trying five or six different techniques. Peter Jackson, the director of Lord of the Rings films and the Hobbit, before he was this kind of giant fantasy epic film director and producer. He was doing a hundred other things. He wrote horror films, he wrote all sorts of other films.

And so you’ve gotta kind of dance around and figure out what works best. But if you do that forever, you’re never gonna get anywhere. So once you’re done exploring, you basically have to call it and say, okay, I’ve been exploring for a while. Of the five things I explored, this one looks like it’s the most fruitful. And so what I’m gonna do moving forward is say yes only to that thing. I’m gonna put all my time and attention and money towards that thing and say no to everything else. I’m gonna become singularly focused on that thing and make the most of it. And that’s when you see Jackson Pollock with his drip paintings and you see Peter Jackson with his fantasy epics. You just can’t get there if you don’t first explore. And you can’t succeed if you don’t, after exploring exploit, go really deep and make the most of what you’ve got. And so when you look at careers, you look for the period of careers where you find a hot streak, like the best period in someone’s career. It’s almost always after they have explored and then exploited and sometimes multiple times between the two. Explore then exploit, explore then exploit. And that’s when those hot streaks come up.

Brett McKay: I think this is great advice for people. Again, going back, I’m middle-aged. If you feel like you’ve reached a point in middle-aged where you feel stuck, you probably had a period in your 30s, maybe through your 40s where you were exploiting, like you did all this exploration in your 20s, you went to college, tried different classes, tried different careers, you moved to new cities, made new friends. And then you slowly found, here, this is what’s working for me. I’m gonna just, I’m gonna exploit this. And you probably stopped exploring. You might reach a point where you’re like, I’m feeling stuck, I’m feeling stagnant. And that’s where you have to sort of purposely and intentionally shift into exploration mode. And that can be hard because you’re probably comfortable and there’s this, gonna be an inertia not to say yes to things or try new things, but that’s what you gotta do.

Adam Alter: Yeah, you’re right. There is an element of difficulty here, right? Whenever you’re doing something that you’ve been doing for a while and therefore by definition perhaps, you’ve reached a plateau, it’s very comfortable at that point. Part of the plateau is this signal that you are doing something that no longer taxes you and so you’re not improving. And there’s, in some cases, nothing wrong with that. There are these famous cases of people who said, I was overwhelmed with the job I was doing. So every day, I wore the same clothes. I had 10 of the same suit or Steve Jobs in his black turtleneck, Barack Obama in the same suits every day. That’s an attempt to kind of minimize the mental load. And so there’s value in that in just doing things the same way all the time. But as you say, you have to reach a point where you say, I’m gonna pivot back to exploring. You’ve gotta range far and wide again.

Brett McKay: How have you done this in your own career? I mean, you’ve had a long career and varied career. How have you kind of gotten over that inertia to not explore when you needed to explore?

Adam Alter: Yeah, I mean for me, this started really early. I was at university in Australia. I was studying actuarial science, which is this sort of high level financial math course. And I knew I didn’t like it. And I was on a fellowship. And one day the person running the fellowship came in and said, if you keep doing this for another week, you’re gonna thereafter, if you ever quit, have to pay back the money. And that was the signal I needed. So I quit. I said, look, this isn’t working for me. But I had no idea what to do next. I felt profoundly stuck. I was obviously spending a fair amount of money being at the university, amassing a fair amount of debt and I wanted to figure out what was next, but I had no idea where to go. So what I did was I spent six months going to every possible first level class that I could.

I went to English classes, math classes, chemistry classes, engineering classes, psychology classes, law classes, you name it. I went and sat in and tried to get a taste of it, and that was my period of exploration. And from that, I realized that I liked psychology and I liked law, and those are the two degrees I did as an undergrad, psychology and law. And then ended up doing what I do now, which is sort of, in the beginning it was a combination of the two, and then I pursued psychology more heavily and then ultimately ended up in a business school as a marketing professor. But that’s all… I couldn’t have done that without that six month period of exploration. I needed to do that before I exploited the degrees and the courses that made the most sense to me.

Brett McKay: Well I was thinking as you were saying that. Another reason why going back into explore mode could be hard is ’cause it makes you feel dumb, right? ‘Cause you have to be a beginner again. Like you went to those introductory college classes, and it doesn’t feel good to be a beginner. You’re thinking, well I’ve mastered some things. Why am I not sticking to that? But now you gotta feel how bad it feels sometimes to be a complete noob at something.

Adam Alter: Oh, absolutely. It’s not easy on a certain level, you gotta swallow your pride. But also, you can think about this. There are two ways to live in any moment. You’re either stagnant or you’re growing. And one way to grow is to be a beginner. Beginners grow really fast, much more rapidly than experts grow. And so to go from being a beginner to being someone who’s moderately proficient at something or lots of things, that is a true form of growth that I think a lot of us don’t experience and don’t cultivate. There is massive benefit in that. I will say that period of exploration where I didn’t end up becoming an English major or a chemistry major or a math major, I still learned quite a lot about those areas. And I think that was important for me as well. That period of gathering little bits of information about 25 different disciplines had a massive amount of value that I didn’t foresee. So it’s not like this is all going to waste when you’re exploring, it’s all becoming a part of who you are. And David Epstein wrote the book, Range, about exactly that idea that in the course of ultimately flourishing, you’ve gotta kind of spend some time just dancing around different areas and figuring out if they’re worthwhile for you. And that will have a beneficial effect for whatever it is you ultimately specialize in later on.

Brett McKay: Yeah, no failure, just steps to success.

Adam Alter: That’s it.

Brett McKay: How do you know, if you’re in the explore mode, how do you know we need to shift to exploit mode?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so there are a few ways to do this. One is to just say, I am gonna give myself a certain amount of time. So in the example I gave you when I was jumping around from different course to course in college, I knew that the semester was gonna end at a certain date. So I used that as my guide and then I would have to sign up for a new program and that’s what I did. So I had a very clear six month period to do that. If you have objective metrics to pay attention to, if you’re doing something that gives you numerical feedback, you can use that feedback. Like for example, you might say, I’m gonna try these five different techniques. Let’s say you’re trying to work out, which I don’t know, technique of art is the one that you want to pursue if you’re an artist, something like that, you could say to yourself, I’m going to create five artworks in each style and then once I’ve done that, I’ll have my 25 artworks, five styles times five works, and then I’m gonna decide which one to exploit.

So you can use different decision rules to decide. I think also it’s important to pay attention to what it feels like to be in this process ’cause you can get to the point where exploring gets stale. Where you start feeling like, I don’t want to be doing this anymore. I’m ready to really focus on something. And I know that happens with me with books. Between books, I will, this is my third book now. Between books I’ll say I’m interested in 10 different things, but I don’t know when I’m ready to start actually making one of them a book. So I will spend a certain amount of time until I, that the ideas become from 10 to nine to eight to seven, and then I’ll be left with a few that look like good candidates. And eventually, I’ll hit a wall and just say, I can’t keep noodling about with this. I’ve gotta really make a go of it. And that’s when I’ll write the proposal and work on the book.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about how to deal with being stuck by changing how we think about being stuck, changing about how we think about failure, thinking of ways we can get unstuck, but then eventually, you gotta start taking action. So what role does action take in helping us get unstuck?

Adam Alter: Yeah, so it’s funny, the last chapter in the book is titled Action Above All. And that’s because all of the discussions about emotions, slowing things down, strategies and so on, none of that would matter for getting unstuck if you didn’t do something, all of that is in the service of action and action is really the main thing that we’re focusing on here. So action is critically important for getting unstuck ’cause it’s the thing that actually un-sticks you. And that’s true in a sort of very obvious sense that you can’t get unstuck if you’re not moving, if you’re static. But it’s also true in a more profound sense, which is that when you do something, when you act, even if the action itself is not dramatically productive, even if it doesn’t produce something that you can then use for the rest of time, the mere fact that you’re acting lubricates the wheels and gets you moving forward.

There’s this great example of this that I love Jeff Tweedy, the front man of Wilco who writes music for the band Wilco, but also is a writer. He writes books. He’s talked a lot about his creative process and he talks about the fact that he wakes up a lot of days, he’s been doing this a long time for decades and he’ll wake up on a lot of days and say, I don’t feel like being creative today. Nothing’s gonna happen. And so what he does is, he says to himself, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna spend say half an hour in the morning pouring out all the bad ideas, like sort of extracting them from my brain, putting them on the page and then that will make way for the good stuff. And so what he does is he says to himself, what’s the worst sentence I could write right now? Or what’s the worst bit of music I could compose? And he does that. Sometimes it’s better than he thinks and it’s valuable, but a lot of the time, it’s not, it’s not actually useful, but it’s, it by definition, by doing that, lowering the bar all the way down to the ground, you’re still acting. And so you show yourself something about your capacity to act rather than sitting around and naval gazing you’re doing something and there’s value in that.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I like that idea that quantity and quality are related because the more stuff you put out, you increase the chances of you actually having a home run. I mean the same thing with baseball, right? I think what everyone famously says, Babe Ruth, he’s the home run King, but yeah, like the most strikeouts, he’s struck out a ton of times.

Adam Alter: Exactly.

Brett McKay: He’s taken action. The same idea that applies to any other domain in life.

Adam Alter: Exactly.

Brett McKay: And then also you talk about besides taking action on the thing that you’re wanting to get unstuck in, you also talk about just physically moving can help you get unstuck. Like actually getting up and moving your body can help you get unstuck from whatever is you’re stuck in.

Adam Alter: Yeah, there’s a lot of research on the value of walking, of moving and so if you’re trying to think of something and you’re sitting on your seat at your desk and it’s not working, walk outside if it’s nice out, get on a treadmill, if it’s not. Move your body pace around, it tends to sort of grease the wheels a little bit and get things moving again. If you are an athlete, do whatever it is that you like doing. There’s this amazing set of videos of Paul Simon who obviously not an athlete but a great musician. And Paul Simon was notoriously shy, but he was on a number of talk shows in the ’70s and ’80s. One of them was the Dick Cavett show and he would get onto the show and Cavett would ask him questions, and he would just absolutely struggle to respond. And it was clear that he wasn’t comfortable being there.

He would even make comments about the microphone and its position. He just felt really uncomfortable. But Cavett very wisely said to him, why don’t you pick up your guitar and show us how you wrote bridge over troubled water or something like that. And Simon did that and the minute he started strumming, he was charming and relaxed and things came to him much more easily. So if there’s something you do, whether it’s lifting weights, going for a run, riding on a bike, it doesn’t matter, rowing, whatever it is, that movement seems to be, it gets you to a comfortable place mentally as well and seems to lubricate whatever gears need to be turning in your head to unstick you.

Brett McKay: Yeah, getting into your body gets you out of your head sometimes, which can be useful.

Adam Alter: A 100%.

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

Adam Alter: Yeah, so I’m on Twitter and LinkedIn and are my main channels, that’s where I post information. I’ve been posting about the book a fair amount there, so there’s quite a lot of information there. I also have a website, AdamAlterauthor that is basically a compilation of all the press material and other things that have been written about the book or that I’ve written about the book. And those are probably the two places. But yeah, the book is available online, it’s available in bookstores and will be available from May 16.

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

Adam Alter: Thanks so much for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest, it was Adam Alter, he’s the author of the book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, adamalterauthor.com. Also check our show notes at aom.is/unstuck, and find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you’d like to join ad free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com. Sign up, use code “manliness” at checkout for a free month’s trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad free episodes of the AOM podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify, it helps out a lot and if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of it.

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

The post Podcast #896: The Art and Science of Getting Unstuck appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #895: The Essential Guide to Visiting and Camping in the National Parks

Brett & Kate McKay — Mon, 15 May 2023 15:44:04 +0000

America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming.

Here to offer some really helpful advice on both visiting and camping in the national parks is Jeremy Puglisi, co-author, along with his wife Stephanie, of Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today on the show, Jeremy walks us through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place and what it takes to secure a campsite inside the parks. He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you want to avoid the crowds of the national parks, he also shares his picks for the country’s best state parks.

Resources Related to the Podcast

Jeremy’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #711: — How to Plan the Ultimate Road Trip
recreation.gov
nps.gov
KOA campgrounds
AoM Article: Beat the Crowds (And the Fees) With Dispersed Camping

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. America’s national parks are one of the country’s greatest treasures, and many people have it on their bucket list to visit one or more of these gems. But figuring out where to go and how to execute a national park experience can sometimes feel a little overwhelming. Here to offer some really helpful advice, on both visiting and camping in the natural parks, with Jeremy Puglisi, co-author along with his wife, Stephanie of Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks: The Best Campgrounds and Unique Outdoor Accommodations In and Around National Parks, Seashores, Monuments, and More. Today in the show Jeremy watches through how to navigate the complex reservation system some of the parks have in place, and what it takes to secure a camp site inside the parks.

He then shares his best tips for getting the most out of a national park experience in general, as well as when you’re visiting some of the country’s most iconic destinations. Including Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. At the end of our conversation, Jeremy shares the national parks he thinks are underrated, and if you wanna avoid the crowds of national parks, he also shares his pick for the country’s best state parks. After show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks.

Alright, Jeremy Puglisi, welcome back to the show.

Jeremy Puglisi: It’s so great to be here, and thank you so much for always having authors on your show, big, big fan of your podcast. Great to be here.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you so much. So, we had you and your wife Stephanie, on the show a few years ago to talk about how to plan and execute the perfect road trip. And the reason I wanna bring you back on this time is you all have a new book out called Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. So, I know a lot of people, they’re planning summer vacations, they’re thinking about maybe doing some national parks. And these can be surprisingly tricky to navigate, and I’m hoping we get some advice from you today, but I also wanna talk about camping in national parks. That’s something that a lot of people don’t… You can do, but I think a lot of people just think about visiting national parks, so camping inside of a national park adds another dimension of maybe complexity to this thing, but maybe some high reward there, let’s talk about you and your wife’s experience and your family’s experience with camping in national parks. You guys are big campers, you do a lot of RVing. How many national parks have you all camped in?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, between the two of us, we’ve done about half of the 63 national parks, and then we’ve done a lot of the other national park sites, which are not necessarily national parks. And it’s been about a decade of doing long RV trips with our kids and every summer we definitely hit up a few of our national parks. I would love to get to all of them, I don’t know if that’ll happen, but we’re working hard to do so.

Brett McKay: What’s been your favorite national park you visited so far?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, my favorite, and this surprises people. My favorite is Olympic National Park in Washington State. And I think that’s because it has so many different ecosystems, you’ve got the mountains, you’ve got the ocean, you’ve got rain forest, you’ve got some really hip cool gateway towns. And it’s pretty close to Seattle, so you kinda can fit in a city trip if you want to as well. So, that’s always been my favorite, I think Stephanie would say Glacier National Park was her favorite.

Brett McKay: So, you’re still trying to hit national parks every time you’d go out traveling in the summer?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and this is one of our biggest tips is we often do a big national park trip at the very end of August. That’s the time we’ve been really zooming in on, because our kids are still off school here in the Northeast, they go back after Labor Day. And so, what we’ve discovered is most of the country is back to school at that point, so we have hit some of the major national parks at the very end of the summer, and not had the crowding issues that everybody has been talking about.

Brett McKay: So, you mentioned there’s 63 official national parks, but you mentioned that there’s other sites or land governed by the National Park Service. What other sites should people consider when they think National Park Service?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so there’s 63 national parks, but there’s 424 national park sites, and there’s all different kinds of designations. You’ve got national seashores like Cape Hatteras National Seashore, Cape Cod National Seashore. You’ve got national lake shores like Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. You’ve got national recreation areas, we have in New Jersey, we have Gateway National Recreation Area, we’ve got national memorials, national parkways. And the thing that we really wanted to get across in the book is that a lot of them have amazing camping experiences. Sometimes there are sites inside those parks, but sometimes you have to camp outside of the parks. But we wanted to sort of re-distribute the balance of how people look at national park camping trips, ’cause we all think of the iconic trips out West, and there are more national parks in the West, but in the East, we have a lot of those other designations. We have a lot of the recreation areas, the seashores, the lake shores, the monuments, and those offer great camping experiences too, and we really wanted the book to give people alternatives from the places that are so, so crowd. Some of which I think we’ll talk about today.

Brett McKay: Oh, the other thing I didn’t think about, but it made sense, the Civil War Sites. That’s National Park Service.

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And so Gettysburg, there’s no camp grounds in Gettysburg National Battlefield, but there’s a whole culture of camping right outside of Gettysburg. There’s also a lot of campgrounds outside of Fredericksburg, almost all of those major sites have camping right outside of them, and people love to go on camping trips and make a whole tour out of it.

Brett McKay: So, the big take away there, don’t limit yourself just to the national parks. National parks are great, and we’re gonna talk about some of them today, but also think outside the box, think of other lands or sites governed by the National Park Service. Let’s talk about just visiting national parks in general, maybe someone just planning on going there, they don’t wanna camp, they wanna visit a national park. I’m sure people have heard, or they’ve tried in the past five years to visit a national park, they’ve heard or experienced that getting into a national park can be surprisingly difficult. Why is getting into a national park so hard sometimes?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, my theory here is that during the pandemic interest in national parks, interest in camping exploded for obvious reasons. But then everybody that had been taking other types of vacations like cruises or flying to Europe, I think a lot of them just wanted to go to the same five or six places that they’ve been hearing about their whole lives. They’ve been hearing about Yellowstone, they’ve been hearing about Yosemite, they’ve been hearing about a little place called Zion, and so I think that we had an absolute flood of people that were new to camping and maybe even kinda new to road tripping, all trying to descend on the same places at one time.

So, it is true that there are crowding issues at the most popular national parks, at the most popular times. But shoulder seasons are pretty open, and there’s also so many great national parks that are off people’s radars. Now, I would never tell someone, “Don’t go to Yellowstone, don’t go to Yosemite.” That’s your travel dream, go do that. And we’ve gone to those places too, we just wanted to open up some other options as well, and some of the places that we wanna talk about, I think like Yosemite, it’s near San Francisco. So, that’s gonna be crowded, there’s massive population density nearby. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is within striking distance of massive population density, so a lot of people go to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it’s our most visited Park. But then there are places that are a bit more off the beaten track that people cannot get to quite as easily, and there’s campsites open, there really are.

Brett McKay: Okay, so some national parks, they are very popular, different times they’re gonna be more popular. I imagine Summer, like early Summer is probably the peak time for most of them.

Jeremy Puglisi: That sweet spot where all of the kids in the country are off for school is the worst… It’s the hardest time, the most difficult time to go. ‘Cause you have kids in the country that go back to school after Labor Day, then you have kids in the country that get off earlier in May, so that place in the middle where every kid in America is off, that is definitely, honestly a very tricky time to do these types of trip. So, if you can any way move off to the beginning or end of the Summer as opposed to say July, you’re gonna do better. And then of course, if you’re not traveling with kids and that’s not an issue for you, the shoulder seasons are a really wonderful time to visit almost all of these places that we wanna talk about.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I think something people often don’t realize with the national parks is that sometimes you need a reservation ahead of time just to get into the park, or to do certain things in the park. And we had a nightmare experience with this during the pandemic. So, 2021 my wife was turning 40, and she wanted to go to Yosemite for her 40th, and so I thought, Okay, great, I’ll go to recreation.gov, buy the tickets. But at the time, they were expecting you to reserve your spot into the park three days in advance of your arrival at the park. So, a couple of weeks before the day I needed to buy my permit, I got on there to get familiar with recreation.gov and see how fast things went, and just to practice buying the permit. ‘Cause I heard that things can go fast, and so I got on there and tickets went fast in three minutes, they were all gone. But every time I was able to put a permit in my shopping cart, and delete it. So, I thought, okay, I’m not gonna have a problem with this.

So, on the day of, like this is the day that it counted, I had to get one a permit on this day, because we’d be in Yosemite three days. I had to get it. We had already bought lodging, we already bought plane tickets, so this was now or never. So, I had my friend Grant, him and his wife Mary, were gonna come with this as well, and say, “Hey, you get on too, and you just start refreshing your browser and see if you get one will increase the chances. So, we started doing it, got on 10 o’clock Central Time in the morning, ticked, started refreshing the browser trying to get one, trying to get one, trying to get one. And none of us got one, they were gone in a minute. And I remember I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I just ruined Kate’s 40th birthday. This is devastating.” Luckily, my friend Grant, he was clutch, he got on Reddit right after that happened and started searching about getting permits or whatever. And he found that if you get the app, sometimes they reserve a few permits for the recreation.gov app, so we download the app really quick and he was able to get a permit for us to get in.

So, yeah, he saved the day. So, that’s one tip there if you’re trying to get into a hard to get into park or an attraction at a park. Don’t just use the browser, get the app as well. And what was interesting, I was like, “Why is it? Is this is like an off season? We were in February is like, “This is an off season, why was it so crazy to get in at this time?” And what was going on in Yosemite, around February 20th, there’s this phenomenon and is the fire falls which is like a waterfall. And at sunset, the sun hits this waterfall and it looks like fire is going down the wall of the mountain. And so, there’s photographers from all over the world who are trying to get in to get a picture of this. If you look it up, you can see pictures of this online or videos of it.

Get there and except for people around the waterfall, the park was empty. We had basically at the park to ourselves, we went on these great hikes, didn’t see anybody on the trails at all. So, that was another thing thought that I thought was interesting. Even though a park might be busy or hard to get into, you might have it to yourself, because people are there for a certain attraction. And another thing too is, what we saw when we got to Yosemite was some people didn’t know about the reservations that you needed in advance, you see these people in line. I’m sure they drove hours to get to Yosemite, they get to the gate and they didn’t have the permit, and so they just had to turn around and go back.

So, lessons there, check in advance with the park you plan on visiting months in advance that they have a reservation system, be prepared for some parks or some attractions to have to really be ready and try to refresh the browser to get a permit. Use the app, and yeah, that was the thing, just do a lot of research in advance. But I’m curious, so, that was the pandemic, a lot of people were going to the national parks during this time, so I think a lot of parks put in this permit system. Is that still the case? Do a lot of parks still have this, you need a reservation in advance just to get into the park?

Jeremy Puglisi: Well, it’s only a handful, but actually, I’m guessing that a lot of those people that got turned away that day were not Yosemite rookies. I’m actually thinking a lot of them are probably people that have been going to Yosemite for years and never needed that reservation. Because this whole thing made a lot of news during the pandemic, ’cause it had never happened before, the National Park Service has always required reservations for campsites. But for all of its history, you could just drive up and get into the park. And so, since the pandemic though, they have been targeting really specific parks and some really specific attractions or things like fire fall. This year, there’s only five parks that require a reservation to get into the park, and again, we’re not talking camp sites here, we’re just talking getting in.

So actually, Yosemite doesn’t require a reservation to get in this year, though they do require reservations for fire fall, as you described. But this year Acadia requires a reservation to get in, but that’s not the whole park, that’s like the Park Loop Road. Arches requires a reservation, Glacier requires a reservation, but it’s only for going to the Sun Road, and you need to remember these national parks are gigantic. So, sometimes they’re just pinpointing the busiest part of the park and saying, “You need a reservation to get in.” And in Glacier, from what I understand it’s only from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM that you need that reservation for going to the Sun Road. You can be in other parts of the park and not need a reservation at all. Rocky Mountain National Park, you need reservations for specific things, and then Haleakala in Hawaii, you just need a reservation if you wanna come in super early and do the sunrise, which is a very popular.

So, what the NPS is doing is they’re just targeting things they know they get over crowded, and I think they’re almost keeping people from getting disappointed by showing up and not being able to park or not being able to get in. So, it’s very limited, for the most part, every National Park Service Site, you can pull up and pay the price to get in and not have a problem.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I know at Zion they instituted… You don’t need a reservation to get in to Zion, but to do this hike called Angel Landing, you need a permit or a reservation in advance to do that.

Jeremy Puglisi: And I will admit, I will never do that hike, and I think you did, didn’t you?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I did. And we took her son went up it, and he was like 11 or 10 at the time, I think he was 10 or 9. It was crazy ’cause it’s just like a chain and you’re just going up the sheer cliff. The view is great, but it was pretty crazy going up there, and it was definitely crowded too. You just kinda had to keep inching up this long line of people.

Jeremy Puglisi: I don’t blame the NPS for limiting the number of people doing that hike though, ’cause it’s dangerous. So, there’s been a lot of grumbling about the National Park Service implementing some of these reservations, but they tend to know what they’re doing, and I think that one definitely makes sense. And like Acadia National Park, the Park Loop Road, if you let too many people in, then you can’t park anywhere. So, you literally could just drive around it, but it would be impossible to stop and check out any overlooks. So, for the most part, 99% trust the NPS to make good decisions about this stuff.

Brett McKay: So, I guess the take away there, if there’s a national park you’re gonna visit, I would get on recreation.gov to check out the different reservation policies, if you need one in advance, etcetera.

Jeremy Puglisi: I would do two things, I would go to nps.gov, go to the actual National Park Service website, and then click through to recreation.gov, because what I’ve discovered over the years is sometimes there’s more and better information on the National Park Service website, and then recreation.gov is just where you go to make the reservation and sometimes the information can be different. But if you look at both of them together, you’re gonna get the whole picture of whatever is going on with the reservation system.

Brett McKay: Okay, so always do your research beforehand as to whether you need a reservation to get into the park, or to do a certain hike in the park. And then also be aware that those passes, they can be hard to get sometimes. And that could be especially true when it comes to getting your reservation for a camping site, what does it take to get a camp site inside a national park?

Jeremy Puglisi: So, for Yosemite, it is literally… And we can talk about a few different parks here, but for somewhere like Yosemite, it becomes incredibly, incredibly stressful. There’s 13 campgrounds inside the park, some of them you can reserve five months early, some you can reserve two months early, some you can reserve two weeks early. So, you got to figure all of that out. And again, nps.gov, and then go to Yosemite they lay out everything for you. They have 20 pages worth of information on the reservation system, you need a PhD to book a reservation here. And then they basically tell you. They give you a chart of when you need to get on your laptop and at what time, so basically you need to be on your laptop at 7:00 AM Pacific Time on the day that the camp sites are gonna be released. And then on the national park website, it actually says that thousands and thousands of camp sites disappear in seconds, and the issue has become so stressful that there’s been a lot of complaints from the public about it. The public is saying it’s not equitable, not everybody has access to high-speed internet, and some people are gaming the system. They’ve actually had problems with hackers and bots invading the system and getting camp sites at Yosemite.

And this is a real thing, I actually had somebody direct message me on Facebook and say, “Hey, if you wanna get into Yosemite or Yellowstone in the summer, I’ve got a hacker for you, I’ve got somebody. He’s a little expensive, but I can get you the camp site.” So, the National Park Service has kinda become aware of how stressful and awful this is, particularly at Yosemite, Zion, etcetera, etcetera. So, now they’re experimenting with a lottery system at Yosemite, which could spread to other campgrounds across the country. So basically, you put in the dates you want, you put in when you wanna go, and they sort of pull your name out of a digital hat, and then you get early access to the reservation system. And I kid you not, there are seven pages of instructions just to show you how to get the early access through the lottery system. But I do kind of hope that that kind of lottery system becomes more widespread, because I do think it’s even harder for people to get reservations if they’re not really kind of sophisticated with their laptops as silly as that sounds.

Brett McKay: Okay so getting a campground is gonna vary depending on the national park. Yosemite doesn’t have very many campsites, so there’s an elaborate reservation system. And really, you just have to take the time to walk through the instructions and then basically be at your computer at a certain point and just ready to hit Refresh over and over again until you get a spot, correct?

Jeremy Puglisi: No, you need to be on your laptop, your wife needs to be on a laptop, your three kids need to be on their Chromebooks. That’s what people do. They get the whole family literally trying to do it. And yes, you’re hitting refresh. And I have tried this, and I’ve had my heart broken many times. And the sites disappear quickly. And then a couple of times, I’ve been able to get them at some super popular places. But that is definitely an issue. There’s people that feel like they’re not gonna ever build a camp inside Yosemite during their lifetime.

Brett McKay: Okay, so to get a campsite, you have to look at each national park. It’s gonna be different on how far in advance you have to get a spot. It could be six months, it could be five months, could be two months, could be two weeks. And also, I imagine there are some national parks where you could probably just go to the place and there’s probably a campsite there, ’cause it’s not as popular, for example. Are there any national parks like that?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, I think you could go to somewhere like Big Bend in Texas. I think there are definitely some parks that are like you could walk in Shenandoah National Park it’s in Virginia. That’s kind of closer to me. I would be willing to bet money I could book a site there this weekend right now. So there’s definitely some places that fly under the radar and there are sites available almost at any time. But summer weekends, almost anywhere are gonna be booked inside the parks. And to kinda emphasize a little bit why that is, it’s dirt cheap to camp inside the national parks. It’s often $10, $20, maybe $30 a night, and those campgrounds are in the most beautiful, spectacular locations right inside the parks. And then also, you don’t have to worry about getting into the park in the morning, as you were describing, because you’ve already gone through that process, you’re already in there. You’re waking up in the park and then able to either take a shuttle or just go on a hike from your campsite. But there’s places that are definitely less crowded, for sure, if you dig around, and our book has a ton of them.

Brett McKay: Okay, so camping inside a national park can be stressful. Are there any other campsites that people should consider that are outside of a national park that can give you easy access to the national park, but avoiding the stress and headaches of camping inside the national park?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so it does become much easier to move outside of the park and look outside of the park. Those types of campgrounds do not book up as quickly. They’re often two to three times, to four times more expensive. So that’s one of the dynamics at work here, is that a site inside of Yellowstone might be 20 bucks. A site outside of Yellowstone could very easily be 100 bucks a night, because it’s a small business owner trying to make a profit. And many of those campgrounds outside the parks are beautiful, but they’re not gonna be as beautiful as being in the park. So there’s major trade-offs. But if you wanted to do a last second national parks trip right now after listening to this podcast, you’re most likely gonna end up looking outside the parks. A good place to start, which I often recommend is KOA, that’s Campgrounds of America. They have 500 campgrounds to franchisee system, and they tend to have a strong presence outside of most national parks. For instance, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s gonna be like 8 KOAs around the perimeter of Great Smoky Mountains.

But it also depends on gateway towns. So somewhere like Yosemite does not have an immediate gateway town. You’re gonna drive an hour away to find other camping options. Now, somewhere like Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there are camping options literally right outside the gates of the park. So it’s gonna vary a bit, but it’s always gonna cost more, and it’s always probably gonna be easier to get sites.

Brett McKay: Are state parks a good option for camping outside a national park? ‘Cause I imagine there’s a lot of state parks close by to some of these national parks.

Jeremy Puglisi: State parks can be. Definitely, for sure. Like I think of Custer State Park in South Dakota is a great place to stay if you wanna go to Mount Rushmore. Also national forests are a really great place to walk where there’s more sites available. So particularly thinking about Yellowstone and Grand Teton, they’re surrounded by national forest campgrounds, and those are often first come first served, which makes it a bit tricky if you’re coming from far away, and there’s often maybe like a dirt road to get in, it’s a little more rugged, there’s not a lot of services. But a lot of people do end up in national forest campgrounds, sometimes state parks. It’s unusual to have a national park and a state park right next to each other, though it does happen. Indiana Dunes, which is now a National Park, also has Indiana Dunes State Park literally right next door. And then one of our favorites, Assateague Island State Park, literally right next door is Assateague National Seashore. So you could play that game there, if you can’t get into the national park, try the state park, but that’s gonna be a little bit the exception to the rule, I think.

Brett McKay: Well, another option to consider is dispersed camping. So dispersed camping is, you can do it on certain national lands. And basically, you drive out there, and you can camp pretty much wherever you want, wherever you can find a spot. There are few regulations about where you can camp, but generally, it’s wherever. But the thing is, you’ve got nothing, like there’s no water, there’s no restrooms, you’re digging a cat hole, but it’s a good way to avoid the crowds, and it’s free. So what about dispersed camping? Where is that an option?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so you can do dispersed camping on BLM land, which is only in about 13 states in the American West, though. I’m a New Jersey guy, I’m jealous. We don’t have that. Also, you can do dispersed camping in national forests. Like if you go to the National Forest Service website, they have rules for how close or far you can be from the road, if you need a permit, if you don’t. In those situations, if you’re gonna try what I often call boondocking, what you just called dispersed camping, you can often call a field office, whether it’s BLM or National Forest, where there’s a ranger or there’s jurisdiction over the land. And it’s very wise to check in because mother nature’s at work, and sometimes things are flooding, or sometimes trees are down and roads are cut off. So there is often a point of contact that you can make literally by picking up a phone and calling somebody to say, “Hey, look, I wanna do dispersed camping in this national forest.” Is there anything I need to know? Is anything closed?” Etcetera, etcetera. It’s getting much bigger in the American West, not so much a thing in the American East. And one of the reasons it’s getting bigger among RV owners is because RVs are becoming much more equipped with solar to be able to be out in the middle of nowhere without electrical hook-ups.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. What general tips do you have for people for just visiting the national park, whether they’re camping in it or just visiting for a few days? Any tips that you found that are useful to get the most out of the national park experience?

Jeremy Puglisi: The single most important thing that we tell everybody is to get up early. Even if your family does not naturally get up early, if you wanna hike a popular trail or go to a popular overlook, parking lots fill up, and it’s amazing. Parking lots tend to fill up by like 10 o’clock. If you can get to a popular trailhead at 7:00 AM, you’re golden in almost every case. So we’ll go to a trailhead at 7:00 AM to a hike, like Gorham Mountain Trail and Acadia. When we come down the mountain at 10:00, the parking lot’s full and people are circling. So getting up early, even if that’s not your natural thing, is hugely important. We also tell people to kind of take it slow and don’t feel like you have to cram in everything. We would rather take our time and linger in certain places than say we checked off all 12 things that we wanted to do at Yellowstone. My theory is always, I can come back if I want to. And then we also recommend too, if you do a big activity in the morning, we always hike in the morning with our kids, which they’ll grumble about, to be honest, then we tend to, in the afternoon, kinda let them pick, and that often means going back to a campground pool, maybe going into a town and getting some food or something like that, or buying souvenirs. So creating a balance between what Mom and Dad want and what the kids want has been hugely important too.

Brett McKay: And you also highly recommend visiting the office where the rangers are at, ’cause they have lots of useful information. They also, for the kids I thought it was… I didn’t know about this, the junior rangers… It’s like they’re junior rangers? Is that what it’s called?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, the Junior Ranger Program. So if you go to the visitor center and you ask for the junior ranger booklet, and it’ll be like an activity booklet that kids fill out through their day or through a couple of days at the park, and it’s answering some questions or it’s maybe doing a nature trail. It varies in difficulty from park to park. And then when you complete the booklet, you bring it back to the visitor center, and they will swear you in as a junior ranger. They’ll actually do a little ceremony, which is quite adorable when the kids are little. And then they give them a Junior Ranger badge. So that program was a huge part of my kids national park experience when they were little.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I imagine it keeps your kids from having a meltdown, keep them from complaining or having a bad attitude, because it gives them something to do.

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. And look, if you wanna do a national parks trip as a mom or dad and you are worried about the kid part of it, because you can burn your kids out on another hike, another hike, another hike, another overlook, then camping outside of the park can be a really cool way to go, because then the campground experience can be really fun for them with pools, playgrounds, bocce ball, volleyball, whatever it might be. That’s always helped us strike a balance.

Brett McKay: And also, if you have kids, don’t forget, if you have a fourth grader, they get to go to the national parks for free. They get a free pass to all the national parks that year. And we took advantage of that during the pandemic. My son was in fourth grade at the time. We had the pass, and so we hit up a lot of national parks during that time.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, that’s another great program The National Park Service has, for sure. And just in general though, the admission is cheap, the camping is cheap. It’s all supplemented by our tax dollars, etcetera, etcetera, but it is a… A national parks trip can be a very affordable family vacation.

Brett McKay: Alright, so let’s talk about specific national parks. We’ve talked about some general tips about how to navigate the reservation system, how to figure out if you’re gonna camp inside the park, outside the park, how to get the most out of your park experience. Let’s talk about specific parks, ’cause you do a great job in the book, you basically talk about every single national park and the ins and outs, where to camp, attractions to check out, things you need to consider when you’re planning. So let’s talk about some of the really popular national parks. Let’s talk about Yosemite. We’ve already been talking about Yosemite. And when we went, I was… Before we went, I was wondering, “Is this thing gonna live up to the hype?” ‘Cause you hear about it your entire life. So I was afraid it was gonna be overhyped, but it was so incredible. It exceeded expectations. It lived up to the hype and more. But because it’s so incredible, it’s very popular. It’s one of the most popular parks in the country. So are there any problems with overcrowding at Yosemite?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yosemite is the sixth most visited national park. To put it into context, more people visit Yosemite than Yellowstone, and Yellowstone’s three times the size. And Yosemite is day-trip-able, from San Fran, and most people just are gonna do the valley part. And that’s common in most national parks, that most people are going to one spot. Like in Acadia, everybody wants to do a Park Loop Road. In Yosemite, everybody wants to do the valley stuff. So if you are willing to go off the beaten track, there’s often many other options than the ones that people… The people are just kinda driving in, parking, looking around. They don’t know exactly what they wanna do. Maybe they stumble into a little bit of a hike. So look, Yosemite I wish I had some secret answer to doing Yosemite in the summer, but it is a challenge. But we’ve had people that have gone in the shoulder seasons that have really been raving about visiting in the non-summer.

Brett McKay: Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, when we went in February, we hardly saw anyone else on the trails. We had to hike on the snow. There was still snow on the ground. And we did that. That was fine. It was fun, actually. And there was a ton of people there for the fire-fall at the fire-fall spot, but other than that, there was actually a lot of solitude. So I wouldn’t go again during the fire-fall time, but it seems like winter, in general, is a great time to hit Yosemite.

Jeremy Puglisi: What you’re saying about the hiking is incredibly true. I mean, most people are touring in our national parks. They’re driving in, they’re parking. They don’t really quite know what to do. They’re looking around a little bit. Every national park we’ve been to, from Yellowstone to Glacier to Acadia, very, very crowded parks. Once you get out on the trail… I’m not even talking deep back country. Once you just get out on the trail, it tends to not be super, super crowded.

Brett McKay: Have you guys camped in Yosemite?

Jeremy Puglisi: It’s been a long time, but yeah.

Brett McKay: So was Yosemite one, I imagined you would recommend finding a spot outside? ‘Cause it’s probably just too stressful to get a spot inside the park.

Jeremy Puglisi: In the book, we have a couple of recommendations, but they are 45 minutes to an hour outside of the park. And for most people, that’s a bummer. There is a really cool place called Auto Camp Yosemite, and that’s a campground that’s only Airstream rentals. And it’s expensive, it’s kind of boujee, but that’s a really cool option outside of Yosemite. And then there’s some RV resorts that are an hour away that are fine, but it, frankly, doesn’t compare to being in the park. Now, somewhere like Glacier, there are awesome, beautiful campgrounds outside of the park. So it’s gonna vary from park to park.

Brett McKay: Okay. I recommend Yosemite, if you’re gonna visit a national. It’s fantastic. Another iconic summer national park destination is the Grand Canyon. Anything people should consider when planning a road trip or a camping trip to the Grand Canyon?

Jeremy Puglisi: So there’s some similarities with Yosemite. So the gateway town of Williams is over an hour away. So sort of you’re in the park or you’re far away. The reservation system is a little bit simpler, so you can reserve six months in advance there. And on the South Rim, the more popular rim, there are campgrounds that are open year-around, and there’s a few campgrounds that are just in the summer. Now, on the North Rim, it’s seasonal camping. There’s no camping in the winter. So you could do off-season Grand Canyon. And in fact, a lot of people say it’s really, really beautiful to go. I mean, you run the risk of having bad weather, but there’s campgrounds open year-around. You might consider the shoulder seasons there. And Williams is really cool as a gateway town. So I would certainly recommend stopping there, spending a couple of nights there, and then going into the Grand Canyon.

Brett McKay: Okay, so camping, six months advance reservation mostly?

Jeremy Puglisi: I would definitely get on six months if you want that reservation, for sure, ’cause the campgrounds will book in the summer. Shoulder seasons are gonna be a bit more friendly. Grand Canyon too, for me, like you wanna be there for a sunrise and the sunset, but I feel like the average person can go for just a couple of nights and really experience the Grand Canyon, unless you wanna get super adventurous and do some serious hiking. You don’t need a week at the Grand Canyon, I don’t think personally.

Brett McKay: Yeah. No, we went to the Grand Canyon when I was a kid. I think we just did a day. I mean, we were just kind of driving through and we stopped. Probably could have done a little bit longer. We also talked about, inside the Grand Canyon National Park, there are different types of attractions that, besides the camping, are gonna require advance reservation. What are some examples of that?

Jeremy Puglisi: Like if you wanna do a floating trip or something like that, you’re gonna need to hook up with a concessionaire and you’re definitely gonna need tickets or something like that, but all the hiking is… As far as I know right now, there’s no reservations for things like that. But if you’re gonna be doing something with a concessionaire or a deeper hike into the canyon and staying overnight, that’s also something you’re going to definitely be booking in advance.

Brett McKay: Alright, let’s talk about the most popular national park. That’s Great Smoky Mountains, correct?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, so Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited national park. I think they topped. They almost hit 14 million visitors last year, and I think that’s like twice the amount of visitors that other national parks got. And it’s just a population density issue. I mean, I could hop in my car right now from New Jersey. I could be at Great Smoky Mountains in 10 hours. So people all up and down the East Coast can get to the Smokies within a day’s drive. So yeah, it’s super, super popular. It, up to very recently, was completely free to enter the park, which is maybe one of the reasons it gets very crowded, but Great Smokies, to me, is very accessible and much less stressful than some of these other places we’ve been talking about, for sure.

Brett McKay: What’s the camping like inside Great Smoky?

Jeremy Puglisi: Lots of great camping. And when you think of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you have the Tennessee side, and you have the North Carolina side. So you can approach the park from two different states, which is another reason why it’s so crowded. But there are tons of great NPS campgrounds in and around the park. There’s probably about 15 of them. There’s places like Smokemont and Elkmont that are super popular or harder to get, but much easier than the other places we talked about. And then the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s several gateway towns, where we were saying Yosemite doesn’t really have an immediate gateway town, Grand Canyon doesn’t have a gateway town. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has Cherokee on the North Carolina side, it has Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge on the Tennessee side, which is almost like a little mini Las Vegas right outside of the gates of the park, then also Townsend. So there’s a massive… There’s probably 100 camp grounds outside of the park. So you don’t hear about the stressful stories. If you can’t get a site inside the park, you just move to one of the KOAs outside of the park. The last time we went to the Smokies, we stayed at Camp Margaritaville. We stayed at a Jimmy Buffett property, 10 minutes from the gates. And my wife’s drinking Margaritas at night, there’s a pool, there’s a hot tub. It’s a very different type of national parks trip than the ones that last, we’ve talked about.

Brett McKay: It’s also got… It’s got Dollywood too.

Jeremy Puglisi: Dollywood is awesome.

Brett McKay: Is it really that great? ‘Cause I’ve got some family members who go there all the time, and I’m like, “Why would you go to Dollywood over and over again?”

Jeremy Puglisi: I’ll tell you why, I’ll make the case for Dollywood. Lots of live music. So the ticket… You pay your ticket price, which is not cheap. I mean, it’s less than Disney World, but certainly not cheap to go to Dollywood. But there’s live music all day. You could literally not go on a ride and just go from concert to concert to concert. And these are good people. These are high-level talent. But then also, Dollywood has world-class roller coasters. I like roller coasters. I won’t go on super frightening upside down roller coasters, but they have those too. If you want music and you want entertainment, you want food, all that’s there. But if you also want the thrills of the roller coasters, that’s there too. Now, for the national park purist too, somebody who’s into hiking and all that stuff, you might wanna avoid Dollywood. But we’ve gone twice, and we really liked it.

Brett McKay: Alright, so Great Smoky Mountains sounds like camping inside the park, it’s not as stressful as the ones out West, and there’s also great camping outside as well and a lot of other stuff to do outside the national park. And just from reading about it, I’ve never been, but it sounds like a lot of great hiking as well.

Jeremy Puglisi: Hiking there is beautiful. We did a hike this past year where you can actually hike up to a national park lodge and spend the night, the Leconte Lodge. And the only way you can get there is by hiking. But there’s a beautiful hiking there. And the Great Smokies, it’s like rushing rivers, really deep, thickly, green forests, and then you kind of emerge at the end to a view of the mountain. So it is a very good hiking park.

Brett McKay: Alright, so Yellowstone is another popular national park, but it’s also huge. So any tips on getting the most out of your Yellowstone visit?

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, Yellowstone was definitely one of our favorite trips. You need to decide where your base camp is for Yellowstone, ’cause you can enter the park from so many different places. And we decided to use West Yellowstone as our base camp, which is actually in Montana. But Yellowstone is a driving park, to me, more than it is a hiking park. It’s a touring park, where a big part of the experience is gonna be hopping in your car, driving from place to place to place, so planning for those drives and not being shocked, you have to do a lot of driving, is a big part of the experience. We actually love the driving, but we learn to bring snacks into the park, bring water into the park. You often end up pretty far away from concessions. And we did Yellowstone, like I mentioned earlier, in the last week of August. And I could have landed a plane in the Old Faithful parking lot. It was so empty. So I know Yellowstone is definitely crowded in June and July, but end of August would be a really good time to do Yellowstone. And if it’s your first time, a big tip would be to concentrate on the lower loop. Now, there’s awesome things in the upper loop, but the lower loop has so many of the iconic places we think about, like Old Faithful, like Grand Prismatic Springs.

And then if you have more time, you could do the lower loop in, say, two days, three days. Then if you have a longer trip to Yellowstone, then head into the upper loop, do Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. And then Lamar Valley is quite far away from everything, up there on the upper loop, but the wildlife was incredible. We were in, like, five bison jams. If you’re going to Yellowstone for wildlife, go to Lamar valley. Don’t let people tell you to go to Hayden Valley. That was a total bust for us, and I’ve heard that from other people. Lamar Valley is the place to go to see bison.

Brett McKay: What’s camping like in Yellowstone?

Jeremy Puglisi: So many options. There’s a universe of camping inside Yellowstone. In the lower loop, the Madison Campground is one of the more popular options, but then there are campgrounds in all of the different parts of the park. So if it’s your first trip to Yellowstone, look at Madison Campground. That’s relatively close to the gateway town of West Yellowstone. And then as you progress into a second or third Yellowstone trip, you can get deeper into the park, further into the park, into the northern loop and get sites there. And it’s gonna be easier to get sites in the northern loop than the southern loop, ’cause the southern loop’s where everybody goes. And then there’s great gateway towns, KOAs. There’s all that stuff right outside of the park.

Brett McKay: And another nice thing about Yellowstone, depending on where you are in the park, it’s really close by to Grand Teton National Park.

Jeremy Puglisi: I liked Grand Teton more, and I sometimes…

Brett McKay: I did too.

Jeremy Puglisi: I totally liked Grand Teton more. It’s a super short drive from the bottom of Yellowstone into Grand Teton. If I’m remembering correctly, it’s like a 10-minute drive. And personally, for me, I liked Grand Teton more because we’re a hiking family, and Teton is a hiking park to me, where Yellowstone is more of that, like cruising around in your car kinda park. And I just thought the views were more resplendent and awe-inspiring in Teton. I am not saying that Yellowstone is overrated, but my whole life, people have been saying, “Yellowstone, Yellowstone, best park, national park in the country,” and it was maybe not even in my top five. Grand Teton was certainly in my top three. And Grand Tetons are great for camping. So in the center of Grand Teton National Park, there’s an area called Colter Village, and it’s all concessionaire-run, but there’s a RV-specific campground, there’s a tent camping specific campground, there’s a cabin area. We stayed in cabins last time. And cabins can be an option in some of these national parks. The cabins in Teton were adorable. Then they have this area called The Tent City or something like that, where two of the walls are made of wood and two of the walls are canvas, and it’s kind of like rustic glamping. So Teton is pretty easy to figure out the camping thing too.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I would agree Grand Teton is much better than Yellowstone. We went there, I think it was end of 2021, and we did Grand Teton. And what’s amazing about Grand Teton, it seems so out of place in United States. You look up at it and it looks like you’re looking at the Matterhorn, like you’re in Switzerland, but it’s the United… It’s crazy. Views are great. And yeah, then we went to Yellowstone. We just kind of drove around. That was it. But Teton was the highlight.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, and Jackson’s great too. I’ve not spent much time in my life being jealous of rich people, but when I was in Jackson, I was like, “Man, I wouldn’t mind living here,” right at the base of Grand Teton. To me, to be able just drive from your house and to Grand Teton National Park would be amazing.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned you wouldn’t say Yellowstone is overrated, but it didn’t entirely live up to the hype. Are there any national parks you would say or you think are overrated, even amongst the ones we’ve talked about, like Grand Canyon, etcetera?

Jeremy Puglisi: I very rarely go to one of these parks, and, “Oh, this is overrated.” I just tend to be a guy that’s like, I’m just so happy to be there. I think Olympic is underrated, in Washington state. I think Olympic is one of our most majestic national parks, and it’s certainly not on as many people’s bucket lists as a bunch of these other ones that we’ve talked about. We loved Mount Rushmore. Now, a lot of people say Mount Rushmore is overrated, and we certainly… And there’s the history, Mount Rushmore is very complicated, etcetera, etcetera, politically, but our family really liked Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. Also, I would say Badlands National Park is underrated. Badlands National Park in South Dakota, you feel like you’re on another planet. It’s not that big, it doesn’t take that many days to see. And a lot of people just kinda skip it on their road trip out west to get to Yellowstone, but I think that one’s underrated as well.

Brett McKay: Yeah, if you go to Badlands, you just hang out where Teddy Roosevelt hung out.

Jeremy Puglisi: Exactly. And Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I would say, underrated, up in North Dakota. It’s just so hard to get to. That’s part of the problem.

Brett McKay: Well, I think too… I mean, maybe you even know more about this, ’cause I think when most people think national parks, they’re thinking the big ones out west. Are there any overlooked national parks in the East that people like, “Man, you should go check that out ’cause it’s actually really cool?”

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. So like in the East, we have Acadia National Park in Maine, which is one of the most visited. So that one is very popular. But then you have Cape Cod National Seashore, which my family adores Cape Cod National Seashore, it’s not underrated in our region, if that makes sense, everyone knows it around here, but I don’t know many people from out west who are like, “I’ve gotta get to Cape Cod National Seashore.” So I’d say nationally, that one is a little bit off the radar. Then I think Shenandoah National Park in Virginia is definitely underrated. I think it’s overshadowed by Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which is somewhat nearby. Shenandoah was beautiful, a beautiful hiking, beautiful views. Only takes a couple of days to see it. And now New River Gorge is our newest national park, so I don’t know if I wanna say it’s overrated or underrated yet, ’cause I think people are just sort of figuring it out and discovering it, but I do think that that will emerge as a really, really popular national park in the East. And I also love Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. That is astonishing beach camping options, etcetera, etcetera. And everybody on the East Coast knows it, but I don’t think that nationally, people know it.

Brett McKay: And we mentioned too, the civil war sites. That’s also governed by the National Park Service. And you mentioned you can camp, not exactly in the monuments, but nearby, and that could be another cool… You can plan a whole summer vacation around that. We’re just gonna camp along these civil war sites.

Jeremy Puglisi: Yeah, ’cause Gettysburg is really close to Hagerstown, and then they’re both really close to Harpers Ferry. So those three… And there’s not campgrounds in those parks, but there’s a culture of camping outside of the parks, that you could do a tour of those three battlefields. You could do a week’s trip camp around those three battlefields, and then maybe also head down to Fredericksburg, Virginia. And that’s cool too, ’cause then you’re getting history. It’s a whole different type of national parks trip than just going hiking out west.

Brett McKay: So you all have done a lot of camping and RVing to national parks, but there’s a lot of great state parks too. Do you guys have a list of your favorite state parks that you think are almost as good as a national park, but don’t have the crowds?

Jeremy Puglisi: 100%. The first one that always comes to mind when people ask about state parks, Custer State Park in South Dakota, if it changed to a national park tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. I’m sure the state doesn’t want it to. It is just as a grand as any national park I’ve been to. The wildlife at Custer State Park was better than Yellowstone. And I had people tell me that before. I didn’t believe them. But then we went there, and we saw more bison there than we saw in Lamar Valley in Yellowstone. So Custer is magnificent. There’s like 13 campgrounds in Custer. South Dakota takes a lot of pride in their state park system, and I think that Custer is the crown jewel. And then you could camp in Custer and go right to Mount Rushmore. It’s not very far. South Dakota, most people blow through South Dakota. We always tell people, South Dakota is its own vacation.

Another one to consider, and this is not technically a state park, but the Adirondack Park in New York state, it’s operated separately from the state park system, that is another place that is just as magnificent as any national park, and I feel like it flies way under the radar for people all across the country. Filled with great camping, filled with great hiking, filled with fishing, with waterfalls. Any outdoor activity you want, you can find in the Adirondack Park. And the Adirondack Park is massive, and it’s intertwined with communities and towns. It’s very, very different than a national park. And then my favorite state park in the country, personally, is Assateague State Park in Maryland, where you can camp right on the beach, where you can hear the waves crashing over the dunes from your tent site or RV site. Maybe not as big or as grand as a national park, but it just is beautiful, to me.

Brett McKay: For me, one that sticks out, if you’re going to Zion, in Southern Utah, there’s a state park that’s nine miles from St. George. It’s Snow Canyon State Park. It exceeded my expectations on the hiking and the views. So if you’re going to Zion or you don’t wanna deal with the crowds at Zion, check out Snow Canyon State Park. And then another great state park I like, I don’t know if you can camp in there, but Jack London State Park. It’s by San Francisco kind of. So you got the Redwoods, great hiking, small, like hardly any crowds, and you get to see where Jack London, he built this house out of materials in the area, and the week before he moved in, it burned down to the ground, and the ruins are still there. You can check that out. So that’s cool. Jack London State Park in California.

Jeremy Puglisi: That reminds me of Mark Twain State Park in Missouri, where Mark Twain’s, I think the birthplace home is there in that park as well.

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

Jeremy Puglisi: So the books are ‘Where Should We Camp Next?’ And now the follow-up is ‘Where Should We Camp Next?: National Parks.’ You can get it wherever books are sold, get it at an independent bookstore or from Amazon, obviously. And then everything else we do is at The RV Atlas, The RV Atlas Podcast, @thervatlas on all of the different social media handles.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jeremy Puglisi, thanks so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Jeremy Puglisi: Thank you so much. And again, thank you for having all the great authors on the show and letting us talk about our books. Appreciate it so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Jeremy Puglisi. He’s the co-author of the book, Where Should We Camp Next? National Parks. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about him and his wife’s work @thervatlas.com. Also check out the podcast, The RV Atlas Podcast on any podcast platform you enjoy. And check out our show notes at aom.is/nationalparks, where you can find links to resources and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of The AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like enjoy ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code “MANLINESS” and checkout for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher Premium app on Android, iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of The AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you’d take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member, who you think will get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

The post Podcast #895: The Essential Guide to Visiting and Camping in the National Parks appeared first on The Art of Manliness.

Podcast #894: Thoreau on Making a Living

Brett & Kate McKay — Wed, 10 May 2023 16:05:29 +0000

We don’t often think of work when we think of Henry David Thoreau. We think of Thoreau living with his family, or loafing around at a cabin at Walden, and mostly spending his days walking and enjoying nature. We know he did some writing, sure, but often think of him as being largely the abstract thinker type.

But Thoreau was a man of much practical skill, who lived a life of both thought and action. He did lots of kinds of work — from carpentry to surveying to helping raise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids — and thought a lot about the nature of work, both the paid variety and the kind that’s necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life. Today on the show, John Kaag, a professor of philosophy and the co-author of Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, shares some of Thoreau’s insights on work with us. We discuss what Thoreau can teach us about the value of resignation, the importance of continuing to work with your hands to maintain what Thoreau called your “vital heat,” what makes for meaningful work, and the trap of working in bad faith. We end our conversation with a call to consider what you’re really being paid for in your job and the true cost of the things you buy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

John’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
- AoM Podcast #480: Hiking With Nietzsche
- AoM Podcast #576: A Treasure Trove of American Philosophy
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau
AoM Article: How to REALLY Avoid Living a Life of Quiet Desperation
Sunday Firesides: The Cost of a Thing
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford

Connect With John Kaag

John’s faculty page

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Listen ad-free on Stitcher Premium; get a free month when you use code “manliness” at checkout.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. We don’t often think of work when we think of Henry David Thoreau. We think of Thoreau living with his family or loafing around at a cabin at Walden and mostly spending his days walking and enjoying nature. We know he did some writing, sure, but I often think of him as being largely the abstract thinker type. But Thoreau was a man of much practical skill who lived a life of both thought and action. He did all kinds of work from carpentry to surveying, to helping raise Ralph Waldo Emerson’s kids. And thought a lot about the nature of work, but the paid variety and the kind that’s necessary for simply sustaining day-to-day life. Today in the show John Kaag, professor of philosophy, and the co-author of Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, shares some of Thoreau’s insights on Work With Us. We discuss what Thoreau can teach us about the value of resignation, the importance of continuing to work with your hands to maintain what the Thoreau called, your vital heat. What makes for meaningful work and the trap of working in bad faith. We end the conversation with a call to consider what you’re really being paid for in your job and the true cost of the things you buy. After shows over check out our show notes at aom.io/henryatwork.

Alright, John Kaag, welcome back to the show.

John Kaag: Oh, thanks so much for having me, I really appreciate it.

Brett McKay: So we had you on before and talk about your Hike with Nietzsche, then we also talked about your experience with the pragmatist by this library you found in the middle of the New England Woods. You got a new book out, it’s called Henry at work: Thoreau on Making a Living. It’s about what we can learn from Henry David Thoreau about our work lives. And what’s interesting is, we typically think of Henry David Thoreau as the original drop-out. Alright, the guy that built a shack by a pond, so he could write and look at nature, but you and your co-author, you make the case that Thoreau has a lot to teach us about work. So let’s start off with Thoreau work life. What was his work life like? What did he do to make a living?

John Kaag: Yeah, I mean, we think about Thoreau going off to Walden, we think, Oh, this is just a nice vacation. But really what Thoreau is doing when he goes to Walden is he’s attempting to live deliberately, he says this at the beginning of Walden he says “I went to the woods to live deliberately so that I didn’t get to the end of my life and discovered that I haven’t lived.” But also, what we sometimes forget is that Thoreau worked his butt off at Walden over the last 15 years, some authors have criticized Thoreau for the help that he received while he was at Walden Pond for two years, two months and two days.

But when we really look at Thoreau’s day in and day out life at the pond, what he’s trying to do is he’s trying to sustain himself through his work, he’s trying to build his own house, he’s trying to grow his own crops, grow his own on food, mend his own clothes, and also, write two of the greatest pieces of American letters, Walden and his famous essay called Civil Disobedience. So if you think about Thoreau as a loafer or a Lotus-eater, you’re sort of off base here. I mean Thoreau worked his entire life, you don’t write a 2 million word journal just by sort of sitting on your hands and doing nothing. Sometimes we don’t think about writing as real work, but it was for Thoreau, but he was also a sort of manual laborer in a way that many of us have come to re-appreciate or appreciate once again during the pandemic, and the pandemic is basically a time when we’ve had to re-evaluate our work life and work-life balance, and Thoreau is a really good one to start us on that path.

Brett McKay: And you also highlight his work life before Walden, like the guy had lots of jobs, he tried his hand at teaching school, him and his brother opened up their own sort of alternative country school, he was a surveyor, and then he was also… He was Emerson’s basically was like a babysitter for Emerson and did just sort of general handy work for Emerson when he was out touring the world giving lectures.

John Kaag: That’s right. I mean, if we think of Thoreau’s, early life, it really was a childhood of a working class or middle class family, where he wasn’t the famous author that wrote Walden, he was just a boy who falls off a cow and was a farm hand and who cut his toe off cutting wood and really lived a very straightforward, manual existence for much of his early life, which I think explains in some part why Thoreau disdained the high society and the high intellectual life at Harvard. He believed that the real life, real world lessons of experience were oftentimes far more important than the book learning that we would get from philosophy or from academia.

But you’re right to say, if we think about Thoreau’s life as a worker, he was first and foremost, as we know him today, a writer, that’s true, but he was also a teacher, he was also a nanny, as you say, to Emerson’s children when Emerson went away. In fact, Emerson’s son was so close to Thoreau that when Emerson was away, he asked, he said to Thoreau, Mr. Thoreau can you be my father? I mean, he’s that close to the Emerson kids, and he, in a way that I think comes back to our own present day, we’ve really had to think about what it is to make our homes and the importance of frugality and home economics. Thoreau was very much aware of that and his journey out to Walden and his press for simplicity and frugality was really a function of economic necessity, he lived through the panic of 1837 where lots and lots of people lost their jobs and Thoreau had for one, worked on 75 cents a day for months upon months and even back then, 75 cents a day was not much money.

Brett McKay: This idea of economics, I think to understand Thoreau’s philosophy towards work, you have to understand his philosophy towards Economics in general. When we think of economics today, we think of sort of macroeconomics, the market, business, and that was part of Thoreau’s idea of economics as well, but his was more home-based. He was trying to go back to the original meaning of the word economics from Greek, and he talked about this in a chapter in Walden called economy, so what understanding of economics do we get from Thoreau from this chapter on economy?

John Kaag: So when you open up Walden, sometimes you’re a little surprised to find this chapter called economy, because Thoreau is such a stringent or such a harsh critic of modern consumerism, and you think, What is this chapter economy doing here? But your’re right Brett, I mean he’s thinking about Oikos, the Greek word Oikos, which basically derives from the word to dwell or dwelling. And he’s reminding us, Thoreau’s reminding us that all of the jobs that we have and all the work that we do should really be geared to figuring out how to make the world more livable and how to make a home in the world. And when Emerson encourages us to be self-reliant, his friend Emerson says, “Trust thyself every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Thoreau takes that really practically and really seriously, and he says to himself, What exactly do I need to sustain myself in my everyday life? And that answer, I think if we really are careful about it is a surprising one, we don’t need that much. And what you find in that first chapter of economy is Thoreau’s almost painstaking diary of all of his accounts and all of his accounting of how much it costs to sustain himself, what did he eat, what kind of shelter did he require, what sort of clothing did he have to wear, what actually supported him through life, and I think that if we reorient ourselves to that question, we discover that economy can be a much more humble, modest, but also a much more meaningful word.

So the audience that Thoreau was addressing was one in which they were already beginning to think about the surpluses and the excesses of modern consumerism, and the Thoreau says often times those excesses of our economic life are hindrances to the actual meaningful business of living.

Brett McKay: So that home-based idea of economics that shapes what Thoreau thought about work, and that work is… It’s something you have to do, but make sure you do work that is enriching, that’s life affirming. You start out the book with a chapter on quitting, it’s called resignation, why start with quitting jobs in a book about Henry David Thoreau and work?

John Kaag: Well, one of them is a sort of contemporary issue, and both I have faced and my family have faced, and then a lot of my friends have faced a moment in our US or Contemporary economic scene where many people are losing their jobs and also deciding not to go back to work in the same way. The pandemic sort of changed things for many, many people, and it was a moment that I thought Thoreau could speak to because Thoreau was a very big resigner, in the sense that he resigned to my account six pretty substantial jobs.

The one that sticks out to me is after he graduates from Harvard, he establishes a school with his brother, but also teaches at Concord Academy, and at the academy Thoreau was asked to exact corporal punishment on his students, and he did this for exactly one day and then got completely fed up and quit his job on moral grounds, and I think a lot of people when faced with a pandemic, when faced with sort of existential moments of crisis, have the opportunity to ask if their jobs are in line with their moral lives, their intellectual lives and their passions.

And Thoreau was always adamant that you should never sacrifice your dreams for your dream job, at least in the lucrative sense, and he was very insightful that the next century and then the following century, the one that we’re living in, would see moments in which people confused the size of their bank account with the true riches or wealth of living, and so Thoreau is on to that, and he says, quit your job if you think that it doesn’t fit into the sort of logic of living, deliberately. Ask yourself whether you’re going to get to the end of your life and look back and regret certain things about your life, and that includes your work life, so Thoreau would say or advocate for a certain type of self-examination and then oftentimes a certain type of resignation from jobs that don’t fit our ideal.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing I took away from Thoreau and his willingness to resign himself when he didn’t like a job or wasn’t aligning with his values, he also resigned from himself, from the world, whenever he faced big, I guess we call them, life disruptions or failures, you talk about in the book, you know his brother died. It was devastating to him. I think his brother cut himself with a razor, died from shaving. And then shortly after that, I don’t think a lot of people knows about Thoreau, he actually accidentally burned down a giant forest near Concord, Right?

John Kaag: That’s right. And we oftentimes think about Walden as this almost heroic mission of like self-reliance, but really Thoreau is retreating from a world that seems to have come undone for him. I mean, his brother, John dies in his arms from lockjaw, basically gangrene and then Thoreau, as you say, burns down a chunk of the forest and is the pariah of Concord for several months, if not a year. And we often times think, Oh, Thoreau, he’s just going out to sort commune with nature, he’s also retreating from life in a particular way, but what I will say is that he’s also turning to work or a new version of work, of manual work, of meaningful labor in order to get himself through. So it’s not simply that he went on a vacation to retreat the world, he says, I’m gonna see how much I can rely upon myself in order to sort of sustain myself in life, and I think that that’s a really redemptive move for Thoreau, but also for our understanding of what work can mean for us.

Brett McKay: And what was interesting about Thoreau, he was willing to resign himself from work or projects that were also successful, like Walden, for example, at the end of it, when he writes, why did I leave Walden? Well, just it was time to end it, it was time to move on to something else. He didn’t hang on to it, even though it might have been a good thing, I think that’s another lesson you can take from Thoreau. You might be in a job that’s great, but maybe you need to quit it and move on to something else.

John Kaag: Yeah, I mean I think, if I think about the heroes from American philosophy, the pragmatist William James says that we should do two things every day that are difficult just for the practice of it, and sometimes in Thoreau’s case, just changing your habits of life is both difficult, but also rewarding, we often times get stuck in a rut and we suffer through the sort of fallacy of sunk costs, we put so much into a job in terms of time or resources or ourselves that we can’t imagine doing anything else, and Thoreau says, Oh gosh, everyone, come on, there are so many possibilities to life, you can do something else, and if you fail, at least that failure will be yours in changing careers or changing tax. And I think that that’s something that when we think about the desire for economic security, and when we think about the way that employment sort of draws us in and requires us to invest ourselves, we need to be very careful and self-reflective about knowing when it is time to go or let go, and not allowing the draw of security to actually get in the way of some of our more personal or existential ambitions.

Brett McKay: So Emerson famously said in his eulogy to Thoreau, which is a great… I recommend everyone read this thing, it’s fantastic, willing to it, but in the eulogy to Thoreau, he said that Thoreau lacked ambition, what do you make of Emerson’s critique that Thoreau, you know you kinda just dressed up his willingness to loaf with philosophical pretensions.

John Kaag: Emerson and Thoreau were very good friends through much of their life, but they did have a falling out, and one of the ways that they diverged, I think, is that Emerson became a public intellectual in a way that Thoreau never did. Emerson spent countless hours delivering public lectures, developing public lectures, going on tour and making some serious money doing it, and I think that his comment about Thoreau being less ambitious was a function that Thoreau never achieved the same success on the lecture circuit or in terms of monetary goods, in fact, Emerson oftentimes hired Thoreau to do his household work to plant his gardens, at least impart to the nanny his children.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s one thing that separated in Emerson and Thoreau in their approach to transcendentalism, So Emerson really embraced the life of the mind of transcendentalism. I think, like you said, if he were alive today, I’d imagine he’d be some superstar professor, thought leader going around the world doing TED Talks and writing New York Times best sellers, but he also, he appreciated, he had a romantic appreciation for the sort of the down-to-earth self-reliance that Thoreau embodied. Like he would often imagine himself it would be nice to have some land and do manual labor himself, but he didn’t follow through with that idea ’cause he was busy lecturing and things. So Thoreau, what’s interesting about Thoreau, he continued to write, continued to think about philosophy but he made a point to keep doing manual labor, he had real practical skills, he could build boats, he could build a house, he could do carpentry, he could garden, did surveying. Why did the Thoreau think it was important that we keep working with our hands, even if we are engaging in what we think of as abstract thinking or philosophizing.

John Kaag: That’s such a good question. I mean, we should remember that Thoreau is a contemporary of Marx, that Karl Marx and Marx’s criticism of labor and capitalism turns on the fact that modern industrialism and modern industrialization leads to the alienation of the workforce and how that happens, is that workers no longer have a sense of the control over the means of production. In other words, they lose the sense that their efforts are translating and generating particular products, so you can think about the assembly line in Thoreau’s day in the factory or in the mills, and those workers make only a very small part of a much bigger product, which they don’t particularly own or lay claim to. And Thoreau thought that one way of counteracting modern alienation in the form of economics and in the form of modern economics, was to work with our hands, to go back to sort of older artisan forms of work. And you can think about the maker movement today, or make your own food, make your own clothes, the right to recycle, these are attempts, very Thoreauvian attempts to get back to the products that underlie our lives and also to lay claim to them again. So I think Thoreau more than Emerson said, let’s see what my hands can actually do, and If you…

The front cover of The Book of Henry at Work is Thoreau up on his ladder fixing his cabin at Walden or putting his cabin together at Walden. What’s interesting about the frontispiece, or the first page of Walden is it’s just the cabin already constructed, but Jonathan and I thought that what was most interesting is about Thoreau’s actual attempt, his hands on attempt to put the shingles on the roof, and to think of that as really both an intellectual, philosophical, but also a very personal form of work, Emerson in the American scholar says that a true American scholar needs to draw in a number of resources the past, history, but also nature and action, and the action part was pivotal for Thoreau.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you quote him saying that one of the things you get from working with your hands is you said you get to see immediate feedback, right? Unlike a lot of work today, you do spreadsheets and it goes off to someone and you don’t know what happens to whatever work you did. What he liked about manual work is you got to see right away. So he talks about this in Walden, talking about his bean field. He’s talking about his beans, all the things that went into growing these beans. And he said, it’s just really satisfying to see the things I did weeks before would have an effect on these little beans. But he also had this great line about how manual labor, working with your hands, can give you sort of a spiritual vigor. I’m gonna read it here. It says, it is something to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful, but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.

So I mean, I guess for him, when you work with your hands and you’re shaping your environment, And then that in turns shapes you as well. When I read that line, it reminded me of Matthew Crawford’s work that he did in shop classes, Soulcraft. He had that very same idea. You work with your hands because there’s something about it that’s going to give you a satisfaction that you’re not going to get with just abstract work.

John Kaag: I love that. I love that book Shop Class as Soulcraft. I think in terms of Crawford and Thoreau, there’s also a sense that manual labor connects us to the natural world in a way that intellectual labor sometimes does not. What I mean by that is that when you’re working in a garden or when you’re even washing dishes and you’re really, “into it or immersed in your dishes, you’re connected to something radically other than yourself, and you’re connected in this very intimate way. I think oftentimes manual labor can be a form of drudgery and meaningless if it is forced, but I mean, if we choose to use our hands to, as you say, shape the world and let the world shape us in the process, you also come away feeling like you weren’t just alone in the bean fields or weren’t just alone in the garden. Like you actually feel like you were connected. And I think in our modern day, we really crave that connection that’s just beyond our fingertips, that’s right there for us to have if we’re willing to put our hands into it.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

He also talks about in Walden how manual work can also help us retain our vital heat. I’m curious, you’re a professor of philosophy, so you spend a lot of your time reading, writing. What do you do to work with your hands so you can keep your vital heat in a Thoreauvian sense?

John Kaag: Yeah, that’s a good, thanks for that. I mean, I had a cardiac arrest when I was 40, and I was out for three minutes before the EMT shocked me back to life. And that moment when I was 40 was really a moment when I thought, I need to get this vital heat back. And so we moved, and we started a garden, and we have two kids. And I have spent basically the last three years, I’m now 43, really trying to think about the meaning of work in a more sustained way, but also using my hands and having two dogs and raising two dogs and being much more hands-on. And I’ve gotten emails and letters over the last three years from readers, and they said, when’s the next book coming out? What’s happening? Why aren’t you writing more? And the answer is that I was too busy living and I was too busy using my hands. And in part, I’ve toned back my reading and my writing so that I could have a more Thoreauvian existence in some ways.

Brett McKay: So work can sometimes feel meaningless. For Thoreau, what made work meaningless?

John Kaag: So Thoreau, I think, makes a distinction between meaningful work and drudgery. Meaningful work has an objective that is freely chosen and a path to achieve that objective. That’s like the very, very minimum for meaningful work. Meaningless work usually has no objective freely chosen and oftentimes doesn’t have a true means or a path to achieve any sort of objective chosen or not. So it’s not clear to the assembly line worker what the objective is or the end objective of their work. No one ever sees the final product. All they see is the same assembly line moment. That oftentimes is meaningless, according to Thoreau. And meaningful work is utterly personal. It’s the type of work that you feel like when you do it that you are fully suited to that particular task, that the universe has sort of picked it out for you, that you’re not just some sort of fungible part that somebody else could step in and do exactly the same job. It’s personal and it’s unique.

Brett McKay: Well, to that second point, I think that’s one reason why Thoreau is such a great resigner, right? The more he resigned from stuff, he was able to figure out what was the thing that he was suited for. I think oftentimes we just stick with a job because, well, it pays the bills, whatever, but you limit your opportunities to find what you’re actually called to do.

John Kaag: That’s right. And I mean, we use this expression that oftentimes is associated with 20th century existentialism, which is bad faith. But I think that Thoreau is worried about jobs that we work in bad faith. What we mean by that is that, about how often you hear a friend or even hear yourself say the expression, I can’t leave my job. And that expression oftentimes is a reflection of bad faith, saying that you are not free to do something when in fact you are, but perhaps you’re simply not willing to face the consequences of the action. Now, I understand that many individuals, especially those individuals who are in very tight socioeconomic circumstances might feel that they can’t leave their job. And that situation might not necessarily be one where you are living or working in bad faith. It might actually be that you can’t see any other way forward, that you can’t see any other outlet to make ends meet. But Thoreau was also concerned about those individuals who have more than enough, who live on surplus, but they still at the same time say, I couldn’t change my job. I couldn’t take that risk. I couldn’t do without that last zero on my paycheck. And I think that’s a concern that Thoreau is expressing to his readers in Walden.

So meaningful work is one where you definitely don’t work in bad faith or live in bad faith. You say, I am doing this freely. I’m doing it deliberately. And that also means that I’m free to leave it when I choose.

Brett McKay: Thoreau would say, don’t put golden handcuffs on yourself.

John Kaag: Do not. Do not.

Brett McKay: What would Thoreau say to those situations where there’s work you have to do, it feels like drudgery, You can’t escape. It doesn’t have to be work for money. It could be, you talk about this in the book, I think it was either you or your co-author taking care of their mother as she was, her last few years. And caregiving for someone like that, it can take a lot out of you. But you gotta do it, ’cause you have this responsibility and you feel like this filial duty to that person. What do you do in those situations when you gotta do something, but it’s just man, it grinds you down. Does Thoreau have any advice there?

John Kaag: Yeah, yeah, oh gosh. It’s such a both a really good question and very hard answer. So let me try. The issue about doing things that you would rather not do when it comes to work, like modern adult life is full of these moments. Like maybe I don’t want to drive my kids to the extra soccer practice, or maybe I don’t want to take care of, it was my mother that you’re referring to, who’s now in hospice. Like maybe I don’t want to go see her once again for the umpteenth time. And like, how do I get myself to think about this experience differently? So Thoreau would say that you don’t have to be Zen about drudgery all the time. Like we just don’t have that capacity, that sort of Marie Kondo sort of like capacity to see that tidying up is always that tidying up is always this opportunity for growth and beauty. That would be great, but lots of us don’t have that ability.

What Thoreau says is that we can oftentimes try to see the world a little bit differently. And what I see Thoreau doing repeatedly in his work and also in his walks through nature and his reflections on nature is that he’s pointing out that we oftentimes work under the assumption that we are the sole kings of our little imperial realms and that we are going through life doing things and doing things for ourselves. And if we can shift our perspective just a little bit and realize that adult life really has a lot to do with sacrificing to our loved ones and to strangers and to the world at large and not just about yourself but about something else and trying to take that perspective for just a little bit of time that what might seem like drudgery or might seem incredibly boring can be incredibly interesting. And now how does this work? Well, there was this American philosopher by the name of Ella Lyman Cabot and Ella Lyman Cabot basically set up an informal orphanage and she wrote several books about ethics. And one passage I’ll relay here is a passage where she says that a child came up to her and held out three little cherries in her hand and said, look how miraculous these cherries are.

And at first, Ella Lyman Cabot said, I could scarcely imagine what could be so interesting about three little cherries in this child’s hand. But then what she said is, if she really looked carefully and really thought about things carefully, all of a sudden those cherries or something about the external world seem sort of wonderful or imaginative or meaningful in a way that she had not anticipated. And I think that Thoreau’s message at the end of Walden, which is to the effect that we need to be awake to the world and the world dawns on us only if we have eyes to see it has a lot to do with transforming meaningless drudgery or a boring task into something meaningful. And I think that most listeners and most of my students can think about times in in their life where they actually transform something they thought was going to be boring into something very meaningful and maybe even a little bit sacred. And those are the moments that I think, reaching adulthood, I take a little bit of solace in or I find a little bit of hope in. Because gosh, life is going to be so boring sometimes, especially with our work. And if we have the ability to see things a little differently, I think that will make all the difference.

Brett McKay: And it seems like part of what Thoreau teaches us about how to do that is that he shows the importance of having curiosity. There’s a great quote, his friend said that he was alive from top to toe with curiosity. And that curiosity is what allowed him to take the same walks again and again in this small Concord town, but he never got tired of it. He still felt like there was still interesting Explorations to have there and then I get another thing too like you talked about this in the book like he could stand in a pond In the same spot staring in the water for hours and hours Just studying the bullfrog and people would be like, Hey, Henry, what are you doing? He’s like, Well, I’m just looking at the bullfrog and people were like, What a weirdo?

So that’s another thing we forget about Thoreau like he, Thoreau in his work He was a naturalist and he made lots of observations and studies of nature but yeah, I mean, I think he really embodied the art of of looking or noticing that kept everyday, the everyday things fresh to him. You know, he told his friend, he said this, he says, the art of genius is to raise the little into the large, which that can be challenging, but it’s an interesting challenge to try. So turning back to work more generally, we work to pay the bills and Thoreau wasn’t against that. He wasn’t against money-making completely. Even in Walden, he talked about he’d sell things and he made this much money. But how did he think about the relationship between work and money? What was his idea of compensation? Besides the dollar value that we get from our work, what else was he thinking about? Does that make sense?

John Kaag: It does, yeah. I mean, Thoreau would point out that really what’s happening when we get the paycheck for every month is that our employer is paying us for a task that we perform. But more importantly, the employer is always paying us for the time that we’ve spent of our lives on that task. In other words, our employer is compensating us for our life, for our time. And that’s something that we oftentimes forget, that what we’re spending in our work life is our minutes, hours, days, years, and decades. And Thoreau basically says, the whole point of life is to improve my nick of time. And we oftentimes do that on the clock. We do that at work. So first of all, the compensation that we take away in terms of our monetary gain should not mask the fact that we’re actually being paid to give up parts of our lives. And to make sure that the money that we make actually And the way that we then spend that money is in some ways aligned to the way that we want to spend our lives, the way that we want to value things and revere things and pursue ideals. And just ask yourself, like, is the extra paycheck or the bonus really worth it? Am I sacrificing something that I shouldn’t be?

Brett McKay: Well, he has that famous quote in Walden, the cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run. So we’d think, yeah, like what, what opportunities are you giving up by taking this job? What I don’t know, maybe kids activities are you going to miss because of the job? And he also not only think about this with your work, but also the stuff you buy, the stuff you buy has an immediate cost, but some stuff has long-term costs. Well, if I buy this house, how much money am I going to be spending on in the long run to fix it up or pay taxes on it? And he’d say, you need to take that into account too, when you’re thinking about what you’re buying. Because ultimately the more stuff you buy, the more work you’ll have to do in exchange for it. And then the more life you’ll have to exchange to do that work. And for Thoreau, that’s what he was saying. He’s saying that’s the real cost of a thing.

John Kaag: Right. I mean, Thoreau walked around his native Concord and observed that many men and women were tied to their family farms. In other words, these big farms that in fact made a lot of money perhaps, or made a surplus, cost a lot. And what they cost was the time and energy to keep them upright and to keep them going.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I guess Thoreau’s advice about compensation, don’t get myopic and just think about the number on your paycheck. You also have to think about other things that you’ll have to give up for it, your time, and maybe even your values.

John Kaag: I’m reminded a little bit, someone recently, a friend recently asked me, he goes, When were you most happy with your job? And I said to him, Well, it was when I was teaching community college when I was in grad school. And I remember making, you know, $14,000 a year in grad school and thinking that that was a lot of money and that that was more than enough. Granted, I didn’t have kids, but at least those moments of frugality and those sort of moments of forced frugality remind me that I can be happy on less. And I think that that’s really Thoreau’s takeaway on the notion of compensation and modern compensation. We could probably be happy with less or many of us could.

Brett McKay: I love how you end the book, you and your co-author end the book talking about what is kind of sum up, what does it mean to work in a Thoreauvian sense? And you have this great quote from him. He says, I say to myself, do a little more of that work, which you have confessed to be good. So good work. I mean, so what is good work in the Thoreauvian sense? If you were to sum it up, like what does it mean to do good work in a Thoreauvian sense?

John Kaag: So we say in the book, we say that this type of goodness, Thoreauvian goodness, it doesn’t necessarily turn on God’s grace or the permission of some sort of higher power, but on one’s willingness and ability to confess that the task was good. What do I mean by confess? I mean when you think about the work that you do in the course of your life, and we spend so much of our lives at work. If you take a minute and you think about the ways that you’re working and your work life and you say, if this were my last day on this earth, would I be happy with the work that I’ve done? You might say to yourself, Oh gosh, there’s so many times where I’m like, you know, drudging through something or slogging through something. No, I wouldn’t be happy. Well, then think to yourself, first of all, A yeah, you might resign, you might change that course of action, but you might also change your orientation to work on the whole so that you can do it deliberately, which just simply means to say, this is my task. This is what I shall do and I’m doing it freely.

And that allows you to do lots of tasks that oftentimes aren’t that great, but at least those tasks will be yours. You’ll say to yourself, and this is what I mean by confess, it’s basically to say, this is my life. This is my task. I will get to work on it and I’m free to decide to do this or to do otherwise. That I think is what makes a Thoreauvian moment of work a good work. It’s simply to say that I’ve claimed that moment of work or labor in a real way where at the end I’d be satisfied that I had done so.

Brett McKay: So work in good faith, it goes back to that.

John Kaag: Yeah.

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

John Kaag: The book comes out, June 13th. I would encourage folks to go to Princeton University Press’s website and not necessarily to Amazon, but that’s up to them. And I really, really hope that the book helps a lot of people rethink the way that they approach their work life and also vacations. Also the moments when we don’t necessarily have to work. So that’s my hope.

Brett McKay: Well, John Kaag, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

John Kaag: Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was John Kaag. He’s the co-author of the book, Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living. It’s available for pre-order at Princeton University Press. We’ll put a link to the show notes where you can pre-order it. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/Henryatwork where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you’d think of. And if you’d like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com, sign up, use code Manliness to check out for a free month trial. Once you’re signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the AOM Podcast. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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