Courage is one of our most prized and celebrated virtues. But once you really start exploring it, the nature of courage is surprisingly hard to pin down.

Here to help us explore the fascinating complications of courage is William Ian Miller, a historian, professor of law, and the author of The Mystery of Courage. Today on the show, Bill explains how centuries of philosophers, soldiers, and storytellers have approached courage and the hard-to-answer questions its manifestations raise. We discuss why courage has long been ranked among the highest virtues, the relationship between fear and courage, the fuzzy line between courage and cowardice, the association of courage and manhood, whether or not courage is domain specific, the difference between offensive and defensive courage, whether martyrs are courageous, whether deeds with evil ends are courageous, how fear, shame, and honor shape brave action, and more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Memoirs of Maj. Abner R. Small
• If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home by Tim O’Brien
• Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
• The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
• AoM Article: Developing Manly Courage
• AoM Article: 9 Ways to Become More Courageous
• AoM Article: Courage Vs. Boldness — How to Live With Spartan Bravery
• AoM Podcast #380: How to Increase Your Courage and Bravery
• AoM Article: The 54 Best Quotes on Courage
• AoM Article: The Cardinal Virtues — Courage
• AoM Podcast #763: The Perils and Powers of Cowardice
• AoM series on honor

Connect With William Ian Miller

• Bill’s faculty page

Version 1.0.0

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

We tend to think of genius as something you’re born with — a rare trait possessed by the Einsteins and Teslas of the world. But what if many of the abilities we associate with genius — a great memory, quick problem-solving, mental math, creative insight — are actually trainable skills?

My guest today says that’s exactly the case. His name is Nelson Dellis, and he’s a six-time USA Memory Champion and the author of the book Everyday Genius.

In our conversation, Nelson explains why memory is the foundation of thinking well and why having information stored in your head still matters in the age of ChatGPT. He shares a practical technique for improving your memory, how to read with greater focus and retention, and how to study to actually make information stick. We then talk about the importance of developing “number sense” and how to convert imperial measurements to metric in your head, strategies for solving problems more effectively, and even how to gain an edge in the games of Monopoly and Connect Four. At the end of the conversation, we get into more esoteric territory, including intuition, dreams, and the idea of remote viewing.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nelson’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #546 — How to Get a Memory Like a Steel Trap
• AoM Article: 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory
• AoM Article: How to Speed Read Like Theodore Roosevelt
• AoM Podcast #385: Learning How to Learn
• AoM Article: Study Tactics of the Successful Gentleman Scholar
• The CIA’s remote viewing program

Connect With Nelson Dellis

• Nelson’s website
• Nelson on YouTube

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Cold exposure has gotten a lot of attention the past few years, with people dunking themselves in ice baths for the sake of their health and well-being. But, good news here, exposing yourself to heat by sitting in the sauna or even a hot tub, might actually be even better for you, not to mention more pleasant.

In his new book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, Bill Gifford unpacks the dichotomy of heat: how it can be both a danger and a healer. In the first part of our conversation, we dive into that former side, discussing what happens when your core temperature gets too high, why some people handle the stress of hot temperatures better than others, and how heat tolerance can actually be trained. We then talk about the advantages of heat exposure over cold exposure, and the benefits of heat for both body and mind, including how it can boost athletic performance and heart health, and may even be an effective treatment for depression. We also talk about how to get the most out of your sauna sessions and how Bill and I like to sauna.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: How to Sauna — All the FAQs
• AoM Article: How Saunas Can Help Save Your Body, Mind, and Spirit
• AoM Podcast #585: Inflammation, Saunas, and the New Science of Depression
• AoM Podcast #724: The Strange Science of Sweat
• Study reviewing the health benefits of “sauna bathing”
• Hotter’n Hell Hundred bike race

Connect with Bill Gifford

• Bill on IG
• Bill on X

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Cold exposure has gotten a lot of attention in the past few years with people dunking themselves in ice baths for the sake of their health and wellbeing. But good news here, exposing yourself to heat by sitting in the sauna or even a hot tub might actually be even better for you, not to mention more pleasant. In his new book, Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, Bill Gifford unpacks the dichotomy of heat. How can it both be a danger and a healer? In the first part of our conversation, we dive into that former side, discussing what happens when your core temperature gets too high, why some people handle the stress of hot temperatures better than others, and how heat tolerance can actually be trained. We then talk about the advantages of heat exposure over cold exposure and the benefits of heat for both body and mind, including how it can boost athletic performance and heart health. It may even be an effective treatment for depression. We also talk about how to get the most out of your sauna sessions and how Bill and I like to sauna. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/heat. All right, Bill Gifford, welcome to the show.

Bill Gifford:

Great to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out called Hotwired: How the Hidden Power of Heat Makes Us Stronger, and you take a deep dive into the research about heat and what it does to our bodies, both the good things and the bad things. You start out the book talking about how a bike race in Wichita Falls, Texas in the middle of August, led you to take this deep dive. What was going on there?

Bill Gifford:

Well, it sounds like a terrible idea, right? Riding your bike a hundred miles at a hundred degrees. I like to have a goal or a challenge that sort of then guides me and motivates my training, keeps me accountable, keeps me in shape. And I picked this one for some reason, I think because I’d always thought that I wasn’t good in the heat and that I didn’t do well in the heat. Back when I was a mountain bike racer in my thirties, twenties, and thirties, I always felt like heat was my kryptonite. So I wanted to kind of test that.

Brett McKay:

And so yeah, for those who aren’t familiar, this race, it’s pretty famous. It’s been going on for a couple decades. It’s a hundred miles and it’s again, in Wichita Falls, Texas. If you haven’t been there, it is west Texas. It is really hot in August and I mean people do get heat sickness and some people have actually died during this race because of the heat,

Bill Gifford:

A handful, and the heat is kind of the point. And weirdly you’d think, well, okay, nobody would sign up for this thing, but 10,000 people come and do it some years. It’s wild. And the year I did it, 2023, this, they call it a heat dome. So it was a super hot summer, a hundred degrees or more, pretty much all summer long. And then the day we did the ride got up to about 107 Fahrenheit. It was brutal. Frankly, I was surprised that I made it. And we can talk more about why.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, one of the things you do in this book is you talk about the research you did to prep for this race to see, well, what can I do so I don’t get heat sickness so I don’t die? And you talk about in the book, the very first thing you note is that heat can either kill us or it can help us. And let’s talk about how heat can kill us first. How hot is too hot for humans? Do we know that?

Bill Gifford:

We don’t really know. And it kind of depends. About 15 years ago, some climate researchers theorized that there was a theoretical upper limit past which humans could no longer cool themselves down. And it turns out that people were actually already getting into trouble at much lower temperatures. So for example, when there are heat waves in Europe, it’ll be like 90 degrees and that to you, you live in Oklahoma or to me in Salt Lake City, that seems like a relatively nice day in the summer, not too hot. So heat tolerance is very variable depending on a lot of different factors. But the interesting thing that I learned is that it can be trained, it can be altered. So it’s not something that’s kind of set in stone.

Brett McKay:

And I mean, you talk about people in India, kind of a contrast. There’s people in England where it’s like 90 degrees and they’re like, oh my gosh, we’re dying. People in India, they’re living in this sweltering, it’s super hot, super humid, and a lot of people do fine.

Bill Gifford:

I’m not saying it’s fun, but I did all kinds of crazy research for this. But I found one big study where they compare temperature and mortality rates across 400 different cities around the world, and they found that each city has an ideal temperature at which mortality is the lowest excess mortality. So it’s not too hot, not too cold. And by the way, many more people die from cold than from heat, 10 times as many, that was a stunning thing to learn because that’s not how heat is framed. So a city like Toronto, the ideal temperature or the minimum mortality temperature is like 66 Fahrenheit, and then for Tucson it’s like 86. So there’s differences basically. There’s differences in air conditioning, all that kind of thing. But I think a lot of it comes down to heat tolerance of these different populations.

Brett McKay:

Being used to it. What happens in our body whenever it does get too hot. It sounds like from the research you highlighted, it’s not so much the temperature outside our body that’s the problem. It’s our internal temperature – that’s what causes problems. So what happens when our internal temperature gets too high?

Bill Gifford:

We generate a tremendous amount of heat, internal heat, metabolic heat, just by being alive. And then when we do anything, like any activity, it’s almost like a car engine. Your car moves forward a little bit, but your engine is producing four times that much energy. So 80% of it is heat, like a waste product of heat. When somebody gets too hot, it is kind of gruesome. If you get to a certain point, you get into heat exhaustion territory, which is you feel wiped out, you feel confused, you feel kind of lethargic, you might pass out. So that’s heat exhaustion, not usually fatal. But then the next step is heat stroke, and that is what it sounds like. It’s a neurological situation. You can get aggressive, you can get confused, you can pass out, you can have a seizure. And as you’re unable to cool yourself off, as your temperature rises past 105, 106, 107, you get into a situation where your cell membranes don’t function as well, your cells kind of explode. You get into organ failure, especially the liver, and ultimately you die a horrible death. I mean, it is terrible. I’ve spoken to people who have had heat strokes. I’ve seen people having exertional heat strokes and it’s not pretty.

Brett McKay:

It’s scary. But the thing is, you can treat it. We know a lot more about heat stroke, thanks to research in the military is a big place where a lot of this research is coming out of as well as in athletics. So when someone gets heat stroke, how do you treat it?

Bill Gifford:

This is really important. If somebody is in that zone of elevated body temperature, confusion, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, you dunk them in a tub of ice water if you can. I mean, that’s the easiest that stops it in its tracks really. I went to a road race in Massachusetts, the Falmouth Road race seven mile run in August. It wasn’t particularly hot, but I sat in the medical tent with people from the Korey Stringer Institute, which is kind of devoted to this awareness of heat stroke and prevention of heat stroke. And we had runners coming in various stages of heat illness and we just threw them in the ice tub and they would come around, their body temperature would drop and they’d be okay. They’d walk out. Nobody needs to die of heat stroke. I think that’s the takeaway. 

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting about heat stroke, it can come on, as you said, with this race that you went to when it doesn’t seem that hot outside. Yeah, suddenly, because the issue is, I mean, one of the reasons why we don’t keel over and die when it gets really hot is humans are a species that can cool ourselves really efficiently. We sweat a lot, but for sweat to work, it has to evaporate. That’s what cools you off. So you sweat and then as the water evaporates, it takes heat away from your body. But when you’re in humid conditions, you don’t get a lot of evaporation. So you can run a race when it’s like 80 degrees outside, but it’s really humid. You can get a heat stroke in that because your body can’t cool itself off.

Bill Gifford:

Right. Falmouth was 70 degrees, 70 degrees in like 90% humidity and that length, seven miles, six, seven miles. So it could be around an hour, 45 minutes or an hour intense effort, and your cooling system doesn’t have a chance to catch up. That’s why those events are actually more dangerous than a marathon. But our cooling system is incredible. It’s this incredible gift that I think is one of our fundamental human traits. I mean, it kind of fueled our rise to dominance really. 

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because it’s allowed us to basically migrate across the entire planet and live in just disparate climates. And then, I mean, you talk about this too. We’ve had the Born to Run guy. We’ve had Alex Hutchison on the podcast talking about why humans are so good at running. And one of the theories out there is that, well, we’re really good at persistence running. And so the idea is our early hunter-gatherer ancestors, they would just chase gazelles down and we could do it for a long time because we could sweat and keep ourselves cool. The gazelle couldn’t do that, and so it just eventually had to stop and cool off, and then that’s when we’d go in for the kill. 

Bill Gifford:

Right. So if you think about walking your dog on a hot day in the summer, I mean, you can easily outlast your dog, I’m sure, unless your dog is some kind of endurance monster, but your dog can only cool itself by panting and you’re sweating across your entire body, and it’s amazingly potent cooling. I mean, we have these sweat glands that basically just bring water to the surface of our skin and then it evaporates, and that takes off a tremendous amount of heat. Brilliant.

Brett McKay:

What’s interesting though is that, and you alluded to this earlier, is that you can take two people and put them in the same sweltering conditions and one person could be completely fine and another person could have a heat stroke. What’s going on there? Why the difference?

Bill Gifford:

Right, right. I mean, fundamentally it comes down to different levels of heat tolerance, and there could be other things going on, certain medications, antidepressants for example, it could be a stimulant anyway that plays into it. Somebody could be drunk or hungover, but basically people have different heat tolerance. And the interesting thing to me is that, like I said earlier, this heat tolerance can be trained, it can be modified. So I went to the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, and it’s named after a football player who had passed away due to a heat stroke, a Minnesota Vikings lineman and his family helped found this institute. It’s dedicated to basically studying heat in athletes and workers. And so I did a heat tolerance test. And so basically to do that, they put you in a heat chamber, basically a hot room or a large oven, which is what it felt like, heated it up to a hundred degrees, 40% humidity, put me on a bike and just had me pedal for an hour. And then they monitored my body temperature and watched that go up and up and up and somebody who’s heat tolerant, their body temperature will go up and then it will kind of plateau. If you’re not heat tolerant, it’ll just keep going up and then eventually you’ll get into trouble. So mine just kept going up. So they were like, okay, you flunked. 

Brett McKay:

Okay. So it’s trainable. You can become heat acclimated, and I think anyone who lives in a hot location during the summer has experienced this. Here in Oklahoma in the spring, it’s in the seventies, sixties, it’s pleasant. And then you have that first day that’s above 80 degrees and you’re like, oh, Jesus, this is unbearable. This is hot. And it’s because you lost your heat acclimation during the winter and the spring, and then by the end of August it’s 95, but it feels more bearable. You’ve gotten used to it.

Bill Gifford:

Exactly, exactly.

Brett McKay:

So what insights did you get from this research lab about what you can do to become heat acclimated? Are there protocols? Do we know how long it takes to get acclimated to the heat?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, so this sort of protocol actually dates back to the gold mines of South Africa a hundred years ago. The mine owners used to think that, okay, every black person is heat tolerant automatically. They live in Africa, turned out not to be the case and people died. So they came up with a heat testing protocol, and then people who were not heat tolerant, basically the cure or the protocol is deliberate heat exposure over time. And so they would have these miners go into a tent that’s like 95 degrees. They set up these tents in the hospital, heated them up, and these guys would just shovel rocks for an hour and they would do that four or five times, test them again. Then if they were okay, they could go work. So it takes four or five sessions of an hour of getting your body temperature up to a certain level.

For me, it was going out on my bike ride for a while, get my body temperature up to 101.5 and kind of stay there for an hour. So I did that. I did 10 times as I was training for the hotter and hell a hundred, and I went into the ride thinking, this is a bad idea. This is not going to go well. I was scared. And then I kind of got out there, it got hotter and hotter and hotter and I was fine. I felt great. I couldn’t believe it. Actually, I had built up this heat tolerance by deliberately working out in the heat.

Brett McKay:

So again, heat tolerance is trainable.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I think I should make the point. I made sure to be safe and monitor my core temperature as I did this. So I had a little device called a core and it straps to a heart rate strap and it senses and calculates your core body temperature. So I knew I was never getting into the danger zone. So it’s really important for people who try this to be safe and not overdo it. And I think this also goes for what we’re going to talk about, which is more the sort of heat exposure by choice heat therapy, things like sauna.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Something else you talk about is that there are some athletes who are using heat acclimation or heat adaptation not only to prevent keeling over in a race or a game, but also just as a performance enhancer.

Bill Gifford:

So as events like the Tour de France or the Olympics get hotter and hotter, heat has started to become, and heat tolerance has started to become a huge factor. And so they’ve had sort of star athletes and race favorites coming into these events and just completely bonking. They were fit, but they weren’t heat tolerant and it’s two different things. And so athletes started training their heat tolerance and then they found out that heat training itself actually brings some performance benefits similar to altitude training. So your plasma volume increases, you have more hemoglobin, more red blood cells, more oxygen carrying capacity. After I did my heat adaptation after I did the hotter and hell, I went back to Korey Stringer and I did the heat test and it was like a piece of cake. I was high fiving the lab guys and smiling and it was dramatic and it was a dramatic performance enhancement.

Brett McKay:

So heat can be a performance enhancer and it can also have a lot of other benefits, and that’s what the thrust of this book is about. So heat, yes, it can be bad for you, it can kill you, but heat stroke is preventable. You can adapt to heat and heat can actually be a big positive for your body and brain. Today we don’t really experience a lot of temperature variations. We’ve got climate control. So you can go from your air conditioned house to your air conditioned car. So let’s talk about this. What are some of the benefits of being exposed to hot temperatures?

Bill Gifford:

Well, I think cardiovascular is one side. If you’re in hotter conditions, your cardiovascular system has to work harder to keep you cool. There are these things called heat shock proteins at the kind of cellular level, they’re like little maintenance proteins or one scientist I spoke to called the mommy proteins, they kind of take care of other parts of your cell, other machines in your cell, they take care of your DNA. They kind of clean up age-related damage. So those get activated as you spend time in hot conditions. And I think it’s interesting that people, even though we live in this kind of comfort and I love sleeping in air conditioning, I’m not going to lie, but people gravitate towards things like temperature extremes, things like cold plunging and things like saunas. And I think we kind of crave that variation.

Brett McKay:

I mean, humans have been doing that throughout cultures and throughout time. So the Nordics have their sauna culture, but then other cultures have similar heating therapies that they do where they voluntarily expose themselves to heat. Russia has theirs, Japan has theirs in North America or the desert Southwest native Americans had sweat lodges. So yeah, I think there is this human need to experience extremes and temperature. It does something for bodies. So yeah, let’s dig more into these. This stuff is really interesting. So let’s talk about some of the benefits of heat exposure, voluntary heat exposure, you mentioned a few. It helps our heart health, and we know this because of some studies done on Nordic people who do sauna regularly,

Bill Gifford:

The Finnish, and this was sort of my gateway to this entire topic. I’d been because I’d written two books on longevity, I was aware of these really interesting studies from Finland where they looked at, it was really a sort of a broad heart health study. They were trying to figure out why Finnish guys were dying of heart attacks. And so they looked at a whole bunch of different lifestyle factors over decades. And so in 2015, this cardiologist and some colleagues came along and looked at the data and decided to compare sauna use and outcomes. And they found that the most frequent sauna users in this group had about half the rate or 40% the rate of heart attacks and half the rate of strokes and half the rate of mortality as the guys who used it once a week. Weirdly, they couldn’t find anybody in Finland who any of these guys who didn’t use sauna. So the baseline was once a week, so four to seven times a week did much better than once a week. It’s a huge finding. There’s no drug that does that. It’s a massive effect.

Brett McKay:

So what does the heat do? Why do we get that benefit to our cardiac system from heat exposure?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, it’s primarily, it’s like light exercise I think is the best way to describe it. Your heart rate goes up, your blood vessels expand, your blood pressure drops, so there’s sort of a mechanistic effect on your cardiovascular system. So that’s one, that’s the first level, but I think there’s more to it. I think it may have to do with the fact that you’re activating, and this is a guy who had worked in this lab in Finland. This is kind of what they were pursuing, sitting in the super hot sauna activates your sympathetic nervous system, stressful, it’s the fight or flight, and then when you get out that sympathetic nervous system withdraws. And so they suspect that some of the benefits may have to do with how it manipulates your autonomic nervous system, which I thought was pretty cool.

Brett McKay:

That is cool. You also highlight research how sauna use or any type of other voluntary heat exposure can improve liver and glucose health. What’s going on there?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, that’s a tough one. They did find that it appeared to improve insulin sensitivity, and they don’t know if that’s because it kind of sped up your heart rate’s going, your metabolism is speeding up. Perhaps it’s not clear,

Brett McKay:

But there is some sort of benefit. We don’t know the mechanism.

Bill Gifford:

And some of these healthy behaviors like sauna are kind of tied together. So it’s possible that somebody who’s using sauna more and maybe is healthier to begin with. We can’t discount that possibility. It’s a little tough to sit through a sauna, but it’s also possible that they’re doing sauna and they’re doing a little bit of exercise, they’re eating better or whatever. It’s hard to disentangle. They did find these finished researchers, they did parse that a little bit and they did find that the guys, and this was all men in this study originally, the guys who exercised and used sauna frequently had the biggest benefit. So they’re the ones that had the 50% drop in mortality, but the guys who didn’t exercise and just did sauna, they had about a 30% drop, so 30% effect. So that’s still pretty good. And that tells you that the heat does do something.

Brett McKay:

And then you also highlight research that there might be a potential connection between sauna use or hot tub use with our immune system.

Bill Gifford:

And hot tub use is just as effective by the way people love sauna and hot tubs aren’t as trendy now, but any kind of heat exposure, heat therapy, also infrared has been found to be effective. I think with the immune thing, that’s been something that has been researched actually for decades. And back in the day in the sixties, these German and Scandinavian researchers referred to it as, I think they called it hardening. So by doing the sauna and also the cold, which was part of it, people sort of toughened themselves up and were more resistant to infection. They missed fewer days of work and it’s not clear why.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. What about, I think a lot of people use sauna particularly because they, well, I go to the sauna, I’m going to sweat a lot, so I’m going to detoxify. Is there anything to this idea that sweating a lot detoxifies us?

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I’m going to say I’m going to make people upset and say probably not officially. Sort of mainstream medicine will tell you that the only way we detoxify through our kidneys, through our liver and not really through our skin. So if you’re sweating things out, you’re just kind of sweating out the liquid that’s in your cells, the liquid that’s in your blood plasma. So if there’s a little bit of alcohol from last night that’s going to come out, but it’s not like a primary method of detoxification. There have been some studies that suggest that maybe we do put out things like heavy metals, but those aren’t very good studies. I’ll put an asterisk by that and I’ll say the jury is still out. It hasn’t been well studied. It might be that heat exposure accelerates the detoxification that your kidneys and liver do. Perhaps that’s a possibility. Brian Johnson did sauna protocol for I think a couple months and then he tested levels of various toxins in his body and also microplastics and those dropped by a lot, but that’s an of one. And it’s not a placebo controlled study, randomized study, but he does have access to pretty good testing methods. So I’ll say the question’s still open.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, still open. So potentially we don’t know.

Bill Gifford:

Potentially it does make you feel clean and it is back to your immune point. It’s a pretty clean environment. Not a lot of germs can withstand 180 degree sauna. And in fact, old time Finnish people like I’ve met Finnish people who were born in a sauna, they would give birth there sterile. It was the most sterile room in the house.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. So you mentioned this idea of heat shock proteins. I’ve seen this research before. It’s like, oh, when you expose yourself to heat, you activate these heat shock proteins and that can be good for muscle recovery and strengthen muscle gains. Is there anything to that?

Bill Gifford:

Possibly, but I think it has more to do with cellular resilience and going back to our heat tolerance conversation, there is a military study where they exposed, I think mice to repeated intense heat stress, almost like putting the mice in a sauna again and again and again. They tested their heat shock protein levels and they were through the roof and they found that these mice were extremely resistant to heat stroke. So it’s a protective mechanism I think as far as muscle gains, I think the increased blood flow I think plays a bigger role and that’s why sauna I think is in my opinion, preferable as a recovery or as a post-workout tool to a cold plunge.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about cold plunges because those, that’s been the rage now, we’ll say the past five, 10 years, everyone’s cold plunging. You got the cold plunge bro, and talking about it, talking, how do you know someone guy cold plunges? Well, he’ll let you know that you cold plunges and there’s all these benefits that are touted, increases. Dopamine helps with muscle inflammation, reduces inflammation. But you talk about those benefits are probably overhyped and cold plunges actually might be hurting your gains.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, certainly. In terms of muscle growth, this has been pretty well studied and they’ve found that intense cold exposure slows down muscle protein synthesis. So after a workout, they actually did one crazy study where they had guys do legwork or subjects do legwork, and then they would put one leg in a warm basically leg container and the other leg in a really cold thing, and then they had them drink a special drink, blah, blah, blah, or they could see what was happening in each leg and the warm leg muscle protein synthesis was happening, cold leg, it wasn’t happening. So it tells you that you’re not getting the muscle gains. However, it may help with inflammation. It may increase dopamine, norepinephrine, all those things. It does that in the blood we’re not sure about in the brain. You have to kill the person to test that, so we haven’t done that. Also, it can give you, if you’re talking about jumping into a cold body of water, you’re getting into a territory where drowning is not impossible. If you suck in a big breath of water because of the shock of jumping in the cold, I mean that could be dangerous.

Brett McKay:

The cold plunges for after a workout, they’re like, well, it reduces inflammation. It’s like, well, if you strength train, your body needs inflammation for, that’s what causes your muscles to grow.

Bill Gifford:

Excellent point.

Brett McKay:

If you eliminate that inflammation, you’re just going to kill your gains, but you do highlight it could be useful. A cold plunge could be useful if you’re an endurance athlete. It can help with recovery. And it also just feels good going from the sauna to the cold plunge and back again, that can feel great and it’s okay to just do it, do the cold plunge and hot sauna together just for that. It feels good. But yeah, if you’re focused on building strength and muscle mass, maybe just stick to the sauna

Bill Gifford:

And you want to go in the cold plunge because you’ve built up all this heat in your body and sitting in a sauna, you’re hot. The idea of jumping in a lake superior sounds like the best thing. 40 degrees sounds like the best idea anybody ever had, and I’ve done it too. It’s just I think the science of cold is way behind the science of heat. But you made a great point about inflammation. Inflammation is not always bad, especially in the exercise context. Inflammation is part of what drives those adaptations, and it’s also a healing mechanism.

Brett McKay:

The other thing you point out too is when people do cold exposure, they probably get too cold. They get in a cold plunge that’s like 35 degrees when it really needs to be just like 50. I mean, it doesn’t have to be as cold as you think to get the benefits.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, yeah. This is competitive cold plunging who can do the coldest cold plunge for the longest, and obviously it’s more challenging. I think people like it because a mental challenge, but this is very satisfying to learn from some of the experts I talked to that actually the ideal temperature for the physiological benefits is really in the fifties.

Brett McKay:

I mean, after I read that research about how cold plunging blunts muscle protein synthesis, I stopped doing cold showers after workouts, but I still do cold showers. I don’t do it for any health benefits. I just do it sort of like an exercise in willpower. It’s like, all right, I know this is going to be hard. I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to do it anyways, so that’s why I do it.

Bill Gifford:

And it makes anything else, whatever else you have to do that day, seem easier. And so I’ll do a cold plunge. I’m kind of like, oh God, do I have to do this? I won’t do it alone. But if I’m at the sauna with my son, we like to have little cold plunge duels. It’s social.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a great father-son bonding activity. Instead of playing catch, do some cold exposure. So going back to the heat exposure, getting the benefits of it, what temperature do you need to get to in a sauna and for how long do you need to expose yourself to that temperature to get the benefits we’ve been talking about?

Bill Gifford:

So this is interesting, those finished studies, they asked the subjects about how hot was their sauna, how long did they stay in, but it was just a one-time questionnaire, so it’s not super reliable. It did seem that the people who stayed in 20 minutes at above a hundred, I think 176 Fahrenheit did the best. I mean, having been to Finland, there aren’t any saunas that are cooler than 176. That’s on the cold end. I’m not sure we can definitively say that there is one protocol and certainly not one protocol for everybody. However, it does appear that a lot of the benefits that I’ve talked about and also some of the mental health benefits, so the heat adaptation, the heat shock proteins, those things, those happen when your core temperature gets up to 101.5 Fahrenheit. So I think that’s like 38 Celsius, so you have to get up to a certain core temperature. That’s kind of what it’s all about.

Brett McKay:

Gotcha. And there are ways you had this device that measured your core temperature that doesn’t involve sticking up a probe up your butt. 

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, no rectal probe, no rectal probe, no Vaseline required, and I did endure the rectal probe a few times. It’s just a thing that they do. 

Brett McKay:

My sauna protocol, I have a sauna in my backyard and I like to do it. I get it up to 190 and I’m in there for 20 minutes.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, solid.

Brett McKay:

That’s what it is. And then if I have friends over for a sauna session, we want to talk, I’ll put the temperature lower and turn it more into a sweat lodge. So it’s like 120 and it allows us to talk for a long time, and then we just sweat a lot and then at the end we’ll crank it up and get it really hot and then jump into the pool.

Bill Gifford:

I think going back to our heat tolerance conversation, nobody should jump into 190 degree sauna for 20 minutes out the gate. Just pay attention to your sensations and pay attention to your body. I kind of go in for, I do 10 minutes at first, and then I kind of check in and like, okay, am I bored? Am I too hot? Am I not feeling it? Then I’ll get out, if not stay a little bit longer. I kind of stand past the point when I think about leaving, so I push that a little bit farther, and you have to make sure to give yourself enough recovery. Don’t just go out for two minutes and hop back in. You got to let yourself cool off.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I drink a lot of fluids after

Bill Gifford:

That’s key, and electrolytes, by the way. This is where most of us in our French fry filled American diets, we don’t really need a lot of extra electrolytes. We get plenty, but if you’re intensively sweating or if you’re doing hot yoga or the hotter and a hundred, yeah, you need some electrolytes too, as I found the hard way.

Brett McKay:

How’d you find out the hard way?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, I went to a sauna festival in Minnesota and I was doing saunas all day long and hanging out, and I had a couple beers and I wasn’t really paying attention to hydration or salt. And then the next day I woke up and I just kind of felt miserable and I felt achy. I’d run a marathon. I was just super beat up. And then I talked to somebody and they were like, oh yeah, did you have any electrolytes? Like, nope. 

Brett McKay:

Got to get those electrolytes. 

Bill Gifford:

I didn’t drink enough, didn’t have enough electrolytes.

Brett McKay:

And so you also mentioned earlier that you can get these benefits from heat using a traditional sauna, like a finished sauna that uses wood or an electric stove to heat things up, an infrared sauna, hot tub. You can get the benefits with any of these things. Yeah. So one of the interesting sections that you have in the book, you talk about the mental health benefits of heat exposure, and there’s some researchers who are using heat exposure as a potential treatment for depression. This is coming out of a lab run by a guy named Charles Raison. We’ve had him on the podcast before. Oh, have you? Okay. Yeah, that was episode number 585. This is a long time ago. So for those who haven’t heard that episode and don’t know about this research, what do we know about heat therapy as a treatment for depression?

Bill Gifford:

Well, Chuck is great. He’s a real sort of intellectual explorer and he looks at all kinds of things that might sound extreme or cookie. He’s done a lot with eastern traditions. So the heat piece of it is interesting. He was involved with a study, I think the first study was in Switzerland, and they put these severely depressed people into kind of a heating device. So basically like an infrared sauna that you lie down in. And they heated these people up to, again, 101.5 Fahrenheit, and they found that basically their depression symptoms were wiped out, cut in half or more in some cases, completely gone. So really potent effect against severe depression, which that really surprised me because you think of a heat wave and really hot weather and people can get kind of grumpy, but this appeared to have this powerful effect against depression.

Brett McKay:

Do they have any ideas of why that is?

Bill Gifford:

They have some theories. People who are depressed appear to have a difficult time regulating their body temperature. In general. They don’t sweat as much. Their body temperature is elevated. So there’s something going on with the whole thermal regulation system in these folks. But one theory that these folks are working with is that if you heat up your brain to a certain level that stimulates a brain region. I think it’s called the dorsal Rafe nucleus to start producing serotonin. So similar to what SSRI drug might do. So that’s one possible reason.

Brett McKay:

If I remember correctly, another theory that Charles put out there is that using the sauna, exposing yourself to heat, it is an acute stressor. It causes an acute amount of inflammation. It’s like exercise basically. And then it goes away, and then it goes away. It reduces inflammation. He says it’s sort of like hair of the dog. You give someone, I think depressed people, they have a lot of inflammation in their body and in their brain. So exposing yourself to an acute stressor, it helps dissipate inflammation in the long run.

Bill Gifford:

And exercise does the same thing. And exercise also has a potent antidepressant effect potentially for the same reason is … it spikes, and then afterwards it drops and it stays down.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Bill Gifford:

Super interesting. 

Brett McKay:

And then you highlight this, and I think Charles talked about this in our interview. He says, this heat therapy for depression, it doesn’t work for everyone. And I think the reason is depression can be caused by all sorts of things. It’s not just because your body isn’t how to thermoregulate or you have inflammation. It could be other stuff. So if your depression is caused by something else, the heat exposure is not going to do anything for you.

Bill Gifford:

The way they discovered this is really interesting, or one way they discovered this, they found that they were experimenting with this microbe that they found in the soil in Uganda, and they were trying to use it to help build up people’s immunity to leprosy. And it gives you a slight fever, but a fever is kind of a healing mechanism. And they found that people who had been injected with this microbe were happier. They got happier really after having this slight fever. Kind of a crazy story.

Brett McKay:

And you talk about in the book, you’ve had dealt with a melancholic disposition throughout your life.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah that’s why I’m a writer.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, same.

Bill Gifford:

It’s required.

Brett McKay:

I’m an Eeyore too. Did heat therapy do anything for your melancholy?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, it was amazing. It’s actually why I started gravitating towards heat in the first place. I started going to the sauna in my gym, which was kind of dark. Not the best, but it was warm and comforting, and I felt good being in there and I, I was going through some difficult work stuff, and prior to that, sauna was not on my to-do list. And so I kind of took that. I was like, Hmm, I felt better. I wonder why. Then I came along and I met Chuck Raison and did a little bit of a dive into that research, and then I actually volunteered to be sort of a guinea pig in a study that he and his colleague Ashley Mason were doing in Colorado. And basically they stuck me in this infrared sauna lying in a hospital bed again with the rectal probe, but anything for science. So they heated me up for an hour and it was totally miserable, and I was like, why did I do this? But I was kind of bummed out. So we did this, and then I hopped in a cold plunge and I kind of went home to the hotel thinking, why the heck did I do that? But then the next day it was like the skies opened up and the angels were singing, and it was like, I hadn’t felt this good in months. I couldn’t believe it. It was euphoric. It was amazing.

Brett McKay:

That was the thing that drew me to sauna was the mental health benefits. I’d go there. I’d have this natural drive to go to the sauna whenever I was feeling really stressed out, and that’s why I started it. And if it helps my cardiac health, great. And if it helps heat shock proteins fantastic. But I do it primarily because it just makes me feel better mentally.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah. There’s something about it. And I do the same thing. I go to the sauna place kind of near my house and spend an hour going in and out, and then I’m just driving home and I don’t care. I like somebody cuts me off, don’t care. I can tackle the work things that I’ve been putting off. I’m just better to be around afterwards. It’s great.

Brett McKay:

So I think when a lot of Americans in particular talk about hitting the sauna or doing heat therapy, we typically talk about it as a biohacking tool. We’re like, I want to improve my heat shock proteins, and I want to improve my cardiac health, whatever. But you argue that taking this, it’s a really reductivist view of heat therapy can miss the bigger benefits of heat exposure. What can Americans learn from Nordic sonic culture and heat therapy about some of those intangible benefits of exposing yourself to the heat. 

Bill Gifford:

And those mechanistic benefits are real. But I think it comes down to how do you approach, how do you think about time? And so here we’re like everything we do has to have a purpose and a payoff. It has to have a concrete, okay, I’m doing this and I’m checking this box, and I’m taking down my blood pressure and I’m activating my heat shock proteins. I think in more traditional sauna cultures and heat bathing cultures, it’s really about taking time to, as one person told me to slow down. So you’re going to a third space, you’re not thinking about work, you’re not thinking about status. You’re not necessarily there for a concrete health benefit, but it’s just taking time for yourself or to be with your family or your friends and to do something that doesn’t necessarily need to be quantifiable or productive.

Brett McKay:

And those Nordic cultures like, it’s a social activity. 

Bill Gifford:

It’s social. Yeah. I mean, the benefits, I think the social benefits are tremendous, but I think if you’re doing it by yourself, it’s almost like a meditation. You’re just slowing down. You’re away from your phone, you’re away from work.

Brett McKay:

For me, I mostly sauna by myself, but when I’m in there, it’s like, no phones are allowed. … I’ve taken my phone into a sauna before and you’ll eventually get this warning saying, your phone’s too hot, take it out. But I just go in there and just close my eyes and just really relax and just don’t think about things. But I do think it’s an even more enjoyable experience when you can do it with friends.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, it’s nice. It’s a good little bonding thing. There’s something about it. We’re in this space that is kind of too hot and kind of slightly panicking, a little bit where it’s stressful, but you’re together. So it breaks down inhibitions, I find also. So in New York where people walk around with their guard up, these social saunas are hugely popular, and you go in and you talk to people. It’s crazy.

Brett McKay:

Well, yeah. You mentioned that in that study with the people about depression and sauna treatment, one of the things they noticed, they started talking. People just start talking and they’re just yapping. And you did the same thing. You just started yapping to this guy.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, I was just babbling like a madman.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. That’s really funny.

Bill Gifford:

And I’m not the chattiest person typically, but it somehow broke down those inhibitions.

Brett McKay:

What do your sauna sessions look like these days?

Bill Gifford:

So there’s a couple places in town that I go to. One place is super, super hot, and so I debate with the guy, I think your song is too hot. But anyway, the cold plunge is awesome. It’s clean, which is I think an important quality in a cold plunge, especially a public cold plunge. So yeah, it’s real basic, right?

Brett McKay:

One thing I noticed cold plunges, and I’ve been wary about doing public cold plunges, whenever I’ve done cold plunges, I have to pee you immediately. There’s some response. I think there’s some response in your body once you hit cold, you’re just like, I need to pee. So I couldn’t imagine doing a public cold plunge because the only thing I’m thinking is people probably just pee in the thing. 

Bill Gifford:

You just ruined it for me, I think. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

I’m sorry. Okay. So you do the sauna, you do the cold plunge, and how often are you doing, doing this?

Bill Gifford:

Oh, I do once or twice a week at this point. So I’m like the control group in those finished studies, but it’s enough, and I go when I can take the time it takes. It’s like an hour. And so in fact, I’m going to try to go today and get my kid to go. He’s home from school. So that’s going to be the afternoon, and I go in the afternoon, I go at four. So I’m kind of done with any kind of productive writing I’ve had to do. So relaxing that I want to go to sleep afterwards.

Brett McKay:

For me, I have a sauna in my backyard. It’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. 

Bill Gifford:

That’s so great. 

Brett McKay:

It’s fantastic. You just go in. I go in after a workout for 20 minutes, but it’s awesome. I love it.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah. I feel like I should get one now, but I haven’t pulled the trigger, but I don’t necessarily want to always sit in there by myself. 

Brett McKay:

You like the social aspect of it. 

Bill Gifford:

So maybe that’s a trigger for inviting people over and having sauna days.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, inviting your friends. Well, if I’m ever in Salt Lake, I’ll hit you up. Well, we can do a sauna session.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay:

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

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, the book is called Hotwired, and I’m on Instagram and the site formerly known as Twitter at Bill Gifford. I’m also on things like Threads, so you can go there.

Brett McKay:

Well, Bill, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bill Gifford:

Yeah, Brett, thank you. Great questions.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Bill Gifford. He’s the author of the book, Hotwired. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads.

Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. Today on the show, he argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities, and what’s possible becomes our reality, and that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research in neuroscience and psychology, Nir shares the three powers of belief, and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results. Along the way, he shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nir’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #553 — How to Become Indistractable
• AoM Article: How Reframing Builds Resilience
• AoM podcast episode on William James and pragmatism

Connect with Nir Eyal

• Nir’s website

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads. Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. He argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities and what’s possible becomes our reality. And that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research and neuroscience and psychology Nir shares the three powers of belief and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results along the way. He shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. All right, Nir Eyal, welcome back to the show.

Nir Eyal:

Thanks, man. Great to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on way back in 2019. You’re out with a new book called Beyond Belief: The Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results. And this is about human motivation, and you think you found a missing factor that we need to consider when we think about motivation. How did your struggle with losing weight lead you to explore human motivation? What’s that story?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so let’s go all the way back to the beginning. So for me, I struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life, chunk being the right word that would’ve been descriptive at the time. I was the kid who never went into the community pool when I was a kid. We had one pool in our condominium complex and all the kids in the neighborhood shared it. And I was the one who never went in without my shirt on because I didn’t want anyone to see my belly rolls. And I was super embarrassed by that, and I finally decided to do something about it. And I wasn’t just overweight, Brett, it was much worse than that. I was actually clinically obese and I started dieting and over the next 30 years, my bookshelf became this graveyard of diet books. First I started with low fat, and I don’t know if you remember those days of low fat everything and Snackwells.

Brett McKay:

Yes, Snackwells the Devil Cake. Yeah, yeah.

Nir Eyal:

Alright, so we’re about the same age, if you remember Snackwells. And I would scarf those down. And then after that we determined that was not a good idea anymore. So I became vegetarian and I ate nothing but tofu and potatoes. And then after that the pendulum swung and now it was low carb everything. And I went keto. And then after that, let’s see what came after that. After that it was intermittent fasting. That was the way to go. And honestly, every diet worked until it didn’t. And I was on this rollercoaster ride of yo-yo dieting because as soon as my belief was shaken in that plan, as soon as someone said, oh, keto is bad for you because it’s bad for your kidneys or vegetarians don’t get all the nutrients they need, or whatever the plan was, as soon as my confidence was shaken, I’d abandoned the plan altogether and I’d go for a slice of pizza thinking, ah, it’s not going to hurt whatever one slice of pizza.

And then of course, the what the hell effect kicked in. That’s the real name of that psychological phenomenon where I would say to myself, what the hell? I already had the slice of pizza. I’ll start on a new plan tomorrow, so let me go ahead and chase it with the french fries to compliment the pizza. And what I realized was that after 30 years of dieting, that I got control of my weight. Finally, I’m 48 years old and it’s the first time in my life that I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. And I for the first time consistently watch what I eat and see results. It’s because my beliefs changed is that I had a new conviction that I could do something about the next thing that goes in my mouth as opposed to the what the hell effect that kept saying, okay, I’ll start tomorrow, I’ll start next week, I’ll start in the new year, et cetera.

This has led me to this discovery around why we don’t put good knowledge into action. And we see this all the time. We have all kinds of advice books, we have the internet now we have AI to answer our questions around what we should do. And I think the main problem is that it’s not that we don’t know what to do, the answers are all around us. I basically know what to do to diet. You have to eat right and exercise for the vast majority of people unless you have some kind of severe hormone imbalance. That’s pretty much the plan, but we don’t implement it. And so I think before I wanted to read another self-help book that I didn’t do anything with. I wanted to fundamentally understand what was missing and what was missing is that motivation is not a straight line. We tend to think of motivation as if I want the outcome, if I want the benefit, I have to do the behavior right?

It’s kind of a straight line, do the behavior, get the benefit. But there’s definitely something missing here because I can want the benefit and I can even know what to do, what behavior to do. But if I don’t have the beliefs in place to support what I call this motivation triangle of on one side is the benefit, one side is the behavior. At the base of that triangle is the belief. For example, if I don’t believe that my boss has my best interest and is going to give me that promotion, for example, if I don’t believe in my own ability to do the behavior and that the behavior will reach those outcomes, then the behavior triangle falls apart because the beliefs aren’t there. And I think that was what was missing for me, and I think for millions of other people who basically know what to do, and yet we don’t implement what we know is good for us. And I think that is the reason that we miss out on these powers of belief.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting because I can see that in my own life. So I’ve had instances with my physical practice of weightlifting where I get injured and I’ll go to the physical therapist and they’ll recommend, okay, you need to do this stuff for rehab. And I do it, and I’m like, I’m not seeing anything. This seems so piddly. Why am I doing these little dumb stretches? And I stop believing, I’m like, eh, this is not going to work. And then I stop doing the thing and then I don’t get better. And then finally I have to go back to my physical therapist and he has to tell me, look, I know it doesn’t seem like it’s working in the short term, but I promise you if you keep doing it, it will work. And once I believe him, like, okay, I’m going to trust this guy. I’m going to do the thing, and then the rehab works. It might take a while, but it does work.

Nir Eyal:

Bingo. You really hit the nail on the head here because what you’ve identified is the key determining factor between who reaches their goals and who doesn’t. If you look at, okay, why do people not reach their goals? The number one reason is not that they don’t know what to do. It’s not a lack of resources, it’s not bad timing. The number one reason people don’t achieve their goals is that they don’t persist. How obvious is that. We quit. That’s why we don’t achieve our goals. Why do we quit? Even though we know it’s good for us, even though we know what to do, why don’t we do it? And the reason is, is that there’s a fundamental lack of belief. And so if you don’t know how to use these powers of belief, what I call the power, the first power of belief is attention.

The power to change what you see, power of anticipation, the power to change what you feel, and then the third power, the power of agency, the power to change what you do. If you don’t harness those beliefs and realize how powerful they are, how essential they are to get you where you want to go, you’re going to quit. And that’s what I did year after year, goal after goal. Not that quitting is always bad. I’m not anti quitting. The Lord knows I’ve quit diets, I’ve quit book projects, I’ve quit businesses, I’ve quit relationships. It’s not that quitting is necessarily the wrong thing. It’s that quitting too soon is a problem. That’s terrible when you know persistence could have made a difference and you quit, and now you regret looking back and saying, oh man, if I just had persistent a little bit longer, I would’ve had all these benefits. That’s when we are destroying human capital, and that’s really what I’m fighting against.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so you have this motivational triangle, benefit, behavior, and belief is the foundation of that triangle. How are you defining belief? How is belief different from fact and faith?

Nir Eyal:

Great question. So a fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether you believe in it or not. So the world is more round than it is flat. That’s an objective truth. It doesn’t care what you think, sorry, flat earthers, it’s a fact. Faith is the other end of the spectrum. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens to you in the afterlife? No evidence is required. God rewards the righteous if that’s something that you have faith in, no evidence is required. That is an element of faith. Now, a belief is something different. A belief is something in between a fact and faith. It is a strongly held conviction, open to revision based on new evidence, a strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. And so the big aha, the thing that blew my mind doing this research was that beliefs, unlike facts or faith beliefs are tools, not truths.

I’m going to say it one more time. Beliefs are tools, not truth. So many of our problems, our interpersonal problems, our personal issues, our geopolitical issues as well, it goes all the way up there are caused because far too many people think that the things that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs. And we are bound by these beliefs that we refuse to look at, that we refuse to consider thinking that they are our facts. And we put ultimate faith in many of these things. Unfortunately, sometimes while we restrict ourselves to have the freedom to take out these tools, look at them, assess them, and say, Hey, are these helping me or are they hurting me? So for example, it’s like a carpenter. Would a carpenter say, oh, this hammer, this hammer is the one and only ultimate hammer? No, a carpenter says, okay, sometimes the right tool for the job is a screwdriver.

Sometimes it’s a saw, sometimes it’s a hammer, but not always. And so what I’ve learned is that being able to look at those beliefs critically and understand which ones serve me and which one hurts me is a life-changing practice. It absolutely has changed my business. It has changed my relationships, it has changed my physical fitness. Certainly all of these things have been revolutionized because I’m now able to get out of my own head, consider the things that were invisible to me. I think in the metaphor to think about your limiting beliefs, and by the way, limiting beliefs are beliefs that sap your motivation. While liberating. Beliefs are beliefs that supply motivation. And the best way to think about these limiting beliefs is that they’re like your face. You carry around your face all day long. Other people see your face, but you can’t see your own face unless you look in a mirror.

You can’t see your own face. And that’s exactly the same case with our beliefs that the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. They’re the ones we can’t even see. We don’t even realize, just like you can’t see your face the way you could see your hands or your feet, you can’t see your limiting beliefs. Of course other people can see them and I can prove it to you. Think about any random person close like somebody, well your family member or good friend, I guarantee you, you could probably think of at least one limiting belief. They have something that saps their motivation to do the things that they know they want to do. We can see them in others, but we can’t see them in ourselves. That is a huge impediment. The good news is we can learn to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and then choose the ones that serve us.

Brett McKay:

This idea of beliefs as tools. And you look at your beliefs and ask, is this serving me or limiting me? It reminded me of William James and the American philosophy school of Pragmatism. Are you familiar with pragmatism?

Nir Eyal:

Yes. Yeah, a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So their whole idea is, I mean the extreme version of pragmatism is truth is determined by what works in the world, but I think you can take a modified view. It’s like, okay, you look at your beliefs and say, does this work for me? Is it allowing me to achieve my goals to live a flourishing life? If yes, that’s a good belief, if not it’s a bad belief, you need to change your belief. I thought that was interesting. I made that connection when in your chapter describing beliefs.

Nir Eyal:

So many good things in modern psychology come from William James. I mean, he’s really the granddaddy of all this. And I think the wisdom there is that the vast majority of the decisions we make in our life, they’re not based on fact, they’re not even based on faith really. They’re based on beliefs. They’re based on these convictions that we stay open to revision based on evidence. Should I marry this person? Should I take that job? Should I move to this city? Should I read this book? These are all not based on facts. We like to think they’re facts, but they’re not. They’re based on beliefs. And so you better choose those beliefs wisely knowing that they have such an outsize impact on all the important decisions we make in our life.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so you mentioned earlier there are three powers of belief are attention, anticipation, and agency. Let’s go deeper into the attention aspect of belief. How do our beliefs shape our attention?

Nir Eyal:

So this research really blew my mind, and it all starts from the fact that we don’t see reality clearly. If there’s one thing I wish people understood about their beliefs, it’s that your perception of reality is a simulation that we all live in a simulation. We don’t live in the same simulation. We all live in our separate simulation. So it’s not quite like the matrix, but we are creating a simulation in our minds every single second because the brain can only process about 50 bits of information consciously. That’s about one sentence per second. 50 bits of information. That’s your conscious attention. However, your brain is taking in, it’s absorbing about 11 million bits of information per second. So 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information. So you’re only consciously processing 0.000045% of the information entering your brain. What kind of information is not being processed, at least not consciously, the sound of my voice right now compared to the hum of the room or the light entering your retinas or the temperature on your skin.

This information is being collected. And in fact, if you focus on it, if you place attention to those things, you will actually experience ’em. They will enter conscious control, kind of like a security camera going through a surveillance of different cameras. You can pay attention to those things. But the problem that the mind has in terms of conscious attention is that it simply is too much information. It can’t process all this information that’s entering the brain consciously. So what it has to do, it has to create a simulation. It has to predict what it’s going to see. This is called predictive processing rather than what actually is. So we all live in the simulation in our own minds and what the brain decides to filter. And here’s really the key takeaway is how the brain decides what 50 bits of information are entering your conscious attention are beliefs, your past experiences, what we call priors, these lenses with which we see the world that determines your conscious attention, all determining this power of belief of attention, which means that two people can see the exact same thing, literally the exact same thing in front of them and come up with completely different explanations as to why they’re seeing.

For example, there’s an optical illusion. It’s not really an illusion, it’s just an image called the coffer illusion. And I can show this image to one person, and based on where they grew up, they will see rectangles. I can show the exact same image, the same exact image to someone else, and they’ll see circles. Okay? We know that people who are on a diet see food as larger people who are afraid of heights see distances as further away. We’ve all probably experienced going to some kind of athletic event, right? A football game and the ref makes a call and one team, all the fans see the call one way and the other team, all the fans see it a different way. Of course, when you think about geopolitics, the same exact thing can happen in the news, and based on your nationality, you’ll have completely different interpretations of what just happened.

So this goes on and on and on. I mean, interpersonal, there was an instance a few weeks ago where I came home and I wanted to have a glass of water and my wife saw that I was looking for a glass of water and she said something like, all the glasses are in the sink. And I immediately felt judged like she was saying something, as if I was supposed to have washed all the dishes, but really she was just saying a statement of fact. But I heard it differently. I experienced that. I perceive what just happened completely differently than how she did. She was just saying a fact and I was seeing it as being judged. So this goes on and on and on. So what we pay attention to what we believe is happening literally can change what we see. And so unless we gain power over that, we are essentially blinded to what is actually happening. We’re blinded to reality.

Brett McKay:

Alright so seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing.

Nir Eyal:

That’s exactly right. That’s perfectly said, or at least as much we like to say that I’ll believe it when I see it. But really just the opposite is also true that you’ll see it when you believe it.

Brett McKay:

How can our faulty beliefs limit ourselves and create problems for ourselves that don’t really exist or may not exist all the time? 

Nir Eyal:

We have extensive research around how people see problems that aren’t there. There’s some beautiful classic studies. So for example, they showed people angry faces, a series of angry faces mixed with neutral faces, real images of people, and all you had to do was click a button every time you saw an angry face. And in this experiment they showed it’d be angry face, angry face, neutral face, neutral face, neutral face, angry face, right? So some kind of random appearing order. What the participants didn’t know is that they actually reduced the number of angry faces over time, and yet people saw a consistent number of angry faces in this study because they started creating a reality that wasn’t really there. They literally saw things differently. And we’ve seen this repeated time and time again. We want to replicate these studies. We see this when we show people different colors, so based on what they expect to see, they saw a circle that was more purple or more blue because they were different gradients based on what they expected.

I’ll give you another wonderful example that demonstrates this. There was a study done at Dartmouth where they took women and they told them, we are going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements. And so they created this very realistic scar, realistic looking scar on these women, and they got them all ready and they said, okay, you see this scar? They showed ’em in the mirror. Here’s the scar we put on you. Now we’re going to put you into a room with a study participant, and we want you to observe how you are treated. Okay? Note how you are treated because of this scar. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go to do this, can you just sit back here for just a quick second? We just want to touch up the scar. And what they didn’t know was that the study was on them, was on these women with the scar, not the people they were talking to because in that instant, they actually removed the scar without the participant knowing they didn’t show them what their face actually looked like in the mirror.

So these women went into a conversation with someone they thought they were observing how that person would behave based on their scar that did not exist. There was no scar in their face. And what many of these women reported was what they expected to find. They saw reality differently. They reported that they were discriminated, that people looked at them funny, that some people couldn’t stand looking at their scar and looked away and fidgeted and did all these things that made them feel very uncomfortable because of this scar that didn’t exist. And so in many ways, we see what we believe, we will see, we experience reality in a way that we expect based on what we pay attention to. So many of us unfortunately create problems that don’t even exist.

Brett McKay:

I’m sure people experience this on a personal level. I know public speaking is the biggest fear for a lot of people. And I think what happens is you get really self-conscious about something about the way you speak or the way you look. And so you go into the event thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to be paying attention to my stutter or how I say a lot. And then you’re looking out in the audience and because you have that belief like I am a bad public speaker, you think, oh, that person smiled because they’re laughing at me or that person fell asleep because they’re bored because I’m boring. And usually it’s not that people aren’t really paying attention to those things. In fact, I think studies have shown people in audiences they’re actually rooting for the public speaker. They want you to succeed. 

Nir Eyal:

All the time. That’s so true. 

Brett McKay:

But we have this limiting belief like, oh, these people want to see me fail and they’re going to pay attention to my weaknesses. But that’s not happening.

Nir Eyal:

No, not at all. I mean, one of the first rules I learned about public speaking, which I do quite a lot now, is never apologize to an audience. Most people, they get up on stage, oh, I’m sorry, I have trouble preparing this presentation. I’m sorry to, and that’s not what people want because people want to cheer for you. You’re exactly right. And in fact, what’s so important about this, even if an audience doesn’t like you, I don’t know why. Let’s say you’re delivering bad news and you think, oh, people are going to hate this message. What the research shows, and this is really the takeaway of the book, beliefs are tools, not truths. Even if that is true, let’s say that’s true, and it’s a belief we don’t really know. Does that mean everybody in the room is not cheering for you? No, you don’t have that kind of evidence.

That’s not a fact. But let’s say you have this hunch, it serves you to choose the opposite. It serves you to use these beliefs as tools, not truths and belief. Everybody in this audience wants me to succeed because how much better will you perform? Well change in how you perceive reality and therefore how you act when you believe what serves you. So for example, if you’re running a marathon, is it true that you may not finish? Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people don’t finish marathons, right? So thinking to yourself, I can’t do this. You’re guaranteed not to finish the marathon as opposed to, I can do this, you’re going to persist. So that’s a perfect example of a limiting belief versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is the one that saps your motivation, whereas a liberating belief is one that gives you more motivation, enhances your performance, helps you persist longer, and of course eventually accomplish that goal. 

Brett McKay:

So something that can amplify these limiting beliefs that will change what we pay attention to and kind of create this vicious cycle of poorer performance is rumination. For those who don’t know what rumination is, what is it? And then how does that just entrench ourselves more in our limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so rumination is when we have an intense focus on some type of past event that we keep thinking about again and again and again. It comes from how a cow chews its cud just to keep chewing and ruminating and chewing and chewing. It turns out the research shows it’s not very helpful. It’s associated with all kinds of bad psychological symptoms to continue to ruminate over and over and over. And the more we ruminate. This also happens with this bad advice that I’m very guilty of venting, where we’ve been told from the popular psychological interpretation out there that you have to get stuff off your chest. You have to tell people how you really feel. You’re not supposed to keep things inside. It turns out, in many cases, that’s terrible advice that in fact, when we vent about people, when we ruminate about how we’ve been injured in some way, it makes us more likely to see those bad elements in people.

Because just like we don’t see reality as it is, we see our beliefs about reality. We don’t see people as they really are. We see our beliefs about people, and we think that’s how people really are. And the really tragic thing is that this happens to the people we are closest to. I see this all the time. I’ll meet somebody who’s so nice, who’s so kind to me as a stranger, and yet when I meet their spouse, when I meet their family, oh my God, they’re so rude to them. They’re rude to the people who they’re closest to because to that person, they see the worst aspects of that person. They don’t see the person as they really are. They see what they have been conditioned over and over. He always does that. She always says that there she goes again. And they’ve built this construct, this effigy of this person that doesn’t really exist.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you have a whole chapter about how this rumination on our negative beliefs can really mess up our relationships. You talk about this experience that was funny with your mother. You sent her some flowers for her birthday.

Nir Eyal:

You want to go there, huh?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Talk about how your faulty beliefs about your mother got in the way of you having a good relationship with her. And then we talk about how can you mitigate our tendency to ruminate on faulty beliefs so that things improve for ourselves personally and with our relationships?

Nir Eyal:

For sure. Yeah. So this has really changed my life in many ways, but it was a long painful road to get there. So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday, and I was in Singapore. She was in central Florida where I grew up, and I wanted to send her some flowers for her birthday. And getting flowers from Singapore is not easy. And so I had to stay up till one in the morning finding the perfect florist with good reviews to make sure they could get it there on time, just the way I wanted it so that I make sure they were, the flowers were fresh and they wouldn’t get burned in the car, in the Florida heat and all that. And I went to sleep at 1:00 AM, I patted myself on the shoulder and I said, okay, Nir, good job. You’re a good son.

I called her the next morning and I said, Hey, mom, did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yes, I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead and I wouldn’t order from that florist again, to which I saw what she said through a particular lens of belief. And I blurted out something to the effect of, well, that’s the last time I buy you a birthday present. And Brett, that went over about as well as you think, that did not go over too well. And to be honest, I regretted that that was not what I intended to say, but that’s what came out in the moment. So anyway, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, Hey, would you like to do a turnaround on that? To which I said, no, I don’t want any of your psychobabble hocus pocus nonsense.

I want to vent. I want to tell you how my mom was rude and wrong and how I was right. And yes, maybe I didn’t say the exact right thing, but can you blame me? I mean, come on. You heard what I just said. What mom tells their son that the birthday present they just sent didn’t meet expectations. Clearly, my mom was being too judgmental and hard to please. So I sat down with that for a minute. I didn’t vent because I’d done the research on how venting is not actually all that helpful. And I sat down reluctantly with a piece of paper and a pen, and I did this process called the turnaround, which comes from work by Byron Katie and Byron Katie really channeled thousands of years of practice, even Aristotle, actually, this is a over 2000 year old practice starting with Aristotle of inquiring about your beliefs and seeing are there alternative interpretations.

So here’s how it works. It’s basically four questions that Byron Katie has developed, and I kind of have updated some of them to better suit our needs. But here’s what the four questions are. Question number one starts with, first you write down the belief, okay, the belief is my mother was too judgmental and hard to please. Now, the first question is, is it true? Duh. Did I just tell you what happened? Clearly, I mean, I just told you my mother was very clearly, too hard to please here and very judgmental because of what she said. Okay, next question. Come on, let’s keep moving here. Next question was, is it absolutely true? So in that instance, was she, it absolutely, absolutely means every single time without exception. 

Brett McKay:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

Nir Eyal:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, no other interpretation could possibly be true, other than my mother was being too judgmental and hard to please. Is that absolutely true? I mean, that’s a tough one, right? Maybe there’s another interpretation. I dunno. Maybe there’s a 1% chance that she was trying to be helpful. Maybe she was trying to not be rude, she wasn’t being judgmental, she was just trying to maybe protect me from getting scammed. Could that be possibly maybe in some kind of alternative universe? True. Okay, alright, fine. Okay, I’ll give it to you. Maybe there’s an alternative explanation. Okay, question number three. Who are you when you hold these beliefs? So how do you feel? What do you become when you hold onto that belief? Well, to be honest, when I held onto the belief that my mother’s too judgmental and hard to please, I was short-tempered.

I can’t say I was nice, I was probably pretty rude. And frankly, I was a little embarrassed that that’s what I said. I regretted that I would prefer to not have said that. And then the fourth question is, who would you be without that belief? And if I could let go of that belief, if I really thought about it, I would probably be at peace. I wouldn’t be so angry with her all the time. I would probably be more myself to be honest. And so what we established was just those four questions, which by the way, you can not only use with relationships, I do this at least once a day in some kind of interpersonal relationship, whether it’s with a client, a business customer, whether it’s somebody on the street who did something annoying to me, it doesn’t matter. You can ask those four questions to very quickly ascertain that the way you saw things, that your belief one may not be true, may not serve you.

And getting rid of that belief and adopting an alternative perspective may benefit you. Okay? So what this does is basically just crack open the possibility that there might be another interpretation of what happened. That’s all it does. So now the next step is to actually do the turnaround. And so the turnaround asks us to think about the exact opposite of that belief. It’s not to change anybody’s mind. You’re not trying to change your mind here. You’re just trying to collect what I call a portfolio of perspective, just alternative points of view, whether or not they’re true, it doesn’t matter if they’re true because again, beliefs are tools, not truths. Okay? So we’re just going to collect a portfolio, other tools in our toolkits. So what’s the opposite of my mother’s? Too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.

Okay, so in that instance, could that be right that she was not too judgmental and hard to please? Well, the more I thought about it, I kind of had to admit that maybe she wasn’t being too judgmental and hard to please. Maybe she was actually trying to help me just not get scammed. Maybe that was her real intent. So it could be true. I may not agree with it, but there might be an alternative explanation. Okay, so now let’s do another turnaround. This turnaround might sound something like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Oof. How could that possibly be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please not. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, if I’m honest, Brett, when I called my mom and she didn’t respond exactly the way I had scripted in my mind that a mother is supposed to respond, I kind of lost it. And so who was being hard to please? I was because I didn’t get the kind of reaction I had rehearsed in my head that I expected. And when that didn’t happen, I was disappointed and I lashed out. I was actually being hard to please. Alright, there’s another turnaround here. There’s a third one,

A third turnaround might sound like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. So how could that possibly be true? The more I thought about it, what really happened was that I had these very high expectations of how I was supposed to do things for my mom and how I should do things in general. And when I spent all this time and effort and things didn’t go exactly the way I’d planned, that was a statement on my competency that was a sign that I was not doing a good job at this thing that somehow I was lesser because I had screwed up. And so what really I learned was that I had these unrealistic, it wasn’t my fault that the flowers didn’t appear exactly as I’d wanted. And that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it just means sometimes stuff happens. It didn’t have to get worse from there.

I didn’t have to make all these assumptions, all these beliefs that says it’s called a misattribution of emotion, that I was feeling crappy about myself, about something that had happened. And then I had attributed that crappy feeling with the thing that was right in front of me, my mom. And so I had, through my lens of belief, I had misattributed how I was feeling and placed blame on her, which did not help the relationship at all. Now, now I have four beliefs, not just one. That one belief of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please wasn’t serving me. Why? Because the only way out, the only way that I could be happy was if she changed, she had to do something different so I could be happy. That’s not going to happen. The other perspectives now gave me freedom. Now I could stay on my side of the net.

Now I could do something to interpret that situation differently so that it served me rather than hurt me. Even if it wasn’t true, even if it wasn’t true, it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is does it serve me better? And so that type of thinking, that type of practice that now has become part of my daily life has changed everything for my business, for my relationships, for my health and wellbeing. That type of turnaround, again and again, has absolutely brought so much peace, joy, happiness, to my life in a way that I never thought possible.

Brett McKay:

So what these questions do, it gives you a portfolio of perspectives to choose from. And you’d be like, well, that one’s probably better in this situation. I’m going to go with that one.

Nir Eyal:

And again, the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. The easiest thing to do and what the vast majority of us do, the vast majority of the time, is we never question these things because it feels so comforting, right? Of course, that person’s being a jerk. Of course that person messed up. I didn’t mess up that person messed up. But of course it’s our problem. It’s in our head. It’s causing us suffering needlessly. So what I constantly do is to question whether the suffering is needed. And this goes super, super deep. We think about emotional suffering, but it doesn’t stop there. I mean, we have incredible research around how this affects your perception of pain, of physical pain. For the research for this book, I documented these cases of hypno-sedation, which is where patients will go under the knife.

They will have full-fledged surgery. There’s this gentleman that I followed who I saw the entire recording of his surgery, where this guy by the name of Daniel Gissler, 54 years old, I think he was, he had this freak accident. He broke his fibia and his tibula, he had to get metal screws put into his leg, and then a few years later he had to have them removed. And in that time, he learned this practice of hypno-sedation and he managed, he started practicing by just watching a few YouTube videos. And then he started practicing by having this clamp on his hand to test his pain tolerance. And he progressed over time to be able to have these screws wrenched out of his bone, scalpel, cutting into flesh with zero anesthesia, not even local anesthesia, nothing, no general, no topical, nothing. For 55 minutes he went under the knife and he did as much flinch.

And not only does he report that he didn’t experience the kind of pain that you and I would expect to make to experience, we know his vitals never spiked, his heart rate never went up, his blood pressure never went up. All the things you would expect to happen when there was extreme stress didn’t occur. Now, why do I tell this story? Why is this research so important? Because if our beliefs can tune out, the suffering through the power of attention can tune out the suffering of surgery without anesthesia, well then certainly we can learn from that. Certainly when I have this interaction with my mom, I can also choose, wait a minute, is this suffering necessary? Is this something I actually need to suffer from, or is there another belief that can allow me to not have to suffer through this?

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s the belief, power of attention, what you believe will determine what you pay attention to. And so we want to make sure we choose our beliefs carefully because it will frame how we interact with the world, whether in a useful or not useful way. You talk about the belief, power of anticipation. What do you mean by that?

Nir Eyal:

So anticipating what we think is going to happen next. So if the power of belief of attention is about what is happening right now, what we see in reality, anticipation is what we expect to happen. It’s about our internal states. So seeing is about what’s on the outside anticipation, what we feel is on the inside. And it turns out that people think that what they are feeling is the truth. I feel the way I feel. I am what I am, right? No more damaging words have ever been uttered than I am what I am. And we hear it all the time. That’s just the kind of person I am. That’s my personality, that’s my identity, that’s who I am. And of course, that has all kinds of terrible consequences as well, because again, that can be a very limiting belief. I am not a morning person. I’m a Sagittarius. I have a short attention span. The list goes on and on and on.

Brett McKay:

I’m an introvert. I hear that one a lot.

Nir Eyal:

I’m an introvert. Exactly. Exactly. And now we see actually all kinds of labels. This is actually bleeding into the third power belief around agency. All these labels that can become our limits, that when we think we are a certain type of person or now, unfortunately, a certain type of diagnosis, oh boy, that can have all kinds of cos. But let’s get back to that in a minute. Let’s talk about the power of anticipation. So this blew my mind when it comes to the physical properties that our beliefs have, how our beliefs can actually become our biology through the power of anticipation. And one of my favorite pieces of research around this has to do with the placebo effects. Placebo effects are fricking mind blowing, but particularly what I think is was a particularly interesting study was how placebo steroids can actually help you put on muscle.

Isn’t that crazy? We think about placebos as helping you with a headache or maybe with insomnia or anxiety, placebo, ster. So people who were told, here’s a steroid, but in reality it was a placebo can actually help you put on muscle. How does that happen? How could that possibly be? It’s not that the placebo has some kind of magical powers, it’s that it directly affects motivation. How? Well in this study where they gave young men a pill, they told them, this is a steroid pill, we want you to follow this workout regimen. And then they had a control group that did not receive the placebo steroid and they had to follow a similar workout regimen. They wanted to then see who would put on more pounds. Now the difference was that the people who took the placebo steroid worked a little bit harder. They told ’em what exercises to do, but they didn’t tell ’em how much to do or how much weight to put on.

They just told them work out for this protocol. And so what turned out to happen was that people who were taking the placebo steroids did another rep, they pushed a bit harder, they added a bit more weight. And at the end of the study, they had packed on more pounds of muscle because they believed that they were on this miraculous steroid, which they anticipated would give them more muscle mass. So it’s not that placebos are some kind of magic, it’s that they can increase the motivation. Again, back to persistence, back to what really separates winners and losers and people who achieve their goals and those who don’t. It’s all about this power of persistence, which was driven from the power of their beliefs.

Brett McKay:

This reminds me of Dumbo’s magic feather, right? Dumbo. He thought the feather, if he had the feather in his trunk, he was going to fly. And then when he didn’t have it, he felt like, oh no, I can’t do it. But the feather wasn’t magic. I mean, you thought it was magic. So you thought you could fly, but you were actually flying. 

Nir Eyal:

And you did. You could do it all along. And you think, okay, this is a Disney movie. Okay, very cute. It is a matter of life and death, Brett. It is literally a matter of life and death. Did you know that people who have positive beliefs about aging? So what does that feel like? So someone who believes aging leads to inevitable decline. Okay? That’s one potential belief versus someone who believes something to the effect of, I can grow at any age. Okay, I can grow and adapt at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline. Now, both of those could be true. Both of those could be true. But which one is a limiting belief? And which one is a liberating belief? Which one gives you more motivation to go outside and go for a walk as you age? Which one gives you more motivation to join the bowling league? Which one gives you more motivation to garden, to do tai chi, to do the kind of stuff that it can extend your lifespan?

And so people who have those beliefs, this came out of a study from Becca Levy at Yale, people who have those positive beliefs about aging live seven and a half years longer, seven and a half years longer. To put that in perspective, that is more of an effect than quitting smoking, than eating a healthy diet or exercise. Okay? Doesn’t that blow your mind that your beliefs, now, again, it’s not magic, but your beliefs do change your biology because when you believe certain things about aging, you behave differently. You’re more likely to sustain that motivation and keep going and do the things that make you healthy. So for all the talk we have about quit smoking and eat right and exercise, we should be thinking a lot more about these beliefs because they have such an outsize impact on our lifespan.

Brett McKay:

Well, you talk about in this section about anticipation, this idea of the experience loop. What is that and how can we use it to supercharge those liberating beliefs and mitigate those limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

So the experience loop goes like this. So first, we believe something, then we anticipate what we think is going to happen. Then we actually feel it. We have that internal sensation and then we confirm it. And this can affect so many different things in our life. There was a beautiful study done around wine where they put people in an FMRI machine, they connected ’em to a little tube in their mouth, and as they were scanning their brain, they gave them a wine and said, okay, now this wine is a $5 bottle of wine. They squirted a little bit of the wine. They said, what do you think of this wine? And people report, it’s all right, it’s a little flat, not that much of a finish, whatever. It’s okay. And then they looked at the blood flow in their brain as they experience this wine.

Then they said, okay, now we’re going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine. Okay, you ready? Here comes the little squirt of a very expensive bottle of wine. What do you think of it? Oh, this one has hints of berry and I can taste the oak. And this is much smoother finish. They had all these very wine snobby pronouncements about the wine. Of course, there’s a trick here. It’s a psychology study. The trick was it was the same exact wine, but because of their underlying beliefs, what was the underlying belief? When you know that something is more expensive, you anticipate because of that belief, you anticipate that it will be better. And because you anticipate it’s going to be better, you feel it as better. These people. What’s so amazing about this study, it wasn’t just a blind taste test and tell us how you feel, right?

And we would expect people to say to the scientists, yeah, expensive wine tastes better. No, we could actually see it in their brain. We could see blood flow increase in their reward centers differently when they tasted the wine that they thought was more expensive. So they weren’t lying. They actually experienced the wine differently. They felt it differently in their brains. And then finally is the confirmation steps. So when you think about wine, wine is a social experience. And many of the things that we do are social experiences where now we confirm, oh, this is a really good wine. And you tell your friends about it, and you look at wine spectator and you look at, so it’s not that nobody’s lying here, it’s not a fraud. It’s that our beliefs shape the actual experience itself. I think many people misunderstand what marketing is for. People think that advertising is about awareness and okay, advertising does increase awareness.

But how does that explain why some brands advertise to death? How many Coca-Cola ads can we see? How many billions of dollars have they spent on those ads? Well, because it’s not about awareness. We all know about Coca-Cola. We’ve tried it already. Well, why do they do that? Because the advertising shapes the belief, which makes you anticipate a feeling, which then you will confirm by seeing this ad of, oh, look how refreshing, look how wonderful, look, how great it actually changed the experience itself. So the point of display advertising is to actually create that sensation in the first place. And that’s what you’re paying for, not just the sugar water.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so with the belief power of anticipation, how you expect something is going to be influences how you feel about it, which influences how you behave, which influences the outcome of something. So if you think aging is going to be awesome and you’re going to stay vital, then you’re going to keep doing youthful things and then you’re going to stay vital. And I can see other applications of this. If I think going into a hard conversation that’ll strengthen the relationship, then I’m probably going to approach it like that and it will nudge me to act in a more positive way and then it will strengthen the relationship. And this also reminded me of that study they did with housekeepers where when they told housekeepers that cleaning constituted valid exercise, they lost more weight because they leaned into the activity more. So let’s talk about the belief, power of agency. How do our beliefs shape our sense of agency or ability to get things done in the world?

Nir Eyal:

Okay, so the power of agency is the power to have an effect in the world. And we call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. So external locus of control is that the world is happening to me, that things are going on that are beyond my control, an internal locus of control. This high sense of agency says that I can control factors in the world that what I do makes a difference. And here’s the kicker. So it turns out that people who have this tendency towards an internal locus of control do better in life in pretty much all metrics. They live longer, they have more friends, they contribute to their community more. All the good things happen when you have an internal locus of control. Here’s what’s really amazing, even when you have every reason to believe the opposite. So even when you are on a low socioeconomic status, even if you’re discriminated against, even if you’ve really drawn a bad deck of cards in life, and you have every reason to say the world has beaten me down and I have challenges that other people don’t have, even if that’s the case, even if that’s the case, you turn out to do better psychologically believing you have a high sense of agency.

Again, beliefs are tools not truth. Isn’t that mind blowing? That your attitude that you’re so much more likely to succeed in life based on these beliefs that if you believe you could do something to get out of that situation to make your world better, guess what? Not a big surprise. You are much more likely to do something about it. And so that’s where we go into some of the research that I talked about a little bit earlier, which I think is absolutely incredible and quite jarring, frankly, about the no SIBO effect. So we talked about the placebo effect. Placebos from the Greek mean I will heal. No, Sibos are the opposite. No Sibos are. I will hurt. And one of the studies that was just incredible that really kind shaped my thinking on this, there’s a guy in the research literature by the name of Mr A. He was anonymized Mr. A. Now Mr. A has this bad breakup with his girlfriend and he decides to commit suicide by taking an entire bottle of pills. At the last minute he takes these pills and all of a sudden he decides to change his mind. He decides he wants to live. He runs over to his neighbor’s house, his neighbor rushes him to the ER room. He takes his bottle of pills, and as he gets into the ER room, he collapses on the floor and all the nurses can hear him say is, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he passes out, they put him on a gurney, they rush him into the er, they take his blood pressure, he’s at a critically low level, his heartbeat is plummeting. All these vitals are pointing to the fact that he has a severe overdose.

The problem is that on the bottle of pills, it doesn’t say what medicine he took, what drug he took. All it has is a phone number because Mr. A was part of a clinical trial. And so the doctors have to call this number and ascertain, what was it that Mr. A overdosed on? They call up this number, and it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for an antidepressant, and he turned out to have been in the placebo group. So nothing that he took had any biological effect. It was a completely inert substance that he took as part of the placebo category of the study. And yet he felt all these physiological symptoms, they tell this to Mr. A and in 15 minutes his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is back to normal, and he’s feeling fine. He’s fully conscious. Is that not mind blowing? Does that not make you think all over your life choices here? Because what this means is that our perception, our beliefs, can have a profound impact not only to the positive. We talked about some of the positive effects, but also to the extreme negative. And I think what we’re doing many times in society, unfortunately, is that we are using these maybe non-pharmaceutical, when we have these labels, when we have these monikers about what kind of person we are and increasingly what kind of diagnosis we have, it is limiting our potential. So we need to be very, very careful. I’m not anti diagnosis, I’m not anti-psychiatry far from it, but I am anti using these labels to define who we are because the common perception is you can’t change who you are. And when your diagnosis becomes your identity, it becomes a limitation. And your labels really do become your limits.

Brett McKay:

You take on a diagnosis if it’s useful. If it’s not useful, then maybe don’t take that on.

Nir Eyal:

It’s a map, not the terrain. So if it puts you on a path to getting to a place that is helpful. wonderful. But you are not the map, you are not the terrain itself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so we’ve talked about the three powers of belief. There’s attention, anticipation, and agency which shape what you see, feel, and do for good or bad. And I think the big takeaway from our conversation is that beliefs can be tools and we got to figure out whether they’re serving us or not. And as we were talking, I looked up this William James quote that I really like. He said this, be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. And I think that applies to a lot of things in life. Well this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nir Eyal:

Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So on my website, nirandfar.com, Nir is spelled like my first name. We actually have a five minute belief change plan that we’re giving away for free. Anybody can get. It’s one of those things that we couldn’t fit in the final edition of the book, so we decided to give it away. It walks you through day by day by day, a five minute practice that can start you on this path of changing your beliefs and adopting more of these liberating beliefs rather than the limiting beliefs. And so to get that, you go to nirandfar.com/beliefchange. So that’s nirandfar.com. Nir spelled like my first name, nirandfar.com/beliefchange.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well Nir Eyal, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Nir Eyal:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest is Nir Eyal. He’s the author of the book Beyond Belief. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies — habits and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose.

Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on your physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts on finding your own purpose, what kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment, why finding purpose isn’t a one-and-done process, and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug-of-war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Purposeful app
• AoM Article:The Power of Purpose
• The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM Podcast #1,051: Man’s Search for Meaning, With Viktor Frankl’s Grandson

Connect with Vic Strecher

• Vic’s faculty page
• Vic on LinkedIn

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies, habits, and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose. Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on our physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts and finding your own purpose. What kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment? Why finding purpose isn’t a one or done process and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug of war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/purpose. All right, Vic Strecher, welcome to the show.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a professor of public health and you have spent a lot of time researching and writing about the role purpose plays in our overall health and wellbeing. How did that happen?

Vic Strecher:

Well, I am a behavioral scientist. I think for my whole career I’ve been trying to understand root causes of why we do the things we do. And in public health, of course, we may be helping people quit smoking or manage their stress or their weight or get a mammogram or so many different things. So often we end up scaring people saying, if you don’t do this, bad things will happen. If you don’t quit smoking, you’ll die. If you don’t manage your diabetes, you could lose your legs, blah, blah, blah. And the more I approached behavior in that way, the more I realized that people’s defensive shields just kind of pop up. And naturally I do the same thing. Somebody tries to scare me. I say, well, that’s not like me. That’ll never happen to me. And I start even discounting the person saying it. So I started really thinking more about root causes.

And this is through a lot of experience. A person may come into a smoking clinic I’m running and say, I don’t need this clinic. I don’t need this fancy cognitive behavioral program you’re running. Because my kids just stopped me while I was driving them to school and said, dad, your smoking bothers me so much. And I realized, what am I doing? I’m a dad, I’m a father, and so I don’t need your program anymore. And I used to say something like, well, of course you need it because one little simple motivational event isn’t going to change you. Well, I found that those people change and they change for life. So some deeper root cause, some identity shift or understanding who they really are, understanding and appealing to one’s core values that turns out to be really, really important. And I guess in my own life, I went through a difficult experience that kind of caused me to take a dramatic shift in my own behaviors as well.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. You start off the book talking about your daughter, Julia, can you tell us her story?

Vic Strecher:

Sure. Well, my daughter, Julia was born healthy in 1990. She used to like to say “I was a 10 out of 10,” and then six months into her life when she was a little baby, my wife and our older daughter and Julia were in the Netherlands. I was on a research sabbatical there. And so doing intense research with people, but at the same time, our daughter, Julia started losing weight. And you’re not supposed to be losing weight when you’re six months old. You’re supposed to be gaining weight. And so eventually after seeing a doctor, then another doctor finally, she ended up in the hospital. A cardiologist walked by after her being in the hospital for a few days and just thought, she doesn’t look right. They did an echocardiogram on her just to see what her heart was like. And it turned out that her heart was completely ruined.

She had gotten a chickenpox virus out of the blue like most of us do, and it causes a fever and a rash usually for a day or two. But this chickenpox virus attacked her heart and it destroyed it. And we were told that she was going to die within a month. So we literally took her out of the hospital in the Netherlands and the next morning we flew home and the people at home, we went to a medical center where I was a professor at the time, and they said she may actually be eligible for a heart transplant. And of course, I was an assistant professor. What did I know? I was living a comfortable assistant professor life, trying to get tenure, writing grants, publishing articles, the standard stuff, and didn’t really take my life terribly seriously, Brett, just to be honest, I was in my early thirties and I just thought, this is pretty easy and I’m enjoying it, and this is going to be a nice easy go of it as a life is concerned, I guess.

And suddenly everything shifted. I started realizing that our lives are all finite and we don’t know how long any of us are going to live, but also I had to take her life very seriously. So we as a family decided to list her for a heart transplant, and she became one of the early children to get a heart. But looking at the research data, which I’m a researcher, so I look at the data and there wasn’t a lot of data, but what did exist showed that kids who are waiting for a heart, only about 50% of them ended up getting a heart. They died before getting one half of them. And then if you did get one, if you’re that lucky, half, then half of those kids ended up dying within five years. So I thought her chances of becoming even six years old are about one in four.

So in deciding to list her for a new heart, we had to decide what kind of life should we give her? And it became an existential question for our family. How do you live a life? And so I started thinking about it then and we started, she did get a heart and new heart, and it was almost like she got a brain transplant because she had more energy. She just turned alive suddenly as opposed to just shrinking. And we as a family, I’m sorry, I get a little emotional thinking about this . . . But as a family, we started saying to ourselves, look, we don’t know when she’s going to pass away, but then we don’t know any of us when any of us are going to pass away. So let’s live our life as if this may be our last day or our last week.

Let’s live every moment, make every moment we can, filled with gratitude and filled with caring for what we care about. And so we started living very differently and suddenly all of our lives, not just Julia’s life, but all of our lives started turning technicolor as opposed to simply being black and white. And I think I lived a black and white life before then. Quite honestly. Things were pretty easy. And suddenly when they became very difficult and challenging, that’s when life became really interesting, quite honestly. She ended up needing a second heart transplant when she was nine, but when she was 19, well, she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to give back. She had been in the hospital a lot. Just getting a heart transplant doesn’t mean you’re fully able to do anything that others are able to do. She was in the hospital a lot.

She had headaches a lot. She had issues that she was immune suppressed, so any illness would really be difficult for her. And my wife took a major caregiving role then, but she wanted to be a nurse and give back. She got into nursing school at the University of Michigan, and her first semester was pretty tough, and she was 19 at the time. We decided to go down to the Caribbean just so that she could warm up. We live in Michigan, it’s pretty cold up here. So we went to the Caribbean. We took our older daughter as well. We were all out on the beach having dinner and being grateful for where we were quite honestly. And when we were all going back, we were just very close. And her last words were, I am so happy that I could die now. And she went back to her room and those were her last words, it turns out.

And so when that happened, when she died, I went through a deep grieving process, as you might expect. I almost thought she had some significant future, that she was kind of a miracle child in a way. And my bubble was burst, obviously. And I went through a deep depression. I went up to northern Michigan. We have a cabin up in northern Michigan, right on Lake Michigan, if you’re familiar with that. And Lake Michigan is almost like the ocean if you’ve never seen it before. It usually has great big waves. And this is a few months after she had died. And I’d been by myself for about a month just figuring things out, frankly. But I wasn’t really figuring things out. I was just eating and drinking myself to death. I was falling asleep in front of the TV. I started just watching things that were stupid, just any dumb TV. I started trying to figure out what Kim Kardashian was doing. And to me, I thought, wow, that’s a sure sign that you’re getting ready to die. That’s all you care about what Kim Kardashian is doing or what influencers are doing or what’s on television all the time, or the latest sporting event. Not that they’re not important, and I’m sure Kim Kardashian is a nice person. It’s just why do I care about these things?

And I went to bed and I had been really drunk the night before. I just went to bed. I had this huge dream early in the morning, and I dreamt that my daughter was with me, and she was only nine. And we were in the Netherlands in this little town called Morich where I was working, and it’s a beautiful medieval town, and we’re on rollerblades and rollerblading around the town. And we saw this beautiful, huge, huge building. And it looked like a church. It could have been a mosque, it could have been a synagogue, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful white marble, and it was glowing. And Julia said, we need to go there. And I said, great. It’s beautiful. Let’s go. And we were rollerblading there. And then we went into the entrance and there was this circular staircase in my dream that went down and down and down infinitely it seemed like.

And Julia said, let’s go. And I said, we’re on roller blades, Julia. We can’t just pop down. She said, don’t worry. And we started floating down and we went into this. At the bottom of the staircase was this huge room. And my daughter, who was rollerblading with me, she had passed away when she was 19, but she was nine in my dream. And she looked up and just looked at me. And then I looked out and there were these three beautiful women, and they’re all wearing these beautiful purple dresses. And they all three approached. And suddenly I turned to my daughter and she wasn’t nine anymore, she was 19, and she was wearing the same dresses they were. And she turned to me and said, I’ve got to go. And I said, no, don’t. And she went with these three women and they disappeared. I woke up in the morning and my pillow was soaked in tears. I was trying to get back to sleep thinking I’ve got to get back to sleep. I’ve got to see her again. I don’t know if you’ve ever Brett had a hyper vivid dream where it’s so vivid that you could swear it was real.

And this was very real to me. It turned out to be about five o’clock in the morning, and I looked out and it was still dark outside. I could hear Lake Michigan a little bit, and I just hopped out of bed. I was just in my boxers and t-shirt and jumped into my kayak, which is out on the beach. And I didn’t bother with any sort of life preservation equipment, which is really stupid because it was still springtime.

Brett McKay:

And you’re a public health professor…

Vic Strecher:

And I’m a public health professor, Brett, right. This is dumb as it gets. And I don’t know why I went out there, honestly, but I just hopped in my kayak and it was beautiful. Unlike the way it’s often where it’s like an ocean. It was perfectly smooth, but it was still dark and it was foggy, and the water was like a slurpee. You could still even feel ice crystals in it. And again, just in my boxers, and I jumped in my kayak and I just started paddling like crazy, like a mad person, which I was, I think straight out straight heading toward Wisconsin. And I found myself, I’m guessing around two miles out when the sun came up and I was paddling and paddling. And then when the sun just came up, all of the water started glowing, just these fleck of light everywhere.

It was magical. And I stopped my kayak and I turned and I just looked at the sun coming up. And actually my thinking before the sun came up was to continue kayaking to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. Of course, I never would’ve made it. And like you said, I’m a public health person, but that’s where I was in my head. I saw the sun come up, and I don’t know how to express this other than to say Julia was in me, and she was telling me, you have to get over this. You have to get over this dad. And it wasn’t like, you have to get over this. It was like, you have to get over yourself. You have to get over your ego. And at that very moment, I had this epiphany that I really had a choice. It’s almost like if some street sign lifted up right out of the water, which is hundreds of feet deep already and said, death or life, that’s what was happening to me.

I could choose either one. And actually it was kind of freeing to be able to choose what I wanted to do. Before then, I felt like I wasn’t choosing anything and I was just kind of heading toward my death, whether it was drinking myself to death and watching stupid television or actively dying by kayaking to Wisconsin. But of course I’m here talking to you, Brett. And I decided to turn back and I got back and I was kind of dripping. I didn’t feel any cold. I just sat down at the kitchen table again, I’d been by myself. I almost felt like I was looking down from the ceiling of our kitchen and telling myself, I started just saying, Vic, you’re in some deep trouble right now. You’re in really deep trouble and you’re going to die if you continue on this path. You have to fix yourself.

You’re a behavioral scientist. If you can’t fix yourself, what good are you? Anyway, and I almost looked at my therapist self and said, Vic, you’re right. So I’m going to pull out a sheet of paper, which I did. I started writing just very quickly the things that mattered most to me. And I don’t know why I did that. I hadn’t been thinking in that way. I just started writing them down. I wrote my family, my wife, our older daughter Rachel. I started writing my friends names down. I started writing about what mattered to me at work. My students matter, my work matters. I decided to, for some reason, I circled my students and the university had given me a break. They said, you don’t have to teach this semester. You don’t even have to teach next semester if you can’t do it. I mean, you’ve just gone through one of the worst things a person can go through.

But I started thinking about my students, and I called the university that morning then and called my department and said, look, it’s so kind that you gave me the semester off, but actually it’s not the advice that I need. What I need to do now is teach, and I want to teach every one of my students as if they’re my own child. And I got back, I went back. I started teaching my students as if every single student was Julia, looking out at them. I even would take a couple big deep breaths and I would look at them and just see my daughter’s face in all of them and just tell myself, you’re going to be teaching today as if all of these people have their own needs, their own lives, their own concerns. And when I did that, my teaching changed and my life changed.

I was nominated to become the professor of the year, for example, at Michigan. All these things that I didn’t expect, didn’t think I really deserved. Suddenly all these things happened because I started caring so much about my students. I also started taking care of myself because I have hundreds of students, and that’s just grown. So I realized I needed energy for my purpose. So I started sleeping better. I started trying to eat better. I meditate every day. I started doing things that would hopefully give me more energy. I’d walk to work every day. I needed energy because I had a big purpose. And I realized, wow, I’m actually changing my health behaviors because I have a purpose. And I started doing research on this. Have other people found this? And sure enough, it turns out the purpose is this. If it were a drug, it would be a miracle drug. It helps so many different things. So I started treating it as a research topic. Luckily, there is a person in the psychology department who is looking for a mentor for his dissertation. He asked me if I would do this, and I said, of course I’d be happy to. And with him, I started learning so much more about purpose. And since then, and that was a long time ago, it’s about 15 years ago, I’ve just simply devoted my life to helping people find greater purpose and metaphorically getting out on the dance floor of life.

Brett McKay:

Well, thank you for sharing that story. That was really touching. And like you said, I think the takeaway from that, your behavioral scientist, and typically when you read articles from behavioral scientists, they always offer these tips on how you can change your use reframing or use implementation intentions.

Vic Strecher:

Oh, wow. Yes. 

Brett McKay:

All of these things. 

Vic Strecher:

Acceptance and commitment therapy.

Brett McKay:

Yes, exactly. But what you learned from your own experience with your daughter, Julia, twice including that first time when she got her heart transplant, is that if you have this purpose, it’s this lever you can pull that just causes you to change. And then you learn that again a second time with her passing, that if you have this overarching purpose that’s going to do more for you than all these little cognitive behavioral therapy hacks,

Vic Strecher:

It’s pretty amazing. To me. It truly feels like, somebody recently asked me, what’s it like to feel purposeful? And I thought, what a great question. I hadn’t really thought about that. And I thought for just a few seconds and said, it’s like jumping into a river that has a strong current and that current is moving forward. And as you’re moving forward in this, things become easier. You’re not fighting against things and you’re choosing clarity. So suddenly the world becomes much clearer and there’s less conflict in your life. You’re not wondering, what should I do here? Should I play with the kids or should I have that old fashioned? It depends on what your purpose is. Maybe your purpose is to be an alcoholic, in which case you pick the old fashioned, but typically it’s not. Typically it’s I’m going to play with those kids. And so you put off that old fashioned and you also start thinking, how can I be a better dad? Which I think is incredibly important. And then from that river, you may find streams that move off of that river and you say, that stream looks really interesting. I think I may jump into that stream. And that’s been my life for 15 years now, since I found a very strong purpose or set of purposes in my life. I’ve found my life incredibly joyful, quite honestly, and very happy.

Brett McKay:

Well, how do you define purpose personally, but also with your research? What does it mean to have a purpose?

Vic Strecher:

Great question. Thanks for asking that too. So having a purpose is being value driven, first of all. And what psychologists or other people who study purpose real carefully, they like these academic definitions often, and they might say it’s a values driven self organizing framework for determining goals and channeling your energy. So working through that values driven meaning, this is led by our core values, and I’d love to talk about that a bit more, meaning it’s not other organizing. Somebody else is not telling you what you should be doing. And you referred to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was all about you creating your own purpose in your life. You’re a camel person. You say, educate me of all the joys and the sorrows of the world. And then that camel metamorphosize into a lion goes into the wilderness and finds this dragon that says, thou shalt on every scale.

The lion defeats the dragon, basically saying, I’m going to create my own purpose. I’m not going to listen to what everybody else says. And sure enough, I tell my students in the first day of class, many of whom are freshmen, say, A lot of you come in here essentially with your resume that’s been written by your parents and your back pocket. You’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be this, you’re going to be that. I want you to pull that resume out, and I want you to tear it up because if you’re going to be a doctor, you need to decide to be a doctor. If you’re going to be a business person, if you’re going to be a lawyer, if you’re going to be whatever, you’re going to be an artist, whatever you’re going to be, you’re going to decide. And that’s essential, or you won’t be happy.

You won’t be successful. You need to create your own purpose in your life. So that’s what’s meant by self-organizing. And then purpose helps you organize your goals. It gives you clarity. In this morass, everyone’s trying to get you to set a certain goal, usually around their own thing, their own cause, their own thing. They’re trying to sell, create your own goals, but those goals come from your values and from your purpose. And that’s where you start channeling this most precious resource that you have, which is your energy and vitality, and you start moving your energy into that. But it becomes easier because sorry for all the metaphors, but you’re in this river with a very strong current and you’re not fighting it, so it becomes easier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d like to return to how people can figure out the purpose, and it involves figuring out values, figuring out goals. But before we do that, let’s talk about the research you’ve done on purpose, because you highlight some really interesting research that shows how purpose affects different facets of our health. And you wouldn’t think, well, why would purpose influence my, I mean, people would understand how it influence your mental health, but my cholesterol, my heart disease. So tell us about that. How does having a purpose affect our health? What does the research say?

Vic Strecher:

Wonderful question. Thank you. So first of all, as I was alluding to before, if you have a strong purpose, you start taking care of yourself more. So we find in many, many, many surveys that if you have a strong purpose, you’re less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors and you’re more likely to adopt healthier behaviors, you’re more likely to get screened for cancer, for example, for example, getting a colorectal cancer screen, you’re much more likely to get that. You actually then spend fewer days in the hospital because you get sick less. Well, that’s not bad. So we know those things happen. Also, I’m so lucky to know some amazing neuroscientists. One in particular, Emily Falk, who just wrote a great book on, it’s entitled What We Value, but she’s a neuroscientist who studies people’s core values, and we’ve put people into MRI and have them think about their most purposeful core values.

And there’s a part of the brain that lights up that’s very modern. It’s right in the front of our prefrontal cortex, and it’s a part of the brain that relates to executive functioning, meaning executive decisions, high level decisions that we make. It also relates to the self. Who am I? What am I all about? It relates to our core values. Also, when this part of the brain becomes more active and we’re challenged, usually when we’re scared by something, there’s a part of the brain that’s very ancient, very old. It’s called the amygdala. This is our fear center, and that fear center gets very active and it can hijack our brain. When you think about your purpose, this prefrontal cortex gets active and it actually governs down our amygdala. It governs down our fear. If I think about James Bond, for example, in a Bond movie, maybe he’s being lowered into a vat of boiling oatmeal or whatever’s happening, and he’s going at first, oh God, this is going to be terrible.

And that’s what the audience is thinking. But then he finds some way out of it. So first his amygdala is going, but in this Bond-like heroic sequence, his prefrontal cortex starts lighting up. He’s going, I don’t have to be afraid of this. In fact, I have a solution to it. That’s what happens when you’re purposeful. So we know even what goes on in the brain. We also know that purposeful people have less activation in a part of the brain, a region of the brain that relates to conflict. So they’re less conflicted. They know what to do. As I was saying before, there’s other research that we’ve done looking at longevity, and we’ve looked at longevity a little differently. Now, there are literally almost a dozen studies that have shown that people who have purpose live longer, significantly longer. And this is after statistically adjusting for age and gender and income and education and all sorts of things.

You can’t make it go away. But we wanted to look at people’s biological clocks, what are called in scientific terms, epigenetic clocks. And these clocks are looking at how our proteins are expressed by our DNA. And we find that if you have a strong purpose, your proteins, more healthy proteins are being expressed, and unhealthy proteins are less likely to be expressed. And that can all be put together and form what we would call a biological clock. And sure enough, people with stronger purpose have longer biological clocks. This is really exciting for us because parts of our epigenome may even be inheritable to our children. So this is so valuable. I’ve continued to think all along as we do this kind of research, if this were a pill, it would be a gosh, it’d be a multi-billion dollar drug. It would be a magic pill.

Brett McKay:

And you also highlight research. That purpose is also associated with an increase in HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol, and it seems to have something to do with the reduction in inflammatory cell production.

Vic Strecher:

Yes. So we find that, and this is other people’s research too, not just our own, but other people have found that people with a strong purpose in their lives have fewer pro-inflammatory cells and proteins produced very important because while we want some inflammation, it’s good if you get a cut or something, you want that to inflame and close the cut, right, close the wound. But if we have too much inflammation or chronic inflammation, we start getting everything from arthritis to heart disease, some cancers, and certainly all sorts of other problems. We know, as I said before, that people who have strong purpose take better care of themselves, they eat better, which also may contribute to this higher rate of the good cholesterol that’s in our bloodstream.

Brett McKay:

I’m just going to highlight some other things you highlight in the book, because I thought it was really interesting. People who have low purpose in life were 2.4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those with a high purpose in life. 

Vic Strecher:

There are studies where they combine all the studies, put ’em all together because they say, well, one study may be nice, but it’s not going to convince the scientific community, especially something that’s as strange as well. People with stronger purpose are half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s. That seems crazy. How does that work? Now, there are eight studies of it, and they’ve been all put together, and they find that people with a strong purpose are far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and they’ve even autopsied people’s brains after this and found that people with strong purpose have fewer lesions, lesions that cause dementia, and, and in addition, there’s a new study that came out very recently in middle-aged men. So this is an important study for you and other middle-aged men listening to this because in middle age, very often, that’s when dementia or Alzheimer’s starts to form.

Purposeful people have much stronger connectivity within their brain, between different brain regions, far more. If you have a low purpose in your life, you tend not to have the connectivity needed. It’s hard to get the right metaphor, but maybe if you consider it kind of like pipelines, moving from one region of the brain to another, or circuitry moving from one region to another, we want that. We want our brains, different regions to be talking to one another. People with strong purpose have that much more. So, boy, I’ll give you one final set of findings, and this is with a good friend of mine, Ethan Cross, who wrote a really amazing book recently that’s out called Shift. And I think you even interviewed Ethan Cross.

Brett McKay:

We did, yeah.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah. So he’s a good friend and colleague. We did some research together. I said, Ethan, you do all this work on different coping strategies, and you have this cocktail of about 16 different coping strategies that a person could pick from. So we decided to look at those coping strategies, knowing some are not great for you. I’m going to drink alcohol when I’m stressed out. Just think about my own past or maybe really good ones. I know this won’t last forever. I’m going to take a walk in nature. I’m going to engage in a family or religious ritual. I’m going to see a big picture. It turns out that those positive coping strategies are strongly associated with having a strong sense of purpose in your life. Whereas negative coping strategies like I’m going to drink too much or eat too much, or vent, things like that, those are negatively associated with having a sense of purpose.

So you see the different things that it does. I was talking to a person who’s writing a new book related to purpose, and she said, I really think that having a purpose reduces entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, this entropic law that says everything gradually dissolves and gets less and less organized. We see a dead deer on the side of the road the next week, we pass that same deer. If it’s not gone, it’s looking a lot worse. It’s more and more disorganized. That’s entropy. What purpose does is it’s almost an entropy rebel. It almost reverses entropy. So I really think purpose is just that important, and we can build it, we can enhance it.

Brett McKay:

So in addition to all those health benefits, it can make you more resilient than some — that research you did with Ethan Cross. It can help you cope better. So it sounds like what purpose does the reason why it provides all these benefits? It sounds like there’s two things going on. One is having a purpose causes you to take better care of yourself. So you’re going to eat right, exercise, sleep, not drink, not smoke. But then also there are some physiological changes going on in your body.

Vic Strecher:

It sure seems like it. Yep, yep. There’s really good data showing that. 

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, let’s talk about how do we develop a purpose? What does that look like?

Vic Strecher:

Well, one of the ways to find purpose is to do just what I did when I was coming back on my kayak and pulled it in, ran up to my cabin and pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing down the things that mattered most in my life. And that’s a great way to start. If you start writing down the things that matter to you, what do you care about? Philosophers like to talk about caring about what you care about. So start by figuring out what do you care about? And if you want, the easiest way to do that, maybe you even look on your smartphone wallpaper when you open up your smartphone. How many times do we do that? On average, it’s over 60 to 80 times. So for me, when I open mine, I see my granddaughter, Madeline Julia from our older daughter, and she’s just amazing.

And so I look at her every single day, about 60 times, at least a day. So that’s affirming who I am. It’s affirming who I value. It’s affirming who I care about and what I want to be alive for and active for, and devote my energy to and my goals to. So I teach a lot of physicians, and when I train physicians, I ask, what do you do with a diabetic? Who’s newly diagnosed? How do you get them to start doing the things they need to do because they need to manage their weight very often or work out more, eat better, blah, blah, blah, take their medications. And a lot of ’em say, well, we tell ’em they might lose their legs if they continue on the path they’re taking, or they will die early. Well, what does that do? It sets up this defensive wall.

What if you just simply said, what’s on your smartphone? Open it up. If you don’t mind, show me what’s on your smartphone. Chances are it’s something that matters to them. And then you just sit back and say, so what do you want to do about that? Suddenly, it’s a totally different reframing of the issue. So that’s one thing to do. Write down what matters most. Let’s say you write down 10 things, maybe drop it down to five, and then from the five, maybe drop it to three and you say, I’m here for these people. Usually the things that matter most are not things they’re people, but it may be a cause that you care about. Whatever it is. You may say, those are the things that I live for, and I am going to start building a purpose around those things. I’m here to be on this planet to do this, and now how are you going to end up doing those things?

And you start working that through. You start setting goals around those things. So that’s one way to think about finding your purpose, what we call values affirmation. It’s a part of, you’ve mentioned different theories and approaches. It’s part of what’s called acceptance and commitment therapy, where you are accepting the fact that bad things happen to everybody. I’m by the way, nothing special when I talk about things that have happened to me, things have happened to everybody. All you have to do is live a life and you go through adversity and difficult times. But if you let those hijack, you can do that. You can choose to do that, or you can say, what am I committed to? And suddenly these things become less relevant to your commitment to things that are most important to you. It’s almost like swimming in quicksand. The more you try to get out, the more you sink. So it’s important to not let the stressors in life every day. And we all know we have a lot of stressors in life right now, from everything from politics to media, all sorts of things happening in our lives right now. If you say, okay, those are important. I understand them, but I have a purpose. And that purpose may be multifaceted. You may have a purpose around your family. If you have a family, maybe around your work, maybe around your community, all sorts of domains you could build purpose around or purposes, and then you devote your life, literally, your life to those causes, to those purposes, then suddenly these stressors don’t seem quite so stressful.

Brett McKay:

I think this is helpful. I think a lot of people, when they think about finding their purpose, they think they kind of have to pull it out of thin air. But it sounds like finding your purpose is often a matter of looking at what you already do and finding ways to lean into it and be more intentional about it. Maybe you already have this friendship that’s important to you. How can you lean into it? How can you be a better support for your friend? Maybe you’re already a dad. How can you be more intentional about creating a family culture? What can you do to raise the most excellent possible humans in your job? You can find ways to see a real mission in it. So if you’re a doctor, you can find ways to treat your patients so they feel seen and not like a number. You talked about how you started taking teaching more seriously, treating each student like they were your daughter. If you volunteer in a church youth group, how can you lean into that more and make it the best possible group and create the texture of these kids’, childhood and faith? So yeah, it’s really caring about what you care about. And going along with this, you also talk about what can make purpose more powerful and lead to flourishing is finding purposes that are self transcendent. They move beyond the self.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah, yeah. There’s a big discussion about that in the research community, and there are a few people who say, well, it doesn’t really matter if your purpose is very hedonic or very transcending. A purpose is a purpose, and it’s good. Maybe to some extent that’s true, but there’s enough data showing me anyway very clearly that having a transcending purpose, a purpose that’s bigger than yourself actually makes you much happier. So the more you seek happiness through things, I’m going to sit on the beach for the next two weeks, and maybe that’s great. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you need to recharge the batteries, whatever. But if that’s all you’re seeking, then the next vacation, maybe a little less fun. Kind of like if you eat a great meal every single night, what if you had a gourmet meal every night? After a while, you’d start complaining more.

You’d say, I don’t know about that. I think the chef could have done a better job. Or for golfers out there, if you play golf every single day, after a while, it becomes less interesting, probably. That’s my guess. So yeah, just focusing on things that are focused on you and your own hedonic goals, I don’t think helps as much. Aristotle talked about two forms of happiness. One he called Hedonia, and this of course is pleasure. So he was talking about good food, good wine, good sex, good, all of those things, and those are fine. And Aristotle said, no problem. It’s good that we enjoy those things, but if that’s all we care about, then we are like, and I’m quoting him from his Aristotlian ethics. He said, then we’re like grazing animals. He said, we need to be in touch with this inner God, this true self that’s inside of us, almost this angel that then communicates with these higher order Greek gods.

And he called this angel, the Damon and the Damon in Greek. So it’s this true self, this godlike self. So eudemonia, depending on how you want to pronounce it, is being in touch with that true self, that God-like self, that angel self that the Greeks believe was born with you. It’s part of you since your birth. By the way, Hindus believe this as well. Hindus and Buddhists believe that they’re born with his inner shaman, which is this God, this eternal godlike self that lives in you. I love that idea that we’re born with this godlike self and we’re born good, and we have to keep society from kind of beating it out of us. So the idea here is in being eudemonic, is we care more about things that transcend ourselves, our own egos. We transcend just pure simple pleasures. While we enjoy pleasurable things, that’s fine. We also strive for things that are bigger than ourselves. Things like volunteering, working on causes, helping other people, taking care of other people. Those things are eudemonic. And I think, and research has suggested that those things, those kinds of purposes, eudemonic purposes tend to be much better for you than hedonic purposes.

Brett McKay:

So just to recap here, purpose is you start with your values, the things that are most important to you. Ideally, those values are self transcendent. They’re not just, okay, I want to just lay on the beach and whatever. 

Vic Strecher:

You ask yourself, are all my values equally valuable? Are some valuables more valuable? 

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, you quote Kierkegaard, one of my favorite philosophers. He says, the thing is to find a truth, which is true for me to find the idea for which I can live and die. So I think that’s a good rubric to use. This value is something I could live and die for, just expend all my life for it. And so once you establish those values, start setting goals for yourself on how to realize those. And again, it has to be self-directed. 

Vic Strecher:

Very much self-organizing framework. And this is what Friedrich Nietzsche talked a lot about. And of course, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were proto existentialists, meaning they were really framing the existential movement of the early 1900s. Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, all of those people were influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. And then later, the classic example is Viktor Frankl who went through three concentration camps, but throughout his books, he talks a lot about with great reverence for Friedrich Nietzsche and the importance of finding this bigger purpose that you find and are self-directed.

Brett McKay:

We had Viktor Frankl’s grandson on the podcast. Oh my goodness. That was a great conversation. Yeah, so you talk about purpose isn’t just this one and done thing that you hash out in a cabin after you get out of the kayak. Purpose is a dynamic activity and it’s something you have to live out and you’re constantly refining it.

Vic Strecher:

Maybe can I add to that? Just a second, Brett? Sure. I would say that having a purpose is great. Now, your purpose may well change over time, very much like the rings of a tree. And just think about if you graduate from college, if you get married or not get married, if you get a divorce, if you lose a loved one, if you get sick, if you find a new job, if you retire, all those times may be times you want to rethink and repurpose your life. But what is really ongoing is being purposeful. So you don’t just find a purpose, write it down, put it in your office, tack it up and go, okay, great. That’s all I need. Now. You need to think about applying your resources, your energy to goals that fit with your purpose. Then you become purposeful. And that’s what’s really life-changing. It’s not just simply having a sense of purpose. It’s literally becoming purposeful.

Brett McKay:

What do you tell people? Because I’ve experienced this, people who have a clear sense of purpose, but they have those moments where they’re just like, I don’t have the energy or the mojo or the juice, whatever you want to call it, to keep striving, even if they’re doing things like taking care of their sleep, eating right, exercising. But I feel like I have those moments where it’s like, I just can’t do this anymore where you’re having repeated setbacks or there’s this period happens to all of us. Yeah, periods of stagnation. When you’re trying to pursue your purpose, how do you get the mojo back during these periods?

Vic Strecher:

If I’m in this river that has a strong current in it, in other words, I’m really feeling very purposeful. I’d mentioned this earlier that if you find a stream that’s moving alongside of that purpose, you may want to pop into that stream. You may want to find some new way of still maintaining your sense of purpose and becoming purposeful in just a slightly different domain. You may take up a hobby, you may start to volunteer for something. You may try something that you may even fail in. Purposeful people, by the way, tend to have a more growth mindset. They’re willing to fail, they’re willing to try new things. So going out and challenging yourself I think is really important. When we retire so often, we miss challenging ourselves. So in retirement, very often you need to repurpose your life and provide new, fresh challenges, even if you don’t succeed in those, or even if your body is saying, wait a second, I’m breaking down. I can’t do this as well. Well, you accept that, but you also say, I’m going to continue to challenge myself and continue to maybe risk failure. It’s really essential. That’s a simple answer to it. And I don’t mean to be pollyannish about it. People who stagnate, that’s a tough time. But trying to seek new ways, new purposes, new streams that move off of this river may be an important thing for you to do and consider.

Brett McKay:

So change the purpose, but keep being purposeful.

Vic Strecher:

And one thing, I’m actually working on a new book around purpose. I’ve been asked to write a book that’s almost like a workbook around finding purpose. And one way that’s worked very well for people, especially as you tend to get older, is creating a life narrative. And this is seeing your life as chapters of a book. Literally naming the chapters of your book, like maybe one chapter is Finding my Way. Maybe another one is starting over again. Whatever those things are, they won’t be yours, but those might be chapters. Then identifying turning points in your life as if it’s a book. Then try to learn about the tough times without minimizing the tough times. Learn what the toughest times did to create turning points, finding themes in this book that you have written about yourself. Maybe even name a new chapter. When I wrote my book for Harper Collins, the editor gave me very good advice.

He said, before you write this book, write your book review. I said, I haven’t even written the book. How do I write a book review? He said, write the book review, because then you’ll know what you want people to think and feel about your book. What if you wrote a book review of your life? In other words, you almost wrote your own memorial service. You wrote what’s on your headstone. It may give you certain new ways of thinking about your life to develop a new approach, a new way of thinking about purpose, so it doesn’t stagnate.

Brett McKay:

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

Vic Strecher:

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, my book is entitled, Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. I’ve also spent the last 10 years now developing an application called Purposeful, and you can find this at purposeful.io, and this is an app that really covers just about everything we’ve been talking about. It helps you not only find a purpose, and it uses AI to help you find purpose, but then importantly, it helps you become purposeful. We have real guardrails on this to keep the AI from hallucinating from going off on its own. We didn’t want AI to go into the internet and find things and make stuff up. So everything we put into this is very what we call evidence-based. Very, very carefully done, and we’ve built a framework around helping you become more purposeful as we’ve done in my book as well. So those are two places that I might recommend, and both of them I’ve devoted a lot of time thinking about not just making stuff up, but really making sure there’s a research underlying it, and I just appreciate people like you who have been thinking about these deep thoughts and helping the public think about these deep thoughts as well. I really appreciate this interviewer. You’re a wonderful and very careful interviewer, and I appreciate you.

Brett McKay:

Well, Vic, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vic Strecher. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Kate and I spend many, many hours searching far and wide for the very best guest and shaping the interviews into episodes that are always worth listening to. If you’ve gotten something out of the show, consider helping more people discover it by leaving a review on iTunes or Spotify, or sharing it with a friend. As always, thank for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

If you’re looking for a way to improve your fitness, boost your mental health, and reconnect with a deeply human activity — all without going to the gym or pounding your knees on a daily run — then rucking may be the practice you’ve been looking for.

Rucking is simple: throw some weight on your back and start walking. But a little context and a few key tips can make it a safer, more effective, and more satisfying experience. Here to unpack those principles and practicals is Michael Easter, author of Walk With Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking. Michael and I first explore the evolutionary and military history of carrying load. We then dive into why rucking is perhaps the most accessible form of training for strength and stamina, and such an effective tool for alleviating back pain, building bone health, and fostering fat loss. We get into using a backpack versus a weighted vest, how much weight you should carry, and how you can get started today with stuff you’ve probably already got lying around.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Michael’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast: 
  • Episode #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis
  • Episode #930: Break Your Bad Habits by Escaping the Scarcity Loop
• The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter
• AoM Article: Cardio for the Man Who Hates Cardio — The Benefits of Rucking
• AoM podcast interview with the founder of GoRuck
• AoM Podcast #682: Get Rucking
• AoM Article: Don’t Just Lift Heavy, Carry Heavy
• AoM Article: How to Take Care of Feet on a Hike or Ruck
• AoM Article: One Weird Trick for Busting Through a Weight-Loss Plateau
• AoM Article: The Benefits of Hanging for Strength and Mobility
• AoM Article: Lessons From the Roman Art of War
• GoRuck

Connect with Michael Easter

• Michael’s Substack: Two Percent

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. If you’re looking for a way to improve your fitness, boost your mental health, and reconnect with a deeply human activity, all without going to the gym or pounding your knees on a daily run, then rucking may be the practice you’ve been looking for. rucking is simple. Throw some weight on your back and start walking. But a little context and a few key tips can make it a safer, more effective and more satisfying experience. 

Here to unpack those principles and practicals is Michael Easter, author of Walk With Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking. Michael and I first explored the evolutionary military history of carrying load. We then dive into why rucking is perhaps the most accessible form of training for strength and stamina and such an effective tool for alleviating back pain, building bone health, and fostering fat loss. We get into using a backpack versus a weighted vest, how much weight you should carry and how you get started today with stuff you probably already got lying around after the show’s over. Check out our show notes at aom.is/ruck. 

All right, Michael Easter, welcome back to the show.

Michael Easter:

Thanks for having me back, man. I’m excited to be here.

Brett McKay:

See you got a new book out called Walk With Weight: The Definitive Guide to Rucking. For those who aren’t familiar with rucking, you’ve become kind of the evangelist, the Paul, the Apostle of rucking. For those who aren’t familiar with the activity, what is rucking?

Michael Easter:

That’s a fine distinction. The evangelist of rucking. I like that. The simplest way to put it is rucking is just throwing some weight in a backpack and going for a walk. Now I also think it gets interpreted and starts to capture things like putting on a weight vest and going for a walk, but basically carrying weight on your body, walking across the earth. That’s it. Pretty simple.

Brett McKay:

That’s pretty simple, but there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see in this conversation. But how did you discover rucking? 

Michael Easter:

So my background was, I was an editor at Men’s Health magazine for about seven years, and so I’m always in that role looking for fitness trends coming out and rocking had sort of popped up as this kind of interesting thing that was tied to the military. But I think when I started to really understand why it is such a powerful physical activity for humans, it came when I was reporting my book, The Comfort Crisis, and for that book I spent about a month up in the Arctic and we were on this caribou hunt. So it took us about two weeks to finally hunt a caribou and then we had to pack it out. And as I was doing that pack out, I started to sort of realize, and we can get into the sort of evolutionary science of this, that humans are really unique in our ability to carry weight. So we’re the only mammal that can carry weight for distance. And I’ve always been really interested in the things that shaped us as humans in the past, how can they still help us today? So that sort of set off the idea that packing out 120 some odd pounds of caribou across this freezing tundra. That’s terrible to walk on.

Brett McKay:

How long ago was that? 

Michael Easter:

Yeah, that was the fall of 2019.

Brett McKay:

So I love rucking. I do it about once a week. I discovered it back in 2012 because the founders of Huckberry, Andy and Richard, they introduced me to the founder of GORUCK — at about that time Huckberry started doing some partnerships with GORUCK and…what’s the name of the founder? We’ve had him on the podcast.

Michael Easter:

Jason McCarthy.

Brett McKay:

Jason McCarthy. He invited me to do a GORUCK Tough. Never heard of this. And I was like, okay, why not? So I got a ruck sack, started training for it, and I did the GORUCK Tough with my brother in Oklahoma City in November, I think 2012. It was cold, I remember it was like 30 degrees. And have you done a GORUCK Tough?

Michael Easter:

Is that the 12 hour one?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, the 12 hour one.

Michael Easter:

Yeah. So I’ve done a Tough and a Heavy . . . I did a Tough in Providence in probably about the same time you did. Maybe 2012. And that was for a Men’s Health story, and then I ended up doing a 24 hour one in maybe 2013 or 14 or something like that. So yeah, that was a good introduction. 

Brett McKay:

Yeah that was my introduction to rucking. I mean, for those who aren’t familiar with the Tough events, it’s all night, it’s 12 hours. You got a rucksack on with I think 40 or 30 pounds of weight. And then you get there and you do these calisthenics, bear crawls, pushups, you’re carrying people around and then they get you wet. The first thing, they found a pond and it’s like get in the pond and it was 30 degrees and so the rest of the night you’re just cold and wet and you’re carrying logs. It was brutal. I’ve done a few other events since then. Been a while since I’ve done one, but I still ruck. I caught the bug and I just enjoy it. We’re going to talk about why I enjoy it and why I think it’s so great and why you think it’s so great, because I think you did a really good job capturing it in this book. So people have probably heard the idea that humans were born to run, but you argue that they were really born to carry. So you kind of alluded to it a little bit in your answer previously, but what’s the history of humans carrying stuff?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, so I mean for some context, there’s this 2004 paper that came out from a guy from Harvard whose name is Daniel Lieberman, and he basically argued that if you look at the way the human body is built the way it is, we stand on two feet, we sweat, we don’t have much hair. One of the reasons for that is that we evolve to run long distances in order to hunt prey. So most other animals can’t cool themselves in the heat, and so if you get ’em running in the heat, they’re eventually going to tire. We don’t overheat when it’s hot out and we’re running. So we would use that to our advantage. We’d run like 10 miles chasing an animal. Eventually it would get too hot, it would topple over, we would sprint or whatever, and then we would successfully complete this hunt. Now what got lost in that, though, and this is kind of the realization that I had when I was hunting up in the Arctic, is what happens after you have killed the animal and you’re 10 miles from camp, you got to carry that thing back.

And if you look at us compared to many other animals, pretty much every animal can run, but we’re the only animal that can pick up weight and carry it a long distance across the earth. And that was only in the context of hunting. If you look at what humans sort of evolved doing every single day, we were carrying all the time where hunters and gatherers and gathering is simply an act of walking around finding food. You pick it up, you carry it, you gather more. We also had to carry our children, and that really shaped us as a species. So once we started walking on two feet, this was about 6 million years ago, by the way, once we start walking on two feet, it all of a sudden frees our hands. And once our hands are free, we can use them to manipulate the world, we can use them to carry tools into the unknown. We can do all these really interesting things with them that allows us to eventually take over the world. And that makes us really unique and explains why we are doing this over the internet in these lovely built houses as my dog hasn’t evolved much more than just sitting around begging for treats.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so carrying stuff really opened things up for us as a species. And you also get into the history of rucking. So it seems like the first carrying devices that we would think of as backpacks started with mothers who used them to carry their kids and that freed up their hands for doing other things. And then a lot of the development in the practice of humans carrying cargo on their backs happened in the military. So rucking, this idea of rucking, it comes from the military. Rucking is a military phrase. Talk about the history of soldiers in war carrying load in order to do what they do

Michael Easter:

When it comes to warfare, especially for most of history, these soldiers were having to take equipment really long distances by marching it. So you might have to walk 300 miles to a battle site with all of your unit as it were, and you’re carrying your gear the entire time. And a lot of this gear was very heavy loads in the past a couple thousand years ago, they might range from 35 pounds all the way up to 85 pounds. But this act of rucking, of carrying your gear as a soldier, that has really been the foundation of military training for basically all of time. If you look at how military units throughout the world have trained, the foundation has always been marching with weight and it still is.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean you talk about a manual written by a Roman guy where he talks about how to train a soldier and one of those training exercises was you had to just carry load for distance as much as possible.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, that was basically it. And a lot of the military units throughout time when they were trying to test their soldiers to see if they were ready for battle, the tests were basically tests of being able to march with weight. It could be, you have to be able to walk 12 miles with say 50 pounds in X amount of hours or whatever it might be. And these tests, they all sort of varied throughout different places, different military units and different periods of time, but they all are fundamentally based around can you carry X load for Y distance in Z time?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you had some examples from history. So the Macedonian soldiers, Alexander the Great’s soldiers, they marched to battle carrying about 80 pounds, a Greek hoplight, 50 pounds of gear in armor, and even their armor was just heavy. I remember when I took a class in ancient Greek history and they described how much the shin covers weighed, their spear, their shield, like, man, that’s got to be exhausting.

Michael Easter:

Oh yeah. And I will also add what makes this even more amazing is that, I mean those loads are heavy for anyone today, but when you look at the average size of men back then, they were far smaller than we are today. The average American man right now weighs about 200 pounds, and back then they would weigh say about 140 pounds. So if you’re carrying 85 pounds and you weigh 140 pounds, that’s like an average guy today carrying say around 120 pounds. So these are not insignificant loads. I mean these guys were unbelievably fit.

Brett McKay:

And they were doing it for long distances and sometimes really fast. After the Battle of Marathon, the Athenian army marched 25 miles back to Athens to head off the Persians, and they got there pretty fast and they were carrying their gear.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, it’ll definitely make you feel a little bit soft when you start reading about these soldiers of the past. One thing that I would add that I found pretty interesting is that as technology advances, you would think that the loads that our soldiers carry would’ve gone down. We would’ve made lighter gear, things would’ve become lighter, easier to carry. That’s not actually what happened. So some of our gear did become lighter, but we started adding more and more gear. So by the time we were in World War II, Vietnam, even the Iraq War, the loads that the average American soldier was carrying were around a hundred pounds. So we’ve kind of just ramped up the weight over time. That said, those soldiers were bigger, but these weights have just kind of gone up over time.

Brett McKay:

If you saw Saving Private Ryan, that D-Day invasion seemed like the very beginning. You saw some of those guys, they just drowned because they had too much stuff on ’em when they got into the water.

Michael Easter:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

So in the military, rucking has been a big part of their training. What has the military learned about walking with weight that has carried over into civilian life? What have we learned about the science of walking with weight from the military?

Michael Easter:

I think that there’s been some good and some bad. So I’m going to start with the good. Always give the hug first. Right? There’s some research especially conducted around the 1950s that found effectively the military was noticing, Hey, as we’ve loaded these guys up with more and more weight, we’re starting to see all these injuries. Not to mention to your point about the D-Day invasion, if you load a soldier down with too much weight and someone starts shooting at him, good luck getting out of the way. You can’t move as quick. So the military started looking at, okay, what is an amount of weight that will, one, reduce injury risk? And two, allow our soldiers to move swiftly and efficiently when they need to. And they basically found that one third of your body weight is about as much weight as you should carry to reduce injury risk and also be able to move well.

If you go over that, injury risk rises, you don’t move as well. So there was this push to try to lighten soldiers loads, but of course the industrial, military industrial complex of, Hey, you need more gear one out, we didn’t quite meet that. But that said, I think it gives the average person a good marker to know, Hey, you should probably never go above this weight. And in the book, I argue most people, the vast majority of the time, for your average, you should be going a lot lighter than that as well. Now lemme talk to you on the bad. I think one of the bad things is that because rucking, especially as it has become more popular, it has been framed through this sort of military lens.

But remember, humans evolve to carry, I mean, this is a fundamentally human act we’ve been doing very, very long before we had militaries. And so when rucking becomes popular, people look up rucking and they start to look at, okay, well how much weight are soldiers carrying? But you got to remember, soldiers are carrying these massive weights because their mission is to win a war. Whereas the average person, you’re not going into warfare, you’re just trying to improve your health and fitness. And so a lighter load is going to be a lot more appropriate, and I think it pushed some people into using maybe a little too heavy a weight at first.

Brett McKay:

Do you have any idea when rucking started becoming a civilian fitness activity, were you able to figure out the evolution of that?

Michael Easter:

That’s a good question. I mean, I think you had soldiers come back from the military. Some groups of veterans were doing it. Those that hadn’t been too scarred by the a hundred mile marches they had to do in training. I think you had some brands sort of pop up like GORUCK that started to put it on people’s radar. I think probably the rise of it being popular today, I think my book, The Comfort Crisis helped with that a little bit. Now I will say that took me going on shows like yours and talking about it to sort of give it a bump to the average person, but it’s kind of in this slow trajectory of more people doing it. People who have a sort of platform like I do writing about it, people inviting me on their platforms and it just sort of spreading.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because I see it often. I see it more often when I’m in my neighborhood. I see women might not have a weighted backpack on, but just like a weighted vest on, and you didn’t see that five years ago.

Michael Easter:

Totally. Yeah. The weighted vest phenomenon has become really popular. It’s a great thing.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about why rucking is so great for health and longevity. You start off in the book in this section talking about why rucking is a great activity for weight loss. So why is rucking a great activity for weight loss?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, simplest way to think about it is that rucking combines strength and cardio. So you’re getting a strength stimulus because you’re carrying weight and your muscles have to work harder to carry that weight. Now because you are also walking, that’s an endurance activity, so you’re getting endurance. So by mixing those two things, you see that from a per mile perspective, rucking burns more calories than walking or running alone. And so you kind of get more bang for your buck. Now I will say, of course you can cover more miles in a quicker span of time if you’re running, but then you won’t get that strength stimulus. So when you look at calorie burn, it really depends on how much weight you’re carrying, what is the terrain like, et cetera, et cetera. But anywhere from 20% to about 200% more calories compared to walking or running. And again, it really kind of depends. Of course, the heavier you’re using, the crazier the terrain, the more calorie burn you’re going to get.

Brett McKay:

So it’s a lot of bang for your buck in terms of calorie burn.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, tons of bang for your buck. And one thing I would point out too is that it seems to be uniquely good for fat loss. So there’s some interesting studies. There’s this one on this group of backcountry hunters, and what scientists did is they took this group of hunters, measured their body fat percentage, took a bunch of other health measurements, whatever. Then these guys went out and they did, I believe it was a 12 day hunt. So when you’re doing a backcountry hunt, you have this heavy backpack full of all your gear. You’re also not packing in a ton of food because food is heavy. So you’re generally undereating, which sort of simulates the exact same thing that people do when they’re trying to lose weight. You want to move more, you want to eat less. Now when most people lose weight, you lose a mix of fat, yes, but also muscle.

So you want to lose the fat, but you ideally want to hang on to as much muscle as possible because muscle is going to be good for your ability to function, it’s going to be better for your metabolism, on and on and on. But when these guys came back from their hunt and they retested them, these researchers found that the hunters lost, I think it was about 12 pounds on average. And the entirety of that loss came from fat, which is really surprising. So they hadn’t lost any muscle, and in fact they had gained a slight amount. It was insignificant, but it was still a slight amount, which really shows us rucking can be great for fat loss. And I think the reason for that is rather simple, it’s that when you have this load on your body, your body needs to hang on to your muscle in order to move that load across the ground. So it almost triggers your body like, Hey, we actually need our muscles here. But you’re also pairing cardio, which is generally a much better calorie burner than lifting alone. So it’s almost like it preferentially shifts what you’re burning to fat.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. I’ve also heard that this sort of speculative research about how we maybe have this sense in our body like gravity of weight, and that determines how many calories you burn. So if you weigh 220 pounds, that requires a certain number of calories to maintain, but if you lose 20 pounds, now you’re 200 pounds, your body is going to burn less calories. And so I’ve heard of this. One trick you can do is as you’re losing weight and you want to keep losing weight, is to put on a weighted vest that weighs 20 pounds and your body’s still going to think it’s 220 and then you’ll burn calories as if it were 220. And it’s not just because you burn more calories because it takes more effort to move, but it’s because it senses your body weighs more. Have you heard about that research?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, I think it’s new. It’s definitely emerging, but it’s really interesting. They think effectively what happens is your bones sort of do some signaling. And so when you have that load on your body, your bones don’t necessarily know where it’s coming from. It leads you to not get as much of a metabolic drop as would happen had you not had the added vest on after you’ve lost weight.

Brett McKay:

Well, speaking of bones, rucking is also good for bones. How is rucking good for your bones?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, well, and first I’ll say when you start talking about bone health, I think most people sort of roll their eyes because who the hell cares about their bones? But the reason this is important is because as you age, your bones start to lose density. Now this is generally talked about from a female perspective because it happens more often in women, but that said, doctors are finding more and more men facing an issue with bone density. And the reason for that is because as a society we’ve generally become a lot more sedentary. And so your bones need impact and loading in order to maintain and even improve their density. So rucking gives you this ability to load your bones for quite a long time, much longer than lifting because the average set of lifting exercise is going to be, I don’t know, 20, 30 seconds. So you can load your bones for about an hour, get those impact on them, and that seems to help maintain, maybe even improve bone density, which becomes really important because as you age, if you fall and break a hip, that is the worst thing that can happen. I think the stat is about a third of people who are over 65 and break a hip die within the next six months because it just totally wrecks their function and then everything goes downhill.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so yeah, rucking is great for strengthening bones. You think carrying stuff on your back would be bad for back pain, but you point to research that carrying load on your back is probably one of the best things you can do for your back pain. Walk us through that.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, I think people definitely find that counterintuitive. I did. But what happens is there’s some military research about this. When you have the weight on your back, you would think your back starts to work much harder. That’s not actually the case if your back muscles actually end up working less when you have a weight on your back. And so then the question is, okay, well what’s keeping me upright? What happens is that your core actually picks up all of that slack. So your core ends up working a lot harder. And when you look at what one of the root causes is for back pain, and by the way, 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their life, this is one of the most common pains. The reason is because people’s cores are so weak. So your core is really built to stabilize your spine if you have to pick anything up or move a certain way.

And so as we become more sedentary, our cores have become weaker and then you have to go pick up a bag of mulch or whatever in the backyard. Your core is not strong enough to protect your spine and then you get a problem. So by rucking your strengthening your core in a way that to me is a little more interesting than doing planks and bird dogs and whatever you might do. Now that said, you should do those too. I wouldn’t discourage you from any form of exercise, but rucking really allows you to strengthen your core. And there’s also a researcher up in Canada. He’s kind of considered the world’s foremost back health expert, and one thing that he does with a lot of his back patients is have them ruck because he says that it strengthens their core. It also sort of decompresses their spine, allows their spine to get some light motion in, and that tends to do some good things for your back.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so rucking is great for weight loss, especially fat loss because you’re burning more calories, you’re maintaining muscle as you do the ruck. It’s great for your bones, it’s great for back pain. Another thing you talk about, another health benefit of rucking is that it gets you outside and is social. What are the health benefits of being outside and doing this with other people?

Michael Easter:

Oh man. Well, the health benefits of being outside. Now, I had a chapter about this in The Comfort Crisis and when I first started hearing people say, oh, being outside is good for your health, it’s good for your mental health, I was kind of like, eh, that’s some kind of hippie nonsense. But then I looked into the research and it goes all the way back to the eighties. So we’re talking like four decades of research and it consistently finds that being outdoors tends to reduce stress levels, tends to increase happiness, tends to lead people to be more productive once they get back into the office, tends to improve focus. And it also actually boosts a lot of physical health markers. So time in the outdoors has been shown to lower blood sugar, all these different good things for your health. And then I think on the social component. So when you look at a lot of exercise that’s endurance focused, it can be hard to sort of pair it right with another person and make it social. So let’s say you and I go for a run, and let’s say that you’re a way better runner than me.

Brett McKay:

I’m not.

Michael Easter:

Okay. Let’s say I’m a way better runner than you.

Brett McKay:

Yes.

Michael Easter:

Then we’ll go with that. Then if you and I are going to go for a run and try and have a conversation, well, your lack of running fitness means that in order for us to talk, you’re going to be running rather slow. And that’s really not going to give me that much. I’m really going to be sort of held back right on the opposite coin. If I go, all right, I’m setting the tempo of this run, you’re going to be dragging behind. Like, this sucks. I hate this. We’re not going to be able to talk at all. So it’s hard to sort of get into a deep conversation. You can run together, but you’re not really going to talk. Whereas with rucking, I’ll, I’ll give you the benefit here. Let’s say you’re a way better rucker than me and you can carry more weight. Well, you can simply carry say 45 pounds and get a great workout and walk and I can just carry say 30 pounds and I can get an equally good workout.

And we can have that walk go rucking together and have a long conversation and really connect. And when you look at research about when do humans have the best conversations, how do we connect for men in particular? This is for everyone, but I’ll say for men in particular, it tends to happen when we are shoulder to shoulder out moving across the earth. And so wrecking really allows us to capture that. You get in a good workout, but you’re able to really talk about things with people, connect with people, and that just makes it really sort of universal. So another example is like, I’m not going to go for a run with my mother, right? She’s 75 years old, but I could say, Hey mom, do you want to go ruck together? I could take 35 pounds, she could take like five pounds and we’d be able to do that activity, get in a good workout, but have a conversation. So I think that makes it really social. And then you pair that with the fact that we’re outside that has all those benefits. It makes it really powerful and accessible for people.

Brett McKay:

So going back to what we talked about earlier, how rucking grew out of the military, and sometimes there’s good lessons and parallels we can draw from military rucking to civilian rucking, and sometimes there’s not. Whenever we’ve posted about rucking on the site, military guys will often chime in and say, oh, rucking, that destroyed my joints, it destroyed my body. Don’t ruck. So is rucking safe?

Michael Easter:

The short answer is yes. When I released The Comfort Crisis, I got a few emails from military guys like that saying that I didn’t know what I was talking about because rucking hurt their knees or their back. But you have to ask, what kind of loads is the military carrying? Like I said before, they’re carrying really heavy loads because the mission is the war for the average person. You don’t need to carry that much weight. You can just carry, say anywhere from 5-20% of your body weight and it is really, really safe. So the injury rate for rucking is pretty close to that of walking, and the injury rate for walking is only 1%. Now the rate goes up, the more weight you add, but you don’t have to add a lot of weight to get a really massive benefit. So what was interesting too is that after the comfort crisis has been out for a while, it touches on rucking.

I got follow-up emails from military guys who said I was skeptical about that rucking thing because the military just made me hate it and it injured me. But once I lightened the load, it totally improved my fitness. I didn’t have any injuries. I was able to lose weight to lose fat. I improved my endurance, I improved my body composition. And it also sort of, they said return them to the roots of the military in a way that kind of made them feel good. Like, okay, I’m back at it. So long story short is if you’re not using crazy military loads, you probably won’t get hurt rucking.

Brett McKay:

And I like rucking for cardio because people typically think when I got to do cardio, I got to run. But running can beat up your joints. The injury rate for long distance running is like 20% to 70%, just depending, and it’s usually joint pain. You have something wrong with your knee or something like that because the impact every time you hit the ground, it’s really hard. rucking, you don’t have that issue. So you get a good cardio workout without the stress on your joints again, if you’re keeping the weight reasonable.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, how many people do you know that say they’ve been hurt by running? Probably any runner you’ve ever talked to, running takes a toll on your body. I mean, it’s good for us. I think sometimes it’s like you learn from your injuries, you clean up your form, good things happen. But just from a general population health perspective, my opinion is that if you can choose activities that have a lower risk of injuring, you should probably do those. Because what happens when people get injured is that they tend to stop exercising at all. And then when they stop exercising, all their health markers go down, mental health goes down, a lot of bad things happen. So for me, it’s just thinking about what is the activity that I not only enjoy, but that I can also continue to do for decades without worrying that I’m eventually going to blow out a knee or whatever it is and then be sidelined for a really long time.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I call rucking cardio for the man who hates cardio.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, that’s a good tagline. I should have put that in the book. Should have consulted you.

Brett McKay:

And it’s funny, whenever I’ve introduced rucking to guys, I never done cardio, but once I learned about rucking, it’s changed. I do it all the time and they just love it. So again, I’m a big booster of rucking. That’s why I have you on the podcast to talk about rucking. So let’s talk about how to get started with rucking. For those who haven’t done it before, there are lots of different options these days for carrying weight backpack, there’s special ruck sacks, now there’s weighted vests. What do you think is the best option for someone who’s starting out for the device they use to carry the weight?

Michael Easter:

I think for most people starting out, I just try and make it as simple as possible. Find a backpack you have in your house. Could be backpack you used in college, could be one you used for travel, could be a pack you bought for a hike, fill it with something that weighs something and go out and walk. It’s that simple to begin. You just have to begin because I think oftentimes people get paralysis by analysis when it comes to gear. It’s like, well, should I have this one or this one? And what equipment do I need to buy? It’s like, no, this is just so accessible. Make it that way. And people might often find like, okay, I really love this thing. Great. I want to invest in some proper rucking specific gear. And if that’s you, then I think that can be a good way to find a pack that maybe fits you better, that handles the load more appropriately. But it really can be as simple as just find a backpack and go out for a walk, throw some stuff in it that weighs something.

Brett McKay:

Are there any benefits to the weighted vest? Again, we’ve been seeing those more often.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. The book gets into sort of the nuances between packs and vests and it says, for what circumstances might one be more appropriate than the other? My message is generally that you walk with weight matters a lot more than how you walk with weight. So both are beneficial, both have their nuances, but when you’re just starting, I just tell people, don’t overthink it. Just start. If you want to get a weight vest, get it. It also means you’re going to have to invest a bit more money. It’s also a very sort of hyper-specific contraption, whereas like a backpack, you can use that for travel too. It doubles for all these different things.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve tried both the vest and the backpack, the weight vest does distribute the weight more and it keeps the weight high and tight, but I don’t think it’s as comfortable as a backpack because you’ve got the weight on the back and on the front. Just having that weight on your chest, it makes it hard to breathe. And you talk about this in the book, one of the benefits of the backpack when you have the weight just on your back, you can lean into it and it makes it a little bit more comfortable with the weighted vest. It’s just pulling you down to the center of the earth and that gets uncomfortable.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, so I think for most people, most of the time a backpack is the answer. I’ll get into a couple points. So the one you made when you have a weight vest, you’ve got when weight is on the front, especially if it’s these military style vests that almost look like bulletproof vests.

When you have weight sitting on your chest, that can make it hard to breathe, especially if it’s a heavy load. So now it becomes harder to breathe as you’re doing cardio. That sucks. Number two is that those get really hot if it’s the summer because your sweat can’t evaporate because you’re sort of enveloped by this thing. The second point that you made is, and this kind of applies more to longer distances and heavier loads, but I’ll give you an extreme circumstance so people can understand it. It’s like if you got 300 pounds and you put it in a backpack and put it on someone, say some random guy, chances are it would of course be uncomfortable. It would be too heavy, but it would still be able to stand because when the weight is at your back, you can kind of lean in and you have something to resist against that sort of balances you.

Now, if you take that same 300 pounds in the form of a weight vest and strap it on someone, they’re probably going to collapse. And that’s simply because there’s nothing to really lean into, resist against. It just sort of covers you like this super heavy blanket and you fall. Now of course, most people aren’t using insane loads, but that begins to matter at everyday loads when you’re going across a long distance. So if you get really tired and your sort of form starts to falter with a vest, you’ve got nowhere to go to sort of maintain proper form. Whereas with a pack just to kind of lean forward and you’ll be able to maintain proper form. And a good case study of this is through-hikers. So backpackers who do month long hikes where they’re hiking every day. Now, those people could figure out some way to have a contraption that keeps their gear on their front and their back, but no one actually does that. Every single person uses backpacks. And that’s simply because when you’re covering long distances and a lot of miles, the backpack just becomes way more comfortable, keeps your form better, leads to fewer issues. And so for me, that’s kind of the answer there. And then I’ll add one more thing is that the vests, especially the military style ones, you kind of look like you’re going to maybe throw a coup against your HOA as you’re walking through the neighborhood.

It’s just like, is this dude wearing a bulletproof vest? Should I be concerned what’s going on here? Just sort of a weird look. Whereas a backpack, it’s like people wear backpacks all the time in all different public places, pretty normal.

Brett McKay:

All right, so just go with backpack. Make it simple if you’re getting started. Let’s talk about weight. When you’re first starting out, how much weight should you start off with? So we learned from the military, you don’t want to go above a third of your body weight when you’re first starting out. What weight should you pick?

Michael Easter:

I mean, I tell people a go-to is 10% of your body weight. Some people might find that too light at first, but I would rather you start light than start super heavy and get out there and go, oh my God, this is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I don’t ever want to do this again. Because you can always add weight later on, and that allows you to get your body used to it to sort of build up some fitness and then you can just sort of add from there. I realize this is called the Art of Manliness, but I’ll point out two things, differences between men and women with the starting. So I think women will sometimes start too light. They might only use say, five pounds, and it’s a little too easy. So I would encourage women, you want it to be uncomfortable, shouldn’t feel soul crushing, but don’t be afraid to use 15 pounds instead of 10. With men, we tend to have the opposite problem where we go online and look at photos of navy seals and think, I’m just going to load this sucker up. I would discourage that at first. I think you want to kind of build a base where you’re used to it, you want some muscles that have been underused to sort of develop, and then you can start adding some weight from there.

Brett McKay:

And for weight, there’s all sorts of different options. It can be as easy as when I first started rucking, I just used a bunch of bricks taped together. That was it. It was pretty rudimentary, but you could use books, you could use a milk jug filled with water, or then you can get as fancy with the ruck plates that they have available.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, there’s a lot of options. I think your milk jug idea is really good. And the reason I like that is because if you get out on your initial rucks and you’re like, oh, I’m starting to fade and I still have three miles to get home, you can always just dump out the water and you’ll be fine. So that makes it rather accessible. Things like sandbags can also be good. You can kind of find the right weight. It also sort of molds to the bag nicely. Bags of rice, some people will use dumbbells. If you use a dumbbell, I would suggest you wrap it in a towel so you don’t have this steel weight digging into your back the whole time, which can be uncomfortable. But really just get creative. The thing just has to weigh something when you load it, you want it tight to your back and you’re good to go.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So besides having it tight to your back, is there a placement that’s better for comfort up high in the middle low? What should people think about there as far as comfort and avoiding injuries?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, I think generally if you can have the weight higher, do that’s not always easy to do or practical if you’re just using random stuff you find around the house. I mean, one way to fix that is to put maybe a little cardboard box or something at the bottom of your pack or a towel, so it elevates the weight. And then do keep it close to your back. You also want it secure. You don’t want the weight sort of flopping around every step. That can just kind of alter your walking patterns so tight to your back, secure a little bit higher if you can get it higher and then just go out and walk.

Brett McKay:

And then when you first start out, how long should a ruck be? Start off with a mile, two miles, what are you looking at there?

Michael Easter:

I just tell people if you have a normal walking route in your neighborhood that you do, let’s say your walk with your spouse after dinner is two miles, just do that. It’s a good way to start. I would discourage that phenomenon where we choose a new exercise and we decide to just go all in with crazy distances because pretty much with any exercise, doing too much too soon is the main driver of injuries. So it’s like, yeah, just do your kind of normal walk and see how it goes

Brett McKay:

In terms of frequency, how often can you ruck without running into overuse injuries?

Michael Easter:

So I like to say that if humans couldn’t carry every day, we would’ve died off as a species a very long time ago. But that said, today because we carry so infrequently, it might make sense to have a rest day between days that you ruck, but another option is to simply use more weight some days and less weight. Others. For me, I’m rocking nearly every day, and that’s because I have to walk my dogs every day. So I just look at it as, look, I can get more from every step if I just throw this ruck on when I walk the dogs. And I’ve been totally fine. I mean, I’m not carrying crazy loads. I’ve just sort of found, okay, what’s a good go-to weight? And this is a recommendation for everyone. What’s a weight that feels uncomfortable? It’s there, but it’s also not soul crushing, and you feel like you could walk a really long distance with it without tapping out.

So for me, that’s about 35 pounds. That’s what I wear when I’m walking my dogs. If I’m going a really long distance, let’s say I’m doing a 12 mile walk, I might bump that down to say 25, 20 pounds. But sometimes if I’m training for a hunt or a big backpacking trip, I’ll go heavier than 35. I’ll use 45 or 50. And there’s even sometimes a workout that I love and it’ll make you feel like a pack mule is to throw. You can really load this thing, throw a lot of weight in a pack, get on a treadmill, set it to say an incline, 10 to 15 incline and just walk slowly for an hour that will get you ready for the mountains. And it’s one that I love. And because you’re on a treadmill, you don’t have to worry as much about injury because one of the reasons injury risk gets higher when you have heavier loads is that if you misstep and you roll an ankle with say 80 pounds on your back, well now that ankle, that would’ve been a sort of minor little spraining that can become a real problem. But with the treadmill, you don’t really have to worry about curbs. You didn’t see crap in the road, things like that. And there’s a little bit of give to the treadmill, so most people tend to not ever get injured doing that.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned how you ruck whenever you walk your dog. That’s something you talk about in the book is that you can just ruck whenever. You don’t have to make rucking as this thing of, “I’m setting aside time for a ruck.” You can just put on a ruck sack or a weighted vest when you’re doing chores around the house. I’ve done that. I’ll do that every now and then. It’s like, all right, we got a bunch of chores put on the weighted vest and make it a little bit harder. And yeah, it doesn’t destroy you. It’s a little bit harder, but after you’re done, you’re not like, oh boy, I’m beat. I need to spend a day recovering.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, exactly. For another book I’m working on, I had this really long through-hike through Southern Utah. It took like 45 days, and so to get ready to have a pack on my back 12 hours a day, I would just wear my ruck around the house as I was vacuuming, picking up, living life, whatever it might be. And that really sort of slowly got my body ready to be able to carry that weight, and I’m burning more calories just doing my everyday tasks that I already had to do.

Brett McKay:

Have you noticed for people who are doing rucking as a civilian activity for fitness, are there common injuries you see with this population? And if so, what are some of the things you can do to mitigate those injuries?

Michael Easter:

The most common thing, and I wouldn’t consider it an injury, is that people will say their shoulders are uncomfortable during a ruck or after a ruck. And I think that’s just because we rarely carry weight in backpacks anymore. So it’s like you throw some weight on your shoulders, they’re going, what the hell is this? We haven’t done this since you were in high school, but that discomfort isn’t necessarily injury, it’s just your body saying, what the hell are we doing here? A way to fix that is pretty simple. It’s to just do a dead hang from a pull-up bar. So just hang with your body, slack, your arms totally straight for say 30, 60 seconds because the weight is pulling down on your shoulders. That almost elongates them, and that seems to sort of fix that over time. And eventually most people’s shoulders adapt and it fixes the problem really quick. Another one is blisters. Anytime you start adding weight to your body, now there’s more pressure on your feet. And so blisters can definitely happen. My advice there is if you get a hotspot, don’t let it devolve into a crazy blister. Try and treat it. That’s pretty easy. I mean, a lot of it is just your feet need to get tougher over time, but just don’t push yourself so far into the red that now we’ve got a real blister problem

Brett McKay:

Going back to that dead hang. Even if you don’t ruck, I recommend that for anybody. It’s one of the best things I’ve do for my shoulders, especially if you’re a bench presser, shoulder presser, you get really tight in your shoulders, you might have a shoulder impingement, do the dead hang, make it a regular part of your fitness activity. It’ll help your shoulders out a ton.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. And if you want to level it up, you can just do single arm hangs as you progress. But I agree with you. That’s something I try and do every single day, even for just 30 seconds.

Brett McKay:

So your big proponent of this thing called the 2% mindset, in fact, your substack is called 2%. What is the 2% mindset and how do you apply it to rucking?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, so the 2% mindset, it comes from this study that found that only 2% of people take the stairs when there’s also an escalator available 2%. Now, to me, 100% of people know that taking the stairs is going to be better for their long-term health, maybe even their long-term mental health. But 98% of people choose to do the easy effortless thing, even though it might harm them in the long run, in the context of how little we move today. So the 2% mindset, it’s not really about the stares though in that study. To me, it’s like this overarching idea of being willing to embrace short-term discomfort to get a long-term benefit. So yes, it’s the stairs facing the discomfort of the stairs to get to that second floor instead of doing the easy thing. But you can apply that to so many different areas of your life.

And I think by applying that in as many different areas as you can find, those little benefits you get from each uncomfortable act, they really compound over time and lead to these massive changes. Now to apply it to rucking, I think it goes back to if you have something that you already have to do, but you could throw a rock on as you do it to make it a little bit harder to get more from every step, to me that feels like a massive win. It’s like if you got to walk down to your mailbox in our neighborhood, our mailbox is set away. It’s like a quarter mile away or whatever. If I could just throw a rock on, I’m getting more from every step. And if I do that every single day that I get the mail, that’s going to add up a lot over time.

If I’m vacuuming, throw on the ruck, if I’m doing a nightly walk with my kids or whatever, I’m going to throw on the ruck. And so I think it’s really just finding ways. How can I add this tool into things I already have to do in order to get a bigger long-term benefit from that thing? For example, my doctor, great dude, he started wearing a ruck as he was doing rounds, so he was literally walking around the hospital all day visiting patients, and he just rolls in and consults with people, and he is got this pack on, and it’s like, to me, that is awesome. He already has to do rounds. It’s not impeding his ability to do his job in any way, and he is also showing his patients a really valuable lesson that this exercise thing that I’ve been telling you to do for all these years, it doesn’t have to be that hard. I think that one problem with the way that society views exercise is we view it as this separate distinct thing from our normal lives. It’s like we got our 30 minutes in the gym where we run on a treadmill. It’s a special little time, and then the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of the day were totally sedentary. But to me it’s like, how can I just add more activity into my life? How can I make the things I already have to do a little bit harder so that I can live better?

Brett McKay:

I love the whole idea of the 2% mindset, and I know I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but be a two percenter has become a motto in our family.

Michael Easter:

Awesome. I love it.

Brett McKay:

So whenever we’re at the airport especially, that’s when you see stairs because there’s almost always stairs next to the escalator, and we tell our kids, okay, McKay’s are two percenters. We’re taking the stairs.

Michael Easter:

I love it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So let’s say you’ve been rucking for a while and you want to challenge yourself. Any challenges you’d recommend for people to try out after they’ve been doing this for a while?

Michael Easter:

Yeah, I list a handful in the book, and a lot of them are based off of some of the military challenges that we talked about. I’ve of course adapted them for the average person. So there’s a big list there. But I think just it could be using a certain weight for a certain distance. I mean, my favorite thing personally is once a year I’m going to take a long backpacking trip somewhere, say three days out with my friends. That gives me incentive to keep rucking all year. So I’m able to handle those loads when I go into the mountains. And that in itself is a good challenge. It’s like, all right, we’re going to try and do 20 miles a day. We got our 35, 40 pounds of gear on our backs, and we’re going to do this big loop, this big circuit, wherever it is in the mountains. And so I think finding these big challenges, I think can incentivize you to get those little wins we talked about with the 2% mindset, and then give you something that sort of pushes you up against the boundaries of your limits and teaches you something about yourself.

Brett McKay:

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

Michael Easter:

Probably the best place to find me is on my Substack. It’s called 2% as we talked about, and the website is twopct.com. There’s a lot of rucking material on there. You can find links to the book on there. And the book is of course available at pretty much anywhere you buy books, which I think for the vast majority of people is amazon.com.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Michael Easter, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Easter:

Yeah, thanks a lot, man.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Michael Easter. He’s the author of the book Walk With Weight. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can learn more information about his work at his website, 2%, and you can find that at twopct.com, twopct.com. It’s a great substack, one of my favorite newsletters. Check it out. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/ruck, where you can find resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member 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 podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails.

The simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront.

The dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off-limits.

My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization, from businesses to families, aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant, and the co-author of the bestselling book Crucial Conversations. For decades, he’s studied why people shut down or blow up when the stakes are high, emotions are strong, and opinions differ.

Today on the show, we talk about what makes a conversation “crucial,” why our brains betray us in conflict, and how to escape the false choice between maintaining a relationship and speaking honestly. From figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have, to creating the right conditions for connection, to dealing with criticism, we unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding — at work, at home, and everywhere else.

Connect With Joseph Grenny

• Crucial Learning website
• Joseph on LinkedIn

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. The awkward silence at work when everyone knows a project is going off the rails, the simmering resentment in a marriage over an issue neither spouse will confront, the dysfunction in a church where certain topics are understood to be off limits. My guest, Joseph Grenny, says that some of the biggest problems in every organization from businesses to families aren’t the issues themselves, but people’s inability to talk about them. Joseph is a business social scientist and consultant and the co-author of the bestselling book, Crucial Conversations. For decades he studied why people shut down or blow up when stakes are high, emotions are strong and opinions differ from figuring out what kind of conversation you need to have to creating the right conditions for connection to dealing with criticism. We unpack how to have the conversations you’ve been avoiding at work, at home, and everywhere else. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/CrucialConversations.

All right, Joseph Grenny, welcome to the show.

Joseph Grenny:

Happy to be here with you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a business social scientist and researcher. You’re a speaker and a corporate consultant who specializes in organizational performance and human behavior. And something you observed decades ago in companies really shaped your career, and that was that some of the biggest problems in companies are the result of people not feeling able to speak up about problems. And you wrote a book over 20 years ago, it’s called Crucial Conversations about how to fix that. So you train corporations and companies in this skill of crucial conversations, but this problem of not being able to talk about hard things, this happens in personal relationships too, like in families. It’s not just business. 

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, in fact, the general way we’ve come to describe our findings is that you can pretty much tell the health of any relationship, any team or any organization by looking at one simple thing. And that is the lag time between when people see it and when they say it, between when they feel it and when they discuss it, between when it’s a concern and when it’s a conversation. And so you look at a marriage and if there are undiscussable things that both of us are bothered about, but neither is talking about, it comes out in passive aggressive ways. If you don’t talk it out, you act it out and it shows up in your behavior. And that always makes matters worse and tends to make the problems persevere and even worsen. And so the general finding that any social system, it could be a church congregation, it could be a community organization, a nonprofit or what have you, even entire nations suffer from this. Our inability to have emotionally and politically risky conversations is at the heart of most all of our persistent problems.

Brett McKay:

So what makes a conversation a crucial conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

So there are three characteristics of a crucial conversation. One is that it is high stakes. There’s something on the table that matters a lot to me. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that the entire economy is going to crash. It could just be that my ego feels threatened, there’s something important to me. High stakes. Second, I come into these moments expecting the other person to disagree with me. I expect you to have an opposing opinion. And the third is there’s an emotional piece to this or it’s emotionally salient to us. And so the combination of high stakes, opposing opinions and strong emotions causes us to show up differently in these moments than we would most any other time. There are a lot of us that are quite princely or regal and effective diplomatic and so forth, and how we show up in a lot of communication, great at small talk, but in these moments, these moments of emotional stress and threat, we behave differently and that has enormous consequences for our outcomes.

Brett McKay:

Why do we behave differently? Because you take a step back and say, well, it’s just a conversation. It’s not like someone’s got a gun drawn on you.

Joseph Grenny:

Well, it is kind of like someone’s got a gun drawn on you, unfortunately. So I’ll give you a brief anecdote. One of my business partners, Kerry Patterson, and I had a long, long history of writing together. We did a lot of the writing on these books together and worked in very close collaboration. And as you’d expect, there were crucial conversations along the way. What happened on a particular Saturday where our pattern was one or the other of us would write the first draft of a chapter, send it to the other, the other would do critiques, and then we’d get together on the phone to talk about it. So I sent it over on Thursday. Kerry got the chapter and then he rewrote it. I sent it back and with some rewrites. So here we are, Saturday, seven o’clock. And I said, so Kerry, did you get it? And he said, yes, yes I did. I said, what’d you think? He said, you ruined it. I said, I didn’t ruin it, I fixed it. He said, you didn’t fix it. It’s all disjointed now. I said, it’s not disjointed. It has a soul. I mean, here we are. And this was a chapter of Crucial Conversations.

As I tell that story, and I recall that moment, I think I knew better than this. I knew how to respond in this moment, but it wasn’t coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t even accessible to me. Our problem in these crucial conversations is first and foremost, physiological, literal changes. Physiological changes happen in our bodies when we’re under stress or threat. Cortisol starts to increase and adrenaline starts to occur in our veins in higher concentration. Literally parts of our brain shut down and we behave like idiots. We behave like raw animals that only know how to fight, flight or freeze. And so there’s a physiology you’ve got to overcome. And much of what we learned about how to deal with crucial conversations are skills for addressing that physiological problem. We’ve got the fact that I feel stressed and tight and angry or aroused, that’s the first thing we have to contend with.

Brett McKay:

So whenever we find ourselves in these high stakes moments, so crucial conversations, the stakes are high, there’s differing opinions, and there’s a lot of emotional salience going on. A typical response is that people just don’t say anything. And it’s because I think oftentimes people feel like we have these two choices. It’s like, okay, I can speak up, be honest and ruin the relationship, or I can stay silent and just keep the peace and don’t rock the boat. And you call this the fool’s choice. Why are we so conditioned to believe those are only two options in a tough conversation?

Joseph Grenny:

Well, yeah. You think about it and what I just described, when the prefrontal cortex of our brain starts to shut down because in moments of stress and threat, our body doesn’t think we need complex problem solving. What we need is to be able to run very fast or hit really hard or hide or something like that. Very simple tasks. And so portions of our body get starved for blood and the oxygen associated with it. So we don’t think particularly clearly. And so this fool’s choice is evidence of this simplistic view of the world that I’ve got. I either have to kill my enemy here or I have to run from my enemy. That’s what I’ve got to do. So it’s expressed in that same way, silence or violence. And so the real challenge is juicing your brain back up and starting to recognize those aren’t your only options.

One of the consequences of how we feel during crucial conversations is we start to adopt this false belief and we don’t even realize we have it, but I’d urge all of your listeners to write this down and to commit it to memory so you recognize the next time you’re framing your reality in this way. We often believe we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend. And when you’re thinking those are your only two options, that thought is the problem because the real challenge is to figure out how to do both. And most of us in rational moments realize you really can’t keep a friend without telling the truth. The only way forward in a relationship to high trust and real collaboration or connection is for us to be able to work through the problems. In fact, crucial conversations are intimacy accelerants.

We’ve all had the experience with somebody of dreading a crucial conversation, but getting to the other side of it. And there’s almost this euphoric sense of connection of intimacy if it was a loved one at home, a feeling of trust and relating again. And that doesn’t come without going through this difficult process together. So reminding ourselves, there usually are ways to both tell the truth and keep a friend. In fact, doing one is the way to do both. And so the fool’s choice has to be transcended before we’ll even entertain the possibility that there’s something better on the other side.

Brett McKay:

And I imagine there’s a lot of social conditioning going on there too because I mean, you grow up, you watch Bambi, you hear Thumper say, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” And if you go to church, there’s emphasis on being nice. Don’t rock the boat. You got to keep the connection. And I’ve seen that in family life, friends and church congregations and trying to be nice often isn’t the nice thing. It just makes the problem worse.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, yeah. We had a reprise Thumper to say, “If you can’t say something nice, grow a tumor,” because that’s the outcome. We’ll just suppress all of these concerns that we’ve got and it doesn’t show up in great ways. And interestingly, you mentioned the church or the religious context too. So many will misunderstand their own religious texts and assume that what their religion is calling them to do is just put up with stuff. And there is not a more robust example of a community that dealt with hard conversations than some of the Christian texts. And you could say the same about Muslim and Hindu and others and their great examples there, but if many of your listeners are familiar with that, Jesus wasn’t somebody that pushed it under the rug and it was a pretty fractious thing at times. The people that he gathered around him, they dealt with stuff, but for some reason we misunderstand, we misread that and we start thinking, turning the other cheek means not dealing with stuff that is not anywhere in Christian text.

Brett McKay:

If you read the gospels closely, a lot of it’s just Jesus being annoyed at people. There’s the Pharisees or the scribes or his own apostles, and he would confront them very directly. So what is the goal of a crucial conversation? Is it agreement? Is it compromise? I think when people think about having a hard conversation, they think the purpose is to come to some kind of agreement.

Joseph Grenny:

It’s unwise to make agreement the goal because then you tend to force competition. What we tend to do in a crucial conversation in unhealthy moments is I’ll share my point of view and then you’ll try to pick holes in it and then I hear your point of view and I debate back, but we think of agreement as the natural outcome of a healthy conversation, not the objective. So the objective of a crucial conversation is just to fill a pool of common meaning where we get both of our perspectives and experiences and preferences and everything out there accessible between both and make ’em swim together, stir it all together and see if there’s better combinations or better points of view that come out of having both of those most synergy and most problem solving happens more naturally if we just create a climate where we’re just understanding and appreciating each other’s points of view and not trying to drive for agreement. The agreement tends to follow naturally as we develop more of a sympathy for others’ perspectives, more of an appreciation for where they’re coming from. And so filling the pool of meaning creates a common pool of meaning is our objective.

Brett McKay:

I thought that was really useful. I typically go into these kind of conversations with the idea like, okay, we got to figure this thing out, but you really don’t know what you’re trying to figure out and you can’t even conceptualize the potential outcome because you really don’t know the other person’s side of things and what they’re thinking until you create that shared pool of meaning. And once you do, that’s going to change what comes out of that conversation.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Some people will hear that and say, well, that sounds like a pretty wimpy approach to conversation. You got to come in with a point of view, argue for it, prosecute it, and that’s how you come to be persuasive. Well, that might be good on a TV game show or a reality show where there’s no ongoing relationship or need for mutual commitment and executing on things, but the real point here is it doesn’t make you weak, it makes you effective. I once watched a conversation between a senior executive who believed that another executive was embezzling from the company, so really difficult thing to deal with. And the two of them get together to talk this through, and one obviously expected denial and obfuscation and redirection and all that kind of stuff, but he approached it as filling the pool of meaning and how do you do that?

He started very honestly with laying out what he believes was going on and then all the evidence to support that. And then says, you know what? I might be wrong. Maybe you’re not embezzling from the company, but here’s all the evidence I’ve got. Here’s where I’m coming from. And I watched the other guy kind of staring at this for a moment. He had expected hostility. He expected to be able to try to redirect by saying he was being abused and accused that this was any other sort of thing, but instead as it was just laid out factually and calmly and appropriately and confidently not apologetically, the other guy basically looked at it and said, I think I need to resign and basically confessed. And it was remarkable to watch. When you suck defensiveness out of a conversation, the likelihood of people coming to a common view increases dramatically. And the way to suck out the defensiveness is to make the objective to ensure that both sides are completely heard and to just inquire and explore and be curious about the other point of view to all the meanings in the pool, and then confidently and appropriately place your meaning in the pool as well. And better things tend to happen when we do.

Brett McKay:

So something you talk about is before you have a crucial conversation, you need to kind of prepare your mind for it. And a big reason a lot of crucial conversations fail is because the person is having the wrong conversation. They think they’re talking about the right topic or having the right conversation, but they’re not. You say there are three different kinds of conversations and you got to pick the right one for the issue.

Joseph Grenny:

We have this little acronym we call CPR that many people find incredibly useful because it helps you to tease out the different kinds of conversations we could be trying to have or should have. The C stands for content. So let’s say you and I rideshare together and we take turns driving, and whenever it’s your turn to drive, you tend to show up 15, 20, 30 minutes late and it really compromises my schedule. And we’ve been driving together for about a year, and this happens about 50% of the time. So now it’s Thursday, you show up and you’re about 30 minutes late. I get in the car and I say, “Doggone it, Brett, you’re late.” So there’s the first mistake. The first mistake just let’s take out of this that then I’m being too energetic or aggressive about this. The real problem here is the topic is wrong because I’m talking to you at the content level, the C level, the content level is the immediate problem, the immediate instance of whatever the concern is.

The reason I’m so angry and upset is because I haven’t been dealing with what is a longer pattern. That’s the P. I’ve never addressed it as a pattern. So I wait for one more instance and then I blow all of that upset and energy out through this particular instance. That’s a big mistake. Don’t talk about content when your issue is pattern. And I’ve set it up as a content issue as well, which also makes it less likely I’ll get satisfaction because you might very well say, gosh, I’m really sorry Joseph, I apologize. I got up this morning and there was only five pounds of pressure in my tire and my pump at home didn’t work. And so I had to find a gas station and I put coins in one and it didn’t work. And so I had to find two other gas stations. I’m really sorry.

It won’t happen again. I’ll leave a little bit earlier so I make sure I’m on time. Now, in that moment, what many people will do is feel like, oh, all right, well, he kind of apologized, kind of owned it. Let’s move on. No, he didn’t because your problem was a pattern and all you did was just solve the content problem. If you wait for a new content issue, a new instance of the problem to occur before you try to talk about pattern, you lose because it’s going to get mired down in all of the idiosyncratic things that are part of this particular instance when that isn’t your concern. It’s that 50% of the time over the last year we’ve had this issue. So one of the first pieces of advice on this is when you have a pattern conversation, don’t wait for a new instance of concern to raise it because then you’re going to lose the point, create a special opportunity just to talk about the pattern.

“Brett, we’ve been driving together for a year over the last year. Shame on me, haven’t brought it up, but I want to do it now so we can figure this out. You tend to show up late 15 to 30 minutes late about half the time.” Now we’re on the right topic, the final kind of conversation, the R in CPR, so content pattern, and then the R is a relationship conversation. This is a conversation where it isn’t that there’s a pattern of concern anymore, it’s that I don’t trust you anymore or I don’t respect you, or I don’t think you respect me. So trust, competence, and respect are the three things that tend to describe relationship concerns. So for example, if I keep giving you faulty work, you delegate assignments to me and I’m getting back to it poorly. And the real issue is that it looks like I’ve got bad grammar in some of my written communication, and you want to talk with me about this concern you not just say, “Hey, Joseph, the last two things you wrote had some mistakes.”

That would be content stuff or this tends to happen consistently. That would be a pattern conversation. If your real conclusion is “Joseph, you’re not good at written communication,” that’s a competence problem. And that isn’t solved by you just pointing out a couple of mistakes and me trying to be more attentive. You think I have bad grammar, you don’t think I know how to construct a paragraph, and that requires a much bigger solution. So before you open your mouth, identify, is this a content pattern or relationship conversation, tease that out and then hold yourself accountable to address the right thing.

Brett McKay:

I can see that happening, that confusion happening in marital disputes, like the husband doesn’t turn on the dishwasher at night or something, and for the wife, it’s like a relationship thing. It’s not the fact that he’s not turning on the dishwasher. It’s like what it represents about the relationship. Like, well, you don’t respect me, you’re not considerate. And the husband might say, okay, sorry, I’ll turn on the dishwasher. But for the wife, she’s not feeling like he’s competent. She feels like she can’t trust him to take care of things. So it’s like it’s not really about the dishwasher, it’s a relationship issue.

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, I’ll give you an example of that. So I’ve traveled a lot in my career and I think I’ve been married for about 13 years or something at the time. And so our kids were getting a little older and were aware of different dynamics between us. And at one point the kids said, dad, we want to have a conversation with you. And I got that little tummy tickle and nervousness and sat down and they were pretty prepared for this. And basically they started out with saying, dad, we don’t like it when you come home. That was a big bomb to drop. Now, there could have been better ways for them to open this topic, but they had a relationship conversation to hold. And their grievance with me was that mom has a certain way of doing things and all of a sudden when dad comes home, the rules all change and it’s miserable to try to have to deal with two different regimes and we don’t like that. And so I’d come home and I realized as they said this, I did feel like I had to reset things to the truthful and proper way for things to operate because she wasn’t managing it. And so she had issues with me that she wanted to address. They were relationship things about respect and about care and compassion for other people. They were not just about patterns of behavior and much of the improvement that later came in our family came because we had that relationship conversation with each other.

Brett McKay:

So a conversation can happen on three levels. There’s content, which is an immediate instance of whatever the problem or the concern is. There’s pattern. That’s when a problem is occurring regularly. And then there’s relationship. That’s where the problem is causing an issue that’s making it hard for someone to trust or respect the other person or feel they’re competent. And you got to know which kind of conversation you’re having. 

So another thing you talk about is that each person is coming into the conversation with a story that they’re telling themselves about what’s going on and their feelings are flowing out of that story. So it’s important to get a handle on that story and make sure it’s true.

Joseph Grenny:

Oh boy. I mean this is, of all of the personal work I’ve done on crucial conversations over the last 35 years, this has been my central focus. It’s learning to master my story. If you can develop control over your emotions in your life, a mastery and an understanding of your own emotions, you can master your life. This is the key to intimacy, to connection, to being able to work well and build trust with other people. It’s recognizing that when emotions flare up, they can corrupt your capacity to have a crucial conversation. They are not a function of what happened. They’re not a function of what somebody just did. They’re a function of them doing something and then you telling yourself a story about it. So I share this example of, again, early in our marriage when I was traveling a lot, we would have kind of an adjustment.

When I came back home, I remember at one point I came home late at night, kids were in bed, and it had been a long week. It’s a Friday, and I walk in, and this was when we had wall phones, if any of your listeners were alive during that time. And I remember walking by this wall phone and I looked across the room and my wife is sitting there, she’s relaxed. It’s the end of her day. She’s got a book open. And I looked at her with this adoring kind of gaze, and all of a sudden the phone rang. And that was a moment of decision for me. It was a moment of decision of whether I’m going to pick it up or not, right? I’m looking at the love of my life. The two of us have an opportunity to have a little quiet moment and reconnect, but the phone is ringing, and I picked it up.

Now, a lot of people won’t believe what I’m about to say, but as I turned towards the wall and put the phone up to my ear and heard the voice of my administrative assistant saying, “Hey, I knew you were getting home right now. There were just three things I needed to address before tomorrow morning.” And then she launches in on this. I felt this burning sensation in my back. I mean, it was a physical, tangible kind of thing. And I looked around to find the source of it, and there was Sila across the room staring at me with just this absolutely deadly stare. And that was a moment too. I had an opportunity there. I experienced some emotion when I saw that look on her face. Now, it would’ve been easy for me in that moment to tell myself the reason I’m feeling how I’m feeling right now resentful and hurt and defensive is because she’s being insensitive, because she’s being uncaring, because she’s judging me, because she, so we tend to tell ourselves that our emotions are a function of what’s happening to us, of what others do.

And the beginning of all capacity to manage my emotional life begins with me accepting the fact that it does not, that it comes from the story I’m telling myself about what that other person is doing. I was telling myself a story that she was being judgmental, that she was being rude, that she was being inappropriate. I had these stories. I was telling myself about how insensitive and how impatient and how selfish she is. And so I looked back at her and rolled my eyes, not my best shining moment, but completely dismissed the frustration and concern she was experiencing and continued my conversation. I heard her book slam shut. She stomped upstairs, and we didn’t talk the rest of the night. Now, this is a long time ago, and I think I’ve grown a little bit since then, but as you break all of that down, none of that had to do with me answering a phone or with her staring at me in a deadly looking way.

It had to do with the stories we were both telling ourselves about that. The three kinds of stories we tend to tell in these crucial moments are, number one, a victim story. When something is happening that we don’t like, we tend to make ourselves out to be innocent sufferers. And that’s what I did in that moment. I’ve been working all week. I’ve been on the road, I come home and this is the kind of treatment I get. I look at all my virtues and absolutely none of my vices. And then with the other person, we tell a villain story. If I want to be rude to the love of my life and feel good about it, if I want to be able to justify myself in doing bad things to good people who don’t deserve it, I need three kinds of stories. First, a victim story, second, a villain story.

I need to think about her and think of only her vices and none of her virtues. Think of all of the worst weaknesses I can paint on her, and then I feel justified and mistreating her. And finally, I need a helpless story. I need a story that makes me helpless to do anything other than the petty little thing, the hiding or the sneering or whatever it is that’s coming out for me right now that I’m doing so victim, villain, and helpless. That’s what we mean by master my stories. It’s learning to take responsibility for and be aware of our tendency to tell those three kinds of stories during these crucial moments, and then to set them right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I know I do the villain thing whenever someone does something that I don’t like, the tendency is to jump to the worst conclusion. Like, oh, this guy, he’s out to get me. And then when you actually talk to him, it’s like, oh, man, I’m really sorry. I’ve had a lot going on and I didn’t really address that. I think there’s that story I think Steven Covey talks about in his book where he’s on the subway and there’s these kids just going crazy and the dad’s not doing anything, and Steven’s like, look at this deadbeat dad. He’s not taking care of his kids. And he says, sir, can you do something about your kids? And the dad was like, oh, I’m really sorry. We’re just coming back from my wife’s funeral. And I imagine they’re feeling bad. It’s just like a gut punch, like, oh man, I made this guy a villain, and he’s going through a hard time.

Joseph Grenny:

And we get there so naturally, so quickly. Now, some people will listen to this conversation we’re having and say, but there are villains out there, and that’s true. There are times where somebody lied to you, they stole from you, they embezzled from your company as we talked about before. But oftentimes the story is more complicated than just that too. Does that mean we let ’em off the hook? No, but it would change our emotional response to them. We had a guy that worked for our company many years ago who we were in a building with another firm and we owned the building, so they were subletting from us. And we found out from this tenant of ours that somebody from our company had stolen from them, had broken into their office and stolen things. And I had to sit down with this particular employee and address that.

And I remember first of all being incensed and embarrassed and all of that. And of course he was let go. But it turned out that he was struggling with drug addiction and his marriage was falling apart. He had seven children at home and there was a lot more to the story. And I ended up after letting him go, taking him to lunch a few times and checking in, and just because I cared about whether he was going to get through this awful time in his life as well. So there is no necessary opposition between holding people accountable, dealing with things truthfully, and also making sure you get to the right story, that you get more meaning in the pool so that we have a proper appreciation for even villains aren’t just villains, and you’re not always a completely innocent victim, and you’re not helpless to show up in a more mature and appropriate way too. There are better ways through this. We can tell the truth and keep a friend.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s what you do before the conversation. Prepare yourself for this crucial conversation. Figure out what is the topic of the conversation actually? Is it content, pattern, relationship, get my story straight, master my stories. Am I painting this person as a villain? Am I painting myself as just a victim who’s as pure as the newly driven snow? Or am I painting myself as helpless? And then I think the important thing, you talked about it earlier is once you decide you need to have the conversation, don’t delay, because I thought that was really key, that if you have too much lag between the event and the conversation, it’s just going to get worse than that idea. If you don’t talk about it, you act it out. I think that was because I’ve seen that in my own life. I think if you’re in a marriage or even in a business or a church, you see that where you don’t talk about the thing and then you just start acting resentful towards the person.

You kind of just give them a sideways look. You ignore them, you dismiss them, and nothing’s ever solved. So you got to rip off the bandaid basically. So you mentioned the typical response people often have to crucial conversations is silence or violence. So they either just clam up and just ignore it and try to not rock the boat or violence, which is just lashing out, arguing, being combative. And a big reason why people do that is because they don’t feel safety. They don’t feel psychological safety. And I think often people misinterpret this idea of safety as comfort or being nice, but you argue that safety actually allows you to be more candid and unapologetic with the truth, not less. Tell us about that.

Joseph Grenny:

And so here’s the thing, we’ve done a lot of consulting in healthcare, and it’s fascinating to me that I think I’ve got a friend right now who’s in the hospital that there are people on this planet that you’re willing to walk into a room with, lay down at a table and let them cut you open with a knife. You’re willing to do that. And the reason you’re willing to do that is because you feel safe with them. You believe that they care about your problem. You believe that they’re competent to help you solve it. We call them surgeons obviously, and we ought to limit it to just people with that classification. But we are willing to go through uncomfortable things with people if there’s a reason to do it, and if we feel safe with them. What we know about crucial conversations is that you and I tend to believe that the best predictor of the outcome of a conversation is how risky the topic is, and that isn’t true at all.

We think I couldn’t approach somebody and tell ’em I think they stole from the company or that they’re incompetent or that they’re racist or whatever it is. We couldn’t do that without them getting defensive. Well, that just isn’t true. We’ve seen over the years that there is no correlation between the outcome of a conversation and how risky the topic is. The only correlation is with how safe the people feel discussing the topic. I mentioned Kerry Patterson, my writing partner early on, and one of the first conversations I had with him about writing, I had written a white paper on some topic. I handed it over to him, he gave it back, and I said, what’d you think? And he said, it’s boring. He said, it’s turgid, it’s vapid. And it was interesting to me because normally I would’ve felt really tight and offended inside, but for some reason that information got through to me perfectly fine.

Why? Because I knew he invested a lot of time reading that paper, and he wanted me to be a good writer, and that was his sole motivation in sharing that. When you believe that, when you believe two things, you feel safe with people, and this is your first task in a crucial conversation in the first 30 seconds, you’ve got to generate evidence for them of two things. The first is that you care about their problems, interests, and concerns almost as much as they do. Just like the doctor, that doctor cares about the fact that I’ve got racking back pain and he wants to help me fix it. You care about their problems, interests, and concerns. As soon as they believe that they do this, they go. So I needed to have a crucial conversations with an employee many years ago who I had concluded was incompetent at some really fundamental parts of his job.

He was terrible at managing projects and terrible at managing people. He was a great designer, a great graphic designer, but we tried to grow a department underneath him, and he was terrible at projects and managing people. And so that was the message I needed to get across. It was a big relationship conversation, and I started that conversation not giving myself all the credit. A lot of it goes to him that he cared about these things, but I said, Hey, I’ll call him Paul. I said, Hey, Paul, I need to have a pretty heavy conversation with him. And he knew, of course there was stress and disappointment. He knew that things weren’t working well, but I said, I want you to know that my sole motivation in this conversation is to help you win here. I want you to have a wonderful work experience here. I want you to be here for a very long time.

You’ve made a great contribution in the past and things just aren’t working right now, and I want to talk about that and figure it out. And I watched him take a really deep breath, and you could almost watch his soul open. He just sat back and it was kind of like somebody saying to the doctor, go ahead and do surgery here. I know something needs to be done. I felt such permission from him, such vulnerability from him. Why? Because he trusted my motive. He trusted that I really did care about his problems, interests, and concerns. So that’s point 1. In the first 30 seconds of a crucial conversation, you need to make it clear that you have mutual purpose, that you care about those problems, interests and concerns. And second, you need to make sure the other person knows you care about and respect them. So mutual purpose and mutual respect are what we call the conditions for psychological safety.

They believe that not only do I care about your problems, but I also just care about you as a human being and I respect you. So Paul, this person that I’m talking to here, he got it that I love him and that I like working with him and that I respect him, and he’s then able to take a deep breath and open himself up and be vulnerable. And we had a great conversation where at the end, he agreed to take a salary reduction. Eventually we grandfathered him and kind of moved him gradually there to move out of a management position more into a technical position, and that this was best for him. It worked. It went there. Why? Because he felt safe. You and I tend to believe that when others get defensive and combative, it’s because they’re arrogant or mean or rude or manipulative or whatever. It’s generally about a lack of psychological safety, and that’s an empowering thing for us to learn.

Brett McKay:

So how do you do that? I imagine in longstanding relationships, what helps is you’ve already established a track record over time that shows that you care and can be trusted. But you’re also saying that you can establish that psychological safety in the first 30 seconds of a conversation. So how do you convey that? How do you convey, Hey, I respect you, I care about you, right In that moment.

Joseph Grenny:

I’m going to differentiate here between some gimmick or technique and just what really needs to happen. Your job is to generate evidence, and that can happen in a lot of different ways. If it’s with a loved one, sometimes it’s putting your hand on their knee. Sometimes it’s leaning forward and offering a warm smile. Sometimes it’s breaking tension with a joke because sometimes a joke shows that it’s a relaxed situation and that you feel safe, and therefore they can too. There are lots of nonverbal ways of doing it. One of the best ways to do it verbally is what we call a contrasting statement. It’s telling people what you do and don’t want. That’s what I did with Paul. I told him, look, I don’t want to come in here and just criticize and tear you down and point out everything that’s wrong. I want to get to a place where you are joyful and happy and feel successful in your work.

You describe what you don’t want and what you do want. The most important part of that message is the don’t want part because their brain, the threatened part of them is going to tell them that that is what you want, that you want to hurt them, that you want to insult them, that you’re just trying to downsize. You just want to get rid of an employee, or they’ve disagreed with you in the past, and this is revenge. They’re going to make all that stuff up, and that’s their story. So letting them know what it isn’t is a critical part of constructing that first sentence. But if that sentence doesn’t work, you’ve got to keep generating evidence. Sometimes it’s apologizing. Paul, I’ve let this go for a long time. I’ve let this build and accumulate. That’s my fault. I’m sorry. And I apologize that this conversation is now bigger than it should be, and I’m willing to take my responsibility for that in it. Any of those things that you do that demonstrate I care about you and respect you, and I care about your problems, interests, and concerns, can possibly help the other person get the signal that they’re safe and then be able to engage in the conversation. This does not mean the conversation will be pleasant. It might be really hard, might be really difficult, but you’ll feel safe. You’ll be able to hear.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, and then you can add to that shared pool of meaning. Exactly. One of the hardest conversations to have is whenever you disagree with someone on a value level. So maybe it’s a political disagreement with your loud uncle at Thanksgiving, or maybe a strategic disagreement at work or maybe a disagreement with your spouse about how to raise your kids. How do you find a shared goal when your immediate objectives are completely opposite?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah. Now you’ve used a few different words there that I want to parse out because they’re very important. I think it’s very, very rare when we have value disagreements. It’s very, very common for us to have strategy disagreements. It’s all about the way something is being executed. So you think about the massive political divide we’ve got in the United States. Now, I defy you to find two people with polar opposite views that can’t sit in a room long enough to understand that a lot of their strong advocacy of polar opposite opinions is trying to achieve values that both of them value. And so sometimes digging down deeper and understanding, no. So let’s say we disagree on immigration. Most people at the end of the conversation will agree that we have a primary responsibility to the citizens of our country, and we also ought to care about citizens of other countries too.

But we have a primary responsibility there that we need to make sure our economy works and that it can sustain support for the people that it has primary responsibility for. When you start getting down to the values level, you’ll find there’s usually more ready agreement. I’ll give you an example of that. So I once had a late night flight to London, had a speech the next morning, the flight was delayed, got in at like one o’clock in the morning, got into my black taxi at the Heathrow Airport, and I just wanted to rest on the way to hotel to sleep as much as I could before the next day. And I noticed the taxi driver kept turning around and looking at me, and finally he said, in a really aggressive voice, he said, are you American? And I said, yes, I am. And he said, your president is a murderer.

And I thought, oh, great. Here we go. Here goes my rest. And at first I was going to try to just ignore it, but then I thought, you know what? I’m going to talk about crucial conversations tomorrow morning, and how lame is this that I can’t even engage in one right now? And so I thought, all right, I’m going to do this. And so I said to the guy, I said, look, we’ve got 40 minutes before we’re going to get to my hotel. I said, I’m willing to talk with you about this, but I want some ground rules. I said, first of all, you’ve got 10 minutes and I want you to say anything you want to say to me as an American, and I’m going to listen to absolutely everything and just try to understand it. And then afterwards, you’re going to have to listen to me for 10 minutes.

And I wasn’t saying I disagreed with him necessarily. I just wanted to make sure we had ground rules in place. It would keep us both safe. And he got this silly grin on his face. He said, you’re really strange, aren’t you? And I said, do you want to do this or don’t you? And he said, yeah, let’s do this. And we had a wonderful conversation. And I can’t say that I agreed with all of his beliefs or perspective on US foreign policy, but I was way more sympathetic to it when I got there. And I don’t know that he necessarily agreed with me on everything, but he was probably far more sympathetic to my point of view than he was when we first started. We started realizing we had some common values that both of us cared about decency and honesty and human life. And we didn’t think that economics should come above human life. And so we realized there were common values. So often our disagreements are at the strategy level, not at the values level, but the problem is we never discover it because we don’t spend enough time listening and asking and filling the pool of meaning so that we can appreciate where the other person’s coming from.

Brett McKay:

So to help people guide a crucial conversation, you’ve got an acronym state, S-T-A-T-E. What does that mean?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, we tend when we want to make our points, so let’s say for example, we were talking about immigration or something like that. What we tend to do is we start at the wrong end of the conversation. We just say, I think we need to build a wall and we shouldn’t have any illegal immigration in our country at all, and we got to kick out everybody. That’s illegal right now. That’s my point of view. So I tend to start there and people then react to that. I’m starting with my conclusion. I’m starting at the end of the story, not the beginning of the story. When I came to whatever conclusion I’ve got on immigration or any other topic, it started with me having some experiences, concrete experiences. It starts with my belief about what’s factual and true. And then I tend to tell myself stories about that and then I have feelings about it, and then that results in how I’m going to act.

So we call this the path to action starts with facts. Stories come next, emotions come next. And then the actions, the proposals, the opinions that I form, follow from the end of that. If you want people to be able to understand your point of view, you’ve got to take ’em by the hand and walk ’em down that whole path, start with the factual basis. What do you think is going on in our country today and how is immigration affecting that? What facts do you have to put on the table? What stories do you then tell yourself about it? What feelings does that create for you? And then what policy positions do you advocate as a result? Walk them through that. And even if they don’t agree, at least there’s more meaning in the pool. So they can see how a reasonable, rational, decent person might come to the point of view that I’ve got.

And then help them do the same. We call this state because the acronym S-T-A-T-E describes the five things you need to do in order to be heard non defensively. First, share your facts. S second, tell your story. That’s the T. A ask for others facts and ask for others’ point of view and then talk tentatively and encourage testing. Encourage testing means you encourage the other person to challenge, to question, to interrogate your point of view. Invite that when you do that defensiveness decline. So those are kind of the five ways of showing up when you start to share your opinion in a way that reduces defensiveness.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about that talk tentatively part because I think a lot of guys listening might think, well, that’s just being weak or in unconfident, what does talk tentatively actually look like?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, it just means to tell the truth. Most of us overstate our point of view. We think that banging the table and overstating the fact of the matter is, and as all thinking people know, and the only reasonable conclusion is when we overstate our point of view, when we act as though we’re absolutely certain that I’ll use immigration again, that this one immigration policy is the only right way for us to do this. When you do that, what tends to happen is number one, you lie because you probably don’t really believe that that’s the only point of view that has any reason or factual support for it. And secondly, you provoke defensiveness. So the other people who tend to feel like your goal is to try to convince compelling control, you’re trying to convince them of your point of view. They tend to start poking holes in it.

People naturally look at what’s wrong with your argument when the argument is overstated. If you want them to be able to listen, then state an opinion is an opinion. That’s what tentative means. So in my point of view, this is what I believe, or in my long experience, this is my point of view or after long consideration, I’m quite confident that all of those are perfectly appropriate things to say because they’re honest. They aren’t overstating your level of confidence or your level of omniscience about the topic. We find that people are more persuaded when you’re less aggressive, when you state your opinion as an opinion and allow room for testing.

Brett McKay:

So as part of a crucial conversation with a loved one or at work with a boss or colleague, you might receive feedback and criticism, and that’s always hard because it sets off for flight or fight response to feel criticized. But you say feedback can stop being threatening once you treat it as information rather than indictment. Even when it’s given emotionally or clumsily, you can still separate what’s being said from how it’s being said, and instead of reflexively defending your ego, you can start getting curious and ask, what does this person see that I might not even poorly delivered? Feedback often contains a fragment of truth worth examining, and one thing people can do to get value from criticism without being crushed by it, is to take your time with it. You can say, alright, thank you. I’m going to take that and sit on it for a bit, and then you go through it by yourself and think, okay, this doesn’t mean anything. That’s not true, but like, oh, that comment, he’s got a point here.

Joseph Grenny:

Yes, that’s a powerful, if you can recognize that in a crucial conversation, you can control the parameters of it. You’re not powerless. You’re not a victim of it. One of the best ways to take control is to control the pacing. So if somebody’s coming at you with some really hard feedback, it’s okay for you to set the table like I did with the guy in the taxi cab and to say, I want to hear you out. I’m going to ask a lot of questions, and if it gets a little overwhelming to me, I may ask for a break, but I want to get to the other side of this and understand it, and then I don’t know that I’ll respond right now. I’m going to need some time to reflect on this. So there it is. That’s how I’m okay with engaging in this conversation. So if you’re sitting down with your boss in a performance review and she gives you some feedback that’s surprising to you, don’t respond right? Then let her know that you want a chance to sort through it and absorb it, and then you want to respond in a way that’s respectful of the feedback that you’ve been given, and then go and deal with whatever emotions you need to work through to get to a good place, sort through it and come back and then deal with part two of it.

Brett McKay:

All right, so we’ve had the conversation. We have a shared pool of meaning. Everyone feels heard, but I’ve seen this happen a million times in groups where these hard conversations happen, but people get on the same page, the meeting ends, everyone feels good, but nothing actually happens.

Joseph Grenny:

You’ve been there too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So why do people mess up the transition from meaning to action?

Joseph Grenny:

Yeah, because I think we let ourselves sell out at the end, and we all know that we should always end a conversation by clarifying who does what by when, and how we’re going to follow up. We need to make sure that we confirm our agreement, and if it’s a politically sensitive one or there’s a low trust history, writing it down so that everybody can confirm, yeah, that’s what we agreed to, that’s what we understood, and then how are we going to follow up? What changes are we going to make as a result of this? That’s the work at the end of the conversation. And if you don’t do that work, you will have deja vu dialogues. You will have to have Groundhog Day, and it’s not fun to do it, so why go through all the trouble of having a good crucial conversation if you’re going to just waste it at the end? Always end with who’s going to do what by when, and how do we follow up? 

Brett McKay:

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

Joseph Grenny:

Cruciallearning.com is our website and lots of great resources there to get the training virtually or in person or online with public classes. The book is called Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, and I’m happy to have a chance to share it. Thank you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Thanks, Joseph. It’s been a pleasure. 

My guest here is Joseph Grenny. He’s the co-author of the book Crucial Conversations that’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, cruciallearning.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/crucialconversations where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Of all the books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical. Dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition, it wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death — and it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern. Whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, Is this really it?

Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson, a pastor and the author of Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonates so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy — and even embrace — what first appears to be vanity of vanities.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #956: Feeling Depressed and Discombobulated? Social Acceleration May Be to Blame
• Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• AoM Podcast #1,100: Money and Meaning — What Faith Traditions Teach Us About Personal Finance
• The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa
• Jerry Seinfeld on saving time

Connect with Bobby Jamieson

• Bobby on X

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Of all the books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential and unsparingly honest about the human condition. It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time and death. And it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern, whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature.

Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, is this really it? Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson a pastor and the author of Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonate so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy and even embrace what first appears to be vanity of vanities After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/everythingisneverenough. All right, Bobby Jamieson, welcome to the show. 

Bobby Jamieson: 

Thanks for having me. 

Brett McKay: 

So you wrote a book called Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. Ecclesiastes is a book in the Bible that gets quoted a lot by religious and non-religious people alike. I’m sure people have heard that birds hit song, turn, turn, turn, which riffs off Ecclesiastes. What led you to take a deep dive into this book in the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, so I am a pastor and I preached through it at a church. I used to pastor in Washington DC and it really resonated with me. It really resonated with our congregation. When I got to the end of the preaching series, I just didn’t want to be done with the book. It was like the book had grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. It’s a weirdly personal, confrontational, challenging kind of book. It’s pretty dark as we’re going to see together in some of the themes we’ve probably talked about, but I just didn’t want to be done, and for me, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of hopes, dreams, trajectories, we chart for our lives that then wind up not working out and it’s like Ecclesiastes saw it first, got there first, and if you’ve had any experience of frustrated expectations, dreams that didn’t plan out or even frankly that you actually got what you were looking for and then you were like, man, is this really what I wanted or what’s next or is this all there is kind of Ecclesiastes has been to all those places ahead of you.

Brett McKay:

Well, so let’s do some background on Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is part of the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. If anyone has ever read the Hebrew Bible, they may have noticed that these books, particularly these three books, they seem really different from the other books in the Bible, like the books of Moses or the books of the prophets. What makes the wisdom literature different from the rest of the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, one thing is it’s in many ways more experiential. It invites you to kind of wrestle with it personally. You have to put work into making sense of it for yourself because it is kind of speaking about all of life from different perspectives. One way to summarize the relationship between Job and Ecclesiastes, Job is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by losing it all. The author of Ecclesiastes is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by getting it all and having it all. And so wisdom literature kind of invites you to really reflect on your life as a whole, and you got to kind of earn it. You got to work for it. Proverbs, the book of Proverbs puts contradictory statements side by side and you got to figure out how to reconcile ’em, and Ecclesiastes actually does something similar. So yeah, not these books in the Bible are probably especially maybe familiar to or appealing to even a lot of people who don’t necessarily believe in God or believe that the Bible is holy scripture because they speak so directly to experience, to things like work, money, sex, power, pleasure, all that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay:

It also seems just more philosophical than the rest of the books in the Bible; existential like you were saying.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s true of wisdom literature in general, and I would say it’s even especially true of Ecclesiastes in particular. A lot of people would say Ecclesiastes is kind of the only maybe pure work of philosophy in the Bible, in the sense that it’s observational. It’s even in a way empirical. The author is kind of testing out these different things by experience, and so there’s really sustained reflection on a lot of life’s biggest questions. Is there meaning how can you find satisfaction, what’s worth doing? What is good? There’s a deep relentless quest for answers in a lot of these realms that frankly resonates with different traditions of philosophy and even philosophy as its practice today.

Brett McKay:

And because it hits all these big issues, work, money, love, success, failure. When you read Ecclesiastes in the 21st century as a modern westerner, you read like, wow, I relate to this. It feels really modern.

Bobby Jamieson:

It does feel really modern. That was certainly part of my experience pastoring a lot of young professionals in DC preaching through the book or even just how it spoke to my own challenges and struggles, but even thinking about a bit more, connecting it to maybe some of the challenges and structures in the modern world, thinking about money, thinking about the economy, thinking about issues of justice. Ecclesiastes has something to say about all of those, and I think part of the way it does that is that the author is speaking from the experience of living a whole bunch of different lives in one lifetime. It’s almost a little bit like Winston Churchill or something where you read a biography of Churchill and you go, how did he live so many different lives before he got to the age of 30, you could do a biography of Churchill that would fill massive volumes from any two years of his life. The author of Ecclesiastes is a little bit like that. There’s this full exploration of the potential, the possibilities of work, money, pleasure, power, and so I think in the modern world is in some ways defined by a lot of options. There’s a lot of freedom, there’s a lot of options. There’s a lot of different paths you can follow, and I think one of the main reasons Ecclesiastes resonates so much is basically he’s like, look, I chased this path all the way to the end. Let me tell you where it got me.

Brett McKay:

So who wrote Ecclesiastes? Do we know that?

Bobby Jamieson:

Well, I don’t think we have a kind of confident or certain knowledge. Historically, lots of Christian and Jewish interpreters have held it to be written by King Solomon, David’s son and to be about his own experiences. I think that’s possible. I’m not convinced that’s wrong, but I’m also not convinced it’s right. The book is technically anonymous. The author just introduces himself as the teacher or the preacher. The Hebrew word for that is like, it’s a title, like a job title, and he just introduced himself as the preacher, the teacher son of David King in Jerusalem. So he could have been any number of other kings of Israel. He’s a little bit hard to place. So I think there’s a little bit of a deliberate mystery, a deliberate, you could even say ambiguity where it partially lines up with Solomon. There’s ways you can map it onto Solomon, but I think in some ways the author is making his experience even more accessible by that degree of anonymity.

Brett McKay:

What’s the overall structure of the book?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, well, Ecclesiastes, some books of the Bible have a pretty clear or transparent literary structure. Ecclesiastes, it’s a little bit harder to discern. Discern, roughly speaking. The first half is more his quest for the good life, his quest for the meaning of life and some periodic reflections and kind of look backs on how it’s all gone. That’s about the first six chapters. Then once you get to chapter seven, especially the end of chapter seven, it’s a little bit more collections of wisdom sayings, kind of like the book of Proverbs grouped around different topics and then kind of a poem about death at the very end to cap things off. So there’s kind of a loose literary structure. As I understand the book though, there’s a little bit of a clearer conceptual structure where a whole lot of the book is his observation, his experience, his just saying what he’s lived, what he’s seen, and frankly, you can agree with that just by experiencing the same things or reflecting yourself.

But then there’s these seven passages in the book where it’s almost like his perspective takes a big step up as if he’s moving from kind of ground floor observation to then going up to a second story where you can see farther. And he talks about life as being a gift. He counsels enjoyment, he counsels rejoicing in your work, rejoicing in your marriage, even the toil of your work taking pleasure in it. And so there’s kind of a tone shift from saying everything is vanity or fleeting or absurd. That’s kind of his dominant message in the first half of the book. But there’s these seven times when he ascends to this higher perspective and calls everything a gift and tells you to get busy enjoying all the stuff that he is just told you is meaningless, fleeting, absurd. I mean, there’s even some perspectives that poke through from an ultimate point of view of he believes that there’s a God who created all things.

He believes that there’s a God who’s in charge of all things even though it doesn’t really look like it a lot of the time, and that God will ultimately hold all people to account and even bring about a whole new world in the end. And so that’s a perspective that only comes through in a few places. So I would say there’s this kind of three story building or view from a three story building type of conceptual structure to Ecclesiastes where he doesn’t always give you signposts, he doesn’t always tell you any switching point of view, but there’s these different voices that emerge from the author throughout the book that I think show us that all of life is absurd on the ground floor. Show us that all of life is a gift on the second floor and show us that all of life has a kind of transcendent or even eternal significance that shines through in just a couple places.

Brett McKay:

Those first two floors where everything’s absurd and then everything’s a gift that’s kind like the imminent frames. Well, this is the life now. And then that third floor is like that’s the transcendent frame.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s right. And there’s a sense in which on the second floor to say that life is a gift does kind of puncture the imminent frame. But on the one hand, it also relates then to just how we live day by day, moment by moment, the kind of stuff he’s still focused on enjoying pleasure, enjoying possessions, enjoying even wealth. He says at one point, drink your wine with a merry heart. God has already approved what you do. So there’s a sense in which it’s a little bit more transcendent perspective to say life is a gift from God. But on the other hand, it very much relates to all the stuff of daily life that we experience moment by moment day by day.

Brett McKay:

Alright, let’s dig into what the preacher has to say to us. The book famously starts off with vanity of vanities, says the preacher vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Hebrew word that got translated into vanity is hevel, what did the Hebrews mean by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. Well, it’s one of these words that has kind of a basic or literal meaning, which is breath, breath, wind, vapor. So what are some of the characteristics of breath? It’s here one second, gone. The next, you got to take another breath. If you breathe out on a cold day, you can see a little cloud puff before your face, but then it’s gone. So then as is often the case with a keyword like this, there’s all these metaphorical associations that grow up from that. So hevel as breath, well, it’s also fleeting, it’s here, and then it disappears. It doesn’t last, it doesn’t stay. But Kallet uses this word as kind of his summary statement for everything. So it becomes kind of a term of art. It’s like a one word summary of his whole observation of all of life and some of the situations he applies it to are things where it’s not just something like fleeting that’s here one minute, gone the next, but actually something deeply dissatisfying, something that doesn’t meet your expectations.

Even something that’s deeply wrong, like a case of injustice. If you know somebody’s innocence and they get declared guilty, it’s hard to think of something that’s kind of more wrong in the world than that. And actually Kohe will use the word he to talk about a situation like that. Why? Because it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t match. I would actually say a good kind of modern translation of it is absurd. Even inspired by kind of mid-century existentialist philosophy like Albert Camus, the way he uses the word. I think that’s actually a pretty good fit for what Koal is talking about when he says he, because there’s things that don’t meet our desires. There’s things that don’t meet our expectations. There’s a kind of condition of wrongness or of a misfit between what we want and even what we expect and even what we have a right to demand and then what the world actually pays back.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I like how you used absurd because I think that’s a better word to describe hevel — that idea that we’re in this world and things don’t go according to how we think they should go, and it’s just like, this is absurd. This is absolutely absurd that this is happening to me.

Bobby Jamieson:

And you often have that experience. It might be slightly comical. I mean, we have a minivan for lugging our kids around and it had to be in the shop for three weeks. It’s a long story. They were trying to fix a door handle. They wound up having to put a whole new door in because there’s not the spare parts to actually just replace the handle on its own, and the thing barely works better than it did before. After three weeks in the shop, we had to have a rental car and all this stuff. I mean, it feels absurd, and that’s a pretty minor instance. That’s a pretty everyday not that big of a deal, even though now the door’s a different color and it looks funny and all this stuff. But then at a much more serious level too, I think to describe even some more of those shocks of life or things that we suffer, there is an absurdity. It doesn’t make sense. Why did this happen? There’s not really an answer. There’s no obvious answer. It’s not written into your life. It doesn’t show up in the mail and say, here’s why this happened. So I think that idea of absurdity actually names kind of an experience particularly of things we suffer that’s hard to get at otherwise,

Brett McKay:

And it’s not even just unexpectedly negative things that can feel absurd like your life’s going great, and then you get a shock medical diagnosis that turns your life upside down. But as you said, getting what you want and then feeling depressed and not satisfied, that can also feel absurd. You feel just like, why not? Why don’t I feel good? I got the thing. I summoned the mountain. Why don’t I feel like I think I should feel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s maybe the single most relevant insight in the whole book, and it comes from really the biggest extended narrative. Early in the book, he kind of announces his quest for wisdom, and then he talks about this huge project he went on of testing out every conceivable source of enjoyment under the sun, and he gets to the end and he says in chapter two, verse 11, then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. In some ways, that feels like the ultimate absurdity. When you’ve worked hard, you’ve gotten to the end of it, you’ve attained that summit and it just doesn’t satisfy. It leaves you going, well, why doesn’t this dissatisfied? And oftentimes we don’t really experience a clear answer to that.

Brett McKay:

Everything is never enough.

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s the key lesson of the whole book. Some people experience that after winning a Super Bowl or a major golf tournament. I mean, you hear this again and again, people at the absolute pinnacle, they’re literally the world’s best person at this, their team, their accomplishments, whatever it is. And you often even hear this in an interview right after the fact. Right. Okay, well, what now?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you also bring the thinking of sociologist Hartmut Rosa into your exploration of Ecclesiastes. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, what’s his big idea?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, he’s got a few really insightful big ideas. One that’s really relevant for my book is that modernity is a project of control. And so he’s got this great slim little book, The Uncontrollability of the World that’s very accessible and really insightful, and he talks about how essentially the modern world is defined by a relentless ambition to control more and more to control all that we can. I’m in a room right now that has been set to 67 degrees, and if it dips below 67 degrees, the heater will kick back on and keep me at exactly the controlled temperature I want. You can think about increasing control over our bodies, over medical conditions, technology, transportation, communication, being able to fly places, artificial lights so you can be working and awake whenever you want. All those kinds of things have created a world in which we live, the world that we experience.

We have a lot higher expectation of being able to control things than probably any society that’s ever lived, any people that’s ever lived, whether it’s more hunter gatherer or agrarian or even more of a hard scrabble. You’ve got this job and you work in an older city and you’re at the mercy of all these different forces. We expect to be able to control a whole lot of stuff, and we’re surprised when we can’t. We’re kind of shocked when we can’t. And yeah, Rosa does a really good job kind of opening up the disconnect that we experience when control runs out. He also has this fascinating insight that I think is really brilliant where actually a lot of the most meaningful experiences in our lives are things you can’t control. Think about falling in love, getting this woman that you’re incredibly into to actually go out on a date with you and how does it go?

Or you’re at the championship game and your team wins by a kind of last minute three pointer, or you’re at the concert that’s your favorite band and they play your favorite song from your favorite album, and it’s just as good as you thought it would be. All those type of peak experiences are things you can’t control. You can’t control the dates, you can’t control the game, you can’t control the concert. And in a way, the more you try to control it, the more the meaning drains out of it. The color drains out of it. And so Rosa also identifies this paradox where the more we try to control, the less we actually kind of enjoy our lives. And his thick concept he’s developed for that kind of enjoyment is what he calls resonance. And resonance is basically any experience in which kind of the invisible wire that connects you to the world is humming.

It could be a really engaging conversation. It could be being deeply engaged in a craft, kind of a flow state of being challenged by the materials you’re working with and applying skill to it, and kind of experiencing those challenges giving way as you figure out how to get this joint to fit into this part or how you get the right tool to work on this part of wood or whatever it might be. Rosa talks about resonance as basically anything in which you light up with a connection to the world. And resonance is only an in the moment reality. It’s not something you can file away and stockpile. It’s not something you could just pull out of the fridge. You might have a great time making this meal or eating those leftovers, but resonance itself is not something you can just do at your beck and call.

It depends upon your own kind of internal condition. It depends upon the conditions of the world out there. And so the tension between control and resonance, I think Rosa is really insightful in showing there’s an inverse relationship. The more you control, the less resonance there is, but we keep trying to control more. One last really helpful kind of paradigm from Rosa is what do you call social acceleration, which is basically if you zoom out and you think about life as a whole, society as a whole, think about the ways we make our living, think about the kind of circumstances of the tools or technology we use on a daily basis. Think about even basics of morality or expected patterns of life. He identifies three phases. In traditional societies, those things are pretty stable. They change a little bit over time, but it’s pretty much like things have gone on the way they always have.

Once you get into the modern world, particularly in Europe and the early modern era, you might have generational change. You might have change that takes place over 30, 40, 50 years, and your kids are grandkids live in a pretty significantly different world than you lived in. But Rosa’s point about our present moment, kind of late modernity is what he calls social acceleration, which is basically all those fundamental conditions, how you make a living, how technology influences your life, even kind of what’s agreed upon morality or ways of being in the world. Those things change quicker and quicker even within the span of a single lifetime, which means all sorts of stuff that you took for granted or a job you were trained in or a tool you used to use becomes obsolete quicker and quicker. And so there’s this sense of the world kind of disappearing from underneath your feet as you’re trying to live it, which I think is a pretty compelling description of a lot of the challenges that we experience in different ways just in the modern world. I don’t know, defined roughly by the last couple of generations.

Brett McKay:

So I want to take that idea of resonance. We’ll table that. I’m going to come back to that because I think the preacher kind of agrees with Rosa there that the antidote for all this he absurdness can be resonance or something like resonance. But these ideas of we feel like in the modern world we want to control everything when it causes frustration and this idea of social acceleration, I think this really goes to what the preacher has to say about why life is absurd. And it sounds like too that modernity, this idea of social acceleration and we can control things, it sounds like it just makes that sense of absurdity of life more acute.

Bobby Jamieson:

I think so. I mean, that’s one of the things that really settled in more deeply for me as I was doing the research of this book, is that I think what Ecclesiastes is describing simply is the human condition. You could live at any time. You could live in any place in the world, and this book would really resonate with you at the same time, because Ecclesiastes is so much about ambition and aspiration, it’s so much about the things that kind of become magnets for our hearts that draw out huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of planning and strategy and the kind of things we sort of build our lives around. I do think Ecclesiastes, while it’s describing the human condition, those kind of things that Rosa is identifying as hallmarks of modernity are actually intensifications, kind of deepenings or they’re making even more vivid a lot of the exact things that Ecclesiastes identifies. So I do think that’s another way of getting at why Ecclesiastes feels like such a modern book, partly because Ecclesiastes is not just analyzing individual experience, but there’s a whole lot of insightful commentary and judgments about how the world as a whole works. So even though he’s in ancient Israel, I think he’s diagnosing problems that would sort of flower and blossom in the modern world.

Brett McKay:

I mean, this idea of controlling how intense it is in the modern world, just look at our health. We have all this technology, these tools to look at our, what’s going on inside of our body. We can measure our blood. We have all these supplements, we can measure our heart rate variability, and then we end up getting some sort of debilitating disease. You’re like, how could this happen? I’m doing all the things. I’m tracking everything, what’s going on? So I think the frustration is just more intense compared to you go back to 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago, if you got a cold, there’s a chance you might die. It’s not great. And it’s sort of heavy. It’s absurd, but it was sort of a given. That’s a possibility. Now these days when something happens that should not happen, got the technology to prevent it from happening. So you just feel even more frustrated.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It’s our modern world with the greater degree of control, greater degree of technological sovereignty over our basic bodily conditions. It makes it even harder for us to be reconciled to the realities of accident, injury, illness, ultimately death. If you’re in any kind of pre-modern society, you are just so much more surrounded by death. It’s so much more of a fact of life. It’s a part of the daily fabric of life that’s sad. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it also reconciles you to that reality. Whereas we can sort of put death behind this kind of sealed off door. People mostly tend to die in hospitals. We tend to keep it out of you or you’re not around. If a loved one is dying, typically they’re not in their own bedroom in your own home, you’re not the one sitting by them. And so yeah, I think it also makes it easier to persist in the illusion that somehow we’ll be around forever or even if we don’t consciously think that you can just sort of more effectively keep death at bay as a thought, the kind of illusion of your own. It’s just not part of your daily experience. And Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about death.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about that. And then this idea of social acceleration, I think everyone’s experienced that feeling of they feel like they have to work harder and harder, run faster and faster, but they’re just kind of stand in place and you’re like, what’s going on? I’m doing all this work and I’m not making any progress. This is absurd. This is absolutely absurd. And I have that experience with social acceleration of my own kids. I have a son who’s 15 and he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his future, and he is like, dad, what should I do for work? AI is going to take all of our jobs maybe. And I’m like, man, I don’t know.

Bobby Jamieson:

Honestly, that’s the example that was coming to mind. I’ve got so many friends who work in tech sectors and it just looks like AI is coming to gobble up their jobs. I’m just curious, did you have any advice for your son in the moment?

Brett McKay:

No. I’m like, I don’t know, man. Because when I was trying to figure out my career trajectory, I was able to look at my parents. They did the same thing. It was like, well, you go to college and then you apply for a job. Then you work your way up your career and you’re kind of in the same career for most of your life. My dad was a game warden his entire career for 35 plus years. Me, it’s been a little bit different because the economy’s changed. I’ve had adapt with my career with my kids. I’m like, I don’t know what advice to give you because what worked for me and my parents might not work for you. And it’s tough. That’s an example of social acceleration. You’re like, this is absurd. It should work. It worked before. It should work now, why doesn’t it work?

Bobby Jamieson:

I agree. I think that’s a good example. And even though this wasn’t even really on the radar, I mean, I kind of finished writing the book in 2023. It came out in 2025. I do think AI is the 800 pound gorilla of social acceleration right now, of just, yeah, there could be a career you sort of trained for years in and have put in 10 years of work in and an AI computer coding thing can come over and do in 10 minutes what it used to take you a month to do. Yeah, I think we’re in the early stages of seeing some pretty profound disruptions due to that. And I’m not sure there’s a lot of people out there with great answers.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So Ecclesiastes really speaks to this modern phenomenon of social acceleration where you are trying to do more and more, but we don’t feel any more satisfied. So let’s actually dig into what Ecclesiastes has to say about our relationship to time and feelings of progress and permanence. Let’s read some verses from the book. Some of the most famous verses are in chapter one verses four through nine. Could you read that and then let’s talk about it?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind. And on its circuits, the wind returns, all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full to the place where the streams flow there, they flow Again, all things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

Brett McKay:

How do you think these verses flesh out what the preacher means by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key points is that we try to live our lives as if there can just be this linear series of quests. I want this, I plan for it, I strive for it, I attain it, and it will make me happy. But this is kind of a poem of reflecting on nature’s cycles. A generation goes and a generation comes. Everybody who’s alive today is going to die. They’re going to be replaced by their kind of successors in the next generation. The wind blows around from the south, but then when the weather system blows itself out and things return to normal, it’s going to come back around from the other direction. So it is all these images of repeating of something that you had kind of on one setting, but then it gets flipped to the other setting. And so what happens is that there’s finally no gain.

It’s not like the whole system moves forward. The whole system just kind of returns to its original setting. And Ecclesiastes is observing these different patterns in nature to basically preach to humanity. The message that’s going to happen to you, your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, they’re all going to get reset. Whatever mark you make on the earth, those footprints are going to get filled in time’s going to wear ’em down, the sand is going to blow over ’em, water’s going to wash ’em away. And so we like to think there’s this linear progression toward a goal towards satisfaction, but there isn’t. What’s happened is what’s going to happen again, and it’s going to wipe out your goals, your gains, your satisfaction, and in some ways the key to understanding why are we wired like this? And again, the idea of the absurd, there’s a misfit.

Why is there a misfit between our hearts and the world? It’s there in verse eight. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. We always want more. We always want something more. We always want something better. Our senses are hungry for stimulation, for fulfillment, for something good to come to them. And I think Ecclesiastes would say that’s kind of a window into our deeper condition that there’s something we’re hungry for, there’s something we’re striving for. But the point is there’s this misfit, the world’s not built like that, but our hearts are,

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Kierkegaard said, we’re a combination of the finite and the infinite, and that the way those elements contrast can jar with each other. And that gives us a feeling of anxiety. And then I also think we feel that contrast between the cyclical nature of the world and the fact that we’re very oriented to clock time. I mean, we live by the clock, like, okay, I got to be here at this time. This thing’s got to start at this time. And if it doesn’t start at this time, then things have gone wrong.

Bobby Jamieson:

And clock time obviously enables all kinds of stuff to happen. Time only got standardized in terms of everybody being on the same hour, minute, et cetera, ready, set, go. I think as a kind of international Congress meant to facilitate train travel, it has to be this incredible precision and everybody’s got to be synced up if you’re going to have trains moving at dozens of miles an hour down a track to get to a certain city at a certain time, et cetera. So there are things that it enables this kind of regime of the clock, but it also creates a constant pressure. It creates a kind of constant sort of external accountability, and it can tempt us. Rosa is really insightful on this. It can tempt us to think that we actually have more control over our time. Time is a resource that you can sort of save, spend, invest, reclaim, recoup, not waste time is this kind of commodity that we can do all these different things with.

And in some ways that’s kind of metaphorically valid, but it also tempts you to think, oh, I’m in charge of my time. Time is my thing. I get to spend my way. Whereas actually we’re much more subject to time cycles. We’re much more sort of stuck in time. It only goes in one direction. If you really want to be in charge of time, try to make it run backwards. Try to get a do over for that mistake you just made or try to hit pause when your kid is just having some incredibly sweet, fun, cute thing. You just want to savor. Well, it’s going to end. You wish you could pause it, but you can’t. So I think clock time tempts you. Again, it’s that as you have control to think you have more control over time than you actually do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You quote this Jerry Seinfeld bit, we talked about saving times like, oh, I’m saving time. He’s like, where does that time go that I saved? Does it go to the end? He’s like, no, you’re dead. You don’t need to build up that. Save time. You’re going to die. It’s a very Ecclesiastes message there.

Bobby Jamieson:

Totally. And Seinfeld as the kind of prototype observational comic, he resonates so much with Ecclesiastes. I think Kohat is kind of like a standup comic in the way that he squints at the world, looks at it from a certain angle, draws kind of a caricature that then makes you go, oh wow, that actually is my life.

Brett McKay:

So work and making money make up a lot of human life. And you talked about that the preacher talks a lot about work and money. What did he say about work and why did he think it was he or absurd?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. One of the most revealing statements he makes is in chapter four, verses seven and eight, again, I saw vanity under the sun. One person who has no other either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil and his eyes are never satisfied with riches so that he never asks for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure. This also is vanity and an unhappy business. He’s basically diagnosing the workaholic 2,500 years or 3,000 years before somebody coined that term as a psychologist to describe a typical modern struggle. So yeah, he says, that’s motivated by envy. You want to have more than the person next to you. But I think it’s also our hearts are kind of these bottomless desire factories that work is a way not just to sort of earn your basic necessities, but if you can get more money and if more work can get you more money, and if there’s always more stuff that your money can get you, then you never really have an incentive to quit working.

And I think in some ways, even more subtle than money can be the promise of status. We don’t often talk about status or admit it, but status is basically the legitimacy that some institution or group or person confers on you as being worthwhile having standing. And in our society, the only universal currency of statuses work, what you do in your work is the most definitive aspect of where you stand before other people. And so Ecclesiastes diagnoses envy as the big motive that would keep you running on that hamster wheel, that treadmill of always working. And I think envy in some ways, not just of money or of possessions, but frankly even more so of status is a huge motivator.

Brett McKay:

And then this idea of money, like the preacher, he makes a lot of money and he is like, it’s absurd. I didn’t feel good after making all the money. He even talked about all this money I made. It’s going to go to someone after I’m dead and they’re going to waste it away. They’re going to spend it and this is all going to go away because I’m going to have this spin thrift son or grandson. And it was all absurd. All that work I did was for nothing.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, there’s all kinds of reasons. Ecclesiastes finds money dissatisfying, like you said. One is you got to give it all away and who knows what they’re going to do with it. Another is just, you can’t take it with you personally. You leave this life naked as you came into it. Another kind of famous line from Ecclesiastes that gets reused all the time. Another reason is that the more money you have, it frankly brings more problems. There’s people who want to mooch off you. There’s cares that keep you up at night. There’s more things you got to pay for now that you have this money in this property. And of course, the kind of most basic one, the deepest problem is that you can always want more money. The problem is ultimately your love of money that if you start being motivated by money, it becomes your ultimate good.

And so Ecclesiastes in a couple of places warns about being sort of driven or controlled by the love of money. And so I think that’s hugely relevant. I mean, in our society more than ever, money can get you virtually anything and you can sort of monetize anything. I mean, I think it’s great, Brett, that you have this podcast and all other stuff associated with Art of Manliness where you get to build a living doing this stuff that’s helpful for other people. But there’s also kind of a flip side to the sort of ethic of entrepreneurship. You can always have a side hustle. You can always turn this into a gig. You can always be at the back of your mind thinking, is it okay for me to just be enjoying or having a good time or relaxing when, oh, maybe there’s a way to monetize this. You know what I mean? So there’s, in our society more than ever, there’s infinitely more ways you could be kind of enslaving yourself more to money.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I, throughout my career have had to be aware of and sort of do calculus in my head. Am I taking this too far? We monetize, we have advertisements, we’ve sold some things, but there’s other ways I could monetize that I’m, I could become this walking sandwich board on Instagram pitching products all the time, using myself as a brand to hawk products. And I’m like, no, that doesn’t feel good. I’m not going to do that.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s over the line.

Brett McKay:

So the preacher, he says, okay, money and work – it’s not going to make you happy. So he says, well, instead of doing that, I’m going to pursue wisdom. So he tries to get really wise. How did that work out for the preacher?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, his ultimate problem with wisdom, well, there’s a couple of them. One is that basically you see this in chapter two, verse 16 of the wise, as of the fool, there’s no enduring remembrance seeing that in the days to come, all will have been long forgotten. And then he says how the wise dies, just like the fool. And so if you’re looking for wisdom to give you control, if you’re looking for knowledge as a source of kind of mastery over life, sovereignty over the world, if I can get the right answers, if I can get the right philosophy, if I can get the right outlook, this will give me kind of the crowbar to pry open my desired goods I want to get from the world. He says, it’s not going to happen. There’s no control, there’s no guarantees. There’s no sort of this worldly knowledge that’ll give you power over death or freedom from death. So in a way, he really puts and wisdom in the sense of what you can accumulate humanly speaking, what you can learn, what you can discover. He really puts wisdom to the ultimate test and finds it wanting.

Brett McKay:

And then also I think too, the more wisdom or knowledge you gain, it gives you again, that false sense of control. And then things don’t work the way you think they should work. You’re like, oh, I’m really smart. I’ve studied the books and it should go like this and it doesn’t. Like I’m actually more unhappy now because I had this idea of how it should have worked based on my study and my knowledge, and it’s not working like that, and now I’m actually more unhappy. You know what I’m saying?

Bobby Jamieson:

Absolutely. It’s this funny thing where Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book, is a quest for wisdom. But frankly, okay, part of wisdom. And even an ancient philosopher like Socrates, right? What does he know? Well, he knows that he doesn’t know. And there’s a sense in which Khel is kind of similar. Part of wisdom is learning the limits of wisdom, not just the limits of your own wisdom, but the limits of what wisdom can do for you in this world. And frankly, the wisdom of learning. Sometimes our kind of quest for wisdom is really motivated by a quest for control. It’s motivated by trying to have this position of being in charge, being dominant, being sovereign over my circumstances, that actually there’s no wisdom that’s going to do that for you. You’re just as subject to death. You’re just as subject to accident cancer. You name it. As someone who’s never read a single page of a single book.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the preacher, he tries to find happiness in work, in money, in wisdom, but he finds that they’re all vanity that they don’t ultimately satisfy. He also tries general pleasure like wine, food, laughter, but he doesn’t find lasting meaning there either. You mentioned earlier that he also talks about death a lot. What did Koheleth say about death?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, boy, he said a lot about death. Oh, I mean, one thing he says about death is basically you don’t know when it’s coming and it happens at an evil time, which is dark, but is also bracing and can help you really appreciate the sort of limited and fragile gift that life is. Chapter nine, verse 12 is a good passage on that. Yeah. One thing he says about death is you can’t bring anything with you through it. That’s chapter five, verse 15, man, he says so much about death. I mean, one thing he says about death is that death is the end. Like you were pointing out, you could amass this fortune. This is basically at the end of chapter two. You could amass this fortune, but then you got to give it over to somebody and you have no further say about what they do with it.

So death is the hard and total limit of every pursuit, every project, every pleasure, all the things that we give our hearts to that we think is the stuff that makes life worth living. Death is just an absolute end to all of it. And especially death doesn’t discriminate. He would agree to that extent with, what is it, Aaron Burr’s song in Hamilton. So death doesn’t discriminate, meaning you cannot guarantee that you’ll have a long life or a peaceful death by how you live in this world. And Ecclesiastes Kheled experiences that as a kind of insult, like what? Death chops us all down to size, and it doesn’t do so according to any particular kind of merit or rhyme or reason.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So yeah, death makes things absurd. Basically

Bobby Jamieson:

Death. Death is the ultimate absurdity.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so he spends the first part of Ecclesiastes saying, you can work, you can make a lot of money, you can get really smart, become really powerful, indulge in lots of pleasures, but you’re still going to die. And it’s all just chasing after the wind. It’s he. And that’s kind of depressing. But then he seems to totally change course. Can you read verses seven through 10 in chapter nine?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart. For God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might for. There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shield which you are going.

Brett McKay:

So it seems like he’s saying, do the things that earlier he said won’t bring you happiness. What’s going on there? How can these things that he said were he actually bring us lasting happiness? What’s the shift?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, what is the switch? I think the fundamental one is he is seeing all these things as gifts of God, and then he means that literally God is the creator. God is giving life. God is the one providing this to you. A lot of people will speak about life as a gift or some peak moment as a gift. And I think there’s a real insight there. I think actually Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, trace that insight all the way down. There’s a real reality there that it’s not from you. It’s not ultimately even from this world, it’s from God. So recognizing that life is a gift means I didn’t ultimately create this. I didn’t ultimately deserve this. My work, my skill may have contributed, may have helped to kind of bring this about. But there’s so many things beyond me and apart from me that had to take place.

If I’m a farmer, I know this intimately because it depends upon soil and sunlight and the weather and rain and all sorts of factors that are just clear beyond my control. And I think Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, actually every good thing in your life is like that. So recognizing the limits of your influence, recognizing the limits of your control, even frankly, realistically recognizing the limits of the good thing itself. It is going to end in death. It isn’t going to last forever. You’re not going to have total control over it and be able to make it perfect. When you recognize that there’s kind of a shift in your stance, your attitude, your grip on the thing, you’re not trying to grip it so tight that you kind of choke it. You’re receiving it with open hands. And so I do think Ecclesiastes commends to us, you could say an ethic of gift, an ethic of gratitude, an ethic of recognizing that life is something much more fundamentally that you receive rather than something that you sort of control or conquer. And so once you stop trying to fill your heart to the brim as if this one thing is going to kind of fully and finally satisfy you, you’re free. You’re free to experience all of these things as small good things, small good gifts. So I do think there’s a freedom that comes from trading control for thankful receiving. That’s maybe my kind of summary way of trying to get at what’s happening in these seven passages where Ecclesiastes tells us to get busy enjoying all these things.

Brett McKay:

What does that gift stance look like towards work, for example? What does that look like for you?

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s a good question. I think it looks like learning to treat whatever work I’m getting to engage in even moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, to try to be thankful for it, to try to give myself to it fully, to try to be alert to the opportunities of maybe ways it might challenge me or help me grow. And to try to recognize and be thankful for if this work in any way benefits somebody else. And I kind of get any glimpse of that, to be thankful for that and to not make my stance toward my work depend upon some farther off payoff that may or may not happen. And the payoff could even be some hoped for kind of fruit of the work itself. If I persevere in this for X number of years and I get it to this level and it develops in this way, well you literally dunno what’s going to happen.

You literally have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. And so I think that we can often, of course, we we’re planning creatures, we’re hoping creatures, you have to have some hope for the future to do any work at all. But I think often we can sort of load up our sense of value or worth or expectations really on the kind of compounding future interest that we hope is going to happen. I don’t just mean financially, I mean in terms of the work, its growth, its influence, its development, whatever it is. So I think for me, trying to learn to be present in the moment to whatever challenges there are, whatever opportunities there are, even difficulties in snags and snares as an opportunity to grow in some way. Personally, one kind of one word summary for it would be trying to have an ethic of craft as much as I can.

I’m influenced here by Matthew Crawford, his book Shop Class as Soulcraft or the sociologist Richard Sennett has a wonderful book on craftsmanship, where craft any job that you can both start and finish any job at all that you can do the whole of yourself and have some responsibility for the finished product. There can be an element of craftsmanship. You can control the process, you can control the tools you’re working with. You can respond to difficulties and challenges as a way to actually grow in your skills. So just for me very personally, I write a lot. I preach and teach a lot to try to apply kind of an ethic of craftsmanship to anything at all that I can. When you do that, you actually find that, yeah, the difficulties you run into are ways to get better at working with whatever the materials you are that you’ve been given with.

Brett McKay:

So focus on the process, not the outcome.

Bobby Jamieson:

Exactly. Try to invest as much as you can and learn to enjoy the process, even the more frustrating parts of it. Learn how to become absorbed in process and care less about outcome.

Brett McKay:

Well, what does that gift stance look like towards wealth? Because the preacher says, yeah, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your money. But a lot of scripture can seem kind of down on money or gives a lot of warnings about money. So what does a gift stance towards money and wealth look like?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I do think Ecclesiastes allows you to enjoy the good things of this life, including things that could come with wealth or possessions with a clear conscience with a true heart. Most of the things the Bible says about money are against love of money against excess, against being taken captive by wealth. But there’s even passages in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul talks about God giving us all things richly to enjoy, and that really resonates with Ecclesiastes. So I think there are ways to wisely, responsibly enjoy good things in this world. I think there’s also ways to kind of set disciplines limits boundaries. Can you use those things in a way that’s generous and really freely letting others partake of them? Well, you set limits to your own maybe standards of consumption or keeping up with the Joneses or not letting your sense of aspirational lifestyle expand to fill your whole paycheck or go beyond it. So I do think there’s practical and spiritual disciplines you can put in place to frankly guardians the dangers of wealth. At the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yeah, enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

And he says, you can enjoy other pleasures of this world too. Even though he said before that pleasures can be, he says that there is a way you can truly enjoy them.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So in chapter six, nine, he says, better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite. This also is vanity and a striving after win, which basically says any good thing in front of you from a meal to a conversation to time with your spouse to whatever it is, any good thing in front of you can be the source of enjoyment, but you have to kind of discipline your mind and heart to actually be present to actually, as it were, consume the meal that’s in front of you. There is this thing in front of you, if only you’ll look at it, it’s right before you. But we so often do you kind of look away from the thing that’s right in front of you and your appetite wanders off into all these directions. So yeah, the modern world, your appetite can wander off infinitely indefinitely. You can get whatever you want. There’s actually a discipline of enjoyment that can kind of serve as a bridge from his more dark sayings to the actual ones about enjoyment. Enjoyment actually takes discipline. You somehow have to tie your appetite to this thing that’s right there in front of you, rather than being like, oh, what if it was this? Or, oh, this could be better. Or, oh, this happened last time, or I wish I was here.

Brett McKay:

And I think this all ties in nicely with Rosa, this idea of taking a gift stance towards life. You can’t control gifts, and if you stop grasping for control, it counterintuitively makes the thing more enjoyable.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Rosa even talks about resonance having the character of a gift, and that’s one way to understand the experience of resonance. So I think Rose is really insightful and I think there’s something about even whatever parts of your work life or your various responsibilities might seem to have the most element of toil. If you’ve got little kids, it might be cleaning up their messes, taking care of their bodily needs. There’s aspects of taking care of little kids that are a grind. It’s donkey work, but how can you learn to enjoy even that, both with your kids and the time you get to spend with them, and frankly, enjoy that donkey work for the sake of your kids. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And the fact that you’re getting to do this and having to do this because of these gifts of human beings that are in your life, even that it could allow for a little bit of resonance, a little bit of enjoyment to come through in the toil that might come with say, the care of young children.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I do that a lot. Something my kids do, it’s really annoying, but I’ve had to reframe it in my mind is that they’ll get printer paper out of the printer and then they leave it open. And so when I print something it doesn’t work, and I’m like, ah. And I want to yell at them, close the printer drawer. But then I think I have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids. They come with frustrations, but I’m so glad I have kids.

Bobby Jamieson:

They’re making creations, man. For me, it’s like when they leave that stack, there’s like three pages they’ve drawn on, but then they leave like 45 spread out over the couch. Right.

Brett McKay:

You have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids, so enjoy it. I mean, how has Ecclesiastes helped you remember that life is for a living? Cause I think that’s the message that the preacher ends with. It’s like this life is for living. It’s not for scheming and gain and all that stuff. It’s just for living.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. I think in some ways that kind of stuff, we’ve been circling around for the last few minutes, like learning to be present for life’s present goods, both that that’s a gift to be enjoyed, and frankly that it takes a certain discipline. Like you’re at the pool with your kid in the summer, it’s three o’clock on a Saturday. Just be there. That is the only place you can be, and boy is it a great place to be. So whether it’s 3:00 PM on a Saturday in the summer, whether it’s having a bonfire in the fall and just roasting a hot dog in your backyard, whatever it might be, that’s the only moment you have. That’s what Martin Luther was commenting on something in chapter five where he basically said, this is the key statement of the whole book. That the present moment is the only moment you have.

It’s the only one that belongs to you, and there really is a choice of receiving it as a gift, enjoying it. And that takes a kind of self-limiting, it takes shrinking yourself down to fit yourself in. Here’s where I am as a Christian. I believe, here’s where God has put me. Here’s the moment he has for me right now. Maybe for a lot of people, they get to a certain age, maybe 35, 40, or maybe if they’re raising a family, their kids get to a certain age. Some of these lessons start to kind of dawn on you. But I think that Ecclesiastes, that learning how to be present in the presence, and that’s the only way to enjoy it. I think it’s maybe been the biggest sort of deepening of that for me personally in all the years I’ve spent wrestling with the book.

Brett McKay:

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

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Yeah. I’m on Twitter, Bobby Jamieson, the book has a little website with Penguin Random House. Those would be two ways to connect.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Bobby Jamieson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bobby Jamieson:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest day was Bobby Jamieson. He’s the author of the book, Everything Is Never Enough. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/EverythingisNeverEnough, where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. Word of mouth is the primary way we grow. As always, thank you for the continuous support. 

Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control — getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative — a male-specific counseling center — and the author of Boys Will Be Men: 8 Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift. As a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30, Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked-out and developed a clear, experience-honed framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose.

In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men, and how his approach — which is rooted more in action than in talk — can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men, and how to give them the drive, accountability, and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life “brick by brick” and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #810: How to Turn a Boy Into a Man
• AoM Podcast #926: The 5 Shifts of Manhood
• AoM Podcast #1,028: The 5 Marks of a Man
• AoM Podcast #886: What the World of Psychology Gets Wrong About Men
• AoM Article: Get Your Son Out of His Bedroom
• AoM Article: How Labeling Your Emotions Can Help You Take Control

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Not long ago, the primary concern people had about boys was that they were wild, impulsive, and out of control, getting into fights, pushing limits, and stirring up trouble. Today, the problem has flipped. The more common challenge isn’t reckless behavior, but inert passivity. More and more young men are anxious, apathetic, socially isolated, and seemingly uninterested in doing much of anything at all.

Vince Benevento, the founder of Causeway Collaborative, a male specific counseling center and the author of Boys Will Be Men: Eight Lessons for the Lost American Male, has spent nearly two decades working on the front lines of this shift as a therapist, coach, and mentor who specializes in helping young men between the ages of 14 and 30. Vince has worked with both the combustible and the checked out and developed a clear experience and home framework for what actually helps guys get unstuck, take ownership of their lives, and move forward with purpose. In today’s conversation, we unpack what Vince has learned through years of work with boys and men and how his approach, which is rooted more in action than in talk, can be applied not just in the therapist’s office, but by parents and mentors. We dig into why traditional therapy often fails young men and how to give them the drive accountability and sense of connection they crave. We discuss the importance of teaching young men to build life brick by brick and helping them find their wild, their thing, and a good group of friends. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/boysandmen.

Alright, Vincent Benevento, welcome to the show. 

Vincent Benevento:

Great to be here man. Thank you and happy to be on for sure.

Brett McKay:

So you are a therapist that specializes in working with men between the ages of 16 and 30. How’d you end up working with this demographic?

Vincent Benevento:

So if my wife was on the show next to me, she would say that it all worked out. This is the only thing I’m good at. You know what I mean? So I found my way to something that people would say that I’ve done relatively well. But I mean, the truth was like many people in this field, I have my own story. So I was a lost and wayward young man. I was a guy who struggled with addiction. I was a guy who struggled with pretty profound mental health challenges, came from a broken home, dealt with divorce. My dad came out when I was young, so I had some stuff and my stuff is different than everybody’s stuff, but I had some stuff that required that I had to do some personal work at a pretty young age, and so I needed support. I was very resistant to receiving it personally, mostly because I wasn’t ready to do the work, but I really couldn’t find anything that spoke to me in terms of what I felt engaged to do. And so I started puzzling and being curious around what kinds of things young men would be open to and willing to do. And years later came up with some stuff that has been useful when supporting young men trying to get their lives on track.

Brett McKay:

One of the things you argue at the very beginning of the book is that talk therapy is largely useless for men between the ages of 16 and 30. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, and a pretty bold statement from a therapist of 12 plus years or 15 plus years, whatever it’s been, 15 total, 12 as a licensed practitioner. And so yeah, it’s bold claim, but I stand by it. I mean, I think young men especially don’t have a lot of rich life experience to process through and to pick apart in ways that more mature individuals do. And so I think part of what we practice and preach is the notion that therapy or the therapeutic support process for young men should be much more about doing and not talking. For men and young men in general, this is a generalization but usually true, learn better from doing. And so men, because they learn through experience, gravitate towards frameworks like mentorship and coaching as opposed to traditional talk therapy, which tends to be a little more nebulous.

So we try to impress upon the guys we work with, the setting of small goals, the step work in achieving those goals, the literal experience of going out into the community and doing a thing can be a little more impactful than sitting and talking about something that someone may or may not do in the week in between sessions and just in addition and sort of separately, I think back to when I was 16 and pissed off and I didn’t have the emotional fluency to talk about my issues in the way that I do now. And I would contend that men, as we know, and young men are typically slower to mature than their female counterparts and particularly within the emotional realm. And so I think I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling till years and years later and hours of work in therapy. And so I think if somebody’s not engaged in that kind of process of self-discovery, it may be more productive and beneficial to do a thing rather than talking about a thing that you might not do.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So your approach is a little less conversation, a little more action with these young guys. 

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. For sure.

Brett McKay:

Something you describe in the book is in your career you’ve encountered two types of young men. The first type of guy is acting out, doing dangerous stuff, maybe has an addiction, is drinking, getting into fights. The second type of guy is pretty much the way he described him is anesthetized. He just doesn’t want to do anything. He just wants to sit at home. And you argue that the second type of guy is harder to work with. Why is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. So on first blush, it seems almost unreasonable to make that assertion. I mean, the second guy is just kind of not doing a lot. He’s not doing anything dangerous, he’s not doing anything risky. He’s not a danger to himself, not a danger to others. So how could that guy possibly be more difficult? I think back to when I was the first kind of guy. I was the fighting, drinking, driving, acting out, getting into trouble, but just oppositional externalizing kind of guy. When I go back 25 years to when I was that kind of guy, I was a mess, but there was energy and momentum associated with that mess. I had a girlfriend, I had a job, I had a car that I paid for money that I saved through my job. I was going to college. So there is progression personally and there’s goals that are being set and achieved and that guy’s doing stuff. He may be doing the wrong stuff, but he’s doing stuff nonetheless. 

The second guy isn’t really doing anything. And this is the curious phenomenon that I talk about a lot in the book. It’s like this sort of, I call him the second wave. I saw the first kind of guy 15 years ago when I started my business and now we see the second profile of just anxious, isolative, apathetic, highly dependent young men who are not seeking to individuate in any way, shape or form. They’re not excited to go get a job. We have guys who don’t want to get their license. They’d literally rather have their mother drive them around in the car because they’re so anxious about driving a car that they can’t even consider the notion of having their own vehicle and taking themselves to and fro. And so the first kind of guy at least was doing a lot of stuff and was busy in the world and had energy and it was misdirected, but you could direct it. It’s very difficult with this sort of second wave to cultivate an active process with a guy who’s so inert. And this is where we have to move in the direction of really connecting with an interest and connecting with the soul of that person to get them engaged in something that they care about so that we can start moving them in any direction whatsoever.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’ve noticed this as well in my work with young men. So I’ve coached flag football, I’m a leader at my church’s young men’s group. I remember in flag football you’d see those two types of guys. One guy was super aggressive, had just that kind of killer instinct, but he kind of messed stuff up, but I could work with that. It’s like, oh, he’s got this energy, I can direct that. We can refine his skill and he’ll get better. Then you have the kid who just inert had no drive at all and it’s just like, I can’t work with this. And then in church you see the same sort of thing kids where it doesn’t matter what it is, they’ll be engaged, they’re excited, even if they think the activity we’re doing is kind of boring, they’ll try to make something out of it. And then you have the boys where it’s just like it’s pulling teeth. You do everything you can to get them engaged and they’re just like me. It’s so hard. So they lack that. The Romans called it thumos for that fire in the belly, that drive. And I’m seeing it more and more in young men as you are. What do you think is going on with this younger generation? You talk about how you see this a lot in Gen Z guys. What do you think is going on where you’re seeing this lack of thumos in drive in young men?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I don’t think it’s any one thing. I think it’s a crockpot filled with a bunch of different things that make it hard to do this work with young men and make it hard to connect with people in general. I think there’s a tech piece for sure. There’s a tech piece and a subsequent isolative piece in association with that. We see a lot of skill erosion. So as everything has become both automated and immediately accessible, we can have things done for us rather than do things ourselves. And so the old example that I used to give was not so long ago in the early two thousands, I used to know how to get places and now I just don’t because I just throw it in the Waze just like everybody else and I’m not paying attention to where I’m going anymore. And so that’s one very small detail of the day in which we live where we’re not exercising our brain, we’re not exploring, we’re not engaging with our surroundings, we’re just passively moving through our day.

And that happens more readily than we would care to admit. There’s an instant gratification piece where I’m hungry and so I just ordered dominoes and they send me 44 ounce coke and a pepperoni pizza for with the fee is $31 and I just swipe that or my parents swipe that. And there’s no reward-based system where you do a task and you get a reward and then you can subsequently use it for whatever purposes you see fit. So there’s not a lot of delayed gratification and sequencing and work that goes into achieving goals. And I just think more broadly, because we’re so flooded with information and information that scares us, this pervasive culture of fear that we live in has raised the stakes in terms of the cumulative anxiety that we all experience as people, but specifically young men. And so young men are not excited to go get their first car and drive fast.

They used to. Now I’m not saying that that’s behavior that we should relish upon our boys, but boys used to be excited about getting their car and shining it up and driving around fast. They’re not excited about that anymore. They’re scared and they’re scared of things like that. And they’re scared of talking to a girl and they’re scared of getting a phone number and they’re scared of going on a date, which is why they watch porn and lock themselves in their room incessantly. And so this fear that is pervasive in our young men has caused us to opt out of taking healthy risks. I’m not talking about inappropriate risks, like the risks that I took when I was a younger man. I’m talking about healthy risks, age appropriate developmental risks, and that I think has robbed us of some of the heart work and the soul work that is really important to being a young man.

Brett McKay:

You also talk about how parents might’ve unintentionally contributed to creating this second type of young man. What’s going on there you think?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think it comes from a good place, and I’ve seen over the course of 15 to 20 years of doing this work, 15 years of running my own business, 20 years in mental health in general, I have seen parents’ awareness of mental health skyrocket. Parents are knowledgeable, they understand the resources, they speak the language. They even understand basic symptomology, even parents who haven’t been through or around therapy with a kid or have had a kid with mental health challenges. Your baseline parent understands and speaks the language of mental health. That was not the case when I first started. And so that has bore a lot of fruit in terms of the way we engage with our kids emotionally, but also just in terms of how you triage an issue in a situation. So it certainly comes from a good place. I think the unintended consequence is we pathologize, right?

We pathologize a lot of behavior, parents pathologize. And so if your kid is acting out, he’s depressed, he’s anxious, he’s got a mood disorder, and those things may very well in fact be the case. And so far be it for me to say in all situations that’s not true. But sometimes he’s just not accountable to his behaviors or sometimes he’s acting out and being manipulative or sometimes he just doesn’t feel like doing it and he goes in his room and he games for seven hours instead because he has the autonomy to do so and there aren’t the checks and balances in the system that will make it so that he can’t do those things. And so I don’t think that mental health is always the reason why someone is struggling. And I think parents jump to conclusions sometimes around pointing a finger at their son’s pathology as being the rationale for what’s happening when in fact a behavioral approach can yield better fruit.

Brett McKay:

And going back to the idea of anxiety, I think a lot of parents are anxious these days for their kids because I mean life in the 21st century, it is pretty complicated and complex. And for sure there this anxiety that, oh, my kid is not going to be able to make it. There’s a lot more you have to do to establish yourself in the world economically. So a lot of parents are like, I’m just going to do this for my kid. I remember when I went to college, and here’s a great example, when I went to college, my parents were like, oh, you want to go to college? Great. And that was it. I had to fill out all the forms and I was like, dad, I need this IRS stuff for the FAFSA thing. And they’re like, okay, here you go. But I had to do it on my own. It wasn’t like they were holding my hand. And then I see parents, my peers today who’ve got kids going to college, they’re doing all this stuff to get their kid into college, signing up for these prep classes, doing these elaborate college tours, helping them refine their essays. And I’m thinking that did not happen 20, 30 years ago.

Vincent Benevento:

Not even close. No, not even close. And talk about, it’s a really good call by you, Brett, but talk about contributing factors to the collective anxiety. I remember filling out those applications literally in pencil at my dining room table in the year 1998, so it’s not that long ago. And I did ’em all by myself. And there was no private SAT tutor and there was no educational consultant to pick my colleges for me. And no one filled out my FAFSA stuff. I did it first kid sink or swim, figure it out, go to college. So the world is just not that way. And I mean, listen, I know a lot of people in this space, they do extraordinary work in this space, the college space, the private university space, and the game that is getting your kid into the best school humanly possible to set ’em up on a trajectory for life.

And what I can tell you is the emotional pressure that kids experience as a result of this conveyor belt that has been socially constructed for them, whether they fall alongside it or not. And by the way, I got kids who mostly don’t fall on that conveyor belt and are trying to be shoehorned into it has a lot of challenging consequences for kids and for families. And I see a lot of kids who parents elect to send them to college because there’s no other option. You have to drive around with a sticker on the back of your car that says where junior’s going to college, whether they should be going to college or not. And so I get a lot of parents who call me in November the following semester and say, Hey, he didn’t make it. What do we do now? And I don’t think that the college is for everybody, and you have to go to a top 50 school framework is not one that every single person should subscribe to. Not every parent, not every kid. And I think the people who are having awareness of that in advance are far better suited than the people who are learning that lesson on the backside.

Brett McKay:

And then when parents do, because it comes from a good place again, they want to help their kids succeed.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure.

Brett McKay:

But when they do that stuff for their kids, sort of the unspoken messages, you can’t do this. I got to take care of it. And then that just carries over to other areas they like, well, yeah, you can’t get a job on your own. I got to pull some levers to do that for you. So it just disempowers these young men who are already disempowered.

Vincent Benevento:

Absolutely. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. And the job example is a perfect example because most of the people, I mean, I’m in Westport, I’m in Westchester, I’m in West Hartford, Connecticut, like pretty affluent pockets with a lot of high profile, high influence people. And so when their kid is struggling, usually dad will come into the center and say, Hey, I’m going to get my kid a job and such and such, what do you think? And I say, don’t you dare get your kid a job. Instead, let’s support him in the process of him finding it for himself and navigating and figuring out where his strengths are and where his weaknesses lie. And that’ll position us much better to help him down the line than it will if we just scoop something up and put it in his bread basket.

Brett McKay:

So in your book, you’ve laid out several principles that guide your approach to helping young men that come to your clinics, these sort of disengaged young guys. I want to walk through some of these. The first one is brick by brick. And this is about helping young men build a life for themselves. Why is this the first principle in your philosophy?

Vincent Benevento:

Because I think that to do anything of substance in your life, men have to commit themselves to a long focused approach. And I think the world sends quick fix messages. The world sends messages around both instant gratification and overnight celebrity. I’m advocating a different message. I’m advocating that anything I’ve ever built, whether it’s been my marriage or my relationships with my kids or my business or meaningful relationships, any of those things that matter to me deeply were patient in their growth process, were things that were step by step one after the next, next, next. Were filled with trial and iteration and reset and debriefing and learning. We’re messy at times and we’re not a straight line, none of them. And I think that’s the case. When you build something of substance across life, you don’t usually finish exactly the way that you start. And when you make a blueprint for something, typically there’s unforeseen challenges that come up along the way. And as long as you keep working step-by-step, day by day, brick by brick, it’s a good mantra to set you up for success in whatever you’re doing.

Brett McKay:

So how do you help a young man start becoming a builder? So a young man who can look for a job, find a job, apply to college by themselves, build a relationship. How do you help a young man who just hasn’t done that before? He’s one of those passive anesthetized type young men.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you begin with the acknowledgement that at some point every person hadn’t done it. So me, you everybody, we all had to get started somewhere. And so for me, I get really excited about vision work. And what I mean by that is helping a young man get excited about crafting a vision for where he wants to go, young man or man, because we see people as young as 14 and we see guys into their early thirties crafting, co crafting, leading, sharing a vision for what ignites you, what feels right, what have you felt purpose in doing, what have you done that’s been exciting for you, and just dream boarding it and vision crafting and helping them get excited. One, because if this is their first blush with mental health supports, it debunks their preconceived notions about what it is. I want a guy coming into my office and feeling good enough that he wants to come back the next time of his own accord.

And typically this kind of vision work will draw them in that way. And so we start with vision crafting and developing a sense for where you want to go and what you want to do and what you want to be. And from there we get tangible, we do research, we answer questions, we go out and we learn through experience and service and shadowing and job acquisition and all these different processes, and we teach and instruct and we fill in the gaps as needed. So it starts very broad and very opaque to just cultivate enthusiasm, and then we get down to it sort of step-by-step brick by brick.

Brett McKay:

So that’s that action part. You’re not just having a weekly session where you’re talking about things.

Vincent Benevento:

No.

Brett McKay:

Maybe you have that session to lay out the vision, but then you’re going to assign this guy homework and then there’s going to be follow ups. Like did you get that application? Yes. Okay. Did you fill it out and turn in the application? I mean, that’s what it is. It’s a lot of coaching and mentoring

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, and it’s positioning a guy to be better off than when he started. And I don’t just mean broadly around the process, I mean in that hour, part of what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get you farther in the hour. You come see me that week than you were when you came in. So you come when you go see Vince and you think to yourself, wow, we’re going to get a lot of stuff done today. So one of my favorite processes to do with a guy, and it seems so simple, is to come in and work with a guy who’s never had a resume before, a young kid, 15, 16, 17, now sometimes 18 years old. But listen, let’s bang out your resume and literally hand the kit of paper that reflects to him everything he’s done in his life to walk out of that session.

And it doesn’t have to be sexy and it doesn’t have to light the world on fire. And I’d started doing this 15 years ago, and I know you could throw it in your chat, GBT, you could do it in two seconds, but the co-constructing of that process to build what you’ve done and to reflect to you what you’ve done so you can hand it to your parents and be proud of it, or you could put it in somebody’s hands and go look for a job. Now that’s actually reflecting to you self-worth about your own achievements and positioning you to get excited about the next thing we’re going to do next week. So that’s just one example, but it’s a pretty good one. It’s a very simple exercise that denotes how we get kids moving forward in that very tangible way.

Brett McKay:

I think if you’re a mentor or a parent, you can start doing this with your kids now. Take those basic life skills that you just take for granted and then actively, we’re going to do this. We’re going to make a resume. We’re going to, I did this with my kids. They wanted a bank account. I was like, okay, let’s go to the bank. And I made them talk to the bank teller.

Vincent Benevento:

I love that.

Brett McKay:

You’re going to have to figure this out. And I say, here’s all the stuff you need to get your social security number. You have all this information. And I mean, the thing is, this stuff can be tedious and it’s boring, but it’s important work

Vincent Benevento:

A hundred percent. And I mean, I even think about when my kids were young, we’d go out to dinner and I remember watching people, their kids were like 10 and they would order for their kids in the restaurant. And when my kids were five, four, and two, they were ordering food for themselves just because building that requisite skill is essential for everything. You need to have a conversation with somebody, look ’em in the eye, and to whatever extent is age appropriate, engage with another human being. Right now, the hardest part is the consistent and persistent commitment on behalf of the parents because you’re going to get resistance very often. It’s so much easier to just opt out on one or two or three occasions, and then a habit that you’re trying to cultivate gets extinguished because you don’t consistently curate it. So the bank example that you gave, it’s fantastic. We should be trying to impart these life lessons and skills to our kids beginning as young as is appropriate. It just takes a lot of energy to do that over time.

Brett McKay:

Here’s another example. This is with my daughter. She’s 12 and she got this bad grade on an assignment and she thought, I did the work. I don’t agree with the teacher. And she was really upset and she asked Dad, can you email? I’m like, no, I’m not doing that. And she says, well, I’m just going to write him an email. I was like, no, you’re not going to write an email. I want you tomorrow to have a conversation with him. That night we roleplayed it. I was like, I’m going to be your teacher and you’re going to be, you talk about how you’re going to approach this without getting emotional and accusatory, and we workshoped it, and then she did it. She had this tough conversation with an authority figure challenging him on a grade, and it worked out great. He saw, okay, I messed up there. It was really productive and I was really proud of her, and I could see that she was proud of herself that she did that. Right?

Vincent Benevento:

No, yeah. And that’s how you build esteem. Esteem and purpose and self-belief is cultivated by kids doing for themselves independently with support and with guidance. But had you written the email to the teacher, you’re robbing your daughter of that rep. And part of what we’re always trying to do with parents is helping them support but not do for and enable.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so that’s brick by brick. So just start helping these young people, young men in particular start doing things on their own and it’s going to take a lot of support, but that’s important. The second principle is name it to tame it. What do you mean by that?

Vincent Benevento:

Being radically honest with yourself about your strengths, but also your challenges. And I’m speaking mostly in terms of the realm of mental health diagnosis and stigma. I’m pretty transparent in the book around my own struggles with substance use and my mood, and I’ve had a diagnosed mood disorder since I was 19 years old. I was hospitalized for it when I was 19 years old, and I was an alcoholic for years prior and years post until I was able to kind of clean my life up and get my act together. But it was really my ability to acknowledge and come to grips with those two diagnoses that were the prescription for me getting well and the acknowledgement of the limitations I now faced as a 19-year-old kid in college who was a substance user, who needed to figure out how to manage my life. It was those limitations that actually provided me with freedom and helped me relearn how to exist as a human being in the world. And so that was a very difficult process, that was shameful and humbling for me. But to come to terms in an honest way, which occurred over a series of years, gave me information, helped me take the right steps, helped me understand my boundaries, things that I can do shouldn’t do, and positioned me to be successful really for the rest of my life, truth be told.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So you’re primarily focusing on working with young men who have a diagnosed mental health issue. But I think this is applicable, even if a young man doesn’t have a mental health problem, like you said earlier, a lot of young men, you can call them emotionally illiterate, they have these emotions, but they don’t know what they are. And because they don’t know what they are, they don’t know how to manage them. And so helping young men learn how to recognize, okay, I’m feeling frustrated. I might think it’s anger, it’s not anger, it’s just more of a frustration when you frame it like that, it’s like, okay, I can do something about that now. Or I do this a lot with young kids who are feeling scared, nervous about something. A lot of ’em will say, I’m just really anxious. And I’m like, no, hey, look. Yeah, you’re nervous, but that’s good. It’s not like something bad’s happening to you, it’s just getting you ready to take on this challenge of like, oh, okay. Yeah, that reframe helps them be more proactive with life.

Vincent Benevento:

And those clarifying questions, Brett, I think are super important. So okay, you’re angry. What does that look like for you? How does your anger show up in different situations? Are you blowing holes through the wall? Are you yelling at mom? Are you swearing? Are you not doing your homework? What do you do when you’re angry? And from there, we can develop ways to address that in different fashions depending upon how it shows up. But I think like you said, also, it’s the emotional fluency piece. Guys don’t understand basic emotions besides sadness, which they typically can’t articulate and anger. So I mean, I remember being a guy at 19 years old who was so confounded with my emotional world and so limited in my ability to articulate it, that I just showed up as angry literally all the time. And I think it was essential for me to become better equipped at communicating where I was emotionally, right? I’m ashamed because I’m fearful, because I’m sad, because I’m lonely, because these are all nuanced offshoots of anger that boys and young men and men experience, but naming them well and naming them precisely again gives the prescription about how to approach the solution going forward.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s like a Rumpelstiltskin, remember that story? Once you know his name, you have power over him. It’s the same thing with your emotions.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay:

Once you name, it’s like you have power over it.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So it is just all about helping these young men become more emotionally literate and not confuse maybe frustration or shame or anxiety for anger, because I think that’s what a lot of young guys do. Whenever they feel those things, they express it through anger. It’s probably not anger, it’s something else, but help them understand that and those messier

Vincent Benevento:

Ones, the fear and the shame and the hurt and the regret. Those emotions that are dirty words to boys and young men, giving yourself permission to hold the ability to articulate that and to communicate it. And I think this is where parents can move mountains in their ability to model that in a healthy way for their kids in a setting of difficulty or challenge or conflict in the home. When you are fighting in front of your son, how do you speak to your spouse? How do you speak to your son? How do you speak to your daughter? And what do you do to communicate your own emotional response in the moment? These are the ways that parents can do incredible things to support their kid moving more towards emotional fluency.

Brett McKay:

Another principle that you have in your philosophy towards helping young men is you got to help them find their wild. Why is tapping into your, well, first off, what do you mean by your wild? What is that?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Wild for me is a rejuvenation of the soul. And I think about it as losing it, right? So it’s becoming reacquainted with the things that make us feel alive. I think there’s a very primal natural peace that is deconditioned out of us as men, as we move through life and as we move from young men, competitive, moving through physical prowess, activities that cause us to evaluate ourselves against other people and compete in large groups or packs. When you’re driving around a minivan, doing a Girl Scout cookie drive and reporting to the same cubicle for 10 hours a day, five days a week, those things are the opposite of wild. So I think that as the lifespan continues, and I talk to guys in their thirties, forties, and fifties all the time, they just don’t feel alive and they feel bored and they feel underappreciated and they feel like their value is waning and they’re not alive. And I think the process of finding your wild is re-engaging with your soul and finding the things that used to make you feel alive again.

Brett McKay:

How do you do that? So this is for older guys, we’ll talk about helping young guys find their wild. But let’s say you’re a middle aged guy and you’re feeling just kind of that middle aged burnout, malaise. How do you capture that wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Again, I think it takes effort. I think it takes effort. So you have to seek it. You have to plan a trip with your kid and go ice fishing somewhere. You have to finally stop complaining about the job that you hate and develop a strategy and walk out and start again. You have to take your wife on a getaway to an island that you plan because she plans literally everything. You have to make plans with a guy and go away. You have to try a new hobby and do a new thing. You have to put yourself out there. And so I think a lot of the men that I talk to are highly isolated and they go through their routine and they sit in their house and they, particularly in the winter, they are not actively doing new things that cause them to reevaluate the world around them and test themselves to be better. Part of being wild is competing against yourself and testing yourself to see what you have the capacity to do. And that requires planning and time and resources, but I think the yield is worthwhile.

Brett McKay:

What about a young guy, one of these anesthetized young men we’ve been talking about that just have no wild in them, maybe they’ve never found their wild. How do you help them find their wild?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, I think when we think about what has been lost in the society that we live in now, it’s this male mentorship, male specific mentorship. So 200 years ago when you decided that you wanted to become a blacksmith, your dad was a blacksmith and your grandfather was a blacksmith, and your great grandfather and his father were also blacksmiths. So you grew up learning everything from them and mentoring under them, which not only showed their favor and their investment in you, but it taught you all the requisite skills that you need to learn. Now, we’ve deconditioned men. They don’t do physical things. Young men, especially young men, are not often doing physical things or many of them can kind of extricate themselves from doing physical things by just doing work behind a screen behind a door. So I think we mentor young men and show them and teach them and reflect our favor and investment in them. We take them literally out into the world, into nature like our predecessors, and sit around and tell stories and blaze a trail and hike and climb and grab a pole and fish and engage in nature to be reacquainted with their physical wild. And we communicate with them in ways where we demonstrate what they have the capacity to do. We teach them a skill, we let them learn a skill, we show them that they are capable of a thing, and they begin to believe in themselves over time by trying new things and succeeding.

Brett McKay:

I think as a mentor, as a father, one thing you do for boys, teenage boys is to expose them to as many different things as possible so that they can find, you talk about this in the books, they can find their thing because a lot of young men, they might not be excited about anything. They haven’t found the thing that excites them, and they might not know they’d be excited about something until they actually try it. So I do think as a parent you might have to sort of nudge kind of like, Hey, you’re going to do this thing even if you don’t think you want to do it because there’s a chance you might like the thing that I’m having you do.

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I saw this. We did this. We took some boys rock climbing at church one night, and this one kid, he was kind of a little passive, not confident, and he didn’t think he was going to like it, but then he ended up liking it. He actually signed up for a membership later on. It became like a rock climber. That was great. That’s a perfect example of finding your wild. You have to expose ’em to stuff. You talk about relationships in your book and this idea of mentorship, but also relationships between just having friends, men having friends, and you talk about a lot of the young men you work with, they don’t have any friends. Why are young men so lonely these days? What’s going on there?

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah. Yeah, it’s really sad, but the number one reason for referral documented by the client coming into Causeway is to make friends. And we have countless kids who come through the center who set the goal of having one friend. I’m not talking about girlfriend, I’m not talking about boyfriend, I’m talking one friend. And so to me that just speaks to where we stand, where it is difficult for young people to connect authentically with one another. It is easy for people to remain isolated. And so I think we have to work to practice relationship. And I think we see a lot of guys who are marginalized socially and who struggle socially. Guys on the spectrum, guys who have social challenges, guys who’ve been bullied, guys who are depressed and anxious, guys who haven’t had a lot of success in making friends. But our message to them is to find their tribe and find their people and cultivate the relationships from there.

So if it’s an online community of people and those relationships are fostered predominantly online, we can start there and then potentially scale up to person to person engagement from there. If they’re kids who have a specific interest, be it in Legos or in music or in building something out of wood or in fishing or in whatever, there are communities of people who can develop relationships with them, with shared experience, with shared interests, which makes it a lot easier. And so part of where I think mentorship as we do it is effective is we can model those skills that have eroded over time. We can take Junior to grab a cup of coffee down the street and just kick it with him and get him feeling comfortable talking to someone in a public space. We can have him go down to the town green and throw the Frisbee disc around and have him do an activity that he can then do with someone else.

We can have him just walk around the grocery store and chat with somebody and get a sense of what the body language is as we’re watching him so that we can help him read a conversation more effectively. So when we’re doing mentorship with guys who struggle socially, there’s a didactic component where we’re teaching and we’re gap filling, and we’re helping them understand the things that they can do differently through feedback exchange, but there’s a heavy, heavy relational component because we’re leveraging the relationship and the trust that we’ve built with somebody to get them to do a thing that they wouldn’t otherwise try. And I think that’s the difference. Parents struggle with their kids because they can’t just get them off the dock, they can’t get ’em to try the thing. We’re typically successful because we have the quality of the relationship where we can get a kid to buy in and at least try something. And hopefully he’ll like it more than he thought he would.

Brett McKay:

I’ve got a friend, he doesn’t have any sons, but he has a son-in-law, and he noticed the son-in-law didn’t have a lot of male friends, and he’s like, this is a problem. You need to have friends. You’re a young guy, you should have friends. And he’s like, well, I don’t know how to do it. I’m just so busy with work and I just don’t know where to connect with guys. And he says, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to host, we’ll call the mastermind group at my place once a week and just invite some guys, you know, don’t have to be best friends with them, invite them over and we’ll just talk shop, we’ll talk about work, we’ll talk about life. And he has to model. He is this 50-year-old guy, basically. He says, I’m doing remedial work here with these young men. I had to model what it looks like, and it’s a lot of work, but he’s like, it’s paying off. These guys are starting to connect. They’re starting to form some friendships and it’s enriching their lives.

Vincent Benevento:

For sure, for sure. And I got to be honest, Brett, I actually did it in my life. So when I started to reevaluate the way in which I was spending my time and I really dialed back my commitment to work, I found out that I was almost spending too much time at the house and started working from home more, and me and my wife were around each other too much. I was around the kids maybe a little too much, and I felt that there was this sort of missing piece for me, and it was in the name of relationship with other guys. And so I just started asking guys to go grab coffee, and it was something that I didn’t do for a decade professionally, and I just started. If I met a guy and I hit it off with him at the ball field or in town, or our wives were friendly, but we never really hung out before, I would just grab coffee with somebody and it got to the point where four or five, six hours a week, I’m just having a coffee with a friend, which is good.

It’s good balance for me as a man. It helps me getting out into the community and meeting and talking to people. It makes me visible. It gives me things to talk about in instances, some of them. It allows me to help somebody and see a need and meet a need. So I think male relationship as guys is something that we must continuously practice, even if we’re decent at it or pretty good at it because the force that the accountability provides is also very important. We need to have other guys reflecting how our decisions feel to them, and it makes us better versions of ourselves.

Brett McKay:

Yeah it’s the whole iron sharpens iron.

Vincent Benevento:

That’s right. Yeah. 

Brett McKay:

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

Vincent Benevento:

Yeah, appreciate it very much and it has been awesome. Thank you. So you can check us out at our website, causewaycollaborative.com. That’s the organization. I have a personal website, which is sharperformen.com. My Insta is @VinceBeneventolpc, and obviously the book is available on Amazon, and we hope you guys check it out and enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

All right. Well, Vince Benevento, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Vincent Benevento:

Thank you, Brett. Really appreciate the time, man. Thanks.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vince Benevento, the author of the book, Boys Will Be Men. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, sharperformen.com. Also, check out our show notes where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

We’ve all had that feeling — you meet someone new, and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync. You click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs?

My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony, and she says this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a measurable physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feels so good, and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more “clickable,” and why video calls are the worst.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Dying Breed article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• Kate’s previous book: You’re Not Listening
• Sunday Firesides: Be Someone’s Atmospheric Getaway
• AoM Article: The Importance of Eye Contact

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. We’ve all had that feeling: you meet someone new and the conversation just flows. You’re in sync, you click. But what’s really happening when that magic occurs? My guest today is journalist Kate Murphy, author of Why We Click: The Emerging Science of Interpersonal Synchrony. And she says, this experience isn’t just a vibe, it’s a physiological phenomenon and the most consequential social dynamic most people have never heard of. In our conversation, we dig into what happens when people click, why syncing with others feel so good and how it influences everything from friendships to teamwork to romantic relationships. We also talk about why some people have a knack for connection, how you can become more clickable, and why video calls are the worst. After the show is over, check out the notes and resources at aom.is/click.

All right, Kate Murphy, welcome to the show.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Brett McKay:

So you got a book out called Why We Click. It’s all about that feeling that we’ve all experienced where we’re clicking with someone socially. It could be the first time we meet them and we’re just like, man, I’m on the same page with this person. I’m vibing with them. And there’s actually a name for this in the scientific literature: interpersonal synchrony. And you call it the most important social dynamic. So why is interpersonal synchrony so important?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it is the way we connect, just like you said, it is the physiological mechanism, the under-the-hood mechanism for connection and interpersonal synchrony. The way I define it is, and I still think it’s magical, that moment of clicking, but it’s the magical but now scientifically documented tendency of human beings to fall into rhythm with one another. And what I mean by that is when you gather two or more people together in a room instantaneously, usually in less than 30 seconds, they will not only begin to match or mirror one another’s gestures, facial expressions and postures, they will also start to sync up their heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal activity, their pupil dilation, all these physiological signals that we cannot detect, but we sync up to them nevertheless. 

And why do we do this? We do this because when we internalize and embody one another, we are able to get a read on one another’s thoughts and feelings. And so when you smile, when someone else smiles, you get a read on their joy. When you flinch, like when you’re watching a football game and you see a quarterback get sacked and you flinch, you are actually intuiting their pain. And also when you sync up with somebody else’s racing heart, you start to feel their anxiety. So it’s really an evolutionary advantage of human beings of being able to tell very quickly, instantaneously friend or foe, what are they thinking? What are they feeling?

Brett McKay:

I think all of us have probably heard this idea that we mirror each other. So if someone puts their hand on their chin, we have a tendency to put our hand on our chin if we’re syncing up with them.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

But you go into the fact that there’s a lot more going on with our physiology than just that. Besides mirroring gestures, you mentioned your heart rate syncs up, your hormonal activity syncs up, and there’s also research that shows that when people are syncing socially, their brain activity, their brainwaves sync up.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s key. And that really shows that there’s been this transfer, particularly during meaningful conversations. It doesn’t happen, interestingly, during vacuous conversations, very superficial conversations — only during meaningful conversations, and I learned this when I was writing the listening book and it really got me started on this next book about synchrony. But when the listener and the speaker are really understanding one another, their neural patterns, their brainwaves start to sync up. And that is a measurable way of seeing, okay, there has been a transfer of thoughts, memories, and feelings. So that’s really critically important. 

But also when you are having these meaningful conversations, particularly when you’re in the presence of another person and eye contact, we’ve always been told, look people in the eye. It’s really true because we start to mimic other people’s pupil dilation and there are all these things happening like micro expressions on your face that you are mimicking totally subconsciously and that aren’t really visible, but we’re mimicking them just the same. And it helps us again, embody, internalize one another and really feel and get in the rhythm, in the groove vibe sounds very West coast, woo, but to really get a read on the other person’s vibe, people have energy, they have negative and positive energy, and that’s how we pick it up.

Brett McKay:

And as you were talking about how we all have this desire to connect and click with people and how we want to sync up and basically almost become the same person, it reminds me there’s that myth from Plato talking about where men and women came from, and the myth was that there was a time before in primordial time where there’s these creatures that were kind of like a donut shaped, like a circle looking thing that had four arms and four legs and two heads, and they were together and they kind of connected at the belly button. They kind of wheeled around like cartwheeled to get around and then they separated.

Kate Murphy:

I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Brett McKay:

And then they separated and that became men and women, and then we just had this desire, we want to become that one person again.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, the idea Plato had was that we’re roaming the planet looking for our missing other half that we’ve been separated from, but interpersonal synchrony tells us that what we’re really looking for is we are looking for the person with whom we effortlessly sync the person who harmonize with us, the people that we are on their wavelength. I love how all these turns of phrase things that we have said for time immemorial, being in sync, in step, in tune on the same wavelength and on the other side, discordant, that kind of thing, that those are all actually true, these things that we were feeling. Now we have the technology to actually see that’s actually what’s happening. We’re syncing up in this way and that’s what feels so good.

Brett McKay:

So syncing feels good in the moment, and then when you consistently have those clicking moments with someone, that’s what makes for fulfilling long-term relationship. What contributes to our ability to sync with others? Is there a genetic factor? Does it have something to do with our early childhood development? Is it a mixture of both?

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I think it’s all of that. And I love that you’re bringing up the genetics because I really want to say at the outset that this is an emerging science and we don’t understand it exactly why it happens when it happens. That’s why it’s still magical. I mean, why did John Lennon and Paul McCartney click on so many different levels and were able to produce and have the impact that they did? And the same thing with all of us. When we click with somebody, it’s still somewhat magical. 

But yes, I do think everything comes into play there. It’s genetics, it’s your history, it’s everything that has happened to you in life is embodied within you. And every neural twitch, everything that you do is a product of all of those pieces all the way back to when you were in utero. So I like to use the analogy that we’re all kind of like we’re made up of trillions of oscillating cells and what we’re all kind of like, are these massive symphony orchestras with all of these different instruments playing at different frequencies and and you meet another person and they’ve got their whole orchestra from all these different pieces that came together.

And it’s just a matter of whether or not you two are able to harmonize that you are able to, it’s not necessarily you’re going to start playing their song and get on their tempo entirely or they’re going to do the same to yours. What’s really remarkable is how we both somewhat accommodate to one another and play this even more beautiful tune together. And we also, the key point is we interpret it as pleasurable. So it’s not so much of putting each other in an exact common state of arousal. It’s more accommodating one another and playing this beautiful song together that we both are really in the groove, if that makes sense.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, it’s a dance.

Kate Murphy:

It is a dance. 

Brett McKay:

Well, what you talk about is stuff like genetics and upbringing influences someone’s general ability to sync with people. It’s like their overall capacity to connect with people, but those things, they also influence your personality, your disposition, which also influences whether we click with people. There has to be some kind of alignment there, not that you have to be perfectly parallel and the same. You can still sync if you compliment each other in some way, even if you’re different.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah. What’s sort of cool about this is if there are so many people that we can think of who are odd couples that come together and that we never would’ve like God, I never would’ve put those two together, whether it’s friends or a romantic couple, so you can sync with people that you never thought you would sync with.

Brett McKay:

Something else you talk about is that there are certain people who are just especially good at syncing with other people.

Kate Murphy:

There are people that have, and I talk about this in the book, we have something called effective presence, and we’re all familiar with this personality and that’s sort of the general state of how we feel, but effective presence is this consistent way that we make other people feel. There are some people that just, for lack of a better word, have a really good vibe that people just sync to very easily. And you can call it charisma, you can call it a vibe, you can call it just somebody who’s just really has a compelling personality. And it doesn’t mean they’re always upbeat. It’s not just that it’s just people are drawn to them, but we all carry around an effective presence. That is something that is I think, useful to think about is how do I leave people? Am I leaving people better or worse than I found them? Are they more uptight? Are they happier after they’re around me? And what does that mean and what can I do about it?

Brett McKay:

I think that’s worth remembering that we all have this personal atmosphere that can influence how people feel and that we should be mindful and thoughtful about how we want to leave people feeling after we leave their presence. As we’re talking about this, people might be thinking that these good syncers, these people who can click easily with people, people probably think, well, they’re probably all extroverts. They’re bubbly. They’re charismatic in that sort of stereotypical way we think of charisma. But you highlight examples of individuals who have that great effect of presence and they’re not super dynamic, but people are still drawn to them.

Kate Murphy:

And I think that’s because they’re able to put them in sort of a calming cadence, for lack of a better word. They calm you down, they make you feel more secure. There are also lots of people that can just make you feel more competent or there’s something about their presence that you find pleasurable. Again, it’s like tuning into them and you find it pleasant. I also, I think it’s worth noting that we’re not going to sync with everybody. And as much as we might like to, I think we like to, we’re really not meant to. And so part of maturity is realizing that there will be people that you can really hum along with and you’re really going to click with them. And other people, you’re just, no, that’s not going to work. And it instantly, and there’s no use really forcing the issue. And it’s also, people usually have two reactions to that failure to connect is to say, first of all, there’s something wrong with that person that I didn’t connect with them. There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with that person, or there’s something wrong with me that I wasn’t compelling enough or that’s why we didn’t connect. And sometimes no harm, no foul. You’re just not a good fit and that’s okay.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you’re not for everybody and everyone’s not for you.

Kate Murphy:

Exactly.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So there’s some individuals who just, they’ve got some sort of knack for clicking with a lot of people. They got that effective presence. What about individuals on the autism spectrum? Something that you hear about, it’s hard for them, people with autism to socialize because maybe they don’t pick up on cues as much. Are they still able to sync?

Kate Murphy:

That’s an interesting question. I actually found it really fascinating. There are two schools of thought about that, and one is that just having a really difficult time noticing syncing that they’re so internally directed that they have a hard time syncing with other people. There’s another school of thought is that they’re so overwhelmed by all the signals they’re receiving that they’re flooded and so they aren’t able to sync. 

There’s also some absolutely fascinating literature that, and this is the case for also people who have some learning difficulties, also perhaps with ADD, but certainly autism is that their deficits in their ability to keep time, keep a beat essentially. They have a really hard time keeping a beat to music and also apparently keeping a beat with other people because we all have a rhythm. Neural patterns are rhythmic, inherently rhythmic. Everything in the universe is pretty much because atoms in and of themselves inherently rhythmic. And so the inability to keep time is an indicator and is also how they’re actually using that as a way to diagnose people who do have some of these neurological difficulties to find out whether or not that’s sort of a marker. And also it’s coming into play as a type of treatment to help people with their music awareness with rhythm, perhaps dance, to try and help with that timing deficit that translates into our ability to sync up with other people. Isn’t that fascinating?

Brett McKay:

It is. I thought that was really interesting that your ability to keep a beat with music translates over to your ability to keep a beat socially. I thought that was really interesting. But I mean, it makes sense because one of the things you see people do in groups, sometimes an organization will have people participate in a drum circle and then beating on the drums, it gets people in sync because they’re creating a rhythm together.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think just in general, that’s the other side of this, is that when we are syncing with other people behaviorally, meaning we’re doing the same thing at the same time, particularly to a beat, to your point, it fosters feelings of rapport, of trust. People volunteer more information, they’re generally kinder and more helpful. Even babies strapped into face forward carriers and bounced in time to music are significantly more likely to favor an experimenter who is also bouncing in time to music versus an experimenter who’s bouncing out of sync or who is not bouncing at all. So there’s something about, I mean, I myself am in a line dancing class and a lot of this people in this class, I mean just really probably little else in common, but I mean, we are so cohesive and there’s such a sense of joy of doing the same thing at the same time.

You lose this sense of yourself, you become more of this larger organism moving together, and it does stimulate joy. 

And if you think just even back in history, synchronized behaviors, movements have been used as a kind of social glue. Think of religion, people singing together, praying together, kneeling together, standing at the same time together and in the military marching to a beat. And also all soldiers are really pretty much on the exact same schedule, doing the same thing at the same time. And it builds this incredible sense of cohesion. It brings this feeling of emergence. So when soldiers see something happening to one of their own, it’s like it’s happening to them.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think we’ve all maybe experienced that. I know when I worked in a restaurant when I was in high school or I worked at Jamba Juice making smoothies and you get really busy and whenever the crew, they were just synced up and in the zone. We didn’t have to talk to each other, but we could look at each other and knew what they were going to do and what I needed to do. And it just felt awesome. This is amazing. We’re just cranking out smoothies. 

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, I love that. And the same with the greatest sports teams, the ones where everybody’s cohesive and really clicking. You can see that, and those are the ones that succeed.

Brett McKay:

Another factor that plays a role in our ability to sync socially is something called interoception. What is that and what role does it play in our ability to sync with others?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up. It’s really, I found this, well, I found everything in the book really fascinating, but this was a revelation to me. We like to think of our feelings come from, okay, something happened. We process what happened in our mind and that results in our feelings. But the research is really coming to show that really feelings start in our body and our brain interprets feelings from these experiences, these feelings in our body, and then we translate that to emotions. So interoception is the ability to read what’s going on in your body. It’s essentially body awareness. It’s the flip side of perception. Perception is what you’re perceiving outside of your body, whereas interoception is being really in tune with what’s going on within your body. And that’s super important because if you don’t understand the sensations and what they mean in your body, you really can’t sync up to another person or embody another person and take on their feelings and be really in tune with them.

So for example, we all experience, if you think about what does fear feel like for you? Do you feel it in your stomach? Do you feel it in your chest? Do you feel it in your head? Do you feel it in your feet? Some people feel it in their genitals. I mean, all of us have a different physical signature for fear. And if you’re not in tune of, okay, what does that mean? What am I feeling right now is that anger? And where we get into trouble as human beings is when we start to misconstrue or get detached from those inner feelings within us and what they mean. 

A lot of people have a different sense of what hunger means. I mean, what the feeling is. Is it gnawing in your chest or do you get kind of irritable? People have different ways of perceiving hunger, but where we really get messed up is when we misconstrue things like you can feel a little bit irritable or lethargic and think that’s hunger when it’s really boredom and people get mixed up with that. And particularly in our culture where we’re so busy, and it’s almost a badge of pride to say you didn’t sleep when you were tired. You didn’t eat when you were hungry. You pushed yourself through when you were in a lot of pain. Exercising that detachment from your body, and you can see how this would be a problem is if you are trying to internalize, embody someone else’s feelings. And again, this is all subconscious, but if you’re not in tune with your own body, how can you be in tune with someone else’s body?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s interesting. One of the first things you can do to help develop your own ability to click more with people is just get more in tune or more aware of your own emotions and what they feel like in your body.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, just do an internal review because if we’re internalizing other people’s heart rate, their respiration, all of these things, and we’re not even aware of our own heart rate, you’re not going to pick up someone else’s anxiety if you’re not even aware of your own heart rate. They’ve done a lot of research with particularly heart rate, but there are lots of other things where people work on their interoception going through different parts of their body and what are you feeling? And there was one study I thought was just fascinating, where it had high frequency traders at a hedge fund, and the ones that had better interoception were better traders. They made more money and they stayed in the job longer because they had more of that sense of, okay, this is danger or what these other people are doing. I’m getting sucked into something that maybe I shouldn’t. Where they really had a sense of their own self. And again, this is all subconscious, but the fact that they had better awareness, higher awareness of their heart rate and whether it was up or down versus another person made them a better trader.

Brett McKay:

So personality can influence whether we click with someone, but there can be situations where the fit has potential, but you’re not syncing because you’re just not generally good at syncing with people. And we’ve talked about that some people are just better able to click with people and more people than others. I mean, some of that is genetic and upbringing, but there’s also things we can all do to improve our clickability. And we’ve talked about some of those things already. I mean, be aware of your own emotions, do things in a group, like some kind of physical activity together where you’re all in sync, but what else can we do to make ourselves more clickable? And you actually have a chapter on what the world of speed dating can teach us about this. So what can speed dating teach us about being open to interpersonal synchrony?

Kate Murphy:

Well, your listeners should know there’s a vast scientific literature on speed dating, which was news to me at not only speed dating, but speed networking. And they’ve done a lot of studies to find out that’s how they really figured out what is happening when people are clicking. And the people that reported a sense of attraction and they wanted to see this person, again, whether it was in a professional or a personal context, romantic context, it was that they were syncing on all these different levels. The thing that I think people can do that we discount, and of course that’s what my first book was about is to, you really want to be present, of course. And really, if you can be in person, in person, you’re going to pick up all these different signals that you don’t pick up online or in a two dimensional or even three dimensional.

If it’s virtual reality, you’re not going to pick up. Syncing is a multisensory dynamic, and so you’re losing a lot of information that helps you sync up with somebody if you’re not in person. So there’s that piece of it. But also learn to be a really good listener when you are really trying to inhabit somebody else’s narrative and really trying to understand them. And listening isn’t just being quiet. I mean, it is really trying to almost be with someone in the sense that you’re watching a movie where you’d get totally lost in the other person and to almost let yourself go in what the other person has to say, get rid of your own personal agendas and really be a good listener. That is something that helps with that neural syncing we were talking about with brainwaves. So that’s a piece of it too.

But I just think in general, what’s so powerful about this knowledge is to be aware that this is even something that happens. I mean, I don’t know if you knew this before, but I certainly didn’t know that on all these different levels we’re syncing up with other people and to try and be sensitive to that, and you kind of let yourself go with it if it’s something that’s working for you. But if you get that feeling, that discordant feeling or sort of like that needle across vinyl when you meet someone to also pay attention to that too, because you have intuited, you have felt something that’s pretty important to pay attention to.

Brett McKay:

Can you hack social syncing? Because some bit of advice you always see in magazines or blog posts is if you’re on a date or maybe even you’re on, you’re networking or a job interview, well, if you really want to sync up with someone, you should just do whatever they do. So if your date crosses their legs, you cross your legs and be intentional about that. Does that actually work?

Kate Murphy:

No. Short answer, because we are really fine tuned to authenticity. Human beings are. You talk about a superpower, we’re really, and even subconsciously, anything that’s a little bit off or that we don’t perceive as being authentic, we pick up on that. And then also when there’s a big disconnect between, that’s another thing about syncing, is to actually be authentic. Because if there’s a disconnect between what you’re feeling and what you’re doing or saying, people pick up on that, that’s sort of crossed wires. And so people, they pick up on that, whether they are aware of it or not, they’re aware of the end feeling, which is discomfort.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Another bit of advice I’ve seen people use to try to sync up is, but if you don’t do it right, it’s a total turnoff, is using people’s name.

Kate Murphy:

Oh yeah.

Brett McKay:

Dale Carnegie famously said something like “The sweetest sound a person can hear is their own name.” And I think a lot of people hear this advice and they feel like, okay, I got to drop someone’s name as much as possible in this conversation.

Kate Murphy:

It’s so aggravating.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, I’ve had salespeople do this to me and I’m just like, okay, I know what you’re doing, and it’s just really annoying, so you can just stop it. Please stop. But I’ve also had podcast guests who say my name throughout the conversation and it sounds natural, and I’m like, oh wow, that does feel really good. Even when I think someone is doing it intentionally to be charming, it still feels good if it’s natural, but when it’s really forced, it’s irritating. It’s a complete turnoff.

Kate Murphy:

No, absolutely. There is a natural way to do it. I have a friend who’s an airplane mechanic and he’s absolutely delightful. And he does that. He uses people’s names partially it’s to help him to remember, but it’s so natural. And I mean, Dale Carnegie’s, right? It is like music to your ears when he’s authentic, he wants to know me, he wants to be friends with me. And you feel that, and when someone just drops it every once in a while, Brett. That’s right. Lemme tell you, Brett.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Okay. So you can’t do the whole mirror somebody to sync up with them. That’s just going to happen naturally if you’re syncing up with them. What about looking people in the eye? You mentioned that eye contact is important.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, that’s huge. Look people in the eye.

Brett McKay:

But how much is too much?

Kate Murphy:

Well, there’s creepy staring people in the eye, but I think when that happens, there isn’t a synchrony going on. The person is just in their mind thinking, I’m going to stare at this person. Do you know what I mean? There’s a difference between really looking with a sense of interest and a sense of exploration and really wanting to sync with somebody. And then there’s this, okay, I’m just going to look at you because that’s what I’m supposed to do. And also I think there are people who, everybody’s not as good at this. People have different tuners. And so some people really can try and look at somebody and it’s almost like a blank stare. And that’s where it’s creepy because you don’t, on a certain level, you know that your pupil dilation is not syncing up, they’re not syncing up with your heart rate. You feel that disconnect. So I would say when you’re looking at someone, if you’re really looking at someone with interest and curiosity, then that’s going to come across. But certainly I think people have different tolerances for intimacy and sometimes that all the signals that you’re getting from someone can be a little too much, and they need to look away every once in a while, and that’s okay too.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s fine. So I mean, it sounds like if you want to be more clickable with people, it’s not so much about tactics or techniques, it’s more about an attitude or a stance you take to whatever social interaction you’re in. And that attitude is just one of presence and curiosity and wanting to know about this person. And if you have that attitude, the clickings going to happen naturally.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. If you’re compatible with the person, right? That’s important. And that’s so hard being a nonfiction writer, which I’m mainly a journalist, and now I’ve written my second book after my first, I said, I’d never do this again. But if you look at the landscape of nonfiction books, I think you’re probably more familiar with this than most people, that it is all about this hack. If you just do this and then this’ll happen, and interpersonal synchrony and the things that I write about, it isn’t something where if you do X, then Y will happen. And actually nothing about life is like that. And it’s as you said, and I think it’s really apt. It’s a dance. And so if you go in wanting to dance and you go in with that curiosity and that openness and just generosity of spirit, you will find people who are on your wavelength who will want to join in with your music, who you will play a beautiful song together or dance well together. And then there will always be people who will just sort of be on their own tempo and they’re maybe distracted. They may not even notice you or you’re just not compatible. But again, that’s okay. We’re not meant, we don’t have the cognitive or emotional resources to sync with everyone. And also what would make it special when you do.

Brett McKay:

So you mentioned one of the important things for interpersonal synchrony is you have to be with the person in person.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. 

Brett McKay:

And you have this whole section about the research on our ability to socially click with people via digital mediums. What does that research say?

Kate Murphy:

Well, as I touched on earlier, synchrony is a multisensory experience. And in fact, interpersonal synchrony suggests that we have more senses than the five we take for granted. How do you sense someone’s heart rate, their respiration, their hormonal level, even these subconscious smells? I mean, we have all these pheromones that we’re throwing out that they think is responsible for why women sync up their menstrual cycle. So they’re all these things, and you’re not going to get that online. You’re not going to get this full panoply of signals that someone is throwing out that you could potentially sync up to. And that doesn’t mean you can’t sync on certain levels. I mean, we certainly see things go on viral online, or people’s outrage gets stirred up online. So it’s not like you can’t have synchrony or feel like you have synchrony with people online. But oftentimes, and people who’ve done online dating know this better than most is you might think you have a connection with someone online and then you meeting them in person and you think, oh my God, no. All you can think about is how long do I have to sit here before I can break this off without seeming rude? It’s just you really do not get the full sense of another person online.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s an interesting point about online dating because it also could happen, there might be people in your in-person social circle, maybe at work or at church, where your filters on the dating apps wouldn’t have brought you to that person.

Kate Murphy:

Absolutely. 

Brett McKay:

Because the filters on dating apps are very superficial, like how tall you are, money, income. But there might be people in your interpersonal social circle that you never would’ve thought you would’ve like, I want to date this person. But then you get to be around them and you interact with them and you’re like, oh, wow, I kind of like this person.

Kate Murphy:

Yeah, you swipe. You would’ve totally swiped left if you had read their profile, but then you see them in person and you totally click.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So yeah, in-person, important. Let’s talk about this. We’re on the podcast. I don’t do video podcasts and a lot of podcasts are going the video route. I’m talking to you, I cannot see you. You cannot see me. I do all my interviews remote without video. I don’t like video. I do video calls every now and then. I don’t like it. What is it? Help me justify myself here. Why do I have this aversion to video calls and why do I prefer voice only calls?

Kate Murphy:

Well, the science backs you up on that. I mean, I’m not just trying to make you feel better. I mean, the science totally backs you up on that, and I salute you for resisting it because that is the way of the world right now where everybody’s moving to video. But the problem is that because we have this instinct to sync, looking at video is very disruptive and makes us feel ill. I mean, zoom fatigue is a real malady. And that is because the way the technology is at this point, the way that video images are encoded and decoded and buffered and all these things that are manipulated about the image, and not to mention pixelation, it distorts all these tiny little cues, these facial expressions. And then back to eye contact, you are making eye contact with your, or maybe you aren’t with your camera, so nobody’s actually looking at you.

And so you in your brain, again, this is subconscious, you are just rapidly spinning your wheels trying to do this adaptive evolutionarily entrained thing with another person to sync up with them. You’re looking for all those microexpressions, you’re looking for that eye contact and you’re just spinning your wheels trying to do that. And it ends up making people feel uncomfortable, vaguely disturbed, a little bit off. And I have never met a single person who says, oh, goody a zoom meeting. And I don’t know why it’s become something where everybody thinks is to rigor, because I mean, I’ve had people that I’ve talked to that I’ve worked with who say, oh God, I loved reading that in your book, and I hate Zoom calls. And yet they’ll schedule a zoom call with me. And I feel like, why is this? But I totally agree with you that we are able to connect and sync on a much more authentic real level just by hearing each other than getting all that faulty information that we get from the video that throws us off. And at some part of our brain is really struggling, and it makes it really hard to connect in any way, shape, or form.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I love talking to people on the phone. I’ve been doing that a lot more lately. I’ve got a friend who’s moved and once a month I’ll take a walk for an hour and we just talk to each other on the phone and it’s like we’re together even though we don’t see each other.

Kate Murphy:

Yes, I agree. And there’s also you think there’s kind of an intimacy having someone right in your ear. There’s that piece of it too. 

Brett McKay:

No, I agree. Whenever someone does a zoom call, I always feel kind of like a heel. I’ll do the zoom call, but I’ll keep my video camera off. And then the other person’s like, Hey, is your video camera not working? And I say, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to do audio only. It’s a phone call.

Kate Murphy:

Well, but let’s be honest, Brett, people are mostly looking at themselves on these calls.

Brett McKay:

You’re checking yourself out. 

Kate Murphy:

They’re looking at a little image of themselves, they’re really not looking at you, or they’re getting distracted by looking at what’s that art in the background? Is that a cat crossing in the back? And then when people blur all around them and they look so peculiar with that blur stuff around them, I mean, you do kind of feel like a jerk. I have nothing to hide. It’s not that. It’s just I really want to pay attention to what you’re saying. I really want to connect with you in some way, and I want us to be productive and sync in a way that we can solve problems or get to an agreement. And the video just subverts that.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so let’s use this as a clarion call on Zoom video calls.

Kate Murphy:

Boy, if that came out of my book, I would feel like I had just accomplished something great in the world.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter about the importance of interpersonal synchrony and romantic relationships. What happens whenever a romantic relationship is not synced up?

Kate Murphy:

Well, it’s not good. I mean, when we are not in sync with another person, we experience it as discomfort, romantic or otherwise. And I think it’s particularly painful when you have been in sync and then you move out of sync. And actually that’s not a bad thing because you do want to have periods of asynchrony in any relationship. It’s natural and healthy because that’s how you get back in touch with yourself and recalibrate and makes you better able to, when you do sync back up with the other person that you each can bring something to the dance. I like your analogy, so that’s okay. But I think a lot of times, particularly people who have anxious attachment styles, they get very upset when there is a sense of asynchrony. And so they really spin their wheels trying to what’s wrong,

Which only drives people apart. And they often will do things that provoke the person. If they’re really agitated, they will provoke the other person. So they’re agitated too, just so they’ll be in sync on that level, which is not good for a relationship. But if you really find that you’re really on different wavelengths and really feel like a real distance is coming between the two of you, go back to those things of make sure, are you spending enough time together? Are you with each other enough to establish those physiological, synchronous and also activities, those joint activities we talked about, go for a walk together. I mean, make time. So you’re doing things, having these shared experiences and these joint activities that help you sync up more readily.

Brett McKay:

Okay. That’s great advice. So make sure you’re syncing up regularly. People are busy as a couple. You can just sync up in the morning when you’re having a cup of coffee together, talk about what’s going on with your day, and then maybe at the end of the day, have another chat where you just hang out, talk about how the day went.

Kate Murphy:

Well, I mean that’s one of the greatest things about being in romantic relationships is they used to call it pillow talk, but just when you’re laying in bed at night and just talking and that quiet, and again, you’re not necessarily looking at each other, but you’re so synced up physically by proximity and just talking about your day and sharing things that really promotes that synchrony and that sense of intimacy.

Brett McKay:

So we’ve been talking about the benefits of interpersonal synchrony. It allows you to feel connected to people close. It feels good. It allows you to get stuff done efficiently and effectively. But are there downsides to being too in sync with somebody?

Kate Murphy:

Oh, yes. Because we have this instinct to sync, it makes us vulnerable to getting sucked into other people’s emotional vortex. I mean, I think we’ve all had the sense that when we are with somebody who’s just high drama, incredibly manic, that it’s exhausting. I don’t think everybody has a great emotional vocabulary, but we all can recognize someone who’s hard to be around versus easy to be around. And the people that are hard to be around are the ones that sort of sweep us up into this emotional cadence, resonance that we’re not comfortable with. And it is difficult, and it’s also difficult because when we embody and we internalize other people, it feels like it’s coming from ourselves. So I think we’ve all had the experience of why did I do that? Why did I say that? Or there was sort of a blow up and you’re like, how did that happen?

And that’s because you climb the ladder of emotion, arousal, agitation with another person because of this instinct to sync and you lost sight of yourself. You lost sight of where that person begins and you end. And so that’s why things like interoception are really important. And also just by reading this book, just to have an awareness that this is what’s happening. And when you start getting those feelings, you can kind of think within yourself, okay, what am I doing with this? I’ll give you a really good example. When I was first working on this book, or I had really gathered most of the data, I hadn’t really finished writing the book. I was invited to speak about my last book at a major university, and I won’t say which one, which will become clear in a minute. And I was invited to lunch with one of the deans, and we were at lunch and he was, let’s just say he was socially very anxious, and he was spinning and he was having a hard time looking me in the eye.

He was just kind of agitated. And as a result, I was pretty miserable. I was really uncomfortable and I was feeling really anxious, and I was feeling very socially awkward. And I realized, which is not me. I love meeting new people. And I realized, oh my God, this is what’s happening. I’ve totally internalized this guy. And once I was aware of that, I was able to pull back and do things like think about, okay, where am I putting? I realized, okay, my shoulders are hunched. Let me bring them down. Let me take some deep breaths. I even slowed the cadence of my speech, crossed my legs the other way, and I totally changed the rhythm of the encounter. And not only did I feel better and bring myself back to myself, but he started to relax. He started to sync to me. So there’s a real power in catching yourself. And it’s hard. It seems like an easy thing to do, but it’s really hard because it’s so instinctual and you become so wrapped up in the moment that you don’t realize it’s happening as it’s happening and you do the debrief kind of afterwards, you realize, oh, that would happen. But if you get good at reading yourself and reading other people, and the degree to which you are matching, mirroring that other person, it really can make a total difference in your social life.

Brett McKay:

So the Osmond’s famous saying, “one bad apple, don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” but you say the Osmonds were wrong. One bad apple does spoil the whole bunch.

Kate Murphy:

Yes. And I think the best example of this was an incredibly interesting study that was done in the early two thousands by Will Phelps, who’s now in Australia. He’s at University of South Wales in Australia, but at the time he was at University of Washington. And what he did is he created all of these work groups out of University of Washington business students, and he created all these work groups, but he introduced a confederate or an accomplice who was to go in and either act like a jerk, a slacker or a depressing downer, and see what happened, what the effect was on group functioning. And actually, he didn’t know Will Phelps did not know about interpersonal synchrony at the time. He was just looking for the effects. But he said, now knowing what he knows now, he would’ve done the study totally differently because if you look at the video, it’s striking that during the slacker condition, he’s leaning back in his chair, he is eating, he’s acting like he couldn’t be bothered with the task at hand.

And sure as shooting, everybody else starts leaning back. They’re starting to say things like, let’s get this over with. And they performed really badly. And the really heartbreaking one was the depressive downer one. And the guy comes in and he’s acting real depressed and really lethargic, and it’s really sad. You start seeing everyone else slow down, putting their heads down on the table, and you get this sense, and they actually verbalize it. It’s not only the task at hand was meaningless, but life in general seem meaningless. And so you can see how this contagion happens in situations, and I think we’ve all experienced where somebody new comes into a group and it just totally upsets the dynamic and pulls people in one direction or another. And there can be good apples too. It can be positive or negative, but it’s true that one bad apple, the greatest predictor of the success of a team or organization is not how stellar the best person is or even the average abilities of the rest of the people, but how awful the worst person is that predicts the success or failure of a group.

Brett McKay:

So if you’re a leader of a group, what do you do when you’re dealing with a bad apple? Do you just have to get that person out of there, or do you try to rehabilitate them? What’s the strategy?

Kate Murphy:

Well, most CEOs that I’ve interviewed are just like, yeah, you got to get rid of it. It’s going to ruin everything. But I think what they try to do more on the front end is hire very carefully.

And again, don’t interview by Zoom. Don’t rely on an algorithm that’s going to pick the right resume. As you rightly said, sometimes with dating apps, the people that you swipe left on are the people that are the right person. So there’s that. There’s also, when I interviewed Danny Meyer, he allowed me to go and I watched, I mean, you talk about synchrony in his Michelin starred restaurants, the synchrony between the kitchen and the front of the house. And there’s just a tempo. It’s a ballet in there. And I was talking to one of the managers and he said, with hiring, they typically bring in somebody and have a trial run, which I think is probably a really good idea with a lot of organizations to the degree that you’re able, because it’s to the benefit of the potential hiree as well as the employer, because they all get a sense of, am I clicking here? Is this somewhere where I can flourish? Is this someone who’s going to fit in with the vibe, the rhythm of the team? So I think more to really try and head it off from the beginning.

Brett McKay:

So you got this one chapter. I want to end on this. I thought this was really interesting. You explore our sometimes uncanny ability to sync with people from afar. So for example, I’m sure some people have experienced this where they get a feeling that someone they know who lives far away is having a hard time, or maybe something bad happened to them and they think I better check on them and come to find out something bad did happen to that person. What’s going on there?

Kate Murphy:

Well, I’m not sure, but I do talk about this in the book. And again, this is very, people don’t agree, this is highly speculative, but in the physics world, they are coming to think that our brains operate much like a quantum computer. And again, I really want to preface this, that there is a lot of disagreement among physicists, but there is a camp that believes our brains work like a quantum computer. And quantum is subatomic particles, and their behavior is very unique. And one of the things that is a factor of quantum mechanics is something called quantum entanglement. And that is where these subatomic particles, they can become synced, but then when they are separated by time and space, they maintain that synchrony. And since they think that our brains are operating like quantum computers and obey the laws of quantum mechanics, including quantum synchrony, you can see this really trippy notion that if the quantum particles within your brain are synced up and can become entangled, you can imagine how the quantum particles in another person’s brain that would sync up to your brain would be operating in that same synchronized way. And that might, and I emphasize, might explain why we are able to intuit feel, predict telepathic types of things, and we’ve all had them happen and thought, whoa. I mean, how did that happen? And you could see how that might be an explanation of why that would happen.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting. Yeah, I know people like that. My wife is able to do this. She’ll have those moments where she’ll just be lying in bed and she’s like, I got a friend who’s having a hard time. I need to call them. And then sure enough, she calls and they’re having a hard time. I’m like, what’s going on there? So yeah, it could be quantum entanglement or it could just be the romantic. We’re just so combined that we just are on the same wavelength no matter where we are. So who knows what’s going on there.

Kate Murphy:

But I do like that there’s still some magic to this that we don’t quite understand it all. For me, there’s something intellectually as well as kind of spiritually satisfying about the fact that synchrony binds us not only to one another, but also to the universe as a whole. Because synchrony has been observed throughout the natural and life sciences, everything from the tiniest quantum particle to supermassive quasars exhibit synchronistic properties. And so it really shouldn’t be a surprise that human beings do it too.

Brett McKay:

Well, and you have a section on this. I mean, we can get a little more, let’s go more woo-woo. I like this about syncing with nature. I’ve had that experience where I’ve been out backpacking in the Rocky Mountains and I’m just staring at a mountain by this lake, and I feel like the mountain is talking to me.

Kate Murphy:

Right?

Brett McKay:

And I know it’s not talking to me, but it feels like it.

Kate Murphy:

But on some level it is. I mean, the science is pretty clear on this because, I mean, think about it. We are ruled by nature. The sun coming up, the sun coming down. We have all these internal clocks that are based on the rhythms of nature. And the research is very clear that people feel better out in nature. And they think that is because we sync up with the regular rhythmic patterns of not only what you hear in nature, but also what you see in nature, which is not what happens in urban environments. So we probably need to have another conversation if you’re actually seeing lips moving on the mountain and talking to you. But the sense of communion and feeling in sync while you’re out in nature and with the mountain, I think that’s perfectly valid and accurate.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, humans are designed to click. We love to click. 

Kate Murphy:

Yes.

Brett McKay:

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

Kate Murphy:

Well, I think the best way is just to go to my website. It’s www.journalistkatemurphy.com, and you can read about the book and any journalism that I’ve done, and that’s probably the best place to go.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Kate Murphy, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Kate Murphy:

Thank you, Brett,

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Kate Murphy. She’s the author of the book Click. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, journalistkatemurphy.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/click where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. 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 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 podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.