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

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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.

Valentine’s Day has a way of pressuring couples into impersonal, default choices: an overpriced (and crowded) dinner, a last-minute card from Walgreens, a box of chocolates grabbed on the way home. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but if you want the day to actually mean something, it helps to be a little more intentional.

Over the years, we’ve published a wide range of posts on dating, gift-giving, and building strong relationships. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our best Valentine’s-related and adjacent guides, from creative date ideas and thoughtful gifts to deeper relationship check-ins. With a little bit of forethought, you can break through the shallow, commercial nature of the holiday and plan a day (or even just a conversation) that feels personal, memorable, and genuinely worthwhile.

Date Ideas

Going out to a nice restaurant is standard protocol for a Valentine’s Day date, but it isn’t very original and dining out on such a busy night isn’t always that enjoyable, anyway. Why not mix it up by planning an out-of-the-box date — a novel activity out on the town or in the intimate atmosphere of your own home? Whatever you end up doing, make sure you dress nicer than usual to make the occasion feel special!

• Cheap Date Ideas She’ll Actually Love
• 15 Creative Date Ideas
• At-Home Date Night Ideas
• How to Create the Ultimate At-Home Fondue Date
• Take Her Around the World for Valentine’s Day . . . Without Leaving the Kitchen
• The Perfect Valentine’s Day Menu 
• A Man’s Guide to Smart Casual Dress

Gifts & Gestures

While a woman will often say she doesn’t want anything for Valentine’s Day, what she often means is that she doesn’t need anything expensive and elaborate. But, she’s probably still hoping for a love note and/or flowers at the least. You can’t go wrong with giving her both, and we’ve got some tips for making these gestures more meaningful below. If you want to also give a gift, that will likely be appreciated, too. Extra points if it’s homemade.

• How to Write a Love Letter
• How to Give Flowers Like a Victorian Gentleman
• 7 Romantic, Non-Lame DIY Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas
• How to Give a Gift to a Woman
• Huckberry’s “Gifts for Her” shop 

Relationship Check-In

The approach of Valentine’s Day is a good time to assess the status of your relationship. Are there things you can do to improve it? Should you even still be dating this person?

• How Do You Know When She’s the One?
• Podcast: How to Keep a Happy Relationship Happy
• The Yearly Marriage Checkup
• 10 Ways to Be a Better Husband Today
• Look Before You Leap: Questions to Ask to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• Podcast: How to Avoid Falling in Love With the Wrong Person
• 14 Red Flags to Look Out for in a Relationship

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

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. 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.

You’re at a party and start chatting with another guest.

Twenty minutes later, you’re still talking with them one-on-one. You feel trapped, and you wish you knew how to break away from the conversation.

Maybe the person is annoying, and you’d like to escape their tedious orbit.

But you also might be talking with a friend and are very much enjoying the interaction. It’s just that you want to catch up with some of the other guests, too. He or she might feel the same way, actually, but neither of you wants to risk seeming rude in ending the exchange.

So how do you navigate this situation? You ideally don’t want to break things off abruptly and leave the person awkwardly standing there on their own.

Here are some options from social and etiquette experts for politely bowing out of a conversation:

Option #1: Introduce the person to someone else.

In my AoM podcast interview with etiquette expert William Hanson, he said that his go-to strategy is to try to pair your conversational partner off with someone else. He described how this would go:

‘Brett, it’s been so lovely talking to you. I’ve just seen someone over there I’ve got to go and get and speak to before they leave. Have you met Susan, however?’

And I’ve sort of seen Susan floating around and I grab her as she comes past and go: ‘Susan, may I introduce Brett? Brett has just flown in from Sydney. And Susan, I believe your mother is from Australia. I’ll leave you two talking.’

And off you go.

Basically, introduce the person to someone else, giving both people a bit of context — a conversation starter — to kick off the new interaction before you slip away.

If someone you can introduce the person to doesn’t happen to pass by, you can actively lead them over to a new conversation partner: “My friend Rob is also in the cyber security field. I want you to meet him; I think you’d enjoy talking shop.”

The strategy of introducing your current conversation partner to someone else is a good one if you think the former and the latter will actually get on. However, if you’ve found the person you’ve been talking to a bore, it would, of course, not be very generous to pawn them off on a friend. It is well that Jeanne Martinet, author of The Art of Mingling, calls this technique “the human sacrifice.” If it’s not a situation where you want to throw an unwitting victim to the gum-flapping wolves, try one of the other options on this list.

Option #2: Use the buffet bye-bye.

When I talked to Martinet on the podcast, she noted that one of the most common categories of conversational exit is what she calls “the buffet bye-bye and other excuses.” That’s where you say something like, “I’m going to go grab a drink/some food. It’s been nice talking to you.”

Martinet says that this option can be effective, but carries a risk: the person may follow you to the bar/buffet line. So the excuse she recommends instead is to step away by saying you have to make a phone call:

Even in today’s age of smartphones, everyone knows that if you’re at a party you can’t just whip out your phone right there, so they know you have to go off by yourself. Then you actually have to go off and look like you’re making a phone call for a second, then go to another group.

You can also excuse yourself to use the restroom, though this one tends to read more nakedly as a way to make an escape.

Option #3: Say there’s someone you’re supposed to meet.

Another strategy Martinet shared goes like this:

You find a pause hopefully to interrupt, and you say, ‘I’m so sorry, but someone just walked in the room that I’m supposed to talk to because my boss made me or my girlfriend said I had to,’ or some excuse like that. So it’s like you have a mission, and you’re so sorry but you have to go.

Martinet calls this technique the “counterfeit search,” as you may only be pretending that there’s someone else at the party you’re supposed to meet (though that may legitimately be the case as well). 

Your willingness to use strategies like the counterfeit search — or the phone call excuse from option 2 — will, of course, depend on how comfortable you are with telling a white lie in the name of social grace.

Option #4: Be self-deprecating.

Hanson says you shouldn’t leave someone on their own unless you truly do need to break away to do something like catch a plane. In that circumstance, he recommends making your exit on the back of some self-deprecating pretense:

You can make it sound like you are the bore. So I would say something like:

‘Well, Brett, look, I know I’ve monopolized so much of your time this evening, and I know there are lots of other people you want to go and talk to. But maybe we’ll see each other in a few weeks’ time at that fundraiser.’

Shake hands and off we go.

Acting a little apologetic for having taken up someone’s time is a graceful way to exit without causing offense.

Option #5: Travel together to a new group.

In a situation where you are enjoying talking with someone, and just want to be able to mingle with some other people as well, you can simply say something like, “I’m going to go sit down near Mike. Come with me.” Now you can talk to your current conversation partner and Mike as well. Or the person, who has also been waiting for an excuse to break away from you, will tell you that they’re going to go hit the buffet instead. This strategy works best when the person you’re talking with, and the person you’re going to go join, are mutual friends.

In addition to these options, a couple of other easy lines to use are, “You know, I’d better check in with the host before the night is through,” (a natural, legitimate reason), and “Well, I won’t keep you any longer — I’m sure you’ve got lots of folks to say hi to” (makes your exit seem complimentary to the other person).

Parties are for mingling. So rather than getting locked into talking to the same person for the whole night, use one of these strategies to set yourself free to enjoy both the full buffet of food, and of sociality.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

Connect With Susan Dominus

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

1. You’re in Charge

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

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

2. Delay Smartphones and Social Media

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

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

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

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

3. Create Tech-Free Zones and Times

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

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

4. Use Parental Controls and Clear Rules

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

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

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

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

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

5. Encourage Real-World Freedom and Independence

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Model Good Tech Habits

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

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

8. Recognize That Time Is Limited

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

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

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

9. Be Consistent and Clear About Consequences

Rules are only as good as their follow-through.

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

10. Stay Flexible but Firm

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

Independence and Dependence

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

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

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

Mostly.

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

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

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

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

Gus gives Woodrow the gift of dependence.

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

Woodrow gives Gus the gift of independence.

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

Affection and Instrumentality

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

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

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

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

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

Judgment and Acceptance

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

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

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

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

Expressiveness and Protectiveness

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

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

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

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

The Fruitful Tension of Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

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

Connect With Jeffrey Hall

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

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

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

I was in charge of the men’s group in our church, I think it was 10 years ago, and a common complaint was there’s not enough fellowship. So okay, well let’s do something about it. Let’s plan some events. We plan some events, and we would do a lot to communicate that this isn’t the time we’re doing it. Here’s what’s going to happen, who’s going to come? And we get show of hands and we get this buy-in, and then the day of the event would show up and it would just be the leaders there. You’re like, okay, then. So you’d go like, oh, hey, we had this event. People couldn’t make it. And the common excuses were like, I was just busy, or I was just tired. I had something else going on, and well, okay, we’ll plan another event, and no one would show up. And then people would just continue to grouse. Well, there’s no fellowship. And you’re like, okay, guys, we’re trying to create this for you, but it’s going to take some effort to make this happen. And they just get upset. It’s like, why don’t we have fellowship? And it’s like, well, it’s hard. You got to show up. You got to make the effort. You got to make it a priority. And if you don’t, then you’re not going to have that thing you want.

Jeffrey Hall:

You have to make it a priority. And what does that mean to make it a priority? It’s very something we should really dwell on in the sense that people think about, oh, I prioritize friendship, but what does that actually mean in practice? One thing is showing up. Because I wrote this book, I’m very aware of showing up, so I really work hard to show up. If people invite me to a wedding, I’m like, I’m going, it’s going to be uncomfortable or difficult, or maybe I want to do something that day, but I’m going to go anyway. And I tend to have a better time than I thought. People invite me to a going away party or retirement party or a baby shower. I show up, I show up because it sucks to have a party and no one comes. I mean, is there something more insulting to someone to have a party that no one shows up to?

I’m going to be the person that shows up. I show up to funerals because I figure that I would want someone to come to my funeral if I was to pass away. I show up to everything that I possibly can, and I almost in some ways work with my wife because we almost joke with each other and my wife will be like, I don’t really want to go. And I’m like, come on, show up. Because showing up means that you show your care and concern for other people. But fellowship is showing up, right? Friendship is showing up. You cannot have the benefits of conversation, friendship, or fellowship without showing up. And so the key part of what it means to make it a priority is to show up for others when invited and say yes, not to make excuses and go anyway. And one of the things that I think is critical here is that the research evidence bears out that this is good for you.

There’s plenty of excellent research that says that people way overestimate how bad of a time they’re going to have at these things and underestimate what good things are going to come from it. So they are negatively forecasting something and it’s not true. It’s a false belief that’s not helping. But the other thing they forget about is showing up once makes it easier to show up the next time. So one thing we talk about in this book is this idea of a social battery or basically your social energy. And what we know is the more familiar you are with people, circumstances and conversations, the less work it takes from you. So every showing up is easier. So in the case of your men’s group, let’s say that you’re a person who shows up the first time and you’re a little uncomfortable. You’re worried that people don’t think you have to say is good.

Maybe you haven’t done the reading. If you’re having a Bible study group or something like that. I didn’t do the reading, maybe I couldn’t come. And then you go, and then you’re feeling those anxieties. They work themselves out. The next time you go, the research would suggest that you fill all of them less. It’s less work. So what’s happening is simultaneously, as your brain and your social behavior adapts to a new circumstance, it becomes less work. What’s also happening, which is great, is you’re actually contributing an investment of time into a relationship with other people. So each time you show up is more time kind of put in the piggy bank of investment towards friendship. So what’s fascinating about this is when you start thinking about it as I’m showing up over and over again, makes it easier to keep showing up and there are additional benefits of comradery, friendship and all those things, you begin to realize that this routine has this wonderful self-sustaining ability. In the same way that we talked about the negative feedback loops. There’s also a positive feedback loop, but you have to start with showing up.

Brett McKay:

Well, this idea of showing up, this goes back to that idea that I wanted to explore further. We mentioned earlier where, okay, socializing actually reduces stress in your life, but this idea of showing up in overcoming these barriers to socializing, it makes socializing sound like a stressor. It is stress. That’s why a lot of people avoid it. It’s like, well, there’s all these obstacles. People are terrible. It takes a lot of effort to socialize. So in that sense, it is socializing is a type of stressor.

Jeffrey Hall:

It absolutely is, and people are a major source of stress. But there’s also some fascinating research that suggests it’s maybe good stress, it’s good stress for you. I’ll give you an example which I find really fascinating. There are several studies that have found that they count up questions of who are your close friends or who are the family members you can count on? And then survey researchers will ask another question, which is, so who’s a stressor in your life? Who are family members that are really stressing you out and frustrating you? And what’s weird is that even the people who are frustrating or difficult are also people who help abate loneliness or keep it at bay. And what that means is, is that even when we’re contributing to people who are difficult, we are still feeling important to a community. I’ve actually also started to rethink when people stir up stuff.

I don’t know if you have a family where there are members of family who are stir something up, create conflict when it’s not there or get mad about something. In some ways, what’s curious is now that I’ve kind of taken some time to step back from it, I’m like, well, part of this is that they understand by engaging in this, they’re actually getting people to talk to them to have something to talk about. They have emotional drama to be able to resolve, and it makes them feel connected to part of a broader system. Now, it’s not a particularly functional way of doing it, but that stress interestingly also probably makes them feel valued and connected by the group because they’re trying to work on something in that family or in that dynamic that’s struggling. And we need people in those communities. In my mind, people like my mom who worked really hard to keep everybody engaged with one another and it’s a thankless task, but if she wasn’t doing it, my brothers and I probably wouldn’t talk to each other as often as we would otherwise.

So what’s interesting is social stressors are not necessarily bad things in the long run. They bring us into a community of connection. But the other thing I think is important for us to keep in mind is that’s also the good stuff. Being important to other people means you also have to see them through difficult times. One thing that Andy and I talk about in the book is if I’m a good listener to a close friend and they’re struggling and I have had friends go through divorce, I’ve had friends go through major losses in their life, I’ve had friends struggle with their parents, ill health and all of these things I imagine will continue to come as my life continues on. It is work for me to listen on the phone. It is work for me to show up for them and know that they’re going to do 80% of the talking, and it’s mainly going to be about them.

It’s work for me to check in on them and send a message and sometimes send a message that they won’t even respond to because they’re overwhelmed with the circumstances they’re in. But guess what? Every action of putting that work in is good for you as the giver, but it’s even better for them. It’s even better for them to feel cared for better for them to feel like they have someone they can talk to. And you might be the only person in their life that’s reaching out like that. When we begin to realize that our actions to put work into and the stress into these relationships are actually things we do for other people, it reorients our thinking rather than going, well, I got to do this for myself. I need to go to the gym so I’m not unhealthy. We begin to go, I am engaging in social activity, good for other people, and it’s giving to other people to check in on them and make plans with them and care for them and listen to them. It warrants our thinking, I think, in a way that really helps us get out of our own sense of interiority and towards another people which is healthy.

Brett McKay:

No, I love this idea of socializing as a good stressor. It made me think about how exercise is a stressor in our physical life. Exactly. And so when we exercise, we stress our bodies, but by stressing our bodies acutely regularly, we actually diminish chronic stress in our lives. And I think the same thing goes with socializing. So if we think of socializing as a good stressor, if you get doses of it every single day, it reduces our overall chronic stress and increases our overall wellbeing. And like you said, it’s something we can do for the good of others, but at the same time, it does do a lot of good for us. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely, there’s a quote that I have in the book that I really like Nick Cave, for those of you who may or may not known, Nick Cave was actually a member of a pretty hardcore kind of post punk band. And at the time, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and then there was one before that as well. And he lost his teenage son to a tragic accident. And he talks about the importance of communication. When you’re at your worst, you feel, I mean, I cannot imagine the grief of losing my own son. And Cave says, it seems to be essential even if just a corrective for the bad unexpressed ideas, we hold in our heads to communicate with others. And what I really love about that quote is that he’s conveying this idea that it is healthy for us to get out of our own heads and relieve our stressors that are internal by being stressed socially.

So I’m stressed out about all kinds of stuff, my kids, my work, my situation, and whatever it is, there are stressors in my life. There’s plenty of really good data and excellent research that says when we express those stressors to other and share them and laugh about them and see them outside ourselves, they actually have this wonderful restorative power to not only bring people together and sharing that burden, but also you actually feel less stress in the long run. So it’s like the stress in the moment of caring for others is not only great for building a relationship and a sense of belonging, which prevents long-term chronic stress and loneliness, but the stress of thoughts unexpressed in our head that we’re not sharing with others because we’re afraid of being vulnerable or afraid of admitting weakness also can be benefited by communication, by talking about it and by talking about it, we can laugh about it and see perspective. And another person says, oh yeah, I’ve gone through the same thing and it stinks and it’s not fair. And then you go, oh, I’m not alone. My ideas are not just corrosively sitting inside of me, but they’re actually being expressed in a way that another person can see me more clearly and I can see them.

Brett McKay:

And also the reason why I like this idea of socializing as a stressor and kind of relating it to exercise as a physical stressor, it made me think of that theory of an evolutionary biology of evolutionary mismatch. 

So people talk about, it’s so weird that people go to gyms and walk on these treadmills and lift these weights. Why do we do this? Well, we live in a world where you don’t have to do a lot of physical work to live. You just sit at a desk all day. So we need physical activity. So we have to intentionally put our bodies under physical stress by going to these weird buildings with these contraptions that look like torture devices to get that stress. And it’s the same thing with socializing. We are evolved to socialize, to connect with the group. We now live in an environment where there’s a mismatch. Opportunities to socialize aren’t as automatic and built into modern life as they used to be. They’re not going to happen by default. So we have to intentionally inject social stress in our life the same way we intentionally inject physical stress into our life.

Jeffrey Hall:

I think that’s really brilliantly said. We’re living in a time where it seems conceivable that you can be in a room, never interact with another human being, have all of your food delivered to you as long as you’re making enough money to pay for it, never socialize even with another person. And in the age of ai, have your therapist, your girlfriend, and your best friend all be an AI program. We have created an environment where we can take all of the friction of human society and take it away and replace it with technological affordances of being delivered our food, our comforts, even our social life. So we are at a very huge evolutionary mismatch right now. And it wasn’t even all that long ago in the past where the concept of friendship was deeply born by the fact that we are in the world making exchanges and building trust with one another.

Brett McKay:

So how can we socially exercise?

Jeffrey Hall:

There are simple steps. So if you think about the idea of first thing is enough reflection of where you’re at, where are you at in the continuum? Are you a person who have plenty of social life? You’re given out to everybody around you. You’re the person that people can call on. You’re very busy. And in that case, the book probably is just in some ways just kind of patting in the back and saying, good job. We also do say in the book, you can be overtaxed, you can go too far. You can get to the point where you’re spread too thin and you need some time alone. You need solitude also to balance that out.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s a good point. So socializing is a good stressor, but any stressor, it’s on that U-shaped curve exactly as you go up, it’s good. And then at a certain point you have diminishing returns and actually is bad. Same thing with physical exercise, moderate exercise is good, but if you go past a certain point, it’s going to be detrimental.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I give a talk recently in Kansas City about social, and I was surrounded by young women professionals who were social networking professional reasons, but also to give back to the community. And I said to them, I’m like, I’m guessing I’m in a room of people who are such deeply committed to their social life that they actually need to hear the solitude part of my talk. So I’m going to start with the solitude part of my talk, and I really want to reinforce for folks out there. I’m not saying if you are on the far end and the reaches of being socially stressed to keep doing what you’re doing, nourished solitude is critical for restoring our sense of connection to one another, that shutting off and letting go of our social responsibilities, particularly the social responsibilities that come through our phone is really important. We need to find time to restore restorative, solitude, critical.

And that use shape curve, you describe exactly in the middle part of the curve. Small acts of sociality are probably all you need for a person kind of in that middle part. You’re not too social and you’re not totally alone. Things like talking to your neighbor, talking to a stranger, making small talk at work, making time to make sure that you meet up with friends once a month. Recognizing that small talk gets such a bad rap that we have to reorganize our thinking about it and realize just checking in with another person and showing them dignity and respect, whether that’s your barista or the person that works at your office or a neighbor, is critical in building community. So small steps, nothing big. Some things once a day, like checking in with a stranger or person in your world, something once a week, checking in with a close friend or with someone that you want to really talk to. And once a month, maybe that’s a longer sort of, if you have time for it and you should make time for it, like a dinner together or out together to do something fun, whatever it is that you like. So you can make that work. But it’s really important to realize you have to know where you are to start. So the big thing about breaking social inertia is knowing where you begin.

Brett McKay:

One thing you’d also do in the book, you talk about different ways we can communicate with others and socialize with others, and we have the internet. It’s just so many different ways you actually create a hierarchy on which ones are better than the others. If you’re going to reach out and connect with someone, walk us through that hierarchy. What are some of the ways we can and which ways are better?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, I do a lot of research on social media, on texting, on phone calls. It’s one of my major areas of research. And there’s a hierarchy essentially. And when we think about what that hierarchy is, is I’m encouraging people to move up the ladder of connection, is what I call it. And at the very, very bottom of this ladder of connection is actually scrolling mindlessly on social media. There are mixed studies. I don’t think the evidence is unequivocally that this is harmful for you, but there’s plenty of research that say, depending on the type of content that you’re consuming, it is, it can be very harmful in the sense like doom scrolling. I also think that for certain demographics, like younger adults seeing things that are constantly making them feel that they’re being left out fomo or they’re not as good or they’re not as accomplished, they’re not as successful as other people, those are all pretty bad for you.

And if you can think about ways to minimize the amount of time you’re doing those things, it’s good. So that one is not more or less. The next level up from that is texting. Texting is actually I think kind of an unsung hero of connection. There’s a lot of fun studies that have been done recently that finds that even people you haven’t talked to for a while appreciate a text that just says, Hey, I’m thinking of you people don’t use email anymore. But if you are of the demographic and also of the age group or email’s comfortable, send one of those. One step up from texting would probably be a phone call or a video chat, scheduling a time to check in, have a longer conversation back and forth, whatever. Also, a lot of young adults, interestingly, are more adept at using video chat just to hang out together.

So they just leave it on and then they go about what they’re doing. People long distance relationships do that as well. And then the top of that hierarchy is face-to-face communication. So if you are a person who finds themselves just lacking for time to do any of these things, all I’m asking is one step higher. Maybe if you’re pretty good at keeping in touch on text and you have group chats going on with lots of folks, you can have one you want to check in with and call in the next week, make an appointment to call them. And that’s the only way I keep in touch with my friends, by the way, is by an appointment. So it’s not like I’m just seeing if my friend Craig’s going to pick up the phone. I know he’s a busy guy with kids. We make it time to do that. So I’m just asking one step up, one step up at a time and to recognize that any step up is actually shows empirical evidence to be beneficial.

Brett McKay:

I thought it was interesting the research about the difference between video calls and just regular phone calls.

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah, that one’s interesting too because I think that’s an evolving norm. Some stuff suggests that video chat actually makes you feel a little more lonely because it actually makes you feel perhaps that you’re missing that person more when you see them. And some people really love talking on the phone. I would include myself as one of them. The sound of another person in my head makes me feel so close and connected to them. But when I’m on video chat, I get distracted and confused and I feel like I need to be more aware of my facial behaviors, which makes me feel weird. So I think kind of think a jury is still out. A lot of people are stuck on video chat all day long at work, which I think also degrades its sense of efficacy. But young adults have taught me that they seem to really get it. That video chat’s a good opportunity to just kind of have someone in your room while you’re doing other things.

Brett McKay:

It might be a generational thing. I don’t like video chat. 

Jeffrey Hall:

Me neither.

Brett McKay:

And it’s a reason why on the podcast, I don’t do video. I just like to do audio only.

Jeffrey Hall:

Hey, can I give you a shout out for out? Thank you. It’s a lot less work on my part. I think I can watch my words a lot more closely and really think about what you’re saying, but if I’m watching the interaction, I’m way too attentive to what I’m doing.

Brett McKay:

And you don’t have to worry about the lighting or what your hair looks like. 

Jeffrey Hall:

I’m having a good hair day though, Brett.

Brett McKay:

The tricky thing about socializing is it requires other people. And so it’s a collective action problem. So if you want to socialize, that’s great, but if the other person doesn’t or there’s no one else to socialize with, well then you’re kind of out of luck. It’s like wanting to play catch. There’s no one to play catch with. That’s what a conversation is.

Jeffrey Hall:

Totally.

Brett McKay:

So what do we do about that? Because that collective action problem, it’s structural, the way our time is scheduled up, how our space is arranged, what can we do to improve the structure of our lives so that socializing is maybe a bit easier, can’t be completely easy or completely frictionless. I think the effort is part of what makes it good for us, but how can we approach it to facilitate it being a bigger part of our lives?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. One of my good friends from high school, she had this phrase, she went to social work and she talked about the idea that you need to basically follow the weaker impulse. And I love that phrase because it gives you kind of a sense in which that how you need to be alert to the tendencies to not do this stuff. And what I mean by following the weaker impulse when it comes to being social is you had a hard day, there’s a social event that you haven’t been planning for a while, and you’re like, oh, I don’t want go. You need to follow the weaker impulse, which says it’s a good thing to go another way. Encourage the people in your life to be social. Maybe that’s your partner, maybe that’s your kids. Encourage the people around you to set a norm and an expectation that being social is something that’s worth fighting for and worth doing.

I think structurally and socially, this is a very, very hard problem. Robert Putnam, who I’ve mentioned before, has been counseling every president since Bill Clinton about how to build social interactions and build social community. And they have not been able to reverse the trend. I don’t know how our trends around work can be fixed, but some of this is about acknowledging that we are also engaging in trends that we have probably more control over than we perceive. And I think the big one is how we choose to use our leisure time around media entertainment. I think we have to reorganize the way that we think about what’s valuable about consuming media and say that maybe this is really not the thing that needs to be occupying my time the whole time. And if I make an exception by saying, this night of the week, I’m going to reserve for catching up with a friend or otherwise, it’s a worthwhile endeavor to do so.

What’s hard is I wish for a world in which we could return to a sense of social obligation to one another. I wish for a world in which that it became more normative, that people would reach out and care for the people, especially those who are needed and isolated. But the biggest thing that I got to recommend is the only change that I think you really have control over is to recognize that making it a priority in your life means showing up, doing so consistently and taking your knocks when people can’t be there for you. People can cancel on you, you forgive them, and you try again. If people don’t text you back It’s okay. It doesn’t mean the text didn’t matter. You chit chat with the bagger at the grocery store and that 16-year-old rolls their eyes at you because some middle-aged white dude telling them this or that. That’s okay. I take my knocks. I recognize that every social interaction is not going to be a great one. But the fact that I’m trying in my world and my community, I think makes me a person who’s trying to build a healthier biome for living for everyone.

Brett McKay:

So exercise your agency to change the environment around you.

Jeffrey Hall:

You got it.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And I think the idea is if you start making it a priority in your life, hosting parties, hosting, even just small get togethers with your friends reaching out, the idea is that it can act as a social contagion. People are like, oh wow, this guy’s having a get together where he just has beers and sodas and it’s nothing really big, but I had a really good time. Maybe I could do that.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I think what’s curious about this is that we also know from other research on social norms and contagion is this is how it happens. People begin to understand that this is something that can be done and they see pathways to doing it. Any major social change happens because enough people have modeled it and demonstrated how it works to make it work again. And I’m hopeful. I mean, I think there’s a lot of reason to be hopeful.

Brett McKay:

So if listeners were to take one small action this week to build up their own social biome and the social biome around them, what would you recommend?

Jeffrey Hall:

Yeah. I would say make a plan with somebody that you love. If that’s your romantic partner, if that’s your best friend, if that’s your family member or brother or sister, make a plan to talk to ’em. Make a plan to have lunch. Make a plan to check in, make a plan to make a phone call. Put it on your calendar and do it. And even if you’re just listening right now, send that text. Say, Hey, we haven’t caught up for a while. Would you like to get together? Or, we have this thing coming up. Or When are you available to have lunch? Again, do it while you’re listening to this conversation that Brett and I are having. And then keep being persistent. If that person says, oh yeah, definitely, but I need to get back to you. Get back to them. Follow up, keep working at it. And once you have that opportunity to connect with them, the best piece of advice is to say, let’s do it again. And not just do it out of politeness, but actually put it on the calendar to do it again. And once you start doing it, it becomes easier and easier.

Brett McKay:

It’s true. After I read this book, I told you this in the email that I sent you before this interview, it inspired me. I set up a ruck with some guys here in town. Very cool. Saturday morning, eight o’clock, eat some donuts along the way.

Jeffrey Hall:

That’s awesome.

Brett McKay:

And it was easy. I could have done this so many times, but that social inertia. But looks like a lot of guys are going to show up and it should be fun.

Jeffrey Hall:

And I would also say, if not all of them show up. Do it anyway. Yeah,

Brett McKay:

Do it anyway.

Jeffrey Hall:

Do it again. And maybe new people will show up next time because they weren’t available this time. I think we’re too quick to assume that social failure means it’s not worth doing, and that’s just not the case.

Brett McKay:

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

Jeffrey Hall:

Absolutely. So my run of relationships in technology lab here at the University of Kansas, and my research is posted there, but also on LinkedIn. I’m really active on posting about research related findings on LinkedIn. The social biome specifically is something I promote on Instagram and I’m Jeffrey Hall, PhD at Instagram. So those two kind of places are in which people can kind of see updates on what my work is being doing. So I’d love to have you there too. Fantastic.

Brett McKay:

Well, Jeffrey Hall, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Hey, thank you. My guest today is Jeffrey Hall. He’s the coauthor of the book, The Social Biome. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/socialstress. You can find links to resources and we can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the A one podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

Resources Related to the Podcast

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

Connect With Matt and Maxim Smith

• The Preparation Substack
• Maxim’s Substack

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Transcript

Brett McKay:

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

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

Okay. So tell us about the fighter cycle.

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

In the academic portion are you doing Asian Studies?

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

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

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

Brett McKay:

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

Matt Smith:

Oh yeah. Thank you very much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get the School Sleep Schedule Back on Track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meltdowns averted.

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

Establish a Confidence-Inspiring Back-to-School Ritual

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

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

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

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.