Would you get lost while driving downtown if you didn’t use GPS? Do you find yourself struggling to read a book for more than five minutes without checking your phone? Would you have trouble writing a grammatically-correct email without Google’s auto-suggested corrections?

Do moments where you run up against your dependence on modern technology get you wondering about the ways some of your personal capabilities seem to be atrophying?

Graham Lee has spent years thinking about this idea. While he’s a digital skills educator who appreciates the way technology can enhance our abilities, he worries that our ever-increasing reliance on algorithms and artificial intelligence may be robbing us of elements that are vital to the core of who we are.

Lee is the author of Human Being: Reclaim 12 Vital Skills We’re Losing to Technology, and today on the show, we talk about some of those dozen endangered skills, including navigation, reading, writing, craftsmanship, and solitude. Lee offers case studies on how these skills enhance our humanness, why their loss matters, and how we can reclaim these capabilities and a greater sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• We, the Navigators, The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David Lewis
• AoM series on learning how to navigate with a map and compass
• AoM Podcast #534: How Navigation Makes Us Human
• AoM Podcast #793: The New Science of Metabolism and Weight Loss
• AoM article on the benefits of solitude 
• Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition by Peter Nabokov
• Watchmaker Geoge Daniels
• Castaway Alexander Selkirk
• NotebookLM

Connect With Graham Lee

• Graham on LinkedIn

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Transcript Coming Soon

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

You have a relationship with family, with friends, with a romantic partner. You may not have thought about it this way, but you also have a relationship with your job — a quite serious one, in fact; after all, you spend a third of your life working.

Just like the relationship you have with your significant other, there are ups and downs with your relationship with your job. It can start out with exciting honeymoon feelings, but along the way, you can end up drifting apart from your job, lose interest in it, or not feel appreciated. And there can come a time when you start wondering if you and your job should part ways.

Here to help you figure out if you should break up with your job is Tessa West, a professor of psychology and the author of Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Tessa interviewed thousands of people who have recently switched jobs or undergone career changes and found that there are five forms that job dissatisfaction typically takes. Today on the show, Tessa shares those five job dissatisfaction profiles, and how to know when you need to try to move into a new role within your company, or move on altogether and even change careers.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Tessa‘s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #834 — The 7 Types of Work Jerks (And How to Deal With Them)
• AoM Article: 30+ Questions to Ask Yourself Before Leaving a Job
• AoM Podcast #578: Figuring Out If You Should Change Careers (And How to Do It)

Connect With Tessa West

• Tessa‘s website
• Tessa‘s research lab

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.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

Note: This is a rebroadcast.

Kelly Starrett, a doctor of physical therapy, has trained professional athletes, Olympians, and military special operators, helping them unlock peak performance. But as he approached his fifties, he started to see cracks appearing in the health of the folks around him. What had worked for his peers in their 20s and 30s, wasn’t working anymore; they were gaining weight, having surgeries, and just didn’t feel good.

So he and his wife and fellow trainer, Juliet, decided to write a book — Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully — that took all that they’ve learned from training elite performers and distilled it into the foundational practices that everyone, at every age, can use to develop lasting mobility, durability, and all-around health. Today on the show, Kelly unpacks some of those essential physical habits, sharing the “vital signs” — tests that will help you assess how you’re doing in that area — as well as daily practices that will help you strengthen and improve that capacity.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Kelly’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — Episode #213: Undoing the Damage of Chronic Sitting
• AoM article on the Sitting-Rising Test
• AoM Article: 7 Simple Exercises That Undo the Damage of Sitting (including the Couch Stretch)
• AoM article on foam rolling
• AoM Article: The Benefits of Hanging for Strength and Mobility
• AoM Article: 12 Balance Exercises You Can Do on a 2×4
• AoM Podcast #638: How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life
• AoM Podcast #678: Physical Benchmarks Every Man Should Meet, At Every Age
• Muscles and Meridians: The Manipulation of Shape by Phillip Beach
• Video of Kelly demonstrating the Couch Stretch
• Video of Kelly demonstrating the squat test
• Video of 90/90 sit/stretch
• Video of Chris Hinshaw demonstrating the Old Man Balance Test
• Get yourself a pull-up bar
• The SlackBlock
• Kelly’s article on fixing shoulder pain, including a video on the Shoulder Spin-Up

Connect With Kelly Starrett

• The Ready State website, including the Built to Move book page
• The Ready State on IG
• Kelly on Twitter

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

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Download this episode.

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

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

Podcast Sponsors

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Kelly Starrett, a Doctor of Physical Therapy, has trained professional athletes, Olympians and military special operators, helping them unlock peak performance. But as he approached his 50s, he started to see cracks appearing in the health of the folks around him. What had worked for his peers in their 20s and 30s wasn’t working anymore. They were gaining weight, having surgeries, and just didn’t feel good. So he and his wife and fellow trainer, Juliet, decided to write a book Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully. They took all they’ve learned from training elite performers and distilled it into the foundational practices that everyone at every age can use to develop lasting mobility, durability, and all around health. Today on the show, Kelly unpacks some of those essential physical habits, sharing the vital signs, test that will help you assess how you’re doing in that area, as well as daily practices that will help you strengthen and improve that capacity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/builttomove.

Alright, Kelly Starrett, welcome back to the show.

Kelly Starrett: It is great to be here, my friend.

Brett McKay: So you’ve spent your career helping professional athletes, members of the military achieve elite performance, and I think a lot of people, they probably know you for the book you wrote, and it’s been almost a decade ago, Supple Leopard, which is just this bible of different movements and things you can do to help you move better so you can perform better. Your new book is Built to Move: The Ten Essential Habits to Help You Move Freely and Live Fully. This book is focused less on things like setting PRs and more on just what are the building blocks of feeling good and being vital overall over your whole lifetime. And in the book you talk about 10 physical practices and then each practice has a test or some metrics that you call vital signs to see how you’re doing with that habit.

And this book really resonated with me. We were talking before the podcast, I turned 40 recently. And in my 30s, I was really… I’m power lifting. That was my thing, and I still do it, but what’s interesting is when I was 35, 36, I could just go hard all the time and recover really fast. About two years ago, injuries started popping up and it was like tendon stuff, just overuse my… Your knee hurts and then your hips are achy. And then in 40, it’s the same thing. And now my shift has been moving away from performance, right? Trying to deadlift more and more and more weight to, I just wanna be durable. I just don’t wanna hurt when I get up off of… Out of a chair. And it’s funny, I was rereading Aristotle, his book on Rhetoric, and he goes on this tangent about fitness and health and beauty and it’s really poignant.

He said this, he says, “For a man in his prime,” and he thought a man in his prime was like thirties to maybe 40. He says, “For a man in his prime, beauty is fitness for the exertion of warfare together with a pleasant, but at the same time formidable appearance.” And I can relate to that when you’re in your 20s and 30s, you just wanna look Jack, you wanna be strong, whatever. Then he says, “For an old man, beauty and fitness is to be strong enough for such exertion as necessary and to be free from pain through escaping the ravages of old age.” And that one, I resonate with Aristotle on that one. I wanna be free from pain, but just strong enough to do what I gotta do throughout the day.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. Here… Here’s what’s really crazy about that, is that we’re starting to see a generation of young athletes who follow these principles in the book because they found that it really does enhance the short game. And what you’re seeing is, and what we’re appreciating now is that when we are working with young athletes who are making millions of dollars, they realize that if they can control their sleep and their minimum ranges of motion, some of these pieces in here, they actually can extend their career. So it means… Means a lot of money to them. And then what ends up happening is that universally, the athletes we work with actually realize they can go harder and they’re actually capable of more. And remember, this is a laboratory. So what I’m transferring that to myself now is, you mean I can get to Friday night and feel like I’m not just smoked, that in the afternoons I can get home from my job and actually be more present for my partner and my kids.

Okay, I’m in. And when my friends say, “Hey, we’re going for a pickup bike ride, or basketball game,” I feel like I’m not gonna injure myself to do that. So these 10 behaviors, we chose these 10 because they’re the hinges that open the biggest doors. And simultaneously, if you are not interested in exercise, you don’t identify with power lifting, you don’t identify with diet culture. We realize that there’s a lot you can do to begin to have a conversation with your body, so you don’t end up just sort of devastated by accident. You took a fall, your bone densities… I mean, just realizing that the long game is the short game and to what your point is, you don’t have to feel wretched. And we really haven’t empowered people so if we use an example, pain is a great example of oftentimes the sort of the fulcrum or the catalyst that initiates a lot of conversations with people about their bodies. “This pain won’t go away. It used to just go away. I just ignore it or take some ibuprofen for few days and it went away.”

And suddenly people are realizing, Hey, I’m living with this thing all the time. Is this who I am now? Like, should your hips hurt? So couple of things. One is that I want everyone to hear pain is a request for change. Unless you have a clear mechanism of injury, or you’ve got something occult going on, like a fever or an infection, something obvious. Or your pain is interrupting your ability to occupy your role in your family or do your job, those things are medical problems. They’re medical emergencies. I want you to go get help. Everything else is typical, which means what we’ve said to a generation of people is that pain is a medical problem. So until you’re ready to go talk to a doctor or a physical therapist about it, it’s not serious, or you should just live with it.

And what we set up people to do is just to go ahead and self-soothe it any way they want with bourbon, with THC, with whatever thing could make themselves feel better. And what we’re trying to do here is say, Hey look, if we’re gonna untangle complexity around pain, we need to make sure that you’re eating enough protein and micronutrients, that you’re sleeping and that you’re moving. And then we can also say, Well, hey, these tools that we’ve discovered over the last 15 years to help restore your position and make you bench more, well they can be redeployed for you and your family when someone’s achilles hurts or their knee hurts. And we realize that we have this real rich tapestry of options that I can drop into my household without having to engage with a physician, without being an expert, and I can start to make myself feel better and ultimately use that as a catalyst to transform how I’m interacting in my world.

Brett McKay: Okay, so these 10 essential habits, they’re great for, if you’re a young athlete who’s keyed in on performance, it’ll help you with that. But even if you’re not interested in that, you just wanna feel good and vital throughout the day, it’s gonna work for you too. Alright, let’s talk about some of these. You lay out 10 tests and then with each test or marker habits you can do on a daily basis to help you improve that. The first one you talk about is the sit and rise test. What is this test and why do you think it’s important?

Kelly Starrett: Oh, isn’t that great? So this is a test that has been well validated to show all cause mortality and all cause morbidity. If you struggle to sit crisscross applesauce on the floor and then stand up from that position without putting a knee down or putting a hand down, like you can’t just pop up and down like every 5-year-old, right? Ask your kids to do this, they’ll crush it because it’s not about strength. But what you’ll see is, holy moly, I’m stiff, and that stiffness, I can’t access my power, I can’t access my shapes, and that means that I have fewer movement choices. So I’m like, here, get up and down off the ground holding this baby. And you’re like, I can’t, I have to hold the baby with two hands and now I gotta put the baby down. What you start to see is that it has these follow along implications.

The number one reason people end up in nursing homes, they can’t get up and down off the ground independently. And what’s notable, I think is one of the things that we know is if we were trying to launch a business, save for retirement, train for the world championships, we set a goal and we work backwards from that goal, but we do not engage in that thinking towards our own health and behaviors. So if we know that we have this simple idea that really is a nice predictor of how you’re gonna fare as you get older and stiffer and weaker, theoretically, none of those things have to be true by the way. Then why don’t we one, put it on your radar and show you that, hey, if you got it, no problem. Good, keep doing what you’re doing. But if this was trickier than you thought or you couldn’t do it, let’s pay attention to that, because the first order of business for all of our interventions is exposure.

So the first thing that we’re saying is if you are struggling to get up and then off the ground, well what we want you to do is start spending some time on the ground while you’re watching TV every night. Isn’t that simple and reasonable? Sit cross-legged, sit 90/90, kneel. It doesn’t matter, but if we know that getting up and off the ground ends up being a nice predictor of how well and affluently you can move through the world because you have more hip range of motion, you can play better pickleball, you can deadlift better, what you’ll see is if your lifestyle is working for you, you’ll ace this test. If your lifestyle is introducing what we call a session cost, which is a concept we use when we’re looking at how gnarly the session was the day before. So you and I go and do some crazy deadlift workout, and the next day I’m crippled and you’re not. I paid a higher session cost for that, right? My force was down, things hurt, I couldn’t do it again. Well, we can start applying that session cost idea towards what’s going on with my day-to-day living, my movement fluency, the workouts I’m doing, and is that costing me in terms of this sort of third party validation test, which is show me you have some hip range of motion.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. So you lay out the test, it’s really simple. So everyone can do this right now, they’re listening to us. You just sit on the floor and then get up off the floor and what you do…

Kelly Starrett: Cross-legged. Cross-legged.

Brett McKay: Yeah, cross-legged, cross-legged, right. And you start off, you give yourself a score of 10 and then you subtract a point. If you do one of the following, brace yourself with your hand to the wall, place a hand on the ground touching your knee of the floor, supporting yourself on the side of your legs, losing your balance. And if you do that, you subtract. If you have a low score, it means like, well you got room for improvement.

Kelly Starrett: That’s right. And that’s the right word.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: You got room for more improvement. It’s not bad.

Brett McKay: No.

Kelly Starrett: You got room for improvement.

Brett McKay: I think that’s a good point you made about most people go to nursing homes because they can’t get up off the ground, right? Because like as soon as you can’t move independently, you’re gonna need 24/7 support care there. And it just usually starts going downhill from there. And you hear about… When you hear about like an older elderly person, they fall down, they break a hip, you think, oh man, this is bad. They’re probably not gonna be around much longer.

Kelly Starrett: Not to be Mac Cobb here, but one of the greatest predictors of the gnarliest things that can happen to you is to break a hip after 70. The research is a… Like you die within five… I mean, it’s so bad. And you have to understand exactly what you’re saying. I suddenly lost my mobility. I can’t feed myself, I can’t move, I’m bedridden, I lose my muscle mass, I lose my conditioning, I lose my bone density, I lose my… And then my brain starts to go and my social connections start to go. One of the things that we’re, I think obsessed with in this culture is like all the hard science, like deadlift more or wattage, poundage but all of the ancillary things that happen by being in a community start to go away if your world gets smaller.

One of the things that’s nice about a lot of these behaviors in the book, like eating as a family, is that we are trying to strengthen our social bonds. What we found in COVID was that holy moly, the brain is a social organ. It needs other brains to actually work and be a brain. And what we know is that we need stronger families, stronger households that are more connected to each other and more connected to their neighbors and their community at writ large. And some of those easy ways are to eat together and to go walk around and nod your head at your jerk neighbor. I mean it really, it’s transformative. So what you’re seeing is when we start making inadvertent choices from lack of choice because we don’t realize we’re doing certain things, it starts to take away a lot of our movement choice, which ultimately has implications in the kinds of society we find ourselves in our 50s, 60s and 70s, 80s, a 100, you’re gonna be a 100-years-old. 54% of kids who are in the fifth grade right now are gonna be 105.

Brett McKay: And so there’s… As you said, to improve on this test, the thing you gotta do is just sit on the floor more and there’s no…

Kelly Starrett: That would be a great start. Right. That’s a…

Brett McKay: Yeah, and there’s no specific way you have to sit, you can do crisscross applesauce. I like… My favorite one is the 90/90 sitting, where you kind of put your hips to the side, that feels really good.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah. You are working on an internal rotation there. And there’s a great writer osteopath, I think, and his name is Phillip Beach and he wrote a book called Muscles and Meridians and it really is like functional embryology… I just wanted to throw it out there because I’m a physio and I had to have a bunch of embryology and if I’d had this book, I’d been stoked on it, I would’ve understood it more effectively. But he believes that one of the ways the body tunes itself is that we spend time on the floor. It actually opens up our pelvic floors. It restores motion in your low back, it loads tissues, it loads your hamstrings, it keeps your hip range of motion good so you have more movement choice. It’s one of the ways that our bodies have engaged with the environment for two and a half million years.

Look, I’m not pint… Like I live in a cool mid-century modern house, I love it. But we have to appreciate that just a few hundred years ago, we did a lot more sitting on the ground, toileting on the ground, eating on the ground, building fires, and hanging on the ground. So it’s almost like we know intuitively that, okay, if… This is one of the things that actually helps the body work better. Well it’s pretty easy for you to watch TV at night and sit on the ground for 30 minutes. Just sit on the ground for a little bit and you’ll see that… You’re like, oh, there’s my roller or maybe I’ll roll my calves out. But exposing yourself to these bigger ranges of motion and fidgeting around, you’ll see aggregates. And we start to stack these behaviors, these behaviors start to compound. And if you get 30 minutes of sitting on the ground seven days a week, you’re starting to spend a lot of time in these fundamental positions that do things like improve your squat, improve your ability to run up the hill, right? Make your back feel better, make your knees feel better, etcetera, etcetera.

Brett McKay: Alright, let’s talk about the next vital sign, which is breathing. When you have an assessment, the breathe pull test, what’s going on there?

Kelly Starrett: The body oxygen level test. So I think breathing’s had its moment, right? Wim Hof gets everyone going. Laird Hamilton, we have Patrick McKeown of Oxygen Advantage. There’s so many great systems and it’s not like the yogis have been talking about this forever, but what we discovered was, there was a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of improving people’s VO2 max and mechanical ventilation. So this is why this matters. If you come to me as a physical therapist, you’re like, “Kelly, I have back pain.” There’s three things we’re gonna talk about day one, no matter what. We’re gonna talk about your sleep, because if you’re not sleeping that eight hours, it’s really difficult for me to figure out is it your brain or is it your body? What’s happening here? Number two, I’m gonna make you walk a lot, because I need you to de-congest your system, your lymphatic system, which is the sewage of your body, is built into your musculature. And if you move your musculature, you move your sewers. If you don’t move your musculature, the drains block up. And if you’ve ever seen a gross sink, that’s your body. If you don’t move, that backed up sink, you have to flush that stuff and that’s all done through movement.

So moving and then we’re gonna talk about breathing. And what we’re gonna see is if the first motion of the trunk, everyone is obsessed with it’s okay to round your back when you deadlift. Of course your spine’s supposed to flex and rotate and twist, but the first movement of the spine is breathing. And what we find is that, it’s a nice indicator of sort of vitality in terms of you can find positions that allow you to ventilate more so it improves your VO2 max, but breathing more effectively does things like opens up your upper back so and you put your arms over your head, makes your low back feel better, allows you to create more intraabdominal pressure when you lift.

And as we found out in the last 10 years of really monkeying with breathing, that when we got people more CO2 tolerant, which is what the body oxygen level test does, it allows people to access more hemoglobin. So one of the things we found, believe it or not, is that people who had COVID and smoked, that was a bad deal to have those things, but they were more comfortable with lower body oxygen levels in their body. And the reason was is that they were smoking so much that their CO2 levels were really high and had set their brains at being very comfortable with these lower oxygen levels. Obviously that’s a problem if you can’t breathe. But from a performance standpoint, what we found is people whose brains were more comfortable running higher CO2 levels, those people are actually able to strip off more oxygen off the hemoglobin. So the body oxygen level test is just a simple way of you being aware of how good you are at utilizing what’s available to you.

Brett McKay: And so you just hold your breath for as long as you can. You want… I guess you aim for 30 to 40 seconds.

Kelly Starrett: You exhale.

Brett McKay: Okay, yeah, you exhale then hold your…

Kelly Starrett: Just take a breath, exhale and then see how long you can go, because it turns out you got plenty oxygen on board to hold your breath for two minutes, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes. What you don’t have is a brain that is gonna tolerate the skyrocketing CO2 levels. So your drive to breathe is actually the rising CO2 level. And what we find is now… Because we’ve been doing this long enough with our athletes, is that now we’re seeing athletes be able to breathe nose only, push 90% of their max heart rate, they’re much more efficient, they don’t have to burn the sugar. But also what we find is, man, if we’re gonna talk about your neck pain and your jaw pain, we need to talk about your breathing. And getting you to breathe through your nose, getting you to not breathe only up in your neck like you’re being chased by cocaine bear, those things really end up making a difference in terms of how your brain perceives you in your environment and the effectiveness of not yanking on your neck every single time you take a breath. Imagine this, you’re on the Peloton bike and you’re rounded and you wanna go faster. If I say get into a position where you can take a bigger breath, you’ll automatically organize your body in a way where you have better access to your ventilation and better access to your diaphragm. And those shapes can be applied to work, to holding my kid, to rocking, to whatever I wanna do.

Brett McKay: And yeah, the practice that you recommend, you just said it there, just start breathing through your nose only throughout the day.

Kelly Starrett: That’s one of the practices. Super simple. Tape your mouth shut at night. That’s become very common. But we also have some breathing drills you can do. And here’s one of the things that I want people to understand, is that I think we’ve become habituated to thinking about all of our health behaviors have to occur in these one-hour blocks. That’s weird. No one has time to go to a one-hour balance class or one-hour breathing class, or one-hour mobility class. If you do anything, I want you to go to the gym. I want you to go to your garage and lift heavy weights. That’s what I want you to do. But I want you to bury and hide the reps, everything else. So we do a lot of this breathing stuff on our warm-ups, on our daily walks, during… While we’re spinning up on the bike. It’s so easy to integrate these things into your life.

Brett McKay: So the next vital sign is about your hips, and this one really spoke to me because my hips have been really achy lately. And so the assessment you have for this is the couch stretch. So tell us about this test and what is the couch stretch.

Kelly Starrett: If you had to pin me down and say, “Kelly, what is the one thing I should do from a one-on-one mobilization?” I am obsessed with you being able to take your hip into extension. So if you imagine a lunge position, lunge shape, that’s hip extension. So standing up from a squat is extending your hip, but actually taking your hip into extension is the magic. And what we find is that the way we train the session cost of our day-to-day lives, we see that people are pretty ineffective at having good full hip extension and having control in that hip extension. So what we’re seeing here’s though, there’s a lot of knee pain and a lot of back pain that’s a symptom of not being able to extend your spine or extend your hip. So your knee behind butt is really the magic. It’s not knees over toes, it’s can you get this knee behind your butt. And the couch stretch, if you’ve never done it before, you should Google couch stretch, we invented it so that we could get people doing it while they’re watching TV. And basically you start on the ground, this is the full couch, you put your knees up against the wall, your back is away from the wall, and you put your shin in the corner where the wall meets the floor. So your foot is pointing towards the ceiling and you’re kneeling away from the wall, and then you bring your other foot up into a lunge, so it looks like sort of exaggerated run shape, except your leg is bent up.

Then all I want you to do is squeeze your butt, take five breaths, can you raise yourself higher, yourself more torso upright, take five breaths and squeeze your butt, and then ultimately can you go straight up and down? And what we find is people really struggle because their quads are so stiff, hip is stuff, their butts turn off. That’s one of the reasons now why you’re running and wobbling your back and your hamstrings are stiff all the time because they’re doing all the work that your glutes should be doing. So if we can get people to improve this, it’s amazing how many things start to feel better.

Brett McKay: And then the daily practice for that test, you just do the test, like you just do the couch stretch every day?

Kelly Starrett: You could. We also throw in some isometrics, show you where you can spend some time the end of your day or during the day. Just put your hip into extension a little bit while you’re washing dishes, while you’re hanging out, squeeze your butt, just do some isometrics, hold that for 30 seconds. We also realize that this is a great place to do some soft tissue mobilization, so you can get on the ground while you’re watching TV, roll out your quads, roll out your hips, and you’ll see that those systems start to improve.

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

And now back to the show. Let’s talk about shoulders, another problem that a lot of guys experience as they get older. Shoulder is a weird thing. It’s incredible. It’s got this amazing range of motion, but it can get jacked up really bad. What are the most common shoulder problems you see in the regular Joe athletes you come across?

Kelly Starrett: Well, what’s interesting is, think about it this way, you have the brain, which is the most complex structure in the known universe, seriously, it is, attached to a structure that is equally as sophisticated. So this brain body thing we’ll walk around in is the most extraordinary structure in the known universe. And your shoulder, let’s just start by saying, is designed to last 100 years easily. So when you suddenly throw an error signal and your shoulder hurts, we want you to understand that, A, that’s not typical. It’s a request for change. Well, what change are we talking about? Well, no one on the planet connects range of motion to pain. And there could be a lot of things. Nothing could change. You could have incomplete range of motion, shoulders don’t hurt. All of a sudden you have a baby, you’re sleep-deprived, you have a deadline at work, you smash a bunch of pizza, you drink some beer, [chuckle] it doesn’t matter, whatever the stressors are, and your shoulder starts hurting, and you’re like, “What happened?” Nothing happened except your brain became much more sensitive to your lack of tissue quality or your inability to express normal range of motion.

So what we have here is a really important system. I think most people can recognize or wrap their heads around that. If we were gonna talk about your lower back health, we really should be talking about what’s going on with your pelvis and your leg too. It’s weird how you have big muscles that attach from your spine to your leg and no one looks at how well your leg moves. So if your leg doesn’t move well on your body, it can be yanking, it could be tensioning, it could just be putting mechanical input into your lower spine. So that’s why we look at the spine, the pelvis in the leg as a system. Well, there’s the same system upstream, it’s your neck, it’s your thoracic spine, your chest and your shoulder. They make a trifecta of positions. So if I wanna improve your neck pain, I gotta look at your shoulder range of motion. If I wanna look at your shoulder range motion, I also need to look at how well your thoracic spine works. Remember I told you already, we’re moving in that direction ’cause we’re getting you to take big breaths and you breathe in your upper back? Well, what we’re doing here is we’ve got some simple tests for you around some key range of motion positions and some isometrics that are easy to get you started on untangling what feels like a complicated system. It’s not that complicated.

Brett McKay: Yeah, you got two tests. My favorite was the one where you lay on the floor on your back and then you see how far you can get your arm back, basically.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, basically it’s an I, Y and T, but really in that situation, or if you’re just… Elbows are out to your side at 90 degrees and you flex the back of your hand to the ground, we’re looking at how much force you can create there. And what you see is if you’re struggling to get to that position, you’re weak in that position. Well, welcome to your rotator cuff. And a lot of times, your rotator cuff, or rotator cup, depending on which patient is telling you about their shoulder pain, the rotator cuff is this sort of non-specific idea that I have muscles that help rotate my shoulders. Well, we look at a lot of rotation capacity with our athletes, and what we see is that when you lack fundamental range of motion in your body, specifically in your shoulders, can’t put my arms over my head, can’t achieve some of these fundamental shapes, your force production starts to go down, which means that when you approach some of these positions at high speed, like playing golf, that can be a problem because you see a lot of inhibited musculature, a lot of force production, like it’s taken away and now you’re just hanging on your tissues.

Brett McKay: Any daily practices that people can do to help their shoulder health?

Kelly Starrett: Oh yeah.

Brett McKay: There’s a lot, but I mean, what’s one or two that you’d recommend, like, “Do these and you’ll be good?”

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, it’s interesting, if we look at our movement traditions, everyone listening has probably gone to a yoga class once. And when you’re in there, you’re like, “Holy crap, these people love Downward Dog. Why is Downward Dog so important?” And you do so much Downward Dog. Downward Dog, Downward Dog. Well, Downward Dog is an overhead position. So if there’s one thing you could do is at least once a day, put your arms over your head. Hanging from a door jamb, put your arms over your head, take some breaths. If you have a pull-up bar, which you should have in your house, hang from your pull-up bar. I cannot tell you how hanging will fundamentally change your life. Hang with different grips. You don’t even have to hang with your feet all the way off the ground, put a pull-up bar in your kids’ doorway, but it’s secretly for you. We have a pegboard in our garage, we’ve got pull-up bars outside, inside the house, in our garage, and just hanging will transform your shoulder function, and transform your upper back. If you’re getting that hump in your upper back and neck, hanging is the solution.

What I would direct you to is some kind of shoulder motion every day. And if you did something like Sun Salutation, cool. That would cover it. But also, if you’re really interested in taking the next step, on our site, we have something… And even if you Google “Kelly Starrett shoulder spin-up,” you will come up, and it’s a quick five-minute routine that touches a whole lot of spine shoulder positions. You don’t need any equipment. I use it for all my elite athletes, I teach it to all our teams, and it’s just like daily vitamins for your shoulder, even if you’re not gonna load your shoulder, even if it’s a lower leg day.

Brett McKay: Right. So you’re big of the squat, and that’s one of your tests. Why is being able to get down into a full squat important for human durability?

Kelly Starrett: Isn’t that interesting? We look at squatting as exercise, not squatting as movement choice. Lower yourself down off a cliff or a ledge, you’re gonna have to squat all the way down. One of the things that happens is obviously getting up and down off the ground is useful there, but it’s one of the ways where we can start to expose the tissues of the body to their full range. So taking the knee and flexing it all the way, taking the ankle and flexing it all the way. Letting your back round in that bottom position is really important to normalize the motion of the back. In yoga, for example, they call it Malasana, and they’re like, “It’s a pelvic floor mobilization.” Well, it turns out your pelvis and your femurs are connected directly to the connective tissue of your pelvis. This is why when you get kicked in the nuts, you feel a stomach ache. So what we’re seeing here is that when we restore how people’s hips move, it changes the connective tissue muscular systems and restores it to, again, native range. But also what we start to see is, man, you’re gonna have better choice, you’re gonna be able to move more effectively, and you’ll see things like your wattage improve on the bike.

Brett McKay: And the test is simple as get down to a full squat, you want ass-to-grass.

Kelly Starrett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: That’s it.

Kelly Starrett: I want ass-to-grass. Ideally, you can do that with your feet straight, but you can even turn your feet out to do that ’cause you may not have the ankle range. But if you fall over and can’t get into a full squat, man, that says a lot about you not having full access to the miracles of your body. Again, we’re not arguing about squat technique, I’m talking about getting up and down off the ground or taking a poo or having waiting for a bus. So this is very much one of those use it or lose it shapes. But the research is clear that people that toilet on ground, sleep on the ground, they engage in a lot more squatting-like behaviors, and lo and behold, we see less osteoarthritis, we see less hip disease, we see less lumbar disease. It’s almost like if we just use our bodies and just touch the ranges once a while, tell our brains it’s safe to be here, we see things like skiing or snowboarding improve.

Brett McKay: In the practice of that, just squat more. Like that’s something you can do throughout the day. I do that. After I read that chapter, I was like, “I’m gonna start squatting more.” I’ve been squatting…

Kelly Starrett: It’s easy.

Brett McKay: During this interview. Like when you were talking, I was squatting.

Kelly Starrett: Oh I love it.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: That’s what I think is remarkable. There’s a lot of opportunities for you to move in a more complete way, and this is what every physical therapist, surgeon, orthopedist on the planet says your hip should be able to do. And if you take all of the range of motion books and you’re like, “What should the ankle be able to do? It should flex this much. How much should the knee flex? How much should the hip flex? What should happen to the lumbar spine?” And then you put them in a blender and shake it up, all those things together end up being a squat.

Brett McKay: Yeah, my goal is to be like one of those 80-year-old ladies in Southeast Asia that are just still squatting, I wanna be doing that.

Kelly Starrett: What’s so cool about that is, actually, it’s a really reasonable goal. So anyone who’s starting this… For some people, it’s gonna be a brutal awakening. You’re like, “Oh, I thought I was super fit. I’m doing Peloton and I do my quarter squats and I look good naked, but I can’t move very well.” And we’ve certainly seen a hinge move towards movement culture. And one of the things that I want everyone to hear is that muscles and tissues are like obedient dogs, and there’s no reason… Yes, it’s gonna be harder to maintain your muscle mass as you get older, but there’s no reason you have to lose your range of motion ever at any age. So one of the things you can absolutely do your whole life is actually have access to your range of motion, ’cause you can imagine if your elbows got stiff, all of a sudden you’re like, “Well, that’s not a big deal. I just can’t feed myself anymore.” You know what I mean? That’s crazy. If your life depended on getting up and down, then you would be really good at getting up and down. I was just in Japan with some friends and we were staying at this cool mountain hotel as we were doing some backcountry skiing, and one of our friends got sick and I was like, “Hey, I really should not spend a few days in this room with this sick guy. Do you guys have any other rooms?” And they were like, “We don’t.”

And then we were like, “This hotel is huge. What do you mean you don’t have any rooms?” They didn’t have any White person rooms, Western rooms. What they had was traditional Japanese rooms. But the Americans who’ve been there before haven’t been able to use those rooms because you sleep on the ground on a futon because the table is set for you to kneel and sit cross-legged, because the shower is built for you to squat and sit in. The whole thing was organized around a person being able to move through the environment. Even the controls for the room were set up at sitting height. So I was like, “Oh, no problem, I got it,” and they were like, “Really? You can do it? Look at you, you’re a huge guy,” and I was like, “It’s no problem. Trust me, I can squat.”

Brett McKay: Okay, so squatting is one. The next test to talk about is the old man balance test. What is this one?

Kelly Starrett: We have this friend named Chris Hinshaw, who is an incredible coach, and he tried to come up with a test where he could beat his kids at, and this challenge is all about balance. And one of the things that we know is that fall risk in the elderly is gnarly, but when we started working on foot strength and foot capacity and balance in our athletes, worked it into games, made ’em spend more time on one leg pressing, single-leg deadlifts, things like that, man, their athleticism went through the roof. And so what we realized is that we needed some better ways to challenge people’s range of motion and their balancing control just day-to-day, little micro-balances, because think about it, someone falls in your family like, Go to this balance class because your balance got so bad and I have to go get formal training? That’s crazy. Look, here’s a simple test for everyone, it’s called the SOLEC. Ready for it? Standing one leg, eyes closed. Stand on one leg, don’t put your foot down for 20 seconds. I bet you’re gonna be shocked at what happens when I take away your eyes. And what turns out is that if your feet are stiff, if your feet are always in foot coffins, shoes, if your feet aren’t strong, you’re really gonna struggle. If you don’t have good anchor range of motion, it’s gonna be difficult for you.

And what we’re trying to do is just bring this awareness of balance and play should be happening in sports. So if you’re riding mountain bikes and playing soccer and pickleball and you’re moving your body, chances are this will not be a problem for you. But for a lot of people who are not doing those things, you’re gonna be shocked at how bad your balance is, and it’s only gonna get worse unless we play with it. So the old man balance test is really simple. Every time you put your shoes and socks on, do it one leg at a time. So stand on your left leg, put your right sock on, don’t put your foot down, put your shoe on, tie it, don’t put your foot down. You’re gonna have to reach down and grab it, you’re gonna have to balance. And so every single time you put your shoes and socks on, you can practice a little bit of one or two minutes of balance, and I guarantee you it’s gonna kick your butt.

Brett McKay: Yeah, and then you talk about it, your house, you have different just balance things you can do. Maybe you put like… You just could put like a 2 x 4 in your house and just walk accross.

Kelly Starrett: Oh, nailed it. How about this? You can put a broomstick down and just balance on the broomstick. But I’m a huge fan of having a dynamic work environment. Well, I want choice. I wanna be able to perch against a bar stool, I wanna stand, I wanna… But on the ground, I have a bunch of balance stuff, so I just do this while I’m at work. If I’m on calls, I’m standing on a thing called a SlackBlock, which is like a portable slack line in your house. It’s tiny. It doesn’t take you many space. And I’m standing on one leg, balancing on the SlackBlock while I’m talking on the phone. And so I get so many hours every week of working on my balance. Does it improve my biking? Yes. Does it improve my skiing? Yes. Does it improve my lifting? Yes.

Brett McKay: Another practice you talk about is just standing more, walking more, moving more throughout the day. If you have a desk job, it doesn’t have to be that you’re in a chair eight hours. There’s different ways you can work, right?

Kelly Starrett: Yes. And if you… Look, I don’t talk about this much, but I had the great pleasure of working with a former US President. I’ve worked with and supported a couple of presidents, and this one president was a pretty prolific book writer, but could not write at a standing desk. So what we had to do was create an environment for this former president to get more movement at the desk because he felt like his best writing happened when he was still. And so that meant we needed to make sure that we were introducing a place to put his foot and a chair that wiggled more, and what I want you to realize is that we didn’t come up with this arbitrarily. Harvard defines sedentary lifestyle as sitting more than six hours a day. That’s an aggregate, that’s all your sitting. That means driving in the car, picking up your kid, it’s all of that. So what we’re trying to do is not battle our physiology, but it turns out…

So right now, I’m talking to you at a standing desk, but I’m actually perching on a bar stool. So I’ve got my foot on the ground, I’ve got one foot up, and in this position, because I’m perching and I’m not sitting, I’m actually above this thing called one-and-a-half metabolic equivalence, which is how much energy my body is using to just function in the background, but the sedentariness is that falling below that one-and-a-half. So sitting in most chairs, you fall below one-and-a-half, and that’s what we’re trying to not do. I need you to accumulate enough non-exercise activity that you actually fall asleep.

One of the things that we found was that a lot of people who are working out weren’t actually moving, still didn’t actually get enough sleep or find that they had enough sleep pressure. What we found was that working with Delta Force, of all the technology that they had access to, they had their guys walk 12,000 to 15,000 steps a day in addition to their training, and it knocked down all their insomnia problems. It really started to make everything better. So if you wanna adapt better to your training, you wanna fall asleep faster, you wanna feel better, you need to look at how much your total movement is, and conversely, how to limit your total sedentary time.

Brett McKay: And this does a lot of things, it’s gonna clear out your system, you talked about that earlier, motions lotion, so you’re gonna move and not feel achy. And then, yeah, I think the sleep component is really important, I’ve noticed that as well, when I move more, I have the best sleep. The best sleep of my life was when Kate and I went to Italy for, I don’t know, she was doing some of school thing. Went to Italy, you walk around Rome all day.

Kelly Starrett: You walk 20,000, 30,000 steps a day.

Brett McKay: Yeah, probably. Yeah, it was insane the amount we walked. And I remember, we got to the hotel, just laid down, we were like, “Oh, we’re just taking a nap,” and we were… It was like 15 hours later…

Kelly Starrett: Kids come back from summer camp and they’re just exhausted and sunburned, that’s the game, but for adults. And you just really nailed it. And what I want people to understand is we can come at this any way you want, but one of the ways that’s important to me is that it’s a hidden calorie burner in my day. So I love dessert, I love ice cream, I love cookies. I’m never gonna turn those things down, ever. If they’re combined, it’s even better, but when we wrote ‘Deskbound,’ my wife found a little conversion, a little calculator, and if she just stood and didn’t sit at her desk during her work day, in the course of a year it was 100,000 calories. I outweigh her by almost 100 pounds, that’s 170,000 extra calories I’d burn every year, that’s like 35 marathons, and all I have to do is just not sit while I’m working. I’m talking about perching, fidget, messing around, walk a little bit. And notice that we didn’t say, “You have to get 10,000 steps,” we saw that all of the benefits really start to kick in at 6,000 to 8,000 steps, which is really reasonable if you just start throwing in short walks after your meals, you take a call, you go for a little stroll in your neighborhood. It’s easy to get 6,000 to 8,000 steps. But the average adult gets less than 3,000, so it’s difficult for me to be sensitive to your foot pain and your Achilles and your junky tissues, if you’re not moving more during the day, which means you just have to be more conscious of it.

Brett McKay: And this is important, this daily movement is important, particularly for those who are… I just said exercising regularly, ’cause they’re thinking, I’m good, I got my hour of cardio in and I got my hour of weight training in, but you’re…

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, smashed it.

Brett McKay: You’re probably still sedentary.

Kelly Starrett: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Kelly Starrett: And if you’ve ever flown on an airplane and look down and you’re like, “Why do my ankles… I have cankles, what’s up my ankles are swollen.” That’s what we’re talking about. Your lymphatic system is backing up because you didn’t move your muscles, you ended up collecting fluid in your ankles, that is edema. But really what’s happening there is that it’s a failure of… It’s why… If you ever go in the hospital, they’re like, pump your legs, do calf pumps. Here are these things, we don’t want you to get a DVT. That deep vein thrombosis happens because people are sedentary in the hospital and they’re so freaked out about it, they hire a physical therapist to come in to tell you to wiggle your feet.

Brett McKay: Okay. So we talked about movement, can you get your steps in, don’t sit down all day, you don’t have to stand up all day, but just move around. You mentioned sleep, if you’re having problems sleeping, moving a lot will help you sleep. Nutrition, what role does nutrition… You’re a physical therapist, and one of the first things you ask is, what are you eating? What role does nutrition play in recovery and just our ability to move well?

Kelly Starrett: Nutrition for better or for worse, become identity politics for so many people, and it’s an identity, and it’s a hobby, and it’s a sport. And it’s a full contact sport. If you get on the Internet and talk about your diet. Universally, what we can start to say is everyone on the planet has protein minimums, you should get this amount of protein, and a really reasonable amount for everyone is 0.7 grams per pound of body weight, which turns out, if you’re sedentary, that’s probably enough. But if you’re over 50 or you’re exercising or trying to change your body composition, it probably is a little bit closer to 1 gram per pound body weight. So you’re keto. Cool. You’re carnivore, cool. You’re paleo, cool. You’re Whole30 cool. You’re vegan or vegetarian, cool, just show me you get this much protein.

And what we find is if you’re trying to change your body composition or you’re trying to recover, but you don’t have the building blocks on hand to do that, you’re not gonna see the gains you want, either way for body composition or otherwise. But the other part of that is that based on some really good data, we find that people don’t get enough micro-nutrients. There is not a single study in the world that says improving your fiber intake doesn’t improve your health. The easiest way to do that is actually eat fruits and vegetables, and so what we found is based on one of our friends, EC Synkowski, her company is OptimizeMe nutrition. She has something called the 800-gram challenge, and every single day, she challenges people to eat 800 grams of fruits and vegetables, and you’re like, “I don’t like vegetables,” cool, you eat fruits.

I don’t eat apples. Cool, you do eat berries and rutabaga. I don’t really care. But it turns out when we get more micronutrients in, all the polyphenols, all the vitamins, all the minerals, you can do that with four big apples a day. But when we get into people’s diets, and we’re trying to talk about soft tissue health and connective tissue health, and brain, health whatever it is, glow, gut health turns out fiber and micronutrients and protein make the basis. For people who are trying to lose weight, when we ask them to eat more and expand their choices, it’s the first time in their life, they’re like, “Holy shit, I had to eat so much to meet these minimums?” We’re like, “Yeah, welcome to it.” A pound of cherries is 230 calories. Go ahead and OD. Let me know what happens. What you’re gonna see is there’s so much food available to… We don’t wanna be restrictive anymore, we want people to hit this baseline.

Brett McKay: If you ate a pound of cherries I think you’d be on the toilet.

Kelly Starrett: It’s an illustrative point. Eat a pound of melon. Eat four apples, you know, what I mean. It really is… And you’re suddenly, I’m like, yeah, you know, the other day, I went to Trader Joe’s got myself up a flat of blackberries, they were just gorgeous, and I ate the entire thing, it was like 400 grams, 350-400 grams, almost half of my micronutrients for the day, and it was 230 calories.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s not like…

Kelly Starrett: I love cookies. One cookie from Starbucks is like 350 calories. So what we get is all of this benefit where I’m full, I’m getting all these nutrients. Somehow we demonize fruit. That was ridiculous, where like fruit is sugar. What a bunch of horse crap that is. It’s not the bananas and apples that are the problem. If you eat more micronutrients and fruits and vegetables, you’re gonna protein, your body will start to turn the lights back on.

Brett McKay: So this is great, and then at the end of the book, you have a schedule for people to follow if they’re trying to figure out how can I incorporate all this stuff in my day-to-day. And as you said, you don’t have to make time. Like, I’m gonna do an hour of my built to move routine, no it’s like…

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, no.

Brett McKay: Just you wake up, I’m gonna do this thing, I’m gonna get my steps in, whenever I’m taking a break or on the phone, I’m gonna walk around. I’m gonna get down in the squat, you can just do this stuff as… Like health shouldn’t be a block on your schedule, it should just be a part of your day.

Kelly Starrett: Yeah, what we’ve found is when we handed this thing to our world champion athletes, they were always viewing it through the lens of I wanna go faster, I don’t wanna do it more often, and they found blind spots that enable them to work harder. And when we applied it and gave this to non-exercisers, like we have some publishers who work with us in the UK who are not exercisers and who love pork pies. They were like, “Just reading this, changed my framework and how I perceived the world around me, and it changed me in making different subtle choices,” that all compound over time to really make radical changes where you can feel better and again, work harder and show up and feel fresher. That’s really the game.

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

Kelly Starrett: Go to builttomove.com. We’ve got… Actually, when the book comes out, we’ve got a 21-day Built To Move challenge, it’s free. And it’s basically a video a day just kind of supporting some of these ideas, just to bring you through, you could aim your friends at it. We are @thereadystate on all our socials, and if you are interested in more about how to assess your body more completely, we’ve got the app and everything else.

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

Kelly Starrett: Always a pleasure. Keep putting out the good word, my friend.

Brett McKay: Thank you, sir. My guest today was Kelly Starrett. He’s the co-author of the book, Built To Move. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website at thereadystate.com. Also check at our show notes at aom.is/builttomove, where you can find links to resources, where we delve deeper into this topic.

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

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

If you’re new to the AoM podcast, or maybe have missed a few episodes in the last six months, here’s a look at the 10 most popular episodes we’ve published so far this year. Hope you find some you really enjoy. Be sure to subscribe to the show to never miss a new episode; we’ve got some great guests coming in the second half of the year!

#955: The Power of NEAT — Move a Little to Lose a Lot

People often dismiss the efficacy of physical activity in losing weight, or think you have to do tons of exercise to get its effects. But Dr. James Levine explains that activity, even small movements, can, in fact, have a big impact on your health.

#959: Come Alive Again by Having More Fun

When was the last time you had fun? If it’s been a while, listen to my conversation with Catherine Price about why you need to put more fun in your life and what you can do to make that happen. 

#968: The Secrets of Supercommunicators

Looking to up your communication skills? Charles Duhigg provides some research-backed advice on how to become a “supercommunicator” so you can handle even the most difficult of conversations with ease. 

#973: A Butler’s Guide to Managing Your Household

Former professional butler Charles MacPherson offers lessons for regular joes on how to manage your household like it’s Downton Abbey, white gloves not required. One of my favorite bits of advice was creating a Butler’s Book for your home (here’s how to do it!).

#972: Down With Pseudo-Productivity — Why We Need to Transform the Way We Work

Regular guest Cal Newport always has some good thoughts to share, and in this episode, he discusses why you need to ditch mindless pseudo-productivity and embrace a more sustainable, humane, and fruitful way of working.

#978: Want to Be Happy? Give Yourself Reasons to Admire Yourself

Ryan Bush explains his theory that to heighten happiness and reduce depression, you have to give yourself reasons to admire yourself.

#993: The Shadows Over Men’s Hearts and How to Fight Them

Jon Tyson walks us through the sources of malaise in the lives of modern men, including despair, loneliness, unhealthy ambition, futility, and lust, and offers suggestions on how to fight them.

#1,000: Rules for the Modern Man

To commemorate the 1,000th episode of the AoM podcast, I brought back Walker Lamond of Rules for My Unborn Son fame to wax nostalgic about the internet back in the 2000s and discuss the rules we think every man should live by. This episode was a lot of fun! Highly recommend.

#1,002: The Fascinating Differences Between Male and Female Friendships

Evolutionary psychologist Jaimie Krems shares research on the differences between male and female friendships, including how men and women differ in friendship formation, friendship jealousy, and managing conflict within a friendship.

#1,003: Books, Routines, and Habits: The Founders’ Guide to Self-Improvement

Constitutional historian Jeffery Rosen shares the books and routines the Founding Fathers used for their personal development. Lots of inspiring takeaways from this episode. 

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

The journey of personal development, of becoming a more excellent and extraordinary individual, can sometimes seem a little abstract. That’s why it’s helpful to imagine it as Mark Divine does, as a set of five metaphorical mountains to scale.

Mark is a retired Navy SEAL Commander, a professor of leadership, a yogi, the creator of fitness and mindset programs like SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, and an author. He combines his two decades of military service with his study of martial arts and zen meditation to create the holistic warrior monk development philosophy that informs his work, including his latest book, Uncommon: Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life.

Today on the show, Mark acts as a guide to the topography of the five mountains of personal development and the daily practices that will help you summit them. We talk about why mastering the physical mountain comes first and climbing the intuitional mountain comes fourth, the Navy SEAL breathing practice that will help you develop your metacognition, how the Japanese concept of ikigai can help you find your purpose in life, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Mark’s previous appearance on the Art of Manliness podcast: Episode #60 — The Way of the SEAL
• Box breathing
• Unbeatable Mind by Mark Divine 
• Staring Down the Wolf by Mark Divine
• AoM Article: 4 Key Insights From the Bhagavad Gita
• AoM Podcast #616: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling
• Sunday Firesides: You Don’t Have the Time, Not to Take the Time
• F3 Nation
• Ikigai

Connect With Mark Divine

• Uncommon website 
• Mark’s website
• Mark on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The journey of personal development, of becoming a more excellent and extraordinary individual can sometimes seem a little abstract. That’s why it’s helpful to imagine as Mark Divine does, as a set of five metaphorical mountains to scale. Mark is a retired Navy SEAL commander, a professor of leadership, a yogi, the creator of fitness and mindset programs like SEALFIT and Unbeatable Mind, and an author. He combines his two decades of military service with his study of martial arts and Zen meditation to create the holistic warrior-monk development philosophy that informs his work, including his latest book, Uncommon, Simple Principles for an Extraordinary Life. Today on the show, Mark acts as a guide to the topography of the five mounds of personal development and the daily practices that will help you summit them. We talk about why mastering the physical mountain comes first and climbing the intuitional mountain comes fourth, the Navy SEAL breathing practice that will help you develop your metacognition, how the Japanese concept of ikigai can help you find your purpose in life and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/five mounds. All right, Mark Divine, welcome back to the show.

Mark Divine: Right. Super stoked to be on the Art of Manliness.

Brett McKay: Well, yeah, the last time we had you on was over 10 years ago, right? It’s been a while.

Mark Divine: Lots happened in 10 years, huh?

Brett McKay: A lot has happened in 10 years and I want to catch up with what you’ve been doing. So you got a new book out called Uncommon. What’s your aim with this book? Like what are you trying to do with this book and how does it pick up where you left off with some of the other things you’ve written about, like the way of the SEAL and things like that?

Mark Divine: Yeah. So really it’s kind of a sequel to Unbeatable Mind. Unbeatable Mind is kind of the whole training philosophy, more like a personal memoir, but it introduced the whole integrated vertical accelerated development that I’ve been now teaching since 2006, starting with SEALFIT and then Unbeatable Mind, the program. And in there, in that program, I kind of lay out how, first of all, we have the potential to become self evolutionary, meaning we can take control of our growth and we can accelerate it, if we do certain things. And that the idea of kind of that self mastery, that personal mastery is actually really important and motivating. And I found it through, obviously, martial arts and being a Navy SEAL and through Zen and meditation, but there’s many different paths to that. But, in Unbeatable Mind, I laid out the whole philosophy and I introduced this idea of the five mountains, which are the five developmental areas that we really need to take control of and then begin to access greater capacity.

But we do it in a way that is integrated, meaning it’s like the typical Westerner is taught that the body is something you drag to the gym and it’s just about health or looking good in a bathing suit or bodybuilding. And the mind, well, that’s really just what it is and it’s really a function of the brain and we have education and we have certificates and podcasts, but that’s the extent of mind training. And the emotions, forget about it. Most guys don’t even go there, but emotional development is something that happens when you break down. Intuition isn’t even talked about and spiritual life is really about your beliefs. And so, all these are kind of like separate aspects of your life. They’re not brought together into an integrated whole. So the experience of the typical Westerner is common and it’s one of kind of separation. You’re separated from yourself, you’re separated from others. These different aspects of yourself, which I call the five mountains, physical, mental, emotional, intuitional, and spiritual are also separate. And inevitably that leads to suboptimal performance, it leads to burnout, it leads to that quiet life of desperation that Thoreau talks about, because you’re not tapping into your full potential and living a life of purpose.

Brett McKay: Okay, so this is all about holistic personal development. Because I think you’re right. I think a lot of times when particularly guys in the West approach self-improvement, they just think, well, I’m going to get fit. And they might do really well there, they’re working out every day, increasing their PRs, but other areas of their life are suffering as a consequence of that.

Mark Divine: Right. That’s right. It’s one dimensional. And they say, well, I’m going to be fit. And then of course there’s tons and tons of folks out there, especially like my Navy SEAL peers are saying, be hard, right? Just be hard, go harder, suck it up, buttercup. And there’s times to be hard, but there’s times to be soft, right? You have to have that balance of the yin and the yang, the hard and the soft. And yet the soft isn’t taught and most guys are like, eh, that’s going to make me weak. Like when I used to train Navy SEAL candidates, which we still do, but on… I had a training center in Encinitas for 10 years and we trained them every day. We used to talk about, if the tsunami comes, which is every day in BUDS, SEAL training, would you rather be the mighty oak or the reed? And they’re like, well, some would say the mighty oak. And I said, no, the mighty oak is going to get washed away by the tsunami, but the reed is just going to lay down and then bounce right back up. It’s resilient. So the point we would teach them is that neither one is right or wrong. You want to develop both.

You want to be the mighty oak when you need to be and the reed when you need to be. And in order to do that, you need to develop both aspects, the hard and the soft, the yin and the yang. And the soft is found in the inner domain. So the physical mountain, you can develop the oak, develop your body to be strong and resilient, but you also have to develop that flexibility and the durability through exercises like yoga and core development and that type of stuff that you know you need to do, but most people don’t do it. But then the real soft side is found through the mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual development, where you’re really tapping into the inner power and insight and the sense of knowingness of when to kind of lay down your sword and lay down and let the tsunami wash over you so you can jump back into the fight.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned there you have spent your career post-serving in the SEALs training would-be Navy SEALs to get ready for BUDS, but you’ve also shifted to other types of personal development coaching. I’m curious in your experience with working with individuals who say they want to make a change in their life, they want to improve themselves, but don’t. What have you found? What keeps people from making those changes they say they want in their lives?

Mark Divine: There’s a lot of obstacles. Fear right, is one. So there’s this desire, but then there’s this fear of failure. There’s fear of change. There’s a fear of the unknown. And you can even take it deeper that there’s these underlying condition patterns that are fear-based or negative-based that keep coming up and tend to torpedo your efforts. So there’s so many people, and you’ve seen this I’m sure with your programs, that people will start and they’ll be all gung-ho, but then they meet an obstacle. And there’s always obstacles out there, right? But they haven’t learned that the obstacle is the way, as Ryan Holiday would say. And so when that obstacle comes and they feel some shame come up or some guilt that they screwed up or they feel some judgment from others, they immediately activate this kind of shame-based fear-conditioned thinking. And they say, well, I’m not worthy for this, or I’m not good enough, or this isn’t for me, right? This program isn’t right for me. And then they quit. And then the energy of like, oh, but I want to improve comes back up. And so they look for the next shiny thing.

They go to another program, and then they repeat this pattern over and over. And so people bounce around from program to program, and then they torpedo themselves because of this underlying unaddressed shadow self side, which is also the work of the emotional mountain in the book. That’s one of the major obstacles. The other one is people lack patience in our society that we’ve been taught that everything is supposed to be easy and quick. And as you know, and most of your listeners know that when it comes to development, patience is the virtue. And especially when it comes to the development of the inner domain, it’s not like tracking your deadlifts. You know what I mean? You can’t really point toward the development until after it’s happened. And maybe you have some evidence from someone like your wife or your significant other coming to you and say, man, something’s really different. And you’re like, oh, really? I guess you’re right.

It’s very subtle until it’s not. And so people start meditating or they start a breath practice or whatever it is, and they get into it, and maybe they get healthier because we’ve got a physical health component, fitness, etcetera. But the inner domain stuff, it’s just hard to see. And so then they develop this sense of uncertainty. Like they doubt the program really works. And so when they start doubting, then they stop adhering to the discipline daily practice. And then they have evidence, they begin to see evidence that it doesn’t work because the real juice in any developmental program is doing daily work. This even relates to physical development. It would be useless to go to the gym once a week and do all your weight training in two hours once a week. I mean, it would have some benefits, but you’re likely to get injured. You’re not going to make that much progress. Same thing with the work of mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual development. It’s a daily practice. And you can build it in different parts of your day, morning ritual, evening ritual, and then kind of throughout your day. Even the way you train physically can become an integrated practice.

And so people will think, well, I’m going to do all that work on the weekend, and it doesn’t work that way. So they lose faith, so to speak, that it works because they’re not doing the work. Those are some of the key obstacles.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So fear, the lack of patience. But you also talk about other things. It’s just, people have reasons like, well, I can’t make the change I want because I just don’t have the time or I don’t have the money. But you talk about, look, self-improvement or these things you want to do to improve yourself, it’s nothing fancy. You can do this in just 30 minutes a day. It doesn’t take that long. And I know when people say, I just don’t have the time to work out or I don’t have the time to do this sort of personal work, whether it’s managing my stress, I’m just like, man, you don’t have the time to not take the time.

Mark Divine: I agree with that.

Brett McKay: Right. Because eventually it’s going to bite you. And eventually you going to have to stop and you’re going to have to take care of the situation, whether you have a health scare and you have to spend time at the hospital or just time at the doctor office, or you have some sort of marital problem because you didn’t take the time to get your anger under control. You’re going to be spending a lot of time. So eventually you’re going to have to pay the fiddler. Might as well pay it on your terms.

Mark Divine: I agree.

Brett McKay: Instead of fate’s terms.

Mark Divine: Those two obstacles are nonsensical, time and money. First of all, the most profound practices are free. I have never… I’ve seen someone charge for breath training, but breath practice is free and you can learn it from a free video. And the breath, doing breath practice like our box breathing training every day is a profound practice that crosses all five mountains and will integrate you just if that’s all you did. That would be enough if you did it every day with awareness for 20 to 30 minutes. You don’t need a gym. I’m a big proponent of austere training, working outside, working with a team, working with cool tools that fit in the trunk of your car like sandbags and weight vests. And so physical training is free except for the cost of maybe a couple of tools and a pair of shorts and water bottle. You don’t need a fancy gym membership.

You don’t need a yoga studio membership, any of that stuff because all the… You just need a few tools, the simple the better, and then you just need to do them every day. And meditation is free. Then back to the time, like you said, you’ve got 30 minutes when you wake up in the morning because you’re feeling this 30 minutes was something. And generally speaking, it’s not going to be conducive to your growth, right? You wake up and you immediately start engaging, obsessive thinking, you’re checking your email or you’re reading the news. None of that’s really going to lead you where you want to go. So all you got to do is just take that 30 minutes, which you’re doing something else unproductive and just shift and ritualize a very productive morning routine, morning ritual. And that alone could be a game changer.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about these metaphorical mountains that you’ve developed for personal development. And the first mountain is physicality, which is all about our physical health. Why did you start there?

Mark Divine: Well, my experience, and I’m a lifetime martial artist and also obviously a Navy SEAL and also a yogi, the physical body. First of all, the body and the mind are not separate. So when you’re training the body, you’re training your mind. And so you’re already beginning to work on the mental mountain. And we know that like all of those of us who are involved in competitive sports and endurance athletics, like there’s a definite aspect of it that is training your mind for concentration, for attention, for awareness, situational awareness, for even opening up the heart mind, especially with team sports, especially in the SEALs, that really had a profound effect on me to open up my heart and to really learn different ways to love human beings. The idea of laying your life down for your teammates is just an act of like supreme love. So physical development is training your mind. Let’s start there. Now, secondly, if you’re physically unhealthy or diseased or drugged up, then your brain, which is part of your body, is physically unhealthy and is going to be suboptimal.

So if we want to do mental development work and emotional development and intuitive, if we want to evolve and grow, we’ve got to start with the body and get the body really healthy. Because if the body is healthy, the brain’s going to be healthy, the brain’s healthy, the mind’s going to be healthy, and you’re going to have the capacity to do the work on the other mountains. At a very simplest level, you’ll be less distracted and distractible. You’ll be able to sit comfortably in meditation or mindfulness or box breathing without agitation, without the discomfort. You’re going to have more clarity because of the electrochemical balance in your body, your homeostatic balance, and all the stress will have been bled off through the physical training. And also, at a very practical level, some of those obstacles we talked about, another obstacle is that your body is not healthy and, or you’re injured. And that becomes a real big distraction for you, which captures your mind. So, you’re not thinking about meditation and yoga if you’re injured or if you’re sick. And so, I think this is really important because, again, our culture is working against us in most of these areas.

It’s working against us in health. The typical standard American diet is an unhealthy diet, so you don’t want to prescribe to that. Most of the food that’s sold barcoded and packaged is unhealthy for us. So we want to get back to really simple principle-based fueling our body, eating when we’re hungry, learning to fast, an intermittent fast, eating really close to the earth foods, whole foods, and high-quality foods. And also, learn to move your body every day, both through different forms of exercise and somatic practices. And get out in nature, like I said. Be outside every day because we’re not separate from nature. We need to be in nature, and there’s profound motivation and mood and both emotional and physical benefits for being outside. We want to have a community of practice, training with a team of people who are dedicated to our success and not trying to beat us all the time. So those are some of the things that we do to get healthy. It’s simple. Again, you don’t have to overcomplicate it. Even when it comes to physical training, everything you need is really free. You can get some tremendous workouts, programs. Even ChatGPT will gin them up for you.

The point is just to get out and do it and to be consistent with your practice. Figure it out and make it as important. The physical training and this exercise, the nutrition, make that all like a practice for optimizing the bodies and the brain so that you can really go deeper and deeper to plumb the depths of the mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual mountains so that you can tap into this raw potential that you have. In SEALFIT, we call it 20X. You’re capable of 20 times more than you think you are. But, that capability is found on the inside. It’s found in your field of potential and you’re hiding it from yourself through your distractions, your addictions, and through this outer focus, and even through an unhealthy body.

Brett McKay: I want to dig deeper on this idea of exercising, having a physical practice outside in nature and with other people because you’re really big on this. What does that look like? What do you do? And what are some things that our listeners could do to incorporate this?

Mark Divine: Fun stuff. Exercise should feel like play. It should be really joyful. So, one way that it’s really joyful is variety. I never do the same workout. Rarely do the same workout twice and if I do, it’s because it’s a really effective one and it’s fun and I’m just like, okay, this is a staple. Many people work, train harder. They think they need to train longer and you don’t. I train 20 minutes a day. I do 20 minutes of physical, of high intensity with weight training, and also 20 minutes of yoga. And so 40 minutes is pretty much all that I need. And the maintenance, it’s like a flywheel. All you do is just spin it every day. And once your body gets up to that ideal fitness, you don’t need to put in countless hours unless you’re training for something specific like the SEALs or to do some big event type thing. Then that’s specific training. I’m talking about optimized performance, generalized training. I train outside every day unless it’s pouring rain, but even if it’s light rain, it just feels really good. And I train with a team.

Right now, my team is my wife, but I’ve always trained with a team, starting with the SEAL teams and then in my SEALFIT program. And just there’s something about it because you learn to take your eyes off yourself and put it on your teammate and make sure that everything is safe and you’re not trying to beat them. A little healthy competition is good, but it should be coopetition. It’s not your ego. So training outdoors has a benefit emotionally. Like I said, it affects your mood. There’s something about being connected in nature that makes you feel connected to yourself. And it helps you develop more situational awareness and a feeling of connection, which then allows you to be more connected to yourself and to others. So there’s a deep emotional kind of spillover effect there. And then training with a team or even a significant other has incredible emotional mountain benefits. Like Sandy and I… My wife and I have been training together for several years now. And I kind of, I wish we had done it way sooner. And what an incredible experience it’s been for our relationship. And I say a couple of the trains together flourishes together. So by training together, again, you’re moving away from this just being a physical exercise by taking it outside.

Now it is a mental and emotional and even a spiritual kind of developmental practice and simplicity. As I said, lots of variety, but simplicity. The tools that I use, I still use a barbell here and there, but mostly it’s sandbag, kettlebell, weight vest, a lot of body weight. I still have a rowing machine, so that’s good, only because I don’t love running anymore much. I’ve done a lot of running in my life, so it doesn’t serve me anymore. But I do a lot of rucking and rowing and we put it all together, every day I was like, okay, what does the body need? Oh, okay, so we’re gonna do a four rounds, we’ll do 500 meter row, 10 bench wrists, 20 kettlebell swings, 30 situps, and we’ll do that. We’ll do four rounds of that or five rounds of that? It takes 20 minutes and it’s a phenomenal workout. Stuff like that. Go to a park, take your weight vest into the wilderness, take your sandbag. There’s some of the principles. Be be simple, get outside, make it fun, play, do it with other people, but do it every day.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Now, if listeners who are wanting to find something like that. Have you heard of F3 Nation?

Mark Divine: I have. Yes.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’ve had the guys who started it on the podcast a while back ago, but for those who aren’t familiar, it’s all around the world. There’s these boot camps, they’re free to go, they’re geared towards men. They’re in the morning, usually before work. Like 5:36, and they have these free body weight bootcamps…

Mark Divine: Awesome.

Brett McKay: Outside with other guys. So if you’re looking for that… I like the idea of fitness where it’s holistic, where you’re trying to also not only nurture the body, but also the soul by being outside and with other people. Check out F3nation.com, you can find a location near you, ’cause I’m sure there is one.

Mark Divine: That’s killer. Yeah.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word for more sponsors. And now back to the show, let’s talk about that second mountain, and that’s the mental mountain. And this is all about developing what you call metacognition. For those who aren’t familiar with this idea, what is metacognition?

Mark Divine: Sure. Well, that’s like the first step in the mental mountain. Metacognition is the capacity to think about your thinking, which requires you to develop the capacity to be able to watch your thinking, to be able to look at it. So the basic level of metacognition is like journaling where you’re like, “Okay, what was my thought process there? And was it effective? What were the results? What could I have done different? It’s like a personal debrief, but you’re thinking about your thinking, and a lot of people do that and they do it well. But mental mountain training for us is to develop the capacity to do that in real time. And I call that simultaneous mind, where you’re cultivating your witnessing capacity, your contextual awareness, where you can begin to experience your thoughts, emotions, and things that are happening to you as if from a distance, like you’ve partitioned the hard drive of your mind and you set up as the watcher, I call it the sentinel in my book, The Way of the SEAL.

And you’re looking across to the left hemisphere of your mind, which is the content awareness. And you’re actually able to see your thoughts coming and going and… But there’s a space between them, which gives you your power back. Because instead of just being merged with your thinking in an reactionary mode, you now have this space to be able to observe that thought and to orient yourself to it like the OODA loop and say, do I wanna like jump on board the bandwagon, or do I wanna just let that one go? And then you choose wisely. And so this is the beginning of development of discernment and wisdom. And so the path to get there is through training your mind really to narrow its focus. So that’s attention control and concentration training. And we use the box breathing practice for that.

So box breathing has this first fundamental layer is arousal control, bleeding off stress triggering the parasympathetic nervous system, all that kind of benefits that come from that deep diaphragmatic breathing. But because you’re breathing in that box pattern and you’re counting the reps, counting the… Five seconds in five seconds hold, five seconds out, five seconds hold, or you’re holding your attention there and you’re able to hold your attention on that pattern for longer and longer periods of time. And that develops concentration. So you have arousal control, attention control and concentration.

So what this does is it gathers up the energy of a mind that has been conditioned to be very distracted. That kind of bouncing ball thinking pattern, that monkey mind that they talk about in the eastern traditions. And so you’re able to begin to focus your energy more.

And then when you begin to work on this witnessing awareness, it’ll happen automatically. But we try to spur it on to facilitate it’s happening quicker through our practices and build mind. And so that what we have you do is kind of set up that watcher metaphorically in your mind, like we simulate it. And the more you do that, the more that simulation kind of dissolves and it becomes a real experience of witnessing. And first it’s intermittent, like you have to practice it and then you kind of slide back into, merge with your thoughts, and then over time you then crack open a small space that stays there, it’s permanent. And then the practice basically widens that space, that space between you as the observer, the witness, and the thoughts that are happening. This is a profound practice. It’s not… It has great benefits obviously for relationships because, you have the ability to kinda like intercept yourself when you go right into reactionary mode.

When you get triggered, it has great benefit for dealing with any kind of crisis because you become the calm center in the storm and you’re able to navigate your team through it because you’re non reactionary. And it’s got great benefits in terms of overall peace of mind and contentment because you become much less attached to the outcomes. Because you see those stories, those dramas of life as things that play out. And you see that, you begin to see that they play out over and over and over the same ones and you’re like, oh my God, look at that. I used to be just swept up in all that and now I can see it for what it is. And you can start to de-energize the negative patterns and replace it with things that are positive and productive. And you become… Life gets really simple and you become very aware of what to say no to and what to say yes to. And you stop getting tangled in things that you shouldn’t be getting entangled in. So that’s what the mental mountain is about. It’s not just packing more content into your head. It’s actually moving away from needing that content, toward developing wisdom.

Brett McKay: Okay. So for this, the daily practices that box breathing, correct, that’s gonna help you start being able to harness your attention.

Mark Divine: Right. Box breathing is the way in breath… Breath is the bridge between the body and the mind and the spirit. So like I said, at a fundamental level box, breathing is a physiological practice. You are slowing down your breathing, you’re retraining yourself to breathe six breaths per minute, which is five seconds in, five seconds out. Call that the tactical breath. And it brings great, great physiological, psychological emotional benefits and health benefits. But because you’re breathing that pattern, you’re also training that attention control and concentration. So now the box breathing is bridging between the physiological, psychological training the mind. Then we layer on the box breathing. The way we teach it is like a stacked practice. So now you’re deliberately training the attention control and the concentration while you’re doing the breathing practice. And then you add in the mindful awareness witnessing.

So there’s like four things now. Arousal control, attention control, concentration and witnessing. And that’s developing that metacognitive capability to be separate from the thoughts and emotions. At the end of our box breathing practice, then we do a visualization practice. And so now we’re training our mind’s natural capacity to imagine or fantasize. And we’re getting rid of the fantasies and we’re using our imagination to create a future reality in our mind. That is based upon an emergent concept of who we are and why we’re on this plane, why we’re on this planet, our calling. That’s that spiritual mountain, I talk about. That sense of like, what is our purpose? Why are we here? What are we gonna do about it? Then you create a vision of that and after your practice every morning, you evoke that vision and you add energy to it. And so what you’re doing there in a future state is you’re creating a memory of your desired future. It’s very powerful. So instead of like worrying about the future or catastrophizing, you actually remember who you really are and why you’re on this planet and what you’re supposed to do about it. And that becomes like a steady companion. It’s always there for you to remind you, especially in the stressful times.

Brett McKay: Okay. So you wake up, you could do the box breathing for five minutes after the box breathing…

Mark Divine: 20 minutes, I recommend.

Brett McKay: 20 minutes. Yeah. Up to… I think you said start off with five minutes, work your way up to 20 minutes eventually.

Mark Divine: Right. Minimum of five minutes. You can get a lot of the arousal control benefits. So a lot of people, Brett, they need to do this kind of in sequence as opposed to like all in one practice because they’re just not ready for it. They’re physically and mentally, they just need to focus on their health, all the things we talked about in the physical mountain. And then just box breathe for five minutes for the arousal control and just start bleeding off all that excess stress. Everyone’s in hyper arousal in the west. We’re overcommitted, we’re stressed, we’re rushing from here and there. The time commitments are crazy. And all of that is mind generated fantasy that’s causing an enormous amount of stress. So the box breathing basically re-energizes the parasympathetic pathway because it gets atrophied. You’re always stuck in this sympathetic nervous system response and you overcompensate with tons of coffee or alcohol or working out like a madman. So we wanna downregulate and that takes some time.

Brett McKay: Then as you extend those box breathing sessions that will allow you to exercise that focus and attention and concentration.

Mark Divine: Right. Exactly. And so when you’re ready, you extend the box breathing session to 10, 20 minutes, then you turn it into attention control concentration training. You work on that for a while until your mind gets really… It’s like sharpening that saw. That’s your one sword cut, that [0:28:20.6] ____ Just sharpen that saw into your mind is really sharp, really focused, less distractible. You can hold your attention on the box pattern without distraction for over 60, 70% of the time. Then you’re ready to move on to the mindful awareness, which is like setting up shop as the witness and beginning to cultivate the process of separating from your thoughts. It may have already started happening ’cause it, this… Like I said earlier, will naturally open up as part of this practice. That’s what happened to me with my zen practice. Zen practice was really a concentration practice.

I started at 21 four years before I went in the seals. And as my mind became more and more sharp and and able to concentrate, then quite naturally that witnessing capacity began to open up. I can’t explain exactly why, but I think that it’s just decreasing the clutter, like the concept of no mind or taming the ego or taming the monkey mind. It makes sense now because as you concentrate your energy into that one’s thought stream, just focusing on the box pattern, all those other thoughts that are distracting you, that you thought were so important, that you thought were you, they begin to settle down. And you realize that, “Wow, you’re still here, you’re completely aware, but there’s no thoughts in my field of awareness except for this pattern of breath. And then when you drop that off, you’re like, “Wow, I’m still here. And I’m not even doing that.” But then all of a sudden you’re like, wait, I’m thinking there’s a thought. But then you’re like, “Wait, that thought is happening. It’s not who I am. I’m this field of awareness. I, I am the ground of being, which this thought is arising.” It’s a profound shift in your whole mental makeup, which like I said is like a turning point in life.

Brett McKay: And then after that you can do a visualization practice.

Mark Divine: Right.

Brett McKay: And people might be hearing this and be like, visualization sounds pretty hokey, but you use this as a, you were a collegiate swimmer.

Mark Divine: Right.

Brett McKay: And you use this as a seal too.

Mark Divine: Visualization is a crucial skill. The body mind doesn’t really differentiate between things you visualize and the things you participate in or see. And so it’s the only place where you can have perfect practice is in your mind’s eye and it’ll have a profound benefit. So it’s good to visualize important physical activities, sporting events, but we can also, if you’re not involved in that, or even if you are, but it’s important to note that visualization can also be used for this idea of becoming who you’re really meant to be. So many of us are living those lives of quiet desperation or we’re trapped in these bodies where we’re like, God, I wish… I think I could be a lot healthier, better looking, lose this weight, be stronger. Yes, you can. But you gotta be able to see it first in your mind’s eye. And it has to be the right things too, Brett. You can’t be fantastical about it. You’re not gonna just visualize being superman or superwoman and have it happen. It’s gotta be right for you.

Brett McKay: I can see you doing a visualization practice for whenever you’re in a situation where your kids are just being crazy and they’re just annoying you. And instead of doing your typical grumpy, annoyed, tense dad routine, you visualize yourself being like, okay, how do I wanna be in that situation?

Mark Divine: Yes.

Brett McKay: Or this could be at work too, when you’re in a high intense negotiation where you’re dealing with a difficult employee, visualize yourself like, how do I wanna…

Mark Divine: That’s right.

Brett McKay: Act in that situation?

Mark Divine: Right. And you do that like the morning ritual, we call that winning in your mind before you step foot in the battleground of your day. So you dirt dive the day. Dirt dive is a term we use in the seals to like, we would mentally visualize and do all of our missions in our mind. And the dirt dive came from the diving missions. We would literally visualize it and walk the dive. You’re spending four hours underwater. You’re not coming up and peaking and taking bearings, you’re underwater. And so you gotta know in your mind, you run the whole thing in your mind. Well, same thing. You can dirt dive your day like you’re talking about. You see yourself being present and positive with your kids not getting triggered and reactionary, not sitting in your phone, checking your email.

You visualize yourself being there for them. Same thing with your important meetings and whatnot. And invariably those interactions go much smoother because your body, mind is already set the expectation that it’s gonna be a positive and productive situation. And the more you do that, then the more those become the new normal. But you can also, Brett, visualize like I’m saying this future me, we call it the future self, sometimes future me, which is like, it’s sometime in the future, it doesn’t really matter, but it’s like the ideal version of yourself. Most people never tap into this, but it’s the ideal version of yourself, your perfect health, perfectly fit, radiating youthful vitality and completely 100% aligned with your purpose and calling why you kind of came through this, to this planet to grow and to learn and to evolve. And your loved ones are healthy and thriving around you. And whatever way you engage with the world, whatever your mission is, is radically successful and you evoke this image and you add energy to it. So it’s very similar to like instead of dirt diving your day, you’re dirt diving your life.

Brett McKay: Oh, so that’s the second mountain. The mental part of yourself. The third mountain is the emotional mountain. And what’s interesting, I think some of the practice we’ve already talked about, the physicality and doing the box breathing and getting your mental game on track. That can go a long way in helping you climb this emotional mountain because as we’ve been talking about, our emotions are connected to our mind, ’cause sometimes, the emotions we experience are because of the thoughts we have, we learn that from cognitive behavioral therapy. And then also our bodies can cause our emotions to get out of whack. So just by exercising regularly, doing box breathing, doing this sort of things, it can go a long way to help regulate our emotions. But what other practices do you recommend people doing? So they get a handle on their emotions. So their emotions are, it’s not about stifling emotions, ’cause emotions is what drives us. But how we can guide our emotions to take us to where we wanna go.

Mark Divine: Yes. That’s great. So emotions and intuition are just different aspects of the mind, but I felt it’s helpful to kind of like parse them out because there are different practices and there’s different language around, especially the emotional mountain that you can benefit from, like the field of therapy and psychology. So in the mental mountain, physical mental mountain, we learn emotional control. And I think a lot of people think… A lot of guys especially think, oh yeah, I’ve developed that emotional control. I’m in control. And it’s helpful to be in control so you don’t torpedo certain situations or look weak in the middle of a crisis and those things. And so that’s great. It’s a valuable skill, but it’s part of it. It’s kinda like the oak part. Remember I talked about the oak and the reed?

You wanna be strong in the face of a crisis, but you don’t wanna be unaware of emotional patterns that are actually harming the team or harming you. And a lot of times when we’d stop at the physical and mental and we develop that emotion control, then we think we’re squared away when in fact you’re the one that’s actually the limiting factor. Because of some sort of pattern, and it could be really overt or it could be subtle, and it’s a recurring pattern based upon some sort of childhood trauma or some traumatic event in your life. And it’s unresolved. And at the time it happened, usually as in early childhood, these things happen. You didn’t have the skillful means to be able to process that situation, the energy in a way that was led to forgiveness and to letting the energy flow.

And so the energy gets trapped and the mind will associate certain feelings to that as well as thoughts that get triggered when that emotional pattern gets triggered. So these thoughts and emotions are really closely aligned because they’re born from the same energy. So for me, the emotional mountain work is really about developing the capacity to go back in your history, we call it recapitulation. And to go back and to reengage those situations that cause the pattern to begin with, to release that energy and to recontextualize it and to let go that you’re holding onto, to forgive yourself and to forgive others. It takes a lot of courage. This is why, again, a lot of… I kind of harp on men, you need to be doing this emotional work because otherwise you’re limiting yourself. You get stuck, you can have great strides in your physical and mental, but then you get stuck because these patterns just keep coming back.

It’s like you’re dragging a whole bag of hand grenades behind you and they just are spilling out. And so this is what my book, Staring Down the Wolf was. It’s like you gotta stare down the fear wolf and release all these negative patterns that you have. And it takes courage. But once you begin to experience the joy and the release of letting go of some of that stuff, then it becomes very motivating. You’re like, oh, this is just part of my development. This is the next step of my development. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or I’m a weak person, or I’m mushy for doing this emotional work. It’s just this is actually critical so that I can show up as a whole person and I’m not the one that’s the limiting factor on the team. Oftentimes the leader is the one who lacks the trust and respect because they’re trying to show up as the one who has the answers and is perfect or is in charge. And everyone knows that they’re not perfect and they’re not always in charge. They don’t have all the answers but when they see the leader doesn’t admit that to himself, then it shuts down the conversation.

Brett McKay: So yeah, in the book you provide how to go through this recapitulation practice so you can sort of get out of that loop you’re in. Journaling can be another tool in this and I imagine if things are really bad like therapy…

Mark Divine: Therapy, yeah.

Brett McKay: You might need to see a professional counselor to help you work through this stuff.

Mark Divine: And look at a therapist as a coach, right? You have a fitness coach, oftentimes you’ll get a nutrition coach. You might even have a cognitive coach like an executive coach who can help you think about your thinking and makes better decisions. Why not have an emotional coach? And some of them are very good.

Brett McKay: Okay, the fourth mountain is the intuitional mountain. I’m sure a lot of our listeners, typically our listeners are mostly guys, they go, intuition, what the heck is that? How do you define intuition and what role did intuition play in your career as a SEAL?

Mark Divine: Extremely important role. Intuition for me is knowing something without knowing how or why you know it. There’s several forms of it. First we have that gut intuition. We now know that your gut, your biome and the enteric nervous system is part of your brain system. It has neurological processing, it’s got neurons and so you are actually communicating with your biome with the millions of bugs down there. And for some reason they have access to information that your brain doesn’t and they’re trying to communicate that to you. The reason intuition mountain is fourth and not third or second is it’s generally not accessible to you if your body’s out of shape and it’s not healthy because your mind is captured at the outer level of the dis-ease, the imbalance. And it’s generally not going to be accessible to you if your mind is racing around and completely distracted and you’re constantly absorbed in distractions, TV, YouTube, email, text, this, that and the other thing, too busy, right? So you’re not going to be able to tap into an issue.

So you’ve got to train your mind to be less distractible and to do the things we talked about in the mental mountain. And it’s not going to be accessible to you if you have all these emotional patterns that are like, klaxons screaming at you every day. So you got to do the emotional work to let go and bleed off and to release that emotional energy which is so loud, I guess, or the feeling sensations overwhelm any kind of the subtle feelings that you need to be able to feel into or experience from the intuitive mountain, from your gut and from your heart. So by doing the work of the first three mountains, your intuitive side actually kind of naturally opens up. But then there’s things that we can do to facilitate it, to speed up that process. One is to trust your gut, so to speak, to trust your heart, to be able to listen carefully and quietly to the messages and then act on them, to believe it, to not override it with your fear mind or your rational mind. Most people override it and then they don’t trust it. In silence, back to our time in nature. Everything we’ve talked about has a spillover effect.

Like the training we talked about in the first mountain, all will affect all five mountains as I mentioned. We have to just parse them out so that we are clear about what’s happening and then we can accelerate the journey by adding some training. But time in nature and stillness really is probably the best thing for developing that intuitive insight. So you had the gut, the gut’s instinctual intelligence really is about avoiding danger or moving toward opportunity. It’s very kind of basic level survival and it’s experienced more as like a tug or a feeling in your belly or any time there’s a danger, it’s felt like a contraction or like I had an experience in the SEALs where I was walking up to a firing range to do some shooting and I felt the word stop. I felt it in my gut and it almost felt like a hand on my shoulder and I just stopped in my tracks. And the instant I stopped, a teammate of mine had an accidental discharge behind me and the bullet like whizzed by me. I felt the wind of the bullet by my right ear. If I had taken the next step, it would have gone in the back of my head. So that was the gut’s intuition saying stop or else we’re all going to die. Right? It’s intense. The second source of intuition is your heart.

So the heart also has neurological processing capacity, it’s got neurons, it’s got an incredible range of experience. Like the heart’s energy can be experienced from across the room, whereas the mind, the brain’s energy is trapped behind the cranium and so it doesn’t… You can’t really feel the force of it outside. It doesn’t project well except through the eyes. So the heart, when you learn to open up and sit and rest with your heart and to really feel into the heart, that’s the source of real empathy, like what other human beings are feeling, even thinking. And then also what you’re emitting. You get very sensitive to the fact that if you’re all agitated and you’re closed down, then guess what? You’re setting the conditions with those around you for them to be agitated and also to feel your closed down-ness and so you’re going to shut the conversation down. So you listen to that and you feel into that and you maintain an open heart and begin to really also sense what other people are feeling and how they’re doing and so then you can attune to that.

You begin to take their perspective and ask better questions and maybe not push as hard or just really kind of be a better leader, a better person. So that’s that heart intuition, which is empathy, compassion, wisdom. Then the third intuition is really, does come from the brain and it comes through the process of relaxing the mind to be opening up to what the yoga tradition calls direct perception, perceiving information or knowingness that is beyond knowledge. So it’s not content. It comes from this witnessing awareness that we talked about earlier where you suddenly just know something and you don’t really have any reason to know it or understanding how you know it, but you know it. And that’s profound. Like for me, that’s why I think sitting in silence and these practices are the most important thing that we shouldn’t waste time not doing it because all of my good ideas come from that direct perception these days. That’s where all the insights come from. So that intuition I call insight, seeing within, it’s so very important again, it’s so hidden from most people because they just don’t trust it.

They think it’s woo woo. But again you’re dealing with such a limited range of perceptual capacity. By training, through training the mind, the emotions and your intuition, you can open that aperture. So you begin to see an experience far more. We already know the brain takes in like vastly more information than it can process or will, is willing to process. Anything that is unusual or can’t be categorized, literally just get blocked or the gap just gets filled in. Most people wouldn’t believe it, but a lot of things that they see are just like painted in by the brain. It’s not really there. The Apache scouts knew this in their… In the way they would scout and track like they would literally, they call the hiding in plain sight. They knew where to stand because they knew that the Western mind, the way it was trained would look at that, take that information in. And if they were standing next to the tree, they would just see the tree. Or if they’re standing looking like a rock, they would just see a rock, but they’re actually looking at a human being. But the mind just says, No, it’s not a human being, it’s a rock. And so it paints a rock there. So that’s incredible.

So through this training and development process, you can open up your aperture. So you’re taking in and perceiving more information. And when you do that, it’s suddenly you’re like, Oh, I get it now. This is real. This is real. I’ve had… I had teammates and myself who had profound experiences in the military and the SEALs, all of it in the realm of intuition, like intuiting where IEDs were going to be planted or going off and being right about it. Most of the time, intuiting whether you’re going to be safe or not, I have a master chief friend who was at Mosul for reef, which they were trying to rescue the [0:44:57.3] ____ And he was with a special forces team and they were pinned down. And this guy just had this intuitive hit that it was his time. He needed to get up and basically take care of this himself. So here’s a SEAL just like gets up in the midst of this firefight and starts navigating and just taking out the enemy left and right. And literally fights his way into the compound, like destroys the enemy. And he describes the experience as this incredible intuitive moment where time slowed down and he could just see, literally see the bullets leaving the muzzles of the rifles. He can navigate around them. He could see which targets were the ones, right ones to take out and everything happened in this super slow motion.

And that was all because he had developed this incredible intuitive capacity to be able to perceive in this manner because the mind is really, it creates the construct of time and space and body experience space, mind experience time. So as you develop these skills and open up the aperture of your mind, then you have a different relationship to time and space. So that’s really what the intuitive mountain is all about is like getting yourself to where your whole experience of life is much more ephemeral. You really start to move beyond just like hard physical materialism to like, you start to experience the metaphysical and the psychic realms. And you have these experiences that are just profound and you see that it’s always been that way. You just kind of hid it from yourself.

Brett McKay: Okay. To climb that intuition mountain, continue your meditative practices. The other important thing I got from there, make time for silence. You don’t have to constantly be consuming new information. Just let yourself work with the stuff you already got. And then when you have one of those intuitive moments, act on it.

Mark Divine: Act on it. Trust it.

Brett McKay: Trust it. Let’s start with the final mountain which is the spiritual mountain. And I liked how you talked about this Japanese idea, I’m going to butcher how you say, Ikigai.

Mark Divine: Yeah. Ikigai.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Tell us about Ikigai and how that can help us climb the spiritual mountain of our lives.

Mark Divine: It’s a profound idea. I’ve been teaching for years that you can uncover your purpose. I talked about it as a calling earlier, but it’s inside. It’s like part of that heart intuition. It’s the primal urge that brought you into this place. It’s not about a job or a career. It’s about this archetypal energy. So for me, it was warrior, now teacher, warrior, leader, and teacher, kind of the dominant archetypal energies, which are my purpose. My purpose is here to fulfill that energy and to learn and grow. So everyone has that. So we want to do these practices to be able to sit in silence, be able to allow that to be revealed to us. That still quiet voice that you’re like, Oh, yeah. That’s it. But then of course, it’s not enough. Like our world needs us. Our team, our family needs us. So I’m not advocating that people become all like foo-foo spiritual and then suddenly become really aloof away from the world or apart from the world or go to an ashram or a Zen monastery. I mean, there are a select few who maybe that’s right for, but no. For most of us, like we need to be engaged in the world.

So this is all about showing up as a whole person, whole mind, not split mind. And to be able to show up in a way that is like in complete alignment, like that future vision self I described, it’s in complete alignment with your calling and your hair is on fire because you’re doing what you’re passionate about. You’re in alignment with your principles. But then the question is, Okay, so if I know all that, what am I going to do about it? What’s my mission? That’s where Ikigai comes in because the model says, Okay, given all that stuff I just talked about, you know why you’re on this planet, you know what you’re passionate about, you know what your principles are. Now what does the world need and how do your skills align with what the world needs? Great. That’s another layer to think about and reflect on in journal. And then what can you get paid for, right? Because we, a lot of people struggle with this when they’re trying to work through transformation. They’re like, Yeah, but I’m really passionate about gardening and being outside and everything, but there’s no career there or I’m walking away from banking. I don’t know how I could do that.

And so Ikigai kind of helps us with a model to really align our calling with meaningful work in the world in service. The whole idea of like, for me, spirituality, the spiritual mind is not about religion or dogma. Again, it’s about getting the mind to do a phase shift away from just thinking with the ego, merge with your thoughts to suddenly being, Oh, I see that. I’m actually a spirit having a human existence. So the spiritual mountain for us is to kind of deeply embody that idea of I’m spirit, having this human existence and making sure that the reason you came into this planet, you’re fulfilling, you’re embodying it, you’re fulfilling it. You’re not accruing any more negative karma. You’re getting the lessons that you need. And in order to get the lessons that you need, you need to be doing what you’re meant to do or else you’re going to miss the boat. That was the whole purpose of the Bhagavad Gita and the story of Arjuna and Krishna. Arjuna was a warrior, but he didn’t want to go fight his brothers and his cousins who were the opposing force who were claiming the kingdom. And he was having a moment like, I don’t want to fight. And most people in our society will say, Well, he’s evolved. He’s practicing Ahimsa or peace. But Krishna, who was his charioteer, who represented God had a little slap down with him and said, listen, Arjuna, you have to fight because that’s your dharma.

That’s why you came into this world. And if you don’t do it, then you’re going to accrue negative karma and you’re going to bring great suffering to yourself and you’ll have to come back and repeat this whole thing. So that fifth mountain, spiritual mountain, is all about living a life on purpose, in service, in a way that only you are meant to do on this planet.

Brett McKay: And so the practice for this is just taking time to actually think about those things.

Mark Divine: Yes.

Brett McKay: I think that’s hard for a lot of guys. They’re just so busy with life, work, family. They don’t make time for that.

Mark Divine: Well, sit with them is probably best and then think about it. If you’re just thinking, then you’re using the wrong side of your brain, the wrong faculty. It’s okay to do some thinking and you may start there, with like, what is my archetype? And there’s like the Enneagram and Jungian archetypes. You can start looking at those. You can look at the arc of your life and be like, Oh, yeah. Like in my early 20s, I was getting my MBA, CPA, working as a in public accounting, finance. But while I was sitting on that meditation bench, on the Zen bench after a year or so of training, I started to get these feelings, these sensations, these intuitive hits that I was meant to be a warrior. And so that created this disconnect. Now with that information, I could start contemplating like, Oh, that’s interesting.

If I’m meant to be a warrior, why am I in finance? That’s not a warrior-ly path. And so you start to ask better questions, but it wouldn’t have happened if I had just started thinking because I’d be wrapped up in coulda shoulda wouldas and judgment and what people are going to think if I do something different and I don’t know what to do. It’s different. So I think sitting in silence and allowing the, developing the capacity to be still, still of your thoughts, still of your emotions, to be able to feel those intuitive messages of your gut and your heart, especially in this case. But you can’t be quiet if you don’t have the physical, mental, emotional, and intuitive skills to be able to like sit in quiet and be able to listen to the messages that tell you, Oh, this is my calling. And what will be revealed to you is this sense of how you’re supposed to show up in the world.

So everything we’ve talked about really like the… It’s hard to say… Like there are practices, like we have a practice in the spiritual mountain around like visualizing yourself at the end of your life, writing your own epithet from the perspective of a best friend looking back at your life as if you’re at the end and saying, well, how did I live? How did I do? And it can be very revealing. Stuff like that. Also visualizing your future self, which I talked about first, that starts out kind of as a imagination, but eventually you start getting information again from your subconscious or from your intuitive realm that starts to fill in some holes and gaps and it just begins to shift. So those are great practices.

And then that metacognition and contemplation about like where you think you need and want to be and what you’re supposed to be doing based upon your growing clarity of your purpose and principles and passions versus kind of what you’re doing right now and how you’ve lived in the past. And that can lead to some great insights.

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

Mark Divine: The website readuncommon.com we’ll still have, we’ve got some cool bonuses. We’ve got some discounts on gear and supplements as well as a real cool journal. And also I’m going to do a group training for folks who order from that site. So it’s readuncommon.com. People can find me at my website, markdivine.com or email me at info at markdivine.com the social media I’m at @realmarkdivine. Last name’s spelled D-I-V-I-N-E. Thanks so much Brett for doing this. This is really enjoyable. Thank you.

Brett McKay: Thanks Mark. It’s been a pleasure. My guest here is Mark Divine. He’s the author of the book Uncommon. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, markdivine.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/fivemountains, where you can find links to resources as we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at @artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives and while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We’ve got a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. The best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM and if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. If you’ve done that already. Thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get read something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcasts, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Filling out paperwork. Making travel reservations. Paying bills. Shopping for groceries. Returning packages.

These are all examples of life admin — the little tasks we have to do to keep our lives moving along.

Life admin is typically pretty tedious and annoying. But staying on top of it is essential to reducing the stress and chaos that would otherwise burden our relationships, muck up the gears of our schedules, and prevent us from participating in all the fun and fulfilling parts of life.

Fortunately, there are ways to better manage your life admin. Here to share some of them is Dinah Rowe-Roberts, the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast and the co-author of a book of the same name. Today on the show, Dinah explains what lists you should be keeping, including the 10-minute time killers list, why you should do a regular “hour of power” to stay on top of things, how to schedule your life admin, how to keep track of and divvy up chores between you and your spouse, how to get all your meal planning and grocery shopping done in less than 15 minutes a week, how to streamline your kids’ schedules and your vacation planning, and much more.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM article on shadow work
• AoM article and podcast on how to have a weekly marriage meeting
• AoM article on how to have a weekly family meeting
• AoM article on how to use Todoist to get things done
• AoM article on how to manage your life admin
• AoM article on how and why to have a reset day
• AoM article on 8 lists you should be keeping (besides the to-do list)

Connect With Dinah Rowe-Roberts

• The Life Admin Life Hacks website
• Life Admin Life Hacks on IG
• Dinah on LinkedIn

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Filling out paperwork, making travel reservations, paying bills, shopping for groceries, returning packages. These are all examples of life admin, the little tasks we have to do to keep our lives moving along. Life admin is typically pretty tedious and annoying, but staying on top of it is essential in reducing the stress and chaos that would otherwise burden our relationships, muck up the gears of our schedules, and prevent us from participating in all the fun and fulfilling parts of life. Fortunately, there are ways to better manage your life admin. Here to share some of them is Dinah Rowe-Roberts, the co-host of the Life Admin Life Hacks podcast and the co-author of a book of the same name. Today in the show, Dina explains what lists you should be keeping, including the 10-minute time killers list, why you should do a regular hour of power to stay on top of things, how to schedule your life admin, how to keep track of and divvy up chores between you and your spouse. How to get all of your meal planning and grocery shopping done in less than 15 minutes a week. How to streamline your kids’ schedules and your vacation planning and much more. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/life admin.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts, welcome to the show.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are the co-host of a podcast called Life Admin Hacks. You’ve also co-authored a book with the same name and it’s all about life admin. I love thinking about and improving how I manage my own life admin. For those who aren’t familiar, what is life admin?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Well, life admin, it’s really the homework of life. So it’s not chores which in Australia we call housework, which is really traditionally, the cooking, the cleaning and the laundry. But it often is supporting those things and it’s not parenting, it’s not about the actual physical, emotional, social development of your child. It’s actually a third piece of the domestic labor puzzle. It’s all of the scheduling, the booking, the shopping, the paperwork, the planning. It often facilitates chores and parenting, but it’s its own beast. It’s its own thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The way I think about life admin, it’s like the mental work that you have to do to do those physical activities. So if you’re planning a trip, the thing is like the trip, like that’s the activity. The life admin is all the stuff you have to do to make that trip happen. Planning the itinerary, rental cars, scheduling flights, things like that.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. It’s often a hidden burden and it can generate a significant portion of what people call the mental load. The kind of thinking, the planning, the anticipating that you need to do to make life work.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s give some more examples, or what’s some more examples of life admin that people might see in their lives on a regular basis.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think then it’s really important or it’s interesting or helpful to think about life admin being like two types of life admin. Because there’s everyday life admin, it occurs cyclically, seasonally daily, weekly. So things like planning the grocery shopping, doing the meal planning, paying the bills, all those things, they just happen over and over again, never ending. And then you’ve got what we call like life event admin. So if you have an event, you get married, you have a baby, those sorts of things, they trigger enormous amounts of life admin as well. So it can be helpful to think about having those two types of life admin and thinking about dealing with them a little bit differently.

Brett McKay: Why does it feel like we’re always drowning in life admin? Like what is so insidious about it that it seems like it’s always piling up?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I think that it has changed in recent times because of technology and choice. And I think that the more choice we have, the reality is, the more life admin it creates. So I think that’s certainly a factor. I think another thing is that the cost of communication are lower. And so what we find is our providers bombarding us with emails and text messages and all those things, who are getting more and more information that we have to figure out what to do and what to process with. And life admin grows with growing responsibilities. So as we move through life, things like buying a home, having kids, it increases the amount and complexity of life admin just if you’ve got less time because you’ve got more parenting, caring work responsibilities. So I think that that’s often why people particularly in a sort of middle age feel like they’re drowning in life admin. And I think part of that is very few people have thought about setting up systems for life admin that really optimize how to deal with it. And even though you might do it in your professional life, a lot of people don’t do it in their personal life. And so they haven’t got the systems to adequately know what to do when something hits them. And I think that makes it feel quite chaotic.

Brett McKay: Well another thing too, I’ve heard about what might be increasing life admin… We’ve written about this on our site. There’s a book by, I think it was a sociologist about shadow work. You’ve heard about this idea of shadow work?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Right. So shadow work is this stuff that used to be done by professionals or companies, but the companies have shifted it to their consumer. So I mean, like planning a trip is a perfect example. Used to be just you call a travel agent or even the airline and be like, “Hey, I want to go here.” And they’d be like, “All right” They’d just figure it out for you. But now, it’s like you have to go through tons and tons of different itineraries to schedule a flight and to the airline’s defense they say, “Well, you just have more options. You can actually figure this out on your own. We’re giving you that choice” like you said earlier. But they’re also saving themselves maybe some, some of the hassle of having to pay an employee to do that for you.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. And I think, often we want to take that control into our life. We feel like we want to be in charge and that gives you that choice, which has upsides, but with more choice comes more work, more responsibility to make those decisions, do the research, understand what you’re looking at. And so that definitely creates more life admin.

Brett McKay: And the other thing I’ve noticed too is that, sometimes it feels like life admin, because there can be a seasonality to it, you can get hit with a whole bunch of stuff all at once. So you see this if you have kids in school, seems like at Christmas right before Christmas and right before summer holiday here in the United States, that’s when everyone tries to cram everything in. And you’re signing up for things that are gonna be happening three months later. And so the last two weeks of school, before school goes out for vacation, just like I’m constantly, like there’s forms to fill out, I’m trying to manage schedules, like this kid needs to be here and this kid needs to bring this thing. I don’t know what happens. Everyone just decides to do everything at once. It causes all the life admin to pile up on you at once.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. I think that often can come in like waves and I think there’s a great saying. I can’t even think exactly what it is, but it’s something like, “You can’t catch the waves, but you can learn how to surf.” And I think that’s really what we’re trying to help people do with their life admin is actually you need to actually have systems so that you can ride the wave as it comes in and comes at you so that it doesn’t turn your life into chaos.

Brett McKay: Okay. So let’s talk about some of your tips for how we can keep from drowning in life admin on a daily basis and surf the bigger waves when they come in. What do you recommend people do to capture the life admin they have coming into their lives?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: So one of the things we suggest to people, particularly when you’ve got other members of the household is thinking about setting up a dedicated email address for your life admin. So that means it won’t get mixed up with kind of your personal emails, which are probably much more on the social side or work emails. And what it means is, if you have a partner, you can actually move your life admin into neutral territory and sort of operate it like you would a shared inbox in a work situation. And that really means that all of your life admin in terms of the electronic stuff comes into the same spot and you can both share the responsibility of triaging everything that hits you through that inbox.

Brett McKay: Okay. So it’d be something like, in our instance, it’d be like mckayfamily@gmail.com, I don’t have that address. So if anyone tries emailing me there, they’re not gonna get anything. So you’d use that email when you sign up for cell service, when you’re doing stuff with your kids’ school, etcetera. That’s the email you’d use. So all that communication would go there.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So that’s what certainly my husband and I have, we have a shared life admin email address and everything to do with our shared life admin hits that email address. And so what it does mean is that I can happily go away for a week and know that I don’t even have to look at that email address. He can take care of it or if I’m having a busy time at work, the same thing. And it really means that we can really seamlessly share that inbox and all of the actions that come out of it.

Brett McKay: That’s a good idea because I know sometimes I’ll use my email address for something like travel reservations or something with school. So I get the email but my wife doesn’t or it’s vice versa. So one of us just ends up out of the loop. So we might have to try that. Okay. So have a shared email address for life admin stuff if you’re married. What about, what do you do to capture stuff that just pops up during the day? Stuff where you’re like, I need to remember that or I need to do that. What do you do with those sorts of things?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think in terms of the actual doing of it and capturing other things, we really like to think about life admin tasks in terms of actually how much time is required to get them done. And that really helps you think about when you’re gonna do them. And maybe we’ll come to that a bit later, but in terms of anything that you can’t do immediately. So we do love to adopt the two-minute too easy. If it hits your inbox and you can do it straight away in less than two minutes, do it, get rid of it, file the email, delete the email, move on. But if it’s something that’s gonna take a little bit longer than that, we recommend setting up a to-do list that we call 10-minute time killers for those kind of 10 minute tasks. So those are tasks that might take, like maybe something a little bit more complicated, but they’re not gonna take a lot of thinking time.

And if you have a separate list with all of those tasks on them, it means that if you have a bit of idle time, you can easily tackle those tasks. And usually that’s the time that people might scroll social media or those kind of, if you’re in between meetings or you are waiting in a line or you’re kind of watching tv. So those tasks don’t need to be scheduled, but if you’ve got them all in a list, you can know what to attack and you can add things that are 10-minute time killers as they occur to you as you go. You just use the simple reminder app on the iPhone to easily add items that I think of to that list as I go. And then I have a another list which has got more chunky life admin tasks in it that we call the hour of power.

So if they’re more complicated, like comparison shopping and those sorts of things. And that means they’re separate in a separate list. And I have a scheduled time once a week to tackle those chunky life admin tasks. So I know if I add something to that list, I know when I’m gonna be able to get to it. So we have a shared 10-minute time killer list between my husband and I. And so things in that list get allocated to one of us, but we can also see what the other tasks are that the other person’s got to do. And then the same for an hour of power list.

Brett McKay: What do you do with paper things? I mean, I know you’re big on, you have a whole chapter about just reducing the amount of paper that crosses your desk, but occasionally it’s gonna happen, when you get something. What do you do with that stuff?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So if it’s something that just needs to be filed, I’m big of like scanning, photographing immediately and trying to destroy it. So I’m a big fan of going completely paperless, but if it is a form that needs to be filled out, I would still add it to the list in terms of the 10-minute time killer, if it’s gonna be a 10 minute list and then we just have a little paperwork spot in the house. But to be honest, very little paperwork hits our house anymore. So once you’ve really made the effort to go paperless, you find that actually there’s really little paper still happening out there.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk more about lists. So you have the two minute, too easy list actually that’s, it’s actually not really a list. Those are things that just kind of come up to you and you do them right then. But you do have the 10-minute time killer list and then you have the chunky admin list where you’ll do stuff in your hour of power. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a minute. But beyond the to-do list, you also recommend keeping checklists and reference list. Walk us through those.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think when we started this whole life admin journey, both my co-author and I, Mia and I, we both had kind of our lists, we’re like a mishmash of all of these three things. And I think that that’s often what happens to people and it makes it really hard to sort of figure out what to tackle next. So, if you think about having those three categories of list to-do lists we’ve talked about. But the second one, checklists. Checklists are things that help you remember how to do things you do over and over again efficiently and comprehensively. So you’re write the steps down once and then you refer to it every time you need to do that. So, for me, the checklists that I use most often are like the things to do before you go on holiday, so all of the, you know, organize the pet sitting, organize the mail collection, etcetera, etcetera.

But you might also have checklists for things like, what to take when you take your child to daycare or something like that. And those checklists really help you not remember important steps in that task. In terms of reference lists, these are kind of the things that you often find on people’s to-do list, but they’re not actually things that they have to do, they’re more like suggestions or recommendations or it’s like sources of information. So the reference lists I’ve got on my phone or in my Reminders app is gift wishlist for family members. So thinking about things I might buy for the next birthday or Christmas, I’ve got reference lists of podcasts to listen to and one of TV shows to watch and one of books to read. So the next time someone ask you something like that, you’ll have a whole list ready to go and you know where to put that information and refer to it when you need that information.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I keep that too. So I keep a list of things to, I need to read movies, I wanna watch, podcasts I wanna listen to. Another list I keep is, this is a new one, restaurants we want to go to. You know how like lots of time you’re driving around town and you see a new restaurant like, “Oh I wanna try that out, it looks cool.” And then the next time when you’re trying to figure out where to eat that night, you end up forgetting about that restaurant you saw. So we’ve tried to make it a habit. Whenever you see a cool restaurant put it on a list so we can check it out. The gift list is a good idea. My wife is really good about doing that. Another kind of list that my wife and I keep is a things-we-want-to-talk-about list. So this is for whenever we’re about to see a friend that we haven’t seen in a while, we’re about to catch up with them. We have a list of things we wanna make sure we hit with them and ask them about when we see them.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. That’s a really good one. I actually read an article about that recently in terms of improving social connection and how important that is. So yeah, that’s a great idea.

Brett McKay: So you can use just the Notes app to make these lists. And you use the Reminders app on iPhone?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And I think that you can get a little bit caught up in trying to get the most complicated app out there. And I think all of our advice really when it comes to technology is use what you find really easy to use. It doesn’t need to be super complicated as long as you know how to use it. And you, particularly if you’re sharing that technology with someone else, you have a shared understanding of how you’re gonna use it together. That’s way more important than having lots of bells and whistles in the particular app.

Brett McKay: Okay. I’ve never used the Reminders app because I use Todoist. That’s the app that I like to use. You can share things on that with other people?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I mean, the Reminders app on iPhone is pretty good now in terms of the sharing functionality. But I mean there’s lots of great apps out there. Todoist is a great one. And so if that’s something you’re familiar with, that’s usually the one to stick with because if you like it you’re gonna use it and if you don’t like it, you won’t use it. So yeah, we really encourage you to find one that feels good to you in terms of its functionality and even aesthetics, so that it works for you. And think about making one that you can use with a voice assistant because that’s really helpful. I don’t know about you, but I often remember things when I’m driving in the car or when I’m going for a walk and being able to just ask Siri to add them to my list, it reduces my mental load because I’ve added it to the list and I can forget about it and move on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think with Todoist you can sync it with Siri so you can talk to Siri and Siri will add it to Todoist but it sometimes it doesn’t work. So it could… I sort of, I’ll check out Reminders app. So I wanna go back to this idea of the hour of power. So you categorize your life admin as the two minute, too easy. So if you can do it in two minutes, just do it. Don’t wait. That’s, I think, David Allen from Getting Things Done has that same idea.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Exactly.

Brett McKay: Then you have the 10-minute time killer. So those are things you can do in 10 minutes that don’t take a lot of mental bandwidth to do, you’ll have that there to do it. The hour of power. And so tell us more about this. So you’re going to dedicate an hour is it each day, each week to doing those life admin that are a little bit more complicated?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Well, I think obviously how many of the hours of power you need will depend on where you’re at in terms of, how in control you are and I guess what’s going on in your life. So if you’re in a time of your life with a lot of life admin, you might need a few of those hour of powers scheduled in your calendar. But for me I actually, we usually have an hour of power once a fortnight and it’s really this dedicated time slot for tackling these substantial items that require concentration. So it might be things like comparison shopping a utility service, it might be planning a birthday party or that kind of thing. And what we really recommend is scheduling this recurring time slot in your calendar so that you know when you’re gonna get to those tasks. Because that is a thing that will take off the kind of stress and anxiety because you’re like, “Okay, I know I’m gonna get to that at this time every week.” And we also encourage people to think about giving it like a powerful name to claim the space. So I know that Mia, who’s my co-host, she likes to call hers, Set Me Up Sunday. So, that’s really helping her thinking about, setting herself up for a really good week because she’s tackled any of those chunky tasks that have been weighing on her mind.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I do an hour of power, Friday is the day I do it. It’s like every Friday I do it. It usually it’s an hour, I just set aside an hour. If I can’t get it done within an hour then I move on to something else. But usually I can get most of it done within an hour.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean, usually if you set yourself a time limit you can get most of those tasks done within an hour and I think it’s really helpful to kind of give yourself a boundary, like I’m willing to invest an hour in my life admin and then I’m gonna move on. Because the reality is it’s boring, it’s tedious but it’s important. So truly trying to knock off those tasks in a shorter time as possible means you can get back to the things you really wanna do in life.

Brett McKay: Something my wife and I do every now and then, we call it a reset day, where we take a whole day to just do stuff that’s been piling up. We do it when we need to, when we feel like, oh my gosh, there’s just so much going on, we need a reset day. So we’ll just take a day. Usually it’s during the week because the kids are at school and they’re not around and so we just get through stuff as much as we can during that entire day.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I think that’s a really good idea. I think when you realize that things aren’t feeling good, really scheduling that time in your calendar and committing to actually getting rid of those things that are stressing you out, it’s gonna improve your life overall. So that’s a great idea.

Brett McKay: You have a whole chapter about scheduling your life admin, because I think the way most people approach life admin, they just do it on a, “Well, I need to do this thing, so I’m gonna do it now.” How do you recommend scheduling out your life admin? So we have the hour of power, that’s one thing, but any other tips on scheduling out your life admin?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think a couple of things there. The first one is, I guess, going back to the sharing idea and thinking, okay, in life there’s lots of… In a household you do need to actually understand what’s going on and so you really do need some sort of cross platform calendar tool that everyone in your household can access. And so in my household it’s not just my husband, I’ve got two teenagers. So understanding where they’re going and them understanding where we are going is really important to kind of dealing with the family logistics. So we are really technology agnostic about it, but you really need to have a tool that everyone in your household can add to, can see, so that everyone can see what’s going on and understand what the logistics are of the household. So I guess that’s the first thing. I don’t know if you’ve got a shared calendar in your house.

Brett McKay: So our kids don’t have smartphones yet, so we don’t have that shared digital calendar, but we do have this giant dry erase calendar that we put on the wall, in the kitchen and we have a family meeting once a week and we go over our schedule and we have our kids write in all the stuff they’ve got going on. So that’s what we do. But maybe when they get older and they get smartphones we’ll shift to a shared digital calendar.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh it’s a great habit to get them into in terms of the analog system to transition into digital. But yeah, that’s, it’s been a bit of a game changer for us in terms of… I used to feel like I had to ring up my husband and ask permission of could I go to the movies with my friend because I don’t really know what was going on. And so this kind of shared calendar gives me permission to actually know what’s going on in our family so we don’t have to have those kind of consultations about who’s doing what by when.

Brett McKay: So what sorts of things are you putting on this shared calendar?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So family trips, all of the social events, who’s being picked up, who’s being dropped off, all those school events that we want to go to. And then my husband and I both put our own social events on there so that we can see what each other’s up to and we know that there’s always needs to be an adult home every night to cook the dinner and supervise. And so really making sure that we know what each other’s doing without kind of feeling like we need to ask permission to be able to have a bit of fun in life.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So speaking of syncing up with your spouse, so the shared calendar can go a long way to reducing a lot of the friction of trying to sync your calendar with your family or your spouse. Do you do anything else beyond just having the shared calendar and the shared list to make sure that you guys are on the same page?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think one of the most important things is, and you sort of mentioned it before, this kind of communication. So you really need to think about when you’re gonna communicate about life admin logistics and thinking about maybe having a meeting or a regular time slot every week where you kind of go through everything, like what’s going on in the calendar, what’s on the to-do list, what’s falling behind, what might we need help with. One of the things we might wanna talk about, like if you know we’re planning a trip, do we need to talk about exactly where we’re gonna go or those sorts of things. And so for us we have a regular Sunday night meeting with one another. We have it over a glass of wine if we’re feeling it or if it’s a sort of cup of tea kind of night and we really go through all of those things.

So check that the inbox is kind of inbox zero, check in on what the to-do list items are and check in on the calendar for the next week. And that really helps us stay synced and also helps us talk about something which is important is like the standards of doing something. So I think one of the problems that people get into challenges around is around expecting their partner to do it to the exact same standard or an exact same way that they would do. So, in those meetings we can talk about, okay, well what’s an acceptable standard for doing that? Like what will make us happy, make some compromises and then I can kind of let go of things and give it to my husband and vice versa so that we can kind of divide and conquer so to speak. Because the reality is, there’s a lot of life admin in our family and you really wanna be able to divide it up and share it out and those communications really help actually make that happen.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Something my wife and I have done for several years now, we’ve had a podcast about this and I’ve talked about it on the podcast a lot. We have the weekly marriage meeting as well. We do it on Sunday, takes about 20 minutes. Our four parts of the marriage meeting is we get together, first, we express appreciation to each other. So we just say thank you for all the stuff that each of us have done throughout the week and then we do to-dos and that’s just like the business stuff. That’s when we discuss life admin, here’s what needs to be done, these are the bills that need to be paid, here’s what needs to be repaired in the house. And then we have plan for good times. So this is good times as a couple, good times as a family and also good times as individually and then we end with big concerns. So if there’s like big concerns in the family, that’s where we discuss that. And it’s really it’s a big game changer for us.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean I think it’s amazing that you do that and I love those additional elements. I guess, our meeting tends to be a little bit more on the practical side, maybe that’s because I’m a life admin expert. [laughter] But, yeah. It is a huge game changer in terms of checking in on your own behavior and any resentments you might be holding about not sharing tasks fairly, et cetera. And it really makes sure it brings it out in the open on a regular basis rather than kind of storing up this inner resentment about, if you are feeling like you’re holding more of the mental load, it’s really an opportunity to kind of express that in a calm way, in a much more productive way than perhaps in the heat of the moment.

Brett McKay: And then we also do a family meeting once a week. We usually do that Tuesday night, is our family meeting night. And that’s same sort of thing, we just discuss like what’s going well in the family, what could we improve and then just discuss the kid’s schedule. Speaking of figuring out who does what, any advice on how you determine who does what life admin because that can get complicated. And I think the way a lot of times how couples approach life admin is they just, they don’t really talk about it. Like one person decides to do this, the other person decides to do that, but neither of them are really sure like what is and isn’t getting done.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: And I think that often happens because it kind of evolves as your relationship evolves and often in relationships one person might have certain systems and certainly you know, in our marriage I had kind of systems but they were all really designed for me and they weren’t really designed to let my husband in. And so, when we started this whole journey, I was fed a lot of resentment that I was bearing all this mental load and doing all of this life admin and feeling this huge burden. But the reality was a lot of it was on me was my own behavior, this kind of over-functioning, like I was over-functioning and then just feeling resentment because my husband didn’t know how to do it. But the reality is he didn’t have access to any of my systems. He didn’t know all the things I was thinking about.

So I think the first thing is really to think about agreeing on some tools and systems that you’re gonna both use and the rules of the game of how you’re gonna use those systems. So things we’ve already talked about today, like a shared calendar, shared to-do lists, shared storage, shared email, all of those things really set up systems that enable you to share. And then setting up those systems in and of itself facilitates that discussion of how we’re gonna handle it when an email comes in, who’s gonna handle it, in what circumstances, etcetera. And so those are really the beginning of starting to think about how you can better share the load and it opens up those conversations for, “Oh you know what, I’ll take charge of all of the utilities because I’m really good at that. And do you wanna take care of this?” And really dividing it up so that it’s much fairer and it’s open and transparent about who’s doing what. And it really gives that conversation about that visibility of who is taking care of what in the relationship.

Brett McKay: And then having those regular meetings can just, as things come up that are new, you can have the conversation like, “All right. Do you want this or do you want me to take this?” And then, yeah.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. Yeah.

Brett McKay: So another recommendation you have that I really liked was keeping a folder that has information that you use regularly to fill out forms like health insurance, doctor info, kids, sports info. Tell us more about this reference folder.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh gosh. How much of your time is like dedicated to filling out a form?

Brett McKay: So much. I had this, this happened a couple months ago when I was filling out the application for our kids’ school. And like I filled this thing out before and they asked for the same information but I had to like go and like, okay, I gotta find this thing in this file folder that I used last year. I don’t know where it’s at.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. 100%. So, there’s a few different strategies here. So you can either like save all this info in a spreadsheet, like in cloud storage, like in Google Drive or something. But for me I actually have all of that information saved in my password manager and then it’s all shared with my husband. So that really gives a little bit more security because it’s got like MFA on it. And it also means that it’s really easy to fill in online forms, because when you are filling in an online form, the password manager just automatically fills it in for you. So really encourage you to think about setting up a system that allows that. And I’ve even got like the secure, even my password manager, I’ve even saved all the things like copies of my passport, my driver’s license, those sorts of things. Because increasingly you need those to fill in forms. So being able to have access to those documents on the go just means that a lot of those form filling tasks can become two minute, too easy tasks because you’ve got the information at hand and it really just takes that pain away.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. The one that I see a lot and I always hit myself in the head, like why I haven’t figured out how to do this. Is like when you’re filling out a form for signing your kids up for a sport or a camp and they ask for the doctor’s info like the name and the the phone number.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Address, phone number.

Brett McKay: And address. And I’m like, oh I have to get, okay. I then go Google. Okay. What’s the name of the doctor, I gotta Google it and then okay, then I… It’d just be easier if I had like just in a spreadsheet all that information.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. And emergency contacts is another one.

Brett McKay: Oh, that’s another one.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: And I think I used to fill out all the time and I’m like, why haven’t I just written this down so I can just copy paste or auto fill. And it is a huge time saver when you think about how many forms you’ve gotta fill in during your kids’ life to get that nailed early on.

Brett McKay: Yeah. One thing I did do, so my in-laws take our kids on a vacation every now and then, take them on a trip. So I actually created a folder with like documents that they’ll need and that my mother-in-law has access to that. That was nice because I don’t have to think about that anymore because it used to be like I have to get gathered together every single time, now there’s like a folder there. So I have learned, but I need to do better. So you mentioned paperwork, you’re big on eliminating as much paperwork as possible and you said you just scan it with your phone. Is that all you do? So if you get like a bill that’s paper, you just scan it and then it goes somewhere?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I mean, I just use Google Drive, super easy. You can scan directly from the app straight into the folder. So just go paperless, really move everything to the cloud. It means that you’ll be able to access it from anywhere, anytime and it really just saves that, I don’t know about you but I used to have a pile of filing. I was never quite sure whether I should keep it or not keep it. And so now I just kind of keep it. We have a shared Google Drive between my husband and I, and so we just add things as we go. It makes tax time super easy because all of our receipts are saved in a folder. So, yeah, it’s been a huge game changer in terms of just reducing one more task to do in terms of managing paperwork.

Brett McKay: So you have a chapter about meal planning and cooking and this part of life admin can just suck up so much of your time. Cooking can take a long time sometimes, but it’s like preparing for meals can just take up so much time. Any advice on how to streamline meal prep?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think, a couple of things there. I think the first thing is to think about establishing like this habit of meal planning. So it, whether it be once a week or every couple of days depending on your lifestyle and how many groceries you can buy and thinking about when you’re gonna do it in your calendar and maybe even scheduling it in so that you know you’re gonna do it then. And thinking about okay when does that fit with when I’m gonna do grocery shopping and that kind of thing so that you make sure that it’s a habit that happens, you can easily aimlessly wander around the grocery store picking things up, which can just be a huge time waste and actually it can often result in a lot of food waste. And then once you’ve got that habit, thinking about putting that meal plan into a tool that other members of your family can see.

So going back to that kind of sharing again. So in our house it’s actually, that’s something we do have analog, it’s a magnetized list on our fridge and that means that the teenagers can also contribute to the cooking, not just the adults. And that that meal plan takes into account your household schedule because there’s no point having a meal plan to cook a complicated meal on a night when you’ve got three extracurricular activities. You kind of really need to factor your meal plan around your schedule. And then in terms of what to put on it, I think you can sort of waste a lot of mental space trying to think about, oh my god, what are we gonna have this Tuesday? So one of the things that we suggest is maybe thinking about having themes for certain nights because it can just give you one less decision to make. I know a lot of people like to embrace Taco Tuesday, but you might wanna also think about, like Monday night might be Italian and Wednesday night might be chicken and Thursday night might be pasta. And then it just means, okay, well, I’ve got a repertoire within that category and it’s just, I can easily think of something if I’ve got a category, it really reduces the sort of mental load of thinking what to cook.

Brett McKay: And then yeah, you you’ll have that on the schedule and your kids will never have to ask you what’s for dinner tonight?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Well they can have a look for themselves and on our meal plan we also have who’s cooking. And so we’ve divided it up amongst the four of us and each of the teens gets a night to cook as well. And so that really shares the load of that. And so I’ve definitely embraced handing more of the household chores to them the older that they’ve got.

Brett McKay: So the grocery shopping that’s just, like, you just set aside a day for that? Like you just try to do it all in one day for the week?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. In our house we do our meal plan on a Saturday morning and then I do my grocery shopping online immediately after that and the groceries arrive the next day. And so that means I can do it on a Saturday when the teens are at home and I can say, “what do you wanna cook on your night?” So that means that they’re contributing in terms of that. And we do an online shop. I’ve got a saved shopping list in my online app, so I can literally get my groceries done in five, 10 minutes. So the whole thing can be over in 15 minutes and we’re set up for the week, we all know what we’re doing, meal plans displayed on the fridge and it really just reduces any of that friction around thinking, “Oh my god, what are we gonna have for dinner tonight?” It’s a 15 minute a week task that really just reduces my mental load considerably.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I like the idea of having team nights that just reduces a lot of having to think about things. We don’t have to do that. So we talked about kids, how it can increase your life admin significantly, when they’re born there’s life admin. But I feel like something that my wife and I have been noticing as our kids have gotten older, the life admin has just gotten more and more with them because they’re signing up for sports, they’re doing camps, there’s all this stuff at school. Anything that you found useful there in managing your kids’ life admin?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Interesting. I think we’ve already talked about a few of them. So definitely the visible weekly schedule. So depending on how old your kids are, whether that’s analog as you said, like the weekly planner on the wall so everyone knows where they need to be and can start to get themselves organized as they get older and the forms, oh my God, the forms of children. So really thinking about not only getting all that information set up so that they’re easy to complete but also maybe dividing up the form burden between you in terms of, you do soccer and your wife might do ballet or whatever it is, so that you know who’s responsible for what in terms of those things. Another thing that I think you can find is, with kids comes a lot of stuff. So really thinking about how you’re gonna deal with keepsakes, so items like art or other certificates and prizes.

So thinking about setting up some sort of system of how you’re going to keep those in an orderly fashion and whether that, be it keeping the physical item or for some people even just taking a photo of it so that they can remember it and let it go, I think that can be a huge thing. And I guess related to that is really thinking about, and having a regular rhythm of decluttering. So when you think about, they grow out of their clothes, they grow out of their toys. So how are you going to start to have a rhythm of, is it every season we go through the wardrobe or every Christmas we go through the toys so that you can really make sure that you don’t get inundated with all of the stuff, and that you share it with people, and hand it on to others who can use it rather than your house piling up. And this is in the gray area. Is that a chore or is it life admin? There’s quite a bit of life admin involved in potentially selling things or figuring out where to donate it to. So, I do think that decluttering is one of those ones that falls in the gray area of whether it’s life admin or a chore.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve done that with the kids’ art. So you know, when your kid’s are little they’re always bringing home art and you hang it up on the wall, there just comes a point where it’s just like, okay, I gotta take this down because it’s just gotten too much. Yeah, I took pictures of them before I threw them in the trash can. So I still got it, and which is nice.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. I mean you can’t keep them all so you really gotta embrace that reasonably early on because you can’t keep the first piece of hair, the first pair of shoes, the first, and so you’ve gotta decide how much is important to keep and what you are gonna keep, what’s your system so that you can easily add to it over time.

Brett McKay: You said your kids are teenagers?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah.

Brett McKay: At what point did you start offloading their life admin to them? Like, “Hey, you gotta fill out this form now, I’m not filling out this form.”?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think that you can give them this sort of, what I call the junior version of the game, if that makes sense. So you can kind of adjust it as they go through. So if you do happen to have a paper form, you can get them to fill in what they can, if their handwriting’s good enough, or if it’s a digital form, same thing. You can say, “Hey I’ve got this school form here for you, can you start doing part of it?” Because really that’s just helping them, teaching them what it means to be part of that. I already mentioned, we’ve got the kids contributing both to deciding what they wanna cook and then cooking one meal a week and now that my kids are a bit older, certainly the digital calendar, if they wanna go somewhere, they’re responsible for checking the calendar, making sure it can work, adding it in so that therefore they’re responsible for making that happen.

And if they can see that there’s a clash. So in particular my daughter, she’s got a bit of an active social life and extracurricular she’ll go, “Oh, I really wanna go to this party. I can see mom and dad are going out, I’ll be responsible for finding a ride.” So she will contact her friends and organize a ride and then she’ll note that in the calendar that she’s going to so-and-so’s place and she’s organized this ride. So that just means it’s one less thing for us to organize and it’s really helping her learn like the realities of life and how to organize herself.

Brett McKay: You have a section about the life admin that comes when you’re doing comparison shopping for various products and services, like, a new car insurance, cell phone service. This is really interesting because your book is geared towards an Australian audience. So I learned a lot about how the Australian insurance industry works and that was really interesting because I had no clue about that. But what is some general advice because I know when we’re thinking about buying a new product, we just kind of, I was get sucked down this rabbit hole. I was like, “Well should I get this one or that one?” And now you read all the reviews and you spend two days trying to decide on a vacuum cleaner. Any advice there to streamline that?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think the first thing is really thinking about what’s your criteria. So thinking about establishing that criteria before you kind of dig too much into the comparison in shopping because to make a decision it’s much easier if you know what good looks like. So if you think about okay, what is gonna be my criteria upon which I’m gonna decide and then I actually think you absolutely have to write it down. So get yourself out a piece of paper or a spreadsheet and put the criteria down the left. So set yourself up a comparison table because that really helps you be able to pick the best offer or the best option rather than going through each option one at a time and you can get really confused. So I think that’s probably tip number one.

And I think the second one is really to think about limiting yourself to how many you’re gonna compare, because in lots of things there are infinite possible options and you start to go down this rabbit hole of comparing absolutely every product out there. So really try and think about using some sort of search to find the sort of three that you’re gonna compare and then just picking three options. Because the research shows that the more options you compare, the more confused and dissatisfied you’ll actually be. And often, when you compare a lot, you actually might not make any choice. So really try and limit yourself to how many you’re gonna compare. And then, particularly if it’s not a high stakes decision, compare three move on and that will stand you in good stead.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And something I’ll do too is I’ll, when it’s like a big consumer purchase, like an appliance, I go to consumerreports.org. I don’t know if this works… Does this work in Australia?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So we have something called Choice, which is the same kind of thing. So yeah, very similar to that. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I like that because it’s a nonprofit, it’s independent. I feel like if you Google best pillow, you’re gonna be sent to some website, like Good Housekeeping and it’s gonna be a bunch of affiliate links that are just gonna try to sell you an expensive pillow so they can make some money. I feel like with consumer reports I can trust it a little bit more. So I’ve used that to narrow my options significantly. I think that’s been helpful. So I like that idea, get three and then you gotta be a satisfier, like what’s good enough and then just go with that.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. Definitely. Don’t try and find that elusive optimal solution because you might still be here next year. [laughter]

Brett McKay: So we’ve got some friends that have a saying, “Having fun is a lot of work.” And the idea is that if you wanna make memories with vacations and outings, there’s a lot of admin you have to do to make that happen. So what are some tactics people can use to take the tedium out of our vacation planning?

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah. So I think when it comes to holidays, like talking to an expert here, it’s kind of like my quest in life is to travel as much as possible. So, for me, my personal advice is this kind of real merit in taking a year long view on your holiday or vacation plans, because the people you know who are always off doing something fabulous are probably the people who made that plan a year ago. So planning for the rolling year ahead let’s you do the groundwork early, you get better choices, you get better prices and also it gives you something to look forward to. So I like to always book my next holiday the minute I get back from one. So as soon as I get back, it’s kind of like the next weekend my hour of power is dedicated to booking my next holiday, even if that’s a year out.

Because actually the research shows that anticipating those happy moments or those holidays is actually gives you more good feelings than actually thinking about the past happiness. And so, I love to have the anticipation of the next trip coming up. So I think that’s probably my number one tip. And I think secondly, it’s really like share the load. So divide the tasks between you, because it can be a lot of tasks. So I book the flights, my husband will book the accommodation and if that feels overwhelming, as we sort of mentioned before, there are still travel agents out there, there’s like specialist travel agents. We used one when we came to Disney, it was a huge win. They knew exactly what to do, they helped us with all the hacks. So think about using a specialist travel agent or a travel agent to just, you know, you might pay a little bit more, but this is where you’ve kind of gotta decide what’s the most important to you in your season of life. Is it spending a bit more money or saving a bit more time? And if saving time is really what’s, find a good travel agent and they’ll look after you and they can book your holidays for you.

Brett McKay: What about planning social events with friends? That’s another thing that can be tedious.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Oh yeah. And I mean, when you’re the life admin expert, everyone expects you to be the one who’s organizing all of the things. So, for me, I really, I try and batch the planning. So, if I’m gonna be the one organizing it, I’m really thinking about, okay, what suits me, what really works for my calendar? And then I’m looking ahead, maybe a month, two months ahead and I’m firing off a bunch of emails, texts, WhatsApp messages to my various groups of friends. I’m being really specific with the date and time and venue that suits me. And I’m really saying, “This is what’s happening. Are you in or you’re not in?” And kind of letting go of the idea that you have to find, particularly when you’re thinking about group events, that you don’t have to find a date that suits everyone. There’ll always be another time.

And if you’ve batched it and sent out a whole bunch of things all in your one hour of power, that means that if a few things don’t come off, then you’re not gonna be disappointed. So if your calendar’s feeling a bit empty or it’s kind of not working for you in terms of the sorts of things you’re being invited to, that’s where you sort of take control in terms of batching out those invitations. And I guess going back to what we talked about before, thinking about having a reference list of maybe people you wanna catch up with or the things you wanna do and that can help you kind of really think, okay, if you’ve thought about it in advance, you can start to really think, I’ve spent some time thinking about what’s gonna really enrich me and I’ll use that reference list to design my social life rather than just let my social life happen to me.

Brett McKay: My wife and I, we host a Christmas party, or it could be a New Year’s party. We’ve done New Year’s too, but we’ve done it so many times. We’ve established some check, like having the checklist of, we know we gotta do these things. And then also a reference list of the supplies that we have has come in handy as well.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Yeah, that’s a great tip. And certainly, I think one of those things is I love having those regular social events that happen every year in and out as kind of traditions. We actually in Australia have what we call Christmas in July, because obviously it’s hot for Christmas in us in December. And so if you wanna have kind of that like, open fire, kind of cold Christmas feeling, we have it in July and we host a Christmas in July every year with the same bunch of friends and it’s a great tradition. Just kind of happens on autopilot. So yeah, I really love that too.

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

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: I mean you can find us on our website @lifeadminlifehacks.com and you can also find us at the same handle for Instagram and Facebook.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dinah Rowe-Roberts, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dinah Rowe-Roberts: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: My guest, it was Dinah Rowe-Roberts. She’s the author of the book “Life Admin Hacks”. It’s available on amazon.com. You’ll find more information about her work at her website, lifeadminlifehacks.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/lifeadmin, where you can find links to resources and where you can delve deeper into this topic.

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

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!

There has been a lot of media coverage and dialogue about the struggles men are facing in the modern day. There’s been some solutions forwarded to these struggles as well. Among these, Dr. Anthony Bradley has a more surprising idea that you don’t hear every day: revitalizing college fraternities.

Anthony is a research fellow and professor and the author of Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America. In the first part of our conversation, Anthony offers his take on the state of men in the modern day, the difference between heroic and disordered masculinity, the insights that a writer from the mid-20-century can shed on the forms that disorder can take, and why many men today are choosing the path of resignation. We then turn to Anthony’s idea that college fraternities can be the training ground for virtue. We talk about the loftier origins of fraternities, why, at some universities, they devolved into organizations that have become symbolic of the worst traits of masculinity, and Anthony’s six principles for reviving the potential of fraternities to shape great men.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization by Karen Horney
• AoM Podcast #758: The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather
• Anthony’s framework and list of resources for the course he teaches on the masculine journey

Connect With Anthony Bradley

• Anthony’s website

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. There’s been a lot of media coverage and dialogue about the struggles men are facing in the modern day. There’s been some solutions forwarded to these struggles as well. Among these, Dr. Anthony Bradley has a more surprising idea that you don’t hear every day; revitalizing college fraternities. Anthony is a research fellow and professor and the author of Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America. In the first part of our conversation, Anthony offers his take on the state of men in the modern day, the difference between heroic and disordered masculinity, the insights that a writer from the mid 20th century can shed on the forms that disorder can take and why many men today are choosing the path of resignation.

We then turn to Anthony’s idea that college fraternities can be a training ground for virtue. We talked about the loftier origins fraternities, why at some universities they devolved into organizations that become symbolic of the worst traits of masculinity and Anthony’s six principles reviving the potential of fraternities to shape great men. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/fraternities.

All right. Anthony Bradley, welcome to the show.

Anthony Bradley: Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a professor who spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about men and the issues they face. And you’ve actually, you’ve taught a course about the masculine journey. I’m curious, what sparked your interest in the male experience and the development of manhood?

Anthony Bradley: This actually goes back to when I taught high school when I was in grad school. This is late ’90s. I noticed as a high school teacher that the girls were doing great and the guys were not. I mean, it was demonstrable. I would stand in the hallway and the girls were standing up straight, shoulders back, dedicated, focused, ready to go, dialed in. But the guys, heads down, shoulders slumped over, walking very slowly, lost, discouraged, confused. And this was 20 years ago. So about 20 years ago, a lot of people, mostly conservatives were saying, Hey, there’s a problem. There’s a problem. There’s a problem. People in the culture said, No, no, no, there’s nothing. But I saw it back then. And then as I continued my academic journey and became a college professor, what I’ve seen at every school I’ve taught, is it’s the same.

Girls are doing great, dialed in, focused, motivated, successful. Guys are falling behind. Right now, we have a situation in America, where boys are falling behind girls in every grade, in every subject, in every school, in every county, in every city in America. So we’re having some major, major problems right now. And I’ve just seen it as someone who teaches college. About the fall of 2021, we begin to see a major shift, that about 61% of all new students were women. Last year, about 42% of all bachelor’s degrees were awarded to men. That’s it. So there’s something happening. We have about 9 million men right now who are not working.

And this is prime working age between 24 and 54, who are not a part of the economy. So there’s something wrong. And as I decided to come up with a course, my whole goal was to get guys ready for the workforce and ready to be married. And so what I noticed that guys just needed a little motivation. They needed some direction, and some content of vision for what it means for them to be great men. And once they have that, once they have that, it kind of lights a fire under them and I’ve seen them soar.

Brett McKay: So in your work, you talk about two types of masculinity; disordered masculinity and heroic masculinity. Let’s talk about disordered masculinity. What does that look like?

Anthony Bradley: So disordered masculinity is a self-orientated masculinity. I talk about that in the book in three parts really, that a disordered man is focused on himself. He is a navel-gazing man. He is first self-serving. That means that he really uses his relationships in terms of what he can get out of people. He kind of uses people. It’s also self-centered. And by this, I mean, it’s someone who kind of thinks about themselves always first. They may think about others later, but me first is always the mantra. The last part of disordered masculinity is the self-preserving man.

And this man really doesn’t care about anybody else. I mean, this guy is the narcissist. And so this person who is self-preserving, only wants to pursue things that benefit himself and the heck with everybody else. If he has to hurt people, step on people to climb to the top and win, he will most certainly do it. So the disordered masculinity that we see in our culture really elevates the self and centers the self at navel-gazing and being hyper-focused on one’s own advancement, often to the detriment of others.

Brett McKay: It’s something you’ve done in your work is you’ve brought in this post-World War II psychologist. I never heard of her before, but I thought her insights were really interesting. Karen Horney. What are her ideas? How did that influence your idea of disordered masculinity?

Anthony Bradley: So, Karen Horney was a psychiatrist in Brooklyn after World War II, up until the 1950s, and she wrote this fantastic book I highly recommend called Toward Neurosis and Growth. And Karen Horney’s work was instrumental in me helping guys to see some of the patterns and habits in their lives over the years. I have used her work in a lot of my classes now for 15, 16 years. And she basically says this, that all of us, because we are born in homes of imperfection, have uncertainties. We have insecurities. We have what she calls a very basic anxiety. Now, anxiety basically means that we have some sort of apprehension or tension or uneasiness about the anticipation of danger. That the bottom might fall. We think about, Oh, no. This might not go well. We kind of think about that. And being raised in the context of imperfection means that we are suspicious about things. We are often insecure about the future. And all of us have this. This is not necessarily something that is unique to men or unique to women or age brackets. This is just a part of the human experience, having certain questions and doubts and insecurities about the future.

Now, what she does, though, she says that we tend to handle these things in one of three ways. We either, with these uncertainties or these anxieties, we tend to either take them out on people. She calls this the self-expansive solution. And by this, we seek to master the uncertainty. We want to conquer it and win. We want to dominate the vicissitudes of life. This person who’s self-expansive is the narcissist. Sometimes the self-expansive person is considered type A. This person is about winning. This person is often very vindictive and above all else, is going to use other people in their lives to always be on top.

The second way that she talks about the way that some people handle the uncertainty and the vicissitudes and the anxieties of life is by being a doormat. She calls this the self-effacing solution. And by this, we handle these things by being the classic people-pleasing nice guy. You might call this person the simp of all simps, the beta of all betas. I mean, this is the guy who is neurotically focused on making sure that no one’s ever mad at him. This is the guy who comes across as someone who’s kind and pleasant, but the reason they’re always doing something for other people, is that they are desperate to have other people’s validation and love and affirmation. So they’re kind of chronic, chronic people-pleasers.

The third way she talks about this is the self-resignation solution. And this primarily is what I’m seeing massively across the country right now. This is people who are handling the uncertainties, the doubts, the anticipation of a potential danger in the future by simply checking out. I mean, they have resigned themselves from participating in the sorts of things that would facilitate dating, marriage, college, jobs. They just want to be left alone. I mean, this is the classic guy who is playing video games all day. He just wants to smoke some weed, maybe get drunk every now and then, maybe have sex with a couple girls every now and then, but he just wants to be left alone.

The self-resigned guy has a sign over his door that says, do not disturb. Just leave me alone. I am done with all of this. I’ve completely checked out. And then lastly, she says that what this kind of creates for a lot of men is, the idealized self. I mean, this is the ideal person that we think we must be or ought to be or should be, in order to be acceptable to ourselves and to be acceptable to others. And this is the birthplace of people being fake. This is the birthplace of people wearing a mask and not being truly themselves. Now, the difficult part is that you can have an idealized self. You can be a fake person and be successful. You could end up being the CEO of a company, the president of your high school class. You can end up being the governor.

Our culture is set up so that the way the market economy works is that you can be a terrible human. You can be a narcissist. You can be vindictive and be successful. And unfortunately, there are a lot of guys who are this way and it’s been normed She really does a great job of calling out. I would say one last thing here is that when guys are people-pleasing, when they’re self-effacing. They sort of cut off their face, they often find themselves in relationships with people who are narcissists and self-expansive. And that might be relationships of friendships. It might be employer-employee relationships.

But lastly, and maybe more dangerously, they may marry a partner who is self-expansive. They might marry a narcissist and they are in a relationship where someone controls all of their lives, makes decisions for them. It’s often a context of emasculation. So Karen Horney’s work, I think, is really important and it’s been incredibly helpful for my students and the men that I’ve had a read on.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that self-expansive idea, that could be like that Andrew Tate type of masculinity. Win, dominate, be the alpha bro. And then there’s that self-effacing, the Mr. Nice guy. The resignation one, as you said, you said you’re seeing this mostly amongst the men you interact with or the young men you interact with. What do you think is going on there? What is it about modern life that nudges more and more men towards self-resignation?

Anthony Bradley: Yeah. That’s a great question. I think there’s something different about the way our economy works today than it did, say 50 years ago. And of course, a hundred years ago, plus. Guys are lost. They don’t know where they fit into this current economy. For one, we don’t need men’s bodies anymore. We don’t really need men’s physical strength anymore. So a lot of guys don’t know where their bodies fit into the economy.

We don’t really need men to pick up big things anymore and move them. I recently saw a video of a construction site, an excavation site, where these massive, massive tractors and excavators were being driven remotely offsite somewhere else with a joystick and a screen. So you don’t even need men to be physically driving bulldozers anymore. And so, men don’t often know where they fit. I think also is there’s a lot of neglect. We have not been paying attention to boys, particularly in the K-12 space.

We’ve been focusing so much on girls that we’ve just neglected affirming, validating, building up guys. A lot of guys lack a lot of fatherly attention, fatherly affection, fatherly encouragement. So there’s a dad deprivation problem as well. And this is a really sensitive topic that could probably be an entire episode is mother enmeshment. I mean, we often talk about the ways that men suffer from father wounds, but there is a pretty massive trend, long-standing data on the fact that moms who were neglected or abused when they were girls often become neglectful and abusive moms. And so there’s a lot of boys who grew up with pretty toxic and narcissistic mothers.

And there’s a lot of mom enmeshment, where moms use their sons to get the emotional and sometimes physical support, affection that they’re not getting from their dads. And a lot of guys just don’t want to have any of that anymore. They don’t date or anything like that.

But we also have this ridiculous overemphasis on “toxic masculinity”, where being a guy is bad. There’s some shame there where we place all of the world’s social ills, all of the evil in the world on the backs of men, that men are evil and that being a man is bad and also evil. And there’s a lot of emasculation there. So you add all those things together. And a lot of guys are like, Listen, I don’t know how to date. I don’t know where to work. I’m dangerous, you’ve told me. I don’t have anything to contribute. I don’t think that anybody needs us. No one’s asking us to do anything. So I’m out. I’m just going to resign and live my life.

So just leave me alone. And if guys are constantly told that they are the problem, why would we expect anything differently? Why would we expect anything different from a population of men who are told, that if they exert any sort of influence, if they exert any sort of agency, that they might hurt people just by being physically present. And a lot of guys, I see this with guys beginning in middle school, all the way through their mid to late 30s, they are done. Absolutely, 100% done. Throw in the towel. Give me a 10 count. I’m out. Leave me alone. I’m going to play video games, have a part-time job, smoke some weed. And hopefully I’ll figure out how to have a life where people might want me.

But we’re seeing this more and more, and it just reflects back on the data that we’re seeing. One, spikes in anxiety and depression. Two, spikes in suicide, particularly two age groups, 15 to 24. There’s a spike right now, about three times more likely to commit suicide than girls. Also, major, major suicide spike is between the ages of 45 and 54. That’s the next spike. And the last suicide spike are men who are over 65. So there’s a motivation void.

Then there’s also, lastly here, a purpose void. And that purpose void, I think it is really at the root of so much of the resignation, is that guys just don’t have a purpose anymore. And they’ve been told that if they have any purpose, it’s potentially harmful to others.

Brett McKay: Okay. So that’s disordered masculinity and the potential sources of it. What is heroic masculinity?

Anthony Bradley: Yeah. So the way I framed heroic masculinity is simply this. These are men who use their presence and their power, and their strengths and their creativity for the benefit of those around them. They are primarily thinking about the ways in which their presence makes other people’s lives better. It is the exact opposite of the self-preserving and the self-centered, the self-orientated approach. It’s a way of thinking about the fact that my presence somewhere makes other people’s lives better. I am adding value to others. Everything about me, everything about him makes his environment, makes his surroundings better. When I leave the room, people are much better off than they were before I came.

My friends are better. My siblings are better. My parents are better. It’s a way of thinking about how is it that I can add some sort of value and benefit with my gifts and talents and creativity and my strengths, so that other people can thrive and flourish. And the beauty of this is simply this. If we had massive, massive armies of men who were committed to this level of mutuality, our local communities our states, I would say even our entire country would radically transform into a place where everyone thrives. And it’s not this idea that it’s just about me. The idea is I’m here to help others. And if everyone’s helping each other, we all benefit. No one loses.

And I think lastly here, that when guys really do give themselves to others, that’s where they find themselves as well. They sort of find vision, direction, calling, by giving themselves to others. It’s actually a win-win when men do this. And the history of men and masculinity since the beginning has been primarily this, giving themselves to others for the benefit of others, and in doing so the man finds his own purpose and meaning and significance.

Brett McKay: How is this others-oriented idea of heroic masculinity, how is it different from being a doormat?

Anthony Bradley: That’s a great question. So the doormat is people pleasing for the sake of receiving love, receiving validation, receiving affirmation, because they don’t think they’re worthy of it unless they please other people. The heroic vision, the heroic man knows he’s a person of value. He’s a person of power. He’s a person of strength. He is a person who has something to offer. So he’s not people pleasing. He’s serving people because he knows he brings something of weight to contribute. He knows that he is doing something and has real capacity and agency and self-efficacy that he can do something to change the course of history. He has a weightiness about himself. He is confident, and he is secure, and he is stable in terms of his self-perception.

So he’s not doing it for the sake of receiving love, for receiving validation and affirmation, because he knows he already has it. So he’s offering out of abundance. He’s not simply kind of rolling over, hoping that maybe, maybe if I do what everybody says, then and only then will I get the validation and affirmation that I need to feel good about myself. I’ll say this lastly here. The doormat, the people-pleasing person, is so pathetic and neurotic that he is willing to be hurt and abused and manipulated in order to receive love, affection, and validation, and significance, and community, and connection. The heroic man will never do that because he knows his value. And so if someone tries to manipulate him, abuse him, he’s gonna protect himself. He’s gonna fight against it. And if necessary, he’s gonna walk away. The people-pleasing person will never walk away from abuse and manipulation because they need it because it gives them a sense of purpose and meaning, and they use it as a way to stay connected.

Brett McKay: I think all of us have probably encountered men who have that heroic ideal that you’re talking about here. They’re full of vitality, they’re confident, and yeah, when you’re around them, you just feel better and they improve your life. And in your recent book, Heroic Fraternities, you make the case that college fraternities can be a place where we cultivate men who embrace heroic masculinity. But I imagine a lot of people who are listening or hearing this and they think, what, fraternities? How could that be? Like, this is the place where binge drinking happens and hazing deaths and sexual assault. They’re thinking animal house. And I want to unpack this idea that you have that fraternities can be a place where we cultivate heroic masculinity. But before we do, what’s been your experience with college fraternities?

Anthony Bradley: So I got into this really… Well, two things. One, I myself am a fraternity member. So I pledged Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated at Clemson University when I was a student there. I have to give a shout out to Clemson Go TiGERS. And I was in a fraternity. I was very involved in Greek life, both in my own fraternity, but I also had a lot of friends in other fraternities. And I saw some of the benefits that I talk about in my book. And as I have been thinking about it, what really brought this to my attention in recent years, and I can’t remember, I think it was, I was teaching about fraternities in the course, ’cause we do a section in the course that I teach on the history of fraternities. And I just noticed in the news that about once a week, a fraternity was getting suspended somewhere.

And I set a news alert to have my inbox filled. And about every week, somewhere in the country, at some university a fraternity was getting suspended for the types of things that you were mentioning. And I thought, Man, something is desperately wrong. Now, what’s interesting, though, is when I began to dig in the data, and I’m following about 2200 fraternity chapters right now across the country, what I discovered is that those stories of the hazing and the sexual assault, et cetera, that’s actually the minority. I think the reason that people have that is that that’s primarily the ones that make the news cycle. But what you don’t hear are the fraternity chapters, which is the majority, where guys are really longing for brotherhood, and camaraderie and friendship. And guys are helping each other do great things.

It is a mixed bag. And I think that reputation does sustain at some universities more so than others. I think it has a lot to do with the campus culture, particularly, sort of Power Five football schools, ACC, SEC, Big 10, Big 12. I mean, that sort of Greek life is different than you might see at some of the smaller liberal arts schools. But right now, things are a bit up in the air. But I just want to say for the record that largely, primarily, those negative stories are really more of the minority.

Brett McKay: We’ll talk about the state of fraternities here in a bit. But let’s talk about the history of fraternal life in the United States. When did fraternities start and why did they start?

Anthony Bradley: So it’s really fascinating because when we look back at the history of them in light of the way that we see them. It’s gonna be a real head scratcher. So in the early, early 19th century at Union College and in 1825, a group of veterans were missing the camaraderie of serving together. They were missing their brotherhood experience. And so there at Union College in Schenectady, New York, there were a group of five men who decided to form a secret society. And the society was for the purpose of being social. It also served the purpose of increasing their literacy. They wanted to refine themselves as men.

And they really wanted to sort of sort out how do we maintain some sense of fun and brotherhood and camaraderie, the kind of things that we had when we were doing our military service. So that very first social fraternity there at Union College was named Kappa Alpha Society. And that was the beginning of the social fraternity life in America. Now, remember the year is 1825. So this is the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And that’s when life really began to change in the lives of men. Men started, for the first time in American history to primarily work away from home. They were not in close proximity with their children. And we also had a situation where boys were going off to college in really, really high numbers. Now, they were leaving home and they were also disintegrated from community.

So they needed some camaraderie and they needed some friendship. And this is one of the things that fraternities really came to provide for these men, was a way to have a home away from home, a surrogate family, but also continue to be refined in terms of their skills. So in the early days of fraternities, singing was a requirement. It was necessary. Most fraternity houses in the early days had a piano. Somebody could play the piano. And so they would sing together all the time. You could think of glee clubs back in the ’30s and ’40s was a major, major part of college life. They were also literary societies, so they read the classics together. These guys would get together on the weekends and debate the classics. They would debate philosophy.

They would debate Shakespeare. Rhetoric was really also huge, so they had to learn how to speak. They would practice public speaking. They would critique public speaking. In most fraternity houses in the 19th century, the libraries in the fraternity houses were actually built better than the libraries at the university in terms of their holdings. So they were mainly literary societies that were forming these virtues and values in men preparing them for statesmanship and preparing them to be the leaders of business and politics and culture. And that really was the framework that explains so many of every fraternity’s vision and mission and values. If you look at all of them today, they all are going to have some variation on the theme of character formation and camaraderie and friendship and brotherhood, just like they did when it began back in 1825.

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

Okay. So fraternities served a bunch of different purposes. One was, it was a home away from home, a second family when a young man went away to college and went away from his family of origin. And then it was also a place where they could cultivate themselves, learn how to become well-rounded gentlemen. So a place to develop character and also to a place to develop intellectually. They read, they debated, they studied the classics together, and the Greek names of fraternities, they hearkened to that classical education. So that’s why fraternities started. How did college Greek culture develop the bad reputation that it has today?

Anthony Bradley: So the first major dip in Greek life was in the 1920s. You might think about the Roaring Twenties. And unfortunately, so much of that culture began to spill over into fraternity life. Now, what’s really fascinating, particularly as colleges and universities in the country in the 19th century, some had began to be co-ed. Fraternity men were fairly certain, very clear on this. They were never going to dishonor the reputation of a girl on their campus. I mean, that was an absolute… A non-negotiable principle. We were never going to treat women poorly on our campus. Now, off-campus was different. So there’s some times in the Roaring Twenties where guys would leave the campus and go down into the city and things like that. Bars and brothels and things like that. So the Roaring Twenties was sort of the first step.

But as soon as World War II started, as soon as the Depression started, as soon as we got into World War II in the late 1930s, early ’40s, things changed. A lot of those men, of course, during the war were fighting, they came back and were different men. So after the 1940s, fraternity life almost died. It’s really fascinating to think about a World War II veteran who came back and to think that a bunch of lads who maybe didn’t serve was gonna have him do pushups was just unreasonable. It’s like, No, I’m not doing that. I’m not gonna be hazed or whatever by a bunch of guys that didn’t even serve. So there was this major, major dip. So fraternities were in decline after the war. They were also in decline in the 1960s because they were part of the establishment. So there was a rebellion against institutions.

And what’s fascinating is that as they were declining in the 1960s, those numbers went down. There was a film about a particular fraternity at Dartmouth that really did change the nature of Greek life. It was called Animal House. And anyone who is a Gen Xer or older will know that movie in 1978. And Animal House single-handedly, and there’s really good data on this. It really does speak to the power of film. Animal House is the reason. I can say this confidently that Animal House is the reason for the negative stereotypes that we see in fraternity life across the country today. So that movie was watched by us. I’m a Gen Xer. So what happened in 1978, a bunch of Gen Xers watched that film. We watched Animal House, and we also watched a bunch of other films in that same time era, that same genre, sort of coming of age, like Porky’s and movies like that.

So a bunch of guys saw that movie and said, when I get to college, I wanna do that. And that’s what they did. A bunch of Gen X guys went to college in the ’80s and the ’90s and did exactly what that movie did. And that was the beginning of it shifting. And so every fraternity film after Animal House is a variation on that culture that was really normed and embedded by that one media production. And that’s when we began to see things sort of get off the rails, so to speak, and Greek life becoming something that it was never intended to be. And we see some of that in the sorts of negative stereotypes that you mentioned earlier.

Brett McKay: Yeah, on that chapter about the influence of movies on Greek culture, it reminded me of the influence that mob movies had on mobster culture, like The Godfather and Goodfellas. What’s interesting about those, we did a podcast with a guy who did a book about the history of The Godfather. And so The Godfather was based on mob culture. The author of it, Puzo, he looked at mob culture and he put stuff in there. But what ended up happening was mobsters started imitating the godfather as well. We got to act this way because like the godfather, that’s what they do in The Godfather. So I thought the parallel was interesting.

Anthony Bradley: Yeah. It basically became a social contagion. And this is what we do in America. This is what happens when adolescents consume media products. They take them, they embed them, they imprint them. And then later on they act them out.

Brett McKay: And so I think what happened was you had men who maybe had a type of disordered masculinity. Maybe they’re like the self a grandizement type of man. And they saw fraternities as this place where I could go there and act this out. And because fraternities were diminishing, their numbers were small, they’re like, Yeah, we’ll let you in. And so those men with disordered masculinity in some fraternities took over the fraternity.

Anthony Bradley: Absolutely. What’s interesting, and this is something that I learned from Chad Frick, he was the president of one of the fraternities at Clemson. He made this point really, really clear that fraternities don’t make men terrible, terrible men join fraternities. And they use the fraternity context and culture as a place to exercise, I would say, being self-expansive. Being disordered. They were disordered before they came and they were looking for a place to exercise their disordered behavior.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned earlier the state of Greek life today. I think the point you made is that a lot of our ideas about what fraternity life is like we get from the big, the power schools. So I went to the University of Oklahoma where Greek life, I don’t know what it is like today. I’m sure it’s still big, but it was really big when I was in college. I imagine the Greek life at the University of Oklahoma is gonna be different than Greek life at, say, a smaller liberal arts school.

Anthony Bradley: Yeah. And that’s in part because the chapters are smaller. So, I mean, there are some chapters across the country where there’s like 20 guys in the whole chapter, whereas at some of the big football schools, there might be 200. And so managing a chapter of 25, 19, 20-year-olds is different than managing a chapter of 200.

Brett McKay: So from the research you’ve done, the statistics, what’s the state of things like drinking and drug use amongst fraternity members?

Anthony Bradley: This is really fascinating. I think Gen Zers in general are drinking less. And so one of the things that surprised me when I was doing these interviews and the data is that I found more and more fraternity members who don’t drink at all. In fact, I found fraternity presidents who don’t drink at all. So overall, what you see in Greek life is gonna mirror some of the trends that we see with Gen Z in general. So there’s gonna be less alcohol use. There’s actually declines in sexual activity. One of the alarming trends, though, is a tick in substance abuse. So taking pills and marijuana and things like that, those things are on the upswing. But things like drinking are actually on the decline.

And this is, by the way, true in general, that you’re not going to see in Greek life anything different than you’re going to see in male populations in colleges in general. They’re not going to be any worse necessarily than what you see on the campus. And so as we see these trends with Gen Zers, in general, those same trends are gonna manifest themselves in fraternity life.

Brett McKay: What’s your take on the hazing part of the pledge process?

Anthony Bradley: Yeah. So again, back to Animal House, I think one of the problems with hazing, and maybe we can talk about this later, is a lack of a very clear rite of passage for men to know that they’re men. So for guys to go from boyhood into manhood. And what happens is that guys will make up their own rites of passage. When rites of passage aren’t given, when they’re not bestowed, teenagers and young adults are just gonna make them up. And what’s happened in the context of hazing, the whole point of hazing if I could talk about in a positive sense, is to use obstacles, to use challenges as a way to help men see new capacities and strengths that they did not have and to build a sense of camaraderie.

That’s the whole point of it, to make this sort of pledge class bond together. And because of disordered masculinity and a lot of recklessness, the absence of very clear markers of rites of passage. They’re just making them up as they go along. And even worse, there is a problem in a lot of fraternities of escalating. So when I was in college, they might have had us go do some sprints on the street. Well, 20 years later, we’re now, we got to do sprints on the street, but now we can’t wear shoes. 10 years after that, well, if they do sprints on the streets with no shoes, well now they have to have no shoes and then be in their underwear.

So there is this sort of odd escalation that we have to top the previous generation or the previous year’s obstacles, and there’s just no direction. And that’s what I found so sad, is that these guys have just been left to figure this stuff out on their own, and they just haven’t been given the investment of how do you do the sorts of things that hazing is meant to accomplish?

You might think about it in the same way that men join the military, just kinda strip themselves of individualism, and to see themselves as a part of a group and to be challenged to accomplish things as a group together, to build camaraderie, to give a sense of “we”, instead of “me”, and for a guy to find out that he has some new capacities about himself.

I’ve seen this across the country, when guys are given a clear vision of what that entry point is, what the rite of passage is, and they’re given a new imagination of how to introduce obstacles to achieve those ends, you don’t get the kind of hazing and the dangerous hazing that puts people’s lives in danger that we see on far too many campuses.

Brett McKay: You talk about what bull elephants can teach us about bad behavior that occurs in hazing. Tell us about that.

Anthony Bradley: So there was some work done in South Africa at a nature reserve, and because of the ways in which they have to manage those, because of the park restrictions, they often have to move populations around in order to manage that land well, and there was a section of elephants they were trying to move in and re-populate, and what they did is they moved a bunch of adolescent elephants over to this one side of the park when they noticed that all these other animals were dying, particularly rhinos were being killed, and it wasn’t poachers because the rhinos would have their horns intact. And what they realized is that these rhinos are being killed by these adolescent elephants, these immature elephants who were having massive spikes of testosterone and it was making them aggressive.

They were going into this sort of rut season fairly early, there’s a hormone that gets secreted behind their ear, and it makes them really, really aggressive. And what was really fascinating, they were trying to figure out what was going on, how come these adolescent elephants were killing… Just randomly killing rhinos. So what they did is they transported some mature bull elephants. And what was so fascinating is that the day, the very day the bull elephants showed up, the killing stopped.

In fact, it actually tempered the testosterone secretion of these adolescent elephants. They became less aggressive because the more mature elephants were just physically present, and I also heard there’s a video of one of these bull elephants body slamming one of these adolescent elephants. It was just fascinating to see that just simply the presence of maturity and the very presence of age really had a way of tempering the aggression, helping these young lads manage their aggression, manage their sexuality in these elephant populations.

And sadly, I think that’s what we’re missing on a lot of college campuses today, and what we need is simply the presence of older men, chapter advisors, alumni who are older, to just be around the guys, and that would overnight change a lot of the pathologies that we see, because the presence of older men really does have a positive effect in providing some direction and emotional regulation for young men. It sort of teaches them how to be great men.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So if there was a chapter advisor or an older alumni, if the students were thinking of doing some really crazy hazing ritual, when they have the influence of that older advisor, they might think twice.

Anthony Bradley: Absolutely, right. One of the things that… We tell a chapter is like, You really shouldn’t do anything during the pledge process that you would not do in front of the guy’s dad or in front of your dad, because if these older men are just physically present during the process, they’re the guardrails to tell this developing brain of a 20, 21-year-old in leadership, Okay, that’s too far. You can do that, no, you can’t do that. And they need that sort of direction, and the best chapter advisors are the ones that provide that, and there are very good chapters across the country that are able to have that level of direction by older men.

Brett McKay: So in response to deaths and sexual assaults that happen in frat houses, many colleges, their response is just to suspend the fraternities, or some colleges have gotten rid of Greek life altogether, and you argue that these measures actually don’t solve the problem, why not?

Anthony Bradley: Because if you look at the data, as soon as you remove a fraternity, sexual assaults don’t necessarily decrease, hazing doesn’t necessarily decrease, because what the guys are gonna do is they’re gonna form their own little secret society and do it anyway, so you can get rid of fraternities but they might have hazing in band, they might have hazing in a club, they’re gonna have hazing… We’ve seen this at some universities with their athletes who are playing for the school, so it doesn’t actually work in terms of trying to rid the campus of those sorts of pathologies. Those pathologies happen whether a person is in Greek life or not. I think the difference is that Greek life gives more opportunities and easier access for terrible people to be terrible, but terrible people are on everybody’s campus, and so getting rid of Greek life doesn’t really help. And then secondly, and more importantly, by removing Greek life, you lose the opportunity for formation.

If I was a college president, I would think about it this way, this is the last opportunity that you would have as a college president to isolate a group of guys and form their virtues for the good. It would be virtually impossible to do that on a campus without Greek life, without college fraternities, and college fraternities really do serve as a place of formation.

Brett McKay: What do you think fraternities need to do to become this heroic fraternity that you have in mind? Walk us through the roadmap of… From rush pledge and beyond of your ideal fraternity?

Anthony Bradley: Yeah, I think fraternities, first and foremost, need to, more broadly speaking, recapture, I’d say maybe restore their original values and virtues. Whenever I travel and speak to a chapter of any fraternity anywhere in America, one of the things I do is I call them back to their original vision and mission and values. Those things are already there, every fraternity in America has heroic values embedded in its own mission and vision and virtues. So first of all, I wanna really sort of call them back to those things and think about ways to live those out. I do have sort of a six-step process, sort of six principles, these are not necessarily in order of importance, but these are sort of the six things that if fraternities really focus on, they will never get suspended, ever, and they will always add value to their campus. If fraternities do these six things, presidents will want them around and if they threaten to leave, a president will beg them to stay. Here they are.

First is Friendship and Acceptance, so fraternities that allow guys to not have an idealized self, to work through their anxieties, to be vulnerable, there’s a sense of camaraderie that you’re accepted not because of what’s on the outside, but what’s on the inside.

You can be a person that is imperfect. It’s really important for guys to have at least two or three friends that they can be completely vulnerable with, that knows all of their faults and weaknesses. One of the things that we see in the new cycle regularly are guys who get taken out because they have some Achilles heel weakness that destroys their marriage, destroys their career, destroys their company, et cetera, and when guys have at least a couple of people that know those things, that’s the best protection against that. So we wanna have context where there’s real friendship, there’s real vulnerability and real acceptance.

Second is brotherhood. One of the things that really sets guys on fire is knowing that they have a group of guys that have their back. It is the birthplace of risk-taking. If you know that a group of guys has your back, no matter what, you will do great things. And the brotherhood aspect of fraternities, to foster that on purpose, is really, really key. You can do amazing things in the marketplace, you can take a risk and ask a girl out. If you know that if you fail, if she rejects you, you’re gonna have a bunch of guys, who are gonna build you back up and put you back on the horse, sort of get you back out there, so that brotherhood piece is really, really important, and vital.

Guys will run through a wall, if they look behind them and see they’ve got 15, 20, 30, 100 guys cheering them on. Thirdly here, is initiation. We talked about this a few moments ago. There needs to be a sense of a rite of passage to recognize that you’re actually transitioning these young men from boyhood into manhood, and to be deliberate about these stages, to be deliberate about creating a context where there is a rite of passage where a guy knows that by the end of the four years, that he is gonna be a much stronger, better, more virtuous, more dynamic man than he was when he began, and to really plan that out. You’ve got four years, you’ve got three or four years with these guys, so what kind of things could you do to be making sure that you’re embedding and integrating the values of your fraternity throughout the entire life of a brother in the chapter, so that rite of passage, that initiation part is really important because the main opportunity with initiation is to help a guy find what he’s good at, to help him find his strength.

College is a place where guys leave their home and they can be developed and formed, they can find what they’re good at, and then they’re sent back into the community, so fraternities should really think of themselves as places where they’re forming men’s virtues and values, they’re helping them see what they’re good at, they’re helping them see their strengths, so that when they leave, they can make an even better, more deliberate, concentrated, clear contribution to the communities that will be there to receive them.

So that’s really important that their brothers really want to invest in helping other guys find that what they’re good at. Fourth here is fun. A college is supposed to be fun. I mean, heck, life is supposed to be fun. The data is really, really clear that having fun is really important and necessary for good mental health. It protects against anxiety, it protects against depression, it protects against suicidal ideation. It actually protects against, in many respects, some of the pathologies in substance abuse that undermine striving, and so fraternities need to think about ways to have fun. Now I talk about virtuous fun. Fun that adds value of people’s lives.

I am convinced that if we got these guys in a room and introduce some more creative ways for them to have fun beyond what they see in the movies, they would do it, but what happens? They default to what they’ve seen on screens instead of thinking about being creative about new ways to have fun that actually makes people’s lives better. Fifth here, is to be developmental, to work on character development and professional development, and this is where the alumni networks are really, really important.

One of the great added values of being in a chapter is to be in a context where alumni and even peers are going to set you up so that you can have a successful career and to use those networks really deliberately. So I think the best fraternities are the ones that have really involved alumni who are on campus quite frequently to help these guys manage entering and sustaining success in their career. Lastly here is character development, and this goes back to the vision, mission and values of the fraternity in general. Every fraternity, again, across the country, has fantastic values, and what’s it mean to develop virtue, moral virtue, character in these men, so that the reputation that they have on campus, and the reputation they’ll have in society is that they are the kinds of people that are going to make our context better.

I’ll give a quick example of what this looks like. One of the things that I invite chapters to do is to think about what does it mean for us to develop a reputation of being the safest place for women on campus, the best place for women on campus, the safest, the most ennobling place for women to be, and to think about that as something aspirational, what do you need to do to have that reputation? I can tell you right now, that every chapter I’ve spoken to across the country, when I invite them to have that reputation, they get excited about it, they want to have that reputation because of the negative stereotype. They celebrate that because that’s the kind of men they actually want to be.

Lastly here, I think in general, people don’t understand this, but fraternity men want to be great man, that’s why they joined a fraternity. The problem is, they don’t know how. And if we can do that, I think we can really change the trajectory of men in college and Greek life in general.

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

Anthony Bradley: Great, so I have two places, one, you can just Google my name, I have a website, dranthonybradley.com, but also you can also just Google Heroic Fraternities and you can see more about the book and more about the work in general.

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

Anthony Bradley: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Anthony Bradley, he’s the author of the book Heroic Fraternities, it’s available on Amazon.com. You can find more information about his work at his website, dranthonybradley.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/fraternities, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for over 16 years now, and the podcast for over 10, and they both have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives. To become better friends, citizens, husbands and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something out of the AoM Podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing the episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AoM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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You probably think of the health effects of sunlight as a mixed bag. On the one hand, sun exposure helps your body make vitamin D. But on the other, it can cause skin cancer.

To get around this conundrum, dermatologists frequently recommend avoiding sun exposure when you can, slathering on sunscreen when you can’t, and taking a vitamin D supplement to make up for the lack of sunlight in your life.

Yet in seeking to solve one problem, this advice may open up many others and be contributing to ill health in the West.

Today on the show, Rowan Jacobsen, a science journalist who has spent years investigating the health impacts of sunlight, will unpack the underappreciated benefits of sun exposure, and that, crucially, they’re not primarily a function of the production of vitamin D and can’t be replaced with a pill. We talk about what else is at work in ultraviolet radiation’s positive effects on blood pressure, autoimmune diseases, insulin resistance, mood, and more. We also get into how to weigh these benefits against the risk of skin cancer, why health officials in Australia, which has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, have changed their recommendations around sun exposure, and if there’s a role sunscreen should still play in your routine.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Rowan’s article in Outside magazine: Is Sunscreen the New Margarine? 
• Rowan’s article in the Atlantic: Against Sunscreen Absolutism
• AoM Article: Why You Should Become a Sun Worshipper
• Dermatologist Richard Weller’s TED talk: Could the Sun Be Good for Your Heart?
• Australian recommendations on sun exposure 

Connect With Rowan Jacobson

• Rowan’s website

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

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

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

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. You probably think of the health effects of sunlight as a mixed bag. On the one hand, sun exposure helps your body make vitamin D, but on the other, it can cause skin cancer. To get around this conundrum, dermatologists frequently recommend avoiding sun exposure when you can, slathering on sunscreen when you can’t, and taking a vitamin D supplement to make up for the lack of sunlight in your life. Yet, in seeking to solve one problem, this advice may open up many others and be contributing to ill health in the West.

Today on the show, Rowan Jacobsen, a science journalist who spent years investigating the health impacts of sunlight, will unpack the underappreciated benefits of sun exposure and that, crucially, they’re not primarily a function of the production of vitamin D and can’t be replaced with a pill. We talk about what else is at work, and ultraviolet radiation’s positive effects on blood pressure, autoimmune diseases, insulin resistance, mood, and more. We also get into how to weigh these benefits against the risk of skin cancer, why health officials in Australia, which has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, have changed the recommendations around sun exposure, and if there’s a role sunscreen should still play in your routine. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/sunlight. Rowan Jacobsen, welcome to the show.

Rowan Jacobsen: Hi, Brett. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are a journalist, and for the past few years, you’ve been researching and writing about the benefits of sunlight to our health, and how the injunction to religiously slather on sunscreen might be causing unintended health consequences. Let’s talk about the health benefits of sunlight. I’m sure listeners have heard and know that sun exposure increases vitamin D levels in the body. How does that happen? What is it about sunlight that causes vitamin D levels to go up?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s kind of this interesting phenomenon where we really are photosynthesizing. We don’t do it like a plant does it, but we are synthesizing these compounds with the help of photons from the sun. So the way it works, so I guess for starters, vitamin D is a hormone that is used for all kinds of different reasons in the body. Like it’s kind of misnamed as a vitamin ’cause it’s not like the other vitamins, which are these little things that you get in food. It’s a hormone that we use for lots of different things and it’s essential to health and we mostly make it in our skin. And the way that evolution worked this process out is that it makes these molecules that are similar to cholesterol, they’re sterols, it makes these molecules that are like a couple of chemical processes, chemical steps away from becoming vitamin D and that’s as close as we can make on our own.

And we do that in the skin, and then what we rely on the sunlight to do is the sun hits those molecules, breaks open one of the little chemical bonds between the molecules so that that molecule can then change its form into a different form, which is vitamin D or actually pre-vitamin D. And then that molecule goes into the body and gets transformed into the type of vitamin D that we use after going through the liver and sometimes the kidneys too. So it’s this incredibly complicated process, but the upshot is that there’s this one step that we need sunlight to break open the bond for us so that we can change that molecule into something else.

Brett McKay: So I know sunlight is made up of different types of UV radiation, including UVA radiation and UVB radiation. Is there a specific type of radiation that causes that reaction?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, for vitamin D, it’s all the UVB, which is particularly a narrow wavelength of UVB, about like 295 to 310, 315 nanometers. So yeah, there’s UVA, UVB, UVC. UVC gets filtered out by the atmosphere entirely, which is a good thing ’cause otherwise it would be really deadly. UVB is that next wavelength and then UVA has a very different size wavelength to it. And so we get both UVA and UVB on our skin. UVB is the one that can hit those molecules and break apart that bond and make vitamin D.

Brett McKay: What does our body do with vitamin D once it’s turned into vitamin D?

Rowan Jacobsen: So, most famously, it’s essential for bone mineralization. And this was discovered way back when kids were getting rickets in like… During the Industrial Revolution, suddenly, people who had always been outside farming were in these cities. The cities were really sooty, so even if you were outside in the city, you weren’t really getting any sunlight and the kids were working in factories. So suddenly, all the kids were getting rickets, which is when your bones are soft, too soft. They don’t get hard enough ’cause they don’t have enough calcium in them, and then you get these bowed legs. It’s bad. You don’t want to get rickets for sure. But a lot of kids were in the Industrial Revolution suddenly. And they figured out that that was because they weren’t getting proper bone mineralization.

They weren’t getting that calcium into their bones. And vitamin D does that. And that discovery was a huge health step forward because we were able to pretty much eliminate rickets famously because of cod liver oil. So cod liver oil is a good source of vitamin D. So they started giving the kids cod liver oil and that gave them just enough D to not get rickets. They also started putting babies in the sun. You know, like there’s these crazy photos from back in the day of these little cages hanging out the windows of tenement buildings, and you would put your baby in that cage for a little while just to get a little sunlight on the baby.

Brett McKay: That’s interesting. So people hear that, okay, I just need vitamin D. I don’t want to sit out in the sun ’cause I don’t want to get a sunburn. I don’t have time for that. I don’t want to get skin cancer. So I’ll just take a vitamin D supplement and that will take care of me and I’ll get all these benefits that come from vitamin D, one of them is just bone mineralization. And then there’s been these other health benefits that have been associated with vitamin D. So if you have elevated vitamin D levels, you have better metabolism, you reduce your cancer rates, things like that. So yeah, why not just take the vitamin D supplement?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, right. And this is the message and the advice we’ve been receiving from dermatologists for a couple of decades now, is like, we know that sun exposure causes skin cancer. We know that it makes vitamin D, we know we need vitamin D. But no problem, avoid all sun exposure, and yeah, your body won’t make enough vitamin D, but you just take vitamin D pills to make up for that, and problem solved. So that was this overly simplistic understanding for a while. But to test it, what you have to do is do these trials where you get a lot of people so that you have some statistical power to get randomness out of there, and give half the people vitamin D pills and the other half just get a placebo and see what happens. And so now, some huge, huge trials have been done, multiple years, tens of thousands of people involved in the trials. And we have extremely strong definitive evidence that those vitamin D supplements do not help to improve any disease.

Just they totally failed in a way that… You know, science rarely gets results that are so definitive. Like there’s no question. They didn’t improve a single condition. Which was really surprising, because like you say, people who have high levels of vitamin D in their blood have lower rates of pretty much every disease you can think of. So we really did think, oh, vitamin D is not just for bones, it must be essential for all these other things in the human body and for preventing all these other diseases. So then these supplement trials, when they failed, then everyone had to kind of go back to the drawing board and say like, now wait a minute, how can it be that people who have naturally high levels of D in their blood have lower rates of all these diseases but if you artificially raise people’s amount of D in their blood with supplements, it doesn’t do anything? And you probably, you already know the answer.

Brett McKay: Right. Well, yeah, it’s the sunlight that’s doing it. Vitamin D is just a marker that you’re getting a sufficient amount of sunlight.

Rowan Jacobsen: Right, exactly. So it wasn’t causative, it was just correlation. The people with the lower rates of disease had a higher D because they were getting sun exposure, but now we know it wasn’t the D that was causing the lower rates of disease. It was something else about sun exposure.

Brett McKay: Okay. So people probably heard this idea that vitamin D improves a bunch of health conditions, but it turns out it’s not the vitamin D. There are other things going on, other pathways with the sunlight itself that creates those health effects. And we’re gonna talk about how the sunlight can improve those different facets of our health. That’s not to say that vitamin D is not important. You can get it from the sun or from a supplement. And as you said, we need vitamin D so we don’t get things like rickets. You don’t want rickets. So we need vitamin D for that.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah. And vitamin D is probably important in other ways. Like pretty much every cell in our body has vitamin D receptors in it, so they’re there for a reason. Like our cells are all doing things with D, but we only need so much probably. So you don’t wanna be vitamin D deficient. But this idea that really cranking up your level of D was gonna somehow chase all these diseases out of your body, that has turned out to be false. So D is important, but you probably get enough through sunlight, most of us. But it depends, like it depends where you’re living. So yeah, that’s only part of it. So could there be other things that sunlight is doing for you?

And now we have quite a bit of evidence that, yes, it turns out there’s dozens of different processes and pathways that are triggered by sunlight hitting skin that have lots and lots of different effects on the human body, and we’re really just learning about them. So this is the impasse. So now, the dermatologists are gonna have to readdress this whole formula that they gave to people. Like, don’t worry about the D, get the D through the supplement. Because it doesn’t work, and all those health benefits that we’re chasing, probably you need actual sunlight for that.

Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about some of these health benefits that people are starting to see there’s a connection to sunlight. One of them is blood pressure. There’s a connection between increased amounts of sunlight exposure and decreased blood pressure. And there’s a guy, it’s a dermatologist who found this connection, a guy named Richard Weller. Tell us about him. What’s the connection between sunlight and blood pressure?

Rowan Jacobsen: So he’s a fascinating guy, a dermatologist in Scotland, but he does work in Ethiopia every year and has for decades. And he started questioning the conventional wisdom on sun exposure and vitamin D after doing all this work in Ethiopia. Where Ethiopia, like huge amount of sun ’cause it’s in the tropical zone, in the equatorial zone and it’s up at like 6,000 feet. So it gets a huge amount of sunlight. And he says he never treated a skin cancer there, never saw any ’cause he was treating people with very dark skin and they just weren’t coming down with skin cancers. So that was the first step where he started questioning some of the conventional wisdom. But then in terms of blood pressure that we had known for a long time in these observational studies that people living in areas that got more sun exposure had lower blood pressure. Like high latitudes, where you don’t get as much sunlight, higher blood pressure.

And everyone had sort said like, well, it’s probably just temperature, because your blood pressure is definitely lower in warmer temperature areas. So everyone kind of like chalked it up to temperature. But then, back, I don’t know, in the early 2000s, I think it was, some scientists discovered that… Actually it was earlier than that, scientists discovered that nitric oxide, which is a very simple molecule, is actually a really important signaling molecule in the body, and that nitric oxide will cause the muscles in blood vessels to relax and to dilate. So nitric oxide is a really potent vasodilator, so it will expand those blood vessels and lower blood pressure. And that was, a guy won a Nobel Prize for that back in the ’90s I think. But what people only realized more recently and what Richard Weller’s research helped to show was that our skin actually has these huge stores of nitrates in them, which is sort of a precursor to nitric oxide.

And when sunlight hits skin, it breaks up those nitrates into nitric oxide and sends them into the body and lowers blood pressure. And he did these experiments on his grad students. Like first they showed it in mice and they’re like, huh, it works. And then he did experiments on grad students where he shone UVA. He wanted to prove it wasn’t vitamin D that was responsible for this ’cause everybody chalks up everything about sunlight to vitamin D. So he used UVA instead of UVB ’cause UVA light does not create vitamin D. So he took his grad students and shone UVA light on their arms and he also put foil, like metal foil on half the students so that they were getting the heat of the UVA but not the actual beams of the UVA ’cause he wanted to prove that it wasn’t just heat either, ’cause we know heat can lower blood pressure.

And sure enough, the students who got the actual raise of UVA light, their blood pressure went down more than the students who just got the heat. And they’ve since done other studies looking at huge chunks of people in both the US and UK. And yeah, it’s now very clear that sun hitting skin produces nitric oxide, which lowers your blood pressure. And blood pressure is the number one risk factor for lost years of life and mortality worldwide. So anything that lowers blood pressure can be a pretty big deal.

Brett McKay: And that’s a cheap intervention. It’s free.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, it is. It’s free. You know, it’s a cost benefit ratio ’cause when you’re exposing yourself to light, you are raising your risk of skin cancer. But skin cancer kills very few people. It’s a very, very small factor in mortality, and blood pressure and all the cardiovascular related diseases is number one cause of mortality in the world. So yeah, it’s probably a very good benefit for the risk.

Brett McKay: Yeah, we’re gonna talk more about the real risk of skin cancer later, but with these blood pressure experiments, it was UVA radiation that produces nitric oxide?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, well, so he used UVA ’cause he wanted to prove it wasn’t related to vitamin D. But since then, I think they’ve found that UVB does it too. Like all the UV produces nitric oxide. So yeah, so the blood pressure lowering effect is, and I don’t even like dividing it up too much ’cause anytime we start to boil it down to this sort of human created simplicity, it reminds me of like fat carbs of protein. It’s like this human construct that turns out to be much simpler than the real thing.

Brett McKay: So sunlight can reduce blood pressure. There’s also been research showing that sunlight can strengthen immune function or improve immune function. Can you tell us about that research?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, and that’s really fascinating to me. And that research was one of the main reasons the Australian authorities decided to revise their sun exposure recommendations. But this is, again, is something that’s been known for a while. We’ve got 20 or 30 years of research on this and it’s just… In science, department A is not necessarily talking to department B. So the immunologists were way down this path of researching sunlight’s effect on the immune system, and the dermatologists were just not ever getting the message on the other side of the campus. But anyway, so what we know is that we have a lot of immune cells in our skin, which makes sense ’cause the skin is the first barrier to the outer world. So the skin is constantly dealing with pathogens and cuts and all kinds of assaults to the body. So there’s constant immune action happening in the skin. And UV is another sort of minor assault that we get every day, that we’ve been getting every day for as long as humans have been humans.

So the skin has evolved to deal with it. So it gets a little dose of UV and then it heals that damage and healing that damage is basically an anti-inflammatory response. So the UV is a tiny bit of inflammation and it triggers an anti-inflammatory response in the skin. All these immune cells get created, they reduce inflammation, but then what’s really interesting, which is a more recent discovery, is those cells then migrate from the skin into the body through the lymph nodes and reduce inflammation throughout the body. So it’s the systemic anti-inflammatory response that’s triggered by a little bit of UV. And that’s important, because one thing we’re learning more and more is that a lot of the classic diseases of modern civilization have roots in inflammation. Like we sort of have a lot of chronic inflammation going on all the time. So something, and again, like you said before, a free intervention that can reduce inflammation could be a fantastic health benefit.

Brett McKay: And I feel like we intuitively understood this maybe a century ago. I love reading these old history books, biographies, and there’s always this instance where some famous guy gets sick as a kid and the doctor’s like, “Well, you need to take them out to the desert,” or “Go to the the ocean side and get lots of sun, because you got tuberculosis and that will help heal you.” And I think that just spending time in the sun probably did a lot that helped strengthen their immune system.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, exactly. There was this whole age of heliotherapy where, like you said, tuberculosis, rickets of course, and some other diseases, psoriasis. People would be sent out into the sun, or they’d be sent up into the mountains in Switzerland to cure these diseases. And it worked. They didn’t quite understand why it worked, but it was somewhat successful. So sun was definitely considered by the leading doctors to be a benefit to health. And then that all started to flip in the ’30s and ’40s as everyone realized, they discovered the mechanisms by which UV can cause skin cancer. And then slowly, decade by decade, the message, that sort of the drumbeat got stronger and stronger, stay out of the sun so you don’t get skin cancer. And we’re kind of at this like peak moment of that.

Brett McKay: Another way sunlight can improve your immune function, you know, vitamin D, again, vitamin D plays a role in your immune system. If you get sunlight, you’re gonna increase your levels of vitamin D, which also contributes to your immune system.

Rowan Jacobsen: Exactly. And yeah, that’s an important point. All of these pathways are probably way more complicated than we think. It’s not gonna be one very simple step by step, like this, to this, to this. A whole lot of stuff happens when sun hits skin, and all these signaling molecules and hormones, they don’t necessarily just do one thing. In different situations they’ll do different things. You’ve got this very complex effect happening with nitric oxide, which can also be anti… It can be used to kill pathogens. So you’ve got nitric oxide, you’ve got vitamin D, you’ve got these direct effects on immune cells.

And one of the other things, like vitamin D, we’re all told to take vitamin D pills, that’s because everybody thought there was just one type of vitamin D, and most dermatologists today still think that. But one of the things we’ve learned in the past 10 years is that there are more probably like 20 different, slightly different versions of vitamin D that the body makes with sunlight. And they all have slightly different side chains on these molecules, but they all do slightly different things and we really don’t understand how that works. But we do know that a bunch of those non-canonical types of vitamin D, you can’t replace those with a pill that is going into the stomach and then to the liver. It just doesn’t work. It will not make these other flavors of vitamin D.

Brett McKay: Related to the immune system, there’s also been research showing that sunlight exposure can help with autoimmune diseases. So this is when your immune system goes haywire and starts attacking your body. So things like psoriasis is an autoimmune disease, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, MS is another disease like that. But sunlight seems to help with those conditions.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, for sure. Again, it’s that anti-inflammatory effect. And it’s really strong with MS, which is a disease where the body’s immune system starts attacking the sheaths around the nerves that protect the nerves so that signals can be sent, electrical signals can be sent. The body mistakes the little sheaths around those nerves for an invader and starts attacking them. It’s just this classic but like overreaction of the immune system. And sun exposure really effectively slows down that process for MS. Like you look at the observational studies based on latitude and sun exposure and people living at high latitudes have usually several times the risk of MS compared to people living at lower latitudes. And prevalence is higher in winter than in summer, and it’s also, you can even track it with birth month where people born in spring, at the end of like a long winter, have higher rates than people born in early fall.

Same thing for psoriasis, type 1 diabetes, like you said, and some other autoimmune diseases. And there’s some clinical trials going on right now where they’re tracking this. Because basically this has mostly been observational studies, so you really, in order to prove it, to really have like the gold standard of evidence, you need to have some clinical trials where you’ve shown that it works. But we do know from some early clinical trials that just a little bit of narrow band UVB therapy, so using a light that only shines UVB in this very narrow wavelength that doesn’t cause skin cancer, it reduces all the biomarkers of inflammation in the blood of these patients that have MS and other things. So yeah, it looks good so far for that.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. What about insulin resistance, does sunlight affect that? That’s a big problem these days.

Rowan Jacobsen: Huge. Huge. Yeah. Insulin resistance, diabetes, all the… Like the metabolic syndrome stuff, where your body’s not metabolizing very actively, it’s just sort of slowed down, getting a little groggy and your cells aren’t accepting… They’re resisting insulin. Yes, sunlight has been shown in studies of both mice and observational studies of people to have a pretty solid impact on reducing risk of diabetes and insulin resistance. And in terms of why, like it’s probably some of those same things we’ve been talking about. I think there’s probably an inflammatory component to diabetes and insulin resistance as well, and so this probably reduces that a little bit. But then the other part of it, and I think you can apply this to a lot of things we’ve been talking about, if you wanna like pull back and think about big picture, there’s this really fascinating study a few years ago that looked at all the genes in the human body and when they were being expressed.

So then when they were being cranked up and when they were being kind of turned off, in terms of like month of the year. And what they found was that about a third of the genes in the body have a seasonal component. So they’re either being cranked up in summer or in winter. And generally, what they saw was that the inflammatory genes were being cranked up in winter and anti in summer. So winter, like evolutionary, the theory would be that in winter that’s when flu and all these other infectious diseases are on the rampage. We’re spending a lot of time cooped up together in spaces where we’re more likely to share diseases with each other. Summer is a low disease time, so it makes sense in winter to crank up your inflammatory genes to deal with all these pathogens and to basically try to just survive winter.

 And then summer, things are good, you’re out in the open air, you can reduce all that inflammation. But of course the signal for that is, one of them is sun hitting skin, sun hitting skin and sun hitting retinas. So if we are living our lives indoors and aren’t getting exposure outside, our bodies might be in a sense thinking that it’s biological winter all the time. So they’re acting like it’s biological winter, so they’re staying in this inflammatory state. So that would be the theory underlying why this would be the case, but it’s just a theory right now.

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

What about sun exposure and its connection to sleep and mood?

Rowan Jacobsen: That one is for sure, like no question and nobody even argues with this one. And it’s through different mechanisms. It’s probably partly through the skin, but a lot of it is through the eyes. But yeah, we know for sure that getting that hit of light in the morning is what sets your circadian rhythm, sets your biological clock, tells you that it’s morning, it’s time to crank up your system and be really active and high functioning. So if you’re outside in the morning and you’re getting a lot of bright light, then that melatonin that your body makes that’s for sleeping at night will quickly get reduced and you’ll get alert for your day, and then also you’re on the schedule where at night the body will know to turn up the melatonin so that you sleep well.

And when you don’t get that strong, diurnal change in light, then your circadian rhythms can get messed up. And you can’t get it being indoors, it’s interesting. I didn’t start paying attention to this until I was reading some of these researchers who specialize in this stuff. But even a cloudy day outside is way brighter than with your lights on indoors. Not even close, by like 50 times, 100 times, in terms of lumens. So you really need to be outside to get that signal that tells your body to wake up and sort of crank up the whole system and then the opposite at night.

Brett McKay: And the connection to the mood, people probably are aware of seasonal affective disorder. It happens during the winter. There’s less sunlight exposure, so people kind of get in the funk. You’re probably familiar with this, you live in Vermont.

Rowan Jacobsen: Totally.

Brett McKay: Vermont falls and winter. I remember we lived in Vermont, my wife and I, shortly after I graduated from law school, we were there in the fall. And I remember it was like 4 o’clock in the afternoon, it’s dark. I’m like, what? It’s 4 o’clock. Why is it…

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, it’s depressing.

Brett McKay: It got depressing.

Rowan Jacobsen: It does. And you can fight it, right? You go out, you ski, you do whatever you can to embrace the day. But it’s still, it’s not that natural an environment for human beings at some level. So you got to figure out ways to get around that. And yeah, people do. Yeah, their hormones are strongly affected by that. So again, you kind of go into hibernation mode. It’s kind of like what we were talking about earlier. All that darkness is a signal to the body to just shut down and endure. ‘Cause normally, in winter, food is often tight. Like before all our modern conveniences, you really did want to sort of put the system on minimal mode until things got better. So I think we still are dealing with that. So the best thing and the way to fight it is either, like you can have artificial lights that are bright enough that they can affect that SAD, or you go outside as much as possible or you go on vacation.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So yeah, I saw some research that sunlight can increase levels of serotonin, which is a feel good neurotransmitter, releases endorphins that can also help you feel high and euphoric.

Rowan Jacobsen: Totally.

Brett McKay: I mean, if anyone’s been to the beach or on a hot sunny day, you just feel good, you just feel so groovy whenever you catch some rays.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, and it’s direct, like your skin and brain are producing endorphins, are producing dopamine. Dermatologists talk about how unfortunate it is that people get addicted to sunlight because of these things, but it’s like, well, there’s a reason. Your body isn’t just making those on a whim, there’s a reason. So you don’t want to get too much, but you do want to at least pay attention to those natural signals that we have.

Brett McKay: Okay, so I think we’ve talked a lot about the health benefits of sunlight. Increases vitamin D, but vitamin D, what we talked about is not necessarily connected to all these other health benefits, like reduced blood pressure, reduced metabolic syndrome, etcetera. That is from sunlight itself. Vitamin D is just a marker that you’re getting enough sunlight. And people might be hearing this thing, oh, okay, yeah, I’ll grant you that there’s all these health benefits that come with sunlight, but we know for a fact that it frequently causes skin cancer. So why risk the exposure to get those benefits? Just put on the sunscreen.

And that’s the stance, we’ve talked about this throughout this conversation, that’s the stance the American Academy of Dermatology has taken, which says you should apply sunscreen every day on skin not covered by clothing if you will be outside. And I think this is interesting ’cause I’m 41, so if you’re my age, sunscreen really wasn’t a big thing when I was growing up. Maybe my mom would say, “Well, you’re gonna go to the water park all day, put on some sunscreen.” But I don’t remember putting sunscreen on that much when I was a kid. So when did this message to always wear sunscreen arise? What was behind it?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, and so what was behind it was simply that one fact that we know that UV exposure triggers skin cancer, raises your risk of skin cancer. So based on that one thing is why we’ve been told to, continually to keep reducing our amount of sun exposure to basically zero now. Or let me add, skin cancer, also wrinkles, sunspots, like there’s this cosmetic stuff, the cosmetic damage that UV causes as well. But in terms of health, then skin cancer is the one thing that you have to worry about. And yeah, it’s interesting that the message has gotten more and more strident with each decade. And people have been using more and more sunscreen with each decade. But skin cancer rates are higher than ever. So the etiology is probably more complicated than they think, but it is definitely very well established that sun exposure causes skin cancer.

But in terms of what you wanna do about it, it’s not clear that a little bit of sun exposure is really that problematic. And there’s quite good evidence that there are more benefits than risks for that small amount of sun exposure. So then it’s a question of like, where do you set the… You know, the pendulum’s swung way far, as far as it could in one direction where, I don’t know, if you look at a lot of the recommendations in popular magazines and newspapers, the dermatologists are literally saying, even in winter, on a cloudy day, if you’re gonna be indoors all day, still put on sunscreen. There’s no science behind that. They’re just trying to get people into the habit of doing it. And I think the worry is that people aren’t very good at following directions. So if you want them to put on any sunscreen, you gotta tell them to put on a lot all of the time and hope that they’ll listen to you one out of every three times or something.

Brett McKay: In your articles, you talked about that the conversation about skin cancer is a lot nuanced. I think people hear cancer and they just think, okay, cancer equals death automatically. And they probably think melanoma when they think skin cancer. But there’s different types of skin cancer. Melanoma is the worst one you could get. But the stuff that’s often caused by sun damage, it’s like basal cell carcinoma. Those are actually pretty treatable. Like you can actually just go to a dermatologist and it’s like an outpatient surgery.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s three different kinds of cancers that are the main ones, basal cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma, and melanoma. And basal cell carcinoma is by far the most common cancer in the world. It’s probably more common than every other cancer put together. That’s the one, you know, you always see these public service warnings, like one in every three people will get skin cancer. And that’s what they’re talking about, is basal cell carcinoma. It doesn’t actually really have any health impacts 99.9% of the time. That’s the one, yeah, you go in, you get a cutoff, you’re done. So in a way, it would be better if it wasn’t called cancer, ’cause like you were saying, that word really scares people. Richard Weller, the dermatologist we mentioned, he actually told me that when one of his patients comes in and he diagnoses a BCC on them, he then says, “Congratulations ’cause your life expectancy just went up.”

And what that means, that doesn’t mean BCCs are actually good for you. It means the people who are getting BCCs tend to be quite healthy, because it’s like your dad who’s playing golf in Florida every day. He’s getting sun exposure, he’s getting a lot of exercise, he’s getting BCCs, but he’s quite healthy. So yeah, Richard Weller says he cuts a lot of BCCs off a lot of very healthy old people. SCCs, squamous cell carcinomas, are a little bit more to worry about than BCCs. But again, usually it’s just cut it off, outpatient procedure, that’s it. Melanoma is the one that kills people and that’s the one you need to worry about, but it’s much, much less common than the other two. It’s like 1 to 2% of skin cancers are melanoma, and the rest are BCCs and SCCs. So there’s a little bit of a bait and switch that you see in the public messaging where people will say, skin cancer is incredibly common, one out of three people will get it.

And then they’ll say, melanoma kills 10% of the people who get it. And if you don’t look carefully, you’ll think that skin cancer is both extremely common and extremely deadly, but it’s not. There are some that are extremely common and are no big deal and there’s one, melanoma, that can be deadly, but it’s uncommon. And BCCs, definitely caused by sun exposure. The more sun exposure you get, the more BCCs you’ll get. Melanoma, it’s a different story. It’s not as simple as just chronic sun exposure. Melanoma tends to turn up in people who get intermittent sun exposure. People who have pale skin and basically go to Cancún on vacation and get fried, that’s kind of like the perfect formula for melanoma. And worst thing of all, probably for you and me, it’s mostly associated with sunburns in childhood and adolescence, so.

Brett McKay: I had some sunburns, some really bad ones.

Rowan Jacobsen: Me too. I grew up in Florida. And so a 13-year-old kid growing up in Florida is gonna get a fair amount of sun.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I had one, I had a few where like your skin just peels like paper.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah.

Brett McKay: It hurt. But then when it peels, that was kind of satisfying.

Rowan Jacobsen: And it’s just so weird. It’s kind of fun. But it’s not good for you. They definitely, like every researcher I’ve talked to across the board says, just don’t burn. Burns are bad.

Brett McKay: So one of the arguments you’re making in your articles and in your research is that this sunscreen absolutism that we have in the United States, where it’s like you gotta apply sunscreen, even if you just go outside for a little bit, just all the time, even in winter time. What it’s doing, yeah, we might be staving off these skin cancers like basal cell carcinoma, but those, it’s not gonna kill you. You can get just the surgery to take it off, but we’re missing out on those other health benefits that come from sun exposure. ‘Cause when you block the sun with sunscreen, you’re missing out on the vitamin D production, the reduction in blood pressure, immune system improvement, etcetera.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, possibly. It depends on the sunscreen. And this is one of the interesting nuances here I think, is back when sunscreen was SPF 15 or whatever, it doesn’t block 100%. It blocks maybe like 90%. So there’s still about 10% getting through. And so maybe, like on a day at the beach, that might have actually been the perfect formula, where that sunscreen was letting you get a great amount of UV but was still preventing you from getting burned. So now of course we’ve got SPF 50 or even SPF 100 sunscreens, and the advice is even on a cloudy winter day, put it on. So there’s this real push to make sure that people never, never get any photons hitting their skin. So that’s probably gonna have to change. But I actually think sunscreen can be an ally in making sure you do get the right amount of sun. ‘Cause if it gets you outside without burning, it could actually be a benefit.

Brett McKay: Something you mentioned in one of your articles, this sunscreen absolutism. The dermatologists, they don’t discriminate on your melanin level. So even if you’re Black or Hispanic, where you have a lot of melanin and you don’t burn as easily, they still say, yeah, you gotta wear a SPF 50 sunscreen. And you’re like, well, that doesn’t make sense.

Rowan Jacobsen: Right. And this is the thing that’s gonna have to change I think, and I think probably pretty soon. That advice to always put on heavy duty sunscreen every day, indoors or outdoors, that’s probably not a bad recommendation for people with the very palest skin. Like people who have red hair, freckles, who evolved, their ancestors came from places at very high latitudes that were getting very little sunlight and kind of evolved skin to harvest whatever light they could get. Like people who never tan always burn, that advice makes sense for them, but not for everyone else. And the world is mostly populated by everyone else.

So people with really dark skin, on the other end of the spectrum, basically do not get skin cancers from sun exposure, do not have any of these risks. But also have, because they have more natural sunscreen basically, need more sun in order to produce vitamin D and some of these other compounds. So for them, the recommendations make no sense. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle who have maybe more of like a Mediterranean skin tone, an Asian skin tone, who have a little bit more risk of skin cancer than people with super dark skin, but really very little. And also probably have a lot to gain from moderate sun exposure. And you don’t need, that’s the other thing we should probably talk about, you don’t need too much to get some of these benefits.

Brett McKay: We’ll talk about the daily recommended dose of sunlight here in a bit. So in America we have a very, you call it sunscreen absolutism. No matter what, how you spend your time, whether indoors or outdoors, whether you’re pale, dark, wear sunscreen, health officials in Australia have taken a different tack, they’ve gotten more nuanced with sunscreen use. And this is interesting ’cause Australia is a place that has notoriously high levels of UV exposure and skin cancer, but health officials in Australia are saying maybe you don’t use sunscreen all the time. So what are they recommending?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, and it’s so funny, because probably the last place on earth, you would expect to be the first place to take the plunge on changing the recommendations would have been Australia. ‘Cause as you say, their skin cancer numbers are off the charts, the highest in the world, like more than twice as high as US or UK. And it’s because they have predominantly pale skin population in an extremely sunny place. So it’s a really bad match. So they get tons of skin cancer, but they also have some of the longest lived people on the planet. So right there, it tells you that maybe like sun exposure isn’t so bad for you, even if you do have pale skin.

So Australia, I think the reason that they ended up being the first ones to change, to go away from the zero sun policy is because they’ve had to deal with this. Like melanoma and skin cancer is in their face every day, they’ve had to like process it the most. So maybe they’re a little less scared of it in a sense. And I think it was more obvious to them, ’cause they do a lot of research on it. They have a lot of the top skin cancer researchers in the world. And they can see that a lot of people were clearly getting more harm than benefit from this zero sun policy. They’re also saying that there was a lot more vitamin D deficiency in Australia than they would ever expect for such a sunny place.

So they actually started worrying that people had taken the message to heart maybe too much. So they wanted to change their messaging so that it was no longer this one size fits all message that should only have applied to people with super pale skin. And they kind of broke up their messaging into three groups, people with pale skin, people with dark skin, and then people in the middle, and different recommendations for each one. Pale skin, yeah, still use your sunscreen all the time pretty much. But when the sun’s not so bright, try to at least get outside with sunscreen on to get whatever… They were focusing on D, but they know it’s this other stuff too, to get whatever sun you can.

Middle group, get small amounts, still use sunscreen anytime the sun is pretty bright. But yeah, work the edges of the day, the edges of the season and make sure you are getting some direct exposure. And then people with dark skin, they basically said like, you just should focus on getting lots of sun. You don’t need sunscreen except when you’re gonna be outside for an extended period on a bright day. So that was quite controversial. And they caught a little bit of hell for it, but I think they’ll turn out to be the first penguin in the water and then all the other penguins will start to join them.

Brett McKay: Are you seeing a shift happen amongst American dermatologists yet?

Rowan Jacobsen: No. So far, none. UK, yes. UK is starting to shift a little bit, Europe a little bit. America is gonna be last on this for whatever reason. It’s just kind of how we do things, I think.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s talk about how we can get sun exposure without increasing the risk of skin cancer. ‘Cause some people might hear this news that, okay, sunlight is great for you. I’m just gonna get sun all the time and never wear sunscreen. That’s not what these health officials in Australia are advocating for. So based on the conversations you’ve had and the research you’ve done, how can we get sun exposure and get all these health benefits without increasing our chances of getting different types of skin cancer?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah. And this, I’m quite sympathetic with the dermatologists because, yeah, you tell people that 10 minutes of sun is good for them, and sure enough some of them will go out there and get six hours of sun. ‘Cause they’re like, if a little’s good, then a lot’s better, right? So that is definitely something worth worrying about. But I feel like you just have to give the straight information, right? And then hopefully it’s clear enough that people can follow it. So Australia, when they put out their new position statement, they actually have all these tables in the back. It’s worth looking at that document that they created.

And the tables show for places with different UV indexes, so that’s gonna depend on where you are in the globe and what season it is and the day, right? For your skin type and UV index, how many minutes of exposed sunlight do you need to get a healthy vitamin D dose? So those will translate to the US too. So those are worth checking out. But what it comes down to is, for most people on most days, you’re either gonna get it just walking about your day, or you can get it with 10 minutes or to 20 minutes of focused exposure.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And if you have darker skin, you might have to extend the amount of time you’re out there getting that sun exposure to get the benefits.

Rowan Jacobsen: Quite a bit. And the other part of it, though, is that in higher latitude places, like here in Vermont, we don’t get any UVB. All the UVB is filtered by the atmosphere like November through March, probably. There’s just too much atmosphere that the sun is coming through at that low angle. So we don’t get any UVB for four months of the year. And you can save, your body will save it up a little bit, but that’s where you see a lot of vitamin D deficiencies, is at higher latitude, colder places.

Brett McKay: All right. So those Australian tables are a good place to check to see how much sun exposure you should get each day and in each season, ’cause it’s gonna differ, and then when to use sunscreen. But in general, what are some good general guidelines for using sunscreen? Because you’re not… I mean, even though you’re against sunscreen absolutism, you’re not against sunscreen altogether. So when should people put on sunscreen?

Rowan Jacobsen: Anytime you think you might be out long enough to get a burn, and as I think you and I can both attest to, it’s easier to get a burn than you think. Like you think, oh, I’m not gonna get burned, and then you get burned. It’s easy to just get a little more than you think you’re gonna get. So it makes sense to play it cautious and use it anytime you know you’re gonna be out for a while. And unless it’s like, you know, if it’s winter, that’s a whole different deal.

Brett McKay: Yeah, all the dermatologists you’ve talked to who are sort of pro getting sunlight and not using sunscreen all the time, they all agreed you do not want to get sunburned. Like you want to avoid sunburn as much as possible ’cause that’s what caused all those problems.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s just your skin cells dying and freaking out, and yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So for me, I work from home. I typically don’t wear sunscreen at all ’cause I’ll just go outside, get some sun when I’m doing my early morning walks, doing chores and errands. I will wear sunscreen when I’m gonna be out for a long time, especially if I’m gonna be at altitude. So like my wife and I just went backpacking, I slather on the sunscreen. It’s so easy to get sunburned when you’re up in the mountains at 10,000, 11,000, 12,000 feet, ’cause you don’t have the atmosphere filtering the radiation.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay: So constantly applying sunscreen then and then when I’m skiing, ’cause like the sun reflects off the snow, and it’s easy to get sunburned. And it’s hard there ’cause you think it’s cold, so you really can’t feel anything, but you go in and your cheeks are red, and you’re like, ah, didn’t put on enough sunscreen.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, totally. All those things. And yeah, also anytime it’s gonna help you get outside, because one of the criticisms that people get in these observational studies where it’s like, oh, these people who are getting all the sun exposure are healthier in all these ways, and they have better longevity, blah, blah, blah. And one criticism will be, well, but how can you tell it’s the sun exposure? Maybe there’s just things about being outside, they’re exercising. Like, in those studies, you always try to control for exercise, so you’re comparing people who are exercising the same amount. But still, there could be other things about being outside that are just good for you. So, I don’t see the problem in that if the answer is get outside, right? So if sunscreen is gonna help you spend less time indoors, then I think it’s all to the better.

Brett McKay: Is anyone exploring, I don’t know, special sunscreens or ways people can get the benefits of sunlight without raising their risk of skin cancer?

Rowan Jacobsen: What people are doing is there’s a lot of experiments using these narrowband UVB lamps that a couple of companies are making now. I think this is gonna become a big deal. So they were first used for psoriasis treatment I think, and they just produce a very narrow band of UV, somewhere around like 300, 310 nanometers. It’s been used in psoriasis patients for a long time, decades, and we know it does not cause skin cancer. It’s not the type of wavelength that damages DNA. But it does produce vitamin D, and it also seems to have these good immunological effects.

Like psoriasis is an autoimmune disease where your skin is being attacked by the immune system, and it definitely has an excellent effect on psoriasis. It seems to work for MS. It even worked for COVID, it seems like, maybe. So I think you’re gonna see a lot more people using UVB, so then there’s not even an issue with skin cancer. But I’m still not convinced that you get all the benefits from UVB lamps that you would get from sunlight.

Brett McKay: Here’s a controversial question. Tanning beds. Can you get the benefits of sunlight from a tanning bed?

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I don’t know the answer yet. That’s why I’m working on a book about all this. It’ll be out in a couple of years by the time I’ve done all the research, written the manuscript, and then gone through the production process. But I’ll definitely have a chapter on tanning beds in there. Right now, I don’t know enough. I do know, like tanning beds do raise your risk of skin cancer, so dermatologists are strongly anti-tanning bed. But they do definitely give you some of the benefits, especially the endorphins, for sure. They give you that hit of feeling good. They will improve your vitamin D a little bit. But again, because it’s not the same as sunlight, I’m somewhat skeptical of them, but I don’t know enough to say whether they’re just plain bad or whether they might have a use.

Brett McKay: Yeah, a few years ago here in Oklahoma, we had a winter where it was just gray every day for like two months. And I was getting pretty depressed. I was getting some seasonal affective disorder. I got brown skin. I’m swarthy. So I need a lot of sunlight to get the benefits. And my wife said, you should just go to a tanning bed. And I’m like, tan? I’ve never done that before. That’s like what they do on Jersey Shore. Like I’m not gonna… And so I did it, I did like the least amount. So I did the least amount of time. I think it was just like two minutes. I mean, it was really short. And I felt better afterwards.

Rowan Jacobsen: Totally, yeah. I have friends who do it, and same thing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’d be interested to see if instead of tanning bed salons, you have UVB light salons, where you stand in front of a UVB light instead of going to a tanning bed to get the health benefits of sunlight.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, I’m curious too. And I suspect that the tanning beds are gonna go in that direction, whether it’s more than just the UVB or just the UVB. But I bet they’re gonna try to curate their wavelengths a little bit to try to maximize the good and avoid the bad. That’s just a guess.

Brett McKay: Well, Rowan, this has been a great conversation. Is there someplace people can go to learn more about your work?

Rowan Jacobsen: For me, it would be rowanjacobsen.com.

Brett McKay: Rowanjacobsen.com. And then look out for the book you’ve got coming out.

Rowan Jacobsen: Yeah, In Defense of Sunlight, 2026.

Brett McKay: 2026.

Rowan Jacobsen: I think that’s safe. Safe prediction.

Brett McKay: And in the meantime, if you’re listening, go out and get some sun. You’re a plant. That’s one of the cool takeaways. I forget, like we’re little plants. We need water and we need sun. So get some sun.

Rowan Jacobsen: We photosynthesize, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Well, Rowan Jacobsen, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Rowan Jacobsen: Thanks. It was great being here.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Rowan Jacobsen. You can find more information about his work at his website, rowanjacobsen.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/sunlight, where you can find links to resources, and we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our newsletter. We got a daily option, and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AOM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a rating on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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Note: This is a rebroadcast.

When men think about optimizing their hormones, they tend only to think about raising their testosterone. But while increasing T can be important, an ideal health profile also means having testosterone that’s in balance with your other hormones as well.

Today on the show, Dr. Kyle Gillett joins me to discuss both of those prongs of all-around hormone optimization. We start with a quick overview of the different hormones that affect male health. We then get into what qualifies as low testosterone and how to accurately test yours. We also discuss what causes low testosterone in individual men, and how its decline in the general male population may be linked to both birth control and the world wars. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss how to both raise testosterone and get rid of excess estrogen, including the use of some effective supplements you may never have heard of. We then get into the risks and benefits of taking TRT, before ending our discussion with what young men can do to prepare for a lifetime of optimal T and hormonal health.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM series on testosterone, including How I Doubled My Testosterone Levels Naturally
• AoM Podcast #761: How Testosterone Makes Men, Men
• AoM Podcast #878: The Fitness Supplements That Actually Work 

Connect With Dr. Kyle Gillett

• Kyle on IG
• Gillett Health Podcast on Spotify and Apple
• Gillett Health on YouTube
• Gillett Health website

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. When men think about optimizing their hormones, they tend only to think about raising their testosterone, but while increasing T can be important, an ideal health profile also means having testosterone that’s in balance with your other hormones as well. Today in the show, Dr. Kyle Gillette joins me to discuss both of those prongs of all around hormone optimization. We start with a quick overview of the different hormones that affect male health. We then get into what qualifies as low testosterone and how to accurately test yours. We also discuss what causes low testosterone in individual men and how it’s decline in the general male population may be linked to both birth control and the world wars. In the second half of our conversation, we discuss how to both raise testosterone and get rid of excess estrogen, including the use of some effective supplements you may never heard of. We then get into the risk and benefits of taking TRT before ending our discussion with what young men can do to prepare for a lifetime of optimal T in hormonal health. After the show is over checkout our show notes at aom.is/optimalt.

All right, Dr. Kyle Gillette, welcome to the show.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Thank you. My pleasure.

Brett McKay: So you are a medical doctor. You do family practice, you specialize in obesity but also hormone optimization, helping people have healthy hormones so they live a flourishing life. And today I’d like to talk about hormones, particularly male hormones. I think when most people think about male hormone optimization, they think about testosterone and which is obvious why you do that. And we’re gonna dig deep into testosterone today. But are there other hormones that affect male health that people often overlook?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: There certainly are. So even testosterone in and of itself, there’s nothing unique about it compared to other androgens. There’s just one androgen receptor. Testosterone just happens to be the most well-known androgen. So there’s DHEA, which is a very weak androgen. It’s produced by the adrenal glands, which are small glands above the kidney. There’s DHT, which is dihydrotestosterone. This is a very strong androgen. You don’t have as much of it as testosterone, but it’s vitally important for what’s called secondary sexual characteristic development, like the deepening of the voice, growing facial hair, those secondary sexual characteristics which are vital.

Brett McKay: And also I think people often overlook estrogen plays a role in male health.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Certainly, testosterone aromatizes and directly converts to estrogen. So the way to think about estrogen is the more estrogen the better for your health because it prevents things like heart attacks at a correct ratio to where you feel good.

Brett McKay: Okay, so we gotta have some estrogen in there at the right balance. And then there’s another hormone called SHBG. What does that do?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: So SHBG is also known as androgen binding globulin. It’s a protein, it’s made in many places, the liver makes most of it, but the testes also make some of it. And SHBG stands for sex hormone binding globulin, it most strongly binds DHT and then it binds testosterone, relatively strongly, DHEA weaker than that. And then estradiol, which is your main estrogen, even weaker than that. So think of this as regulating all of the hormones and keeping them more stable. The higher the SHBG, the more stable the level will be. Men produce a lot of testosterone during sleep. So the level is generally much higher in the morning. But if you have a very low SHBG you’ll crash and you can actually have deficient levels of testosterone in the evening routinely. But normal levels in the morning if you don’t have enough SHBG, the most common cause of an SHBG deficiency is insulin resistance, which is often due to too many calories or too many carbohydrates and sugar.

Brett McKay: So what’s interesting about all those hormones is they interact with each other. It’s a complex system so if you raise the level on one, one might go down or up. So I think a lot of guys they get too focused on, well I gotta increase this one thing or reduce this one thing. Well, if you do that you’re gonna have these cascading effects that might not be optimal.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Correct. I actually heard an advertisement from a TRT clinic this morning and it said new studies shows that men with low testosterone are more prone to cardiovascular disease and early death and diseases of aging. And I thought to myself, this is odd because they are implying that you need testosterone replacement to prevent this. But of course that is a logical fallacy because just replacing the testosterone without figuring out what’s actually causing it in the first place, not that TRT is wrong, but you need to figure out what the cause of it is and then address it.

Brett McKay: Okay. And I hope we can talk about TRT ’cause I know a lot of guys are thinking about doing it or maybe they are doing it and they might have questions about that. Let’s talk about testosterone. So there’s two ways to measure testosterone or two measurements of testosterone that I read about. One is total testosterone and free testosterone. So first, what’s the difference between the two and as a clinician is there a particular number you focus on?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, so total testosterone is a total amount of testosterone, whether it’s bound or unbound, when testosterones bound it in general does not bind the androgen receptor, which is on the X chromosome. And total testosterone includes a testosterone bound to albumin, which is the main protein in the blood and also SHBG which we talked about earlier. But free testosterone or any free androgen is what is going to be what is actually binding to the receptor. And then it takes it into the nucleus of the cell and then it binds to DNA to cause what’s called gene transcription. So the androgen receptor gene that’s on the X chromosome is then mostly activated by free testosterone. Oddly enough, sometimes I make the analogy of plumbing. So you have a pipe that’s your bloodstream that takes testosterone everywhere and then you have different types of cells. For example, a muscle cell or a brain cell or a germ cell in the testicle or a somatic cell in the testicle, which we don’t have to get into. But anyway, the free testosterone level can be very different in the bloodstream, which is where we measure it on a blood test versus inside the cell. So it is possible to have symptoms of low testosterone because you don’t have enough androgen in the cell but have a normal level in the blood. It’s rare but it’s possible.

And the opposite is possible, to have a low level in the blood but still have enough inside the cell that’s free to be causing normal gene transcription.

Brett McKay: Okay. So just to recap there, total testosterone is made up of bound and unbound testosterone. Bound testosterone could be bound to albumin or SHBG. And then when it’s bound to those things it can’t attach to the antigen receptor in the cell and so it can’t be… Can’t effect have those changes on the cell. Free testosterone, unbound testosterone is free testosterone. So as a clinician, when you do a blood test on a patient, what number is more important to you? Which one are you gonna be focusing on more? Is it the free or the total?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: I think both are equally important. For athletic purposes, for muscle building purposes. Usually that’s more correlated with free testosterone level. However, symptoms and how you feel is usually correlated more with total. Insurance companies and academic societies usually put more weight into total testosterone, partly because free testosterones are often measured inaccurately so often it’s more accurate to calculate your free testosterone using your total testosterone and your SHBG and then you estimate what your free testosterone is. Some societies say low testosterone is often best treated if you one, have symptoms. And then two, also have a testosterone below about 400. That’s what the urologists say. Most other societies go by 300 and I tend to agree with the level of 400 with a caveat if you have significant symptoms and with a second caveat, if you cannot improve that naturally in any way after identifying the root cause.

Brett McKay: Okay. I wanna dig more into diagnosing low testosterone because there’s lots of commercials out there. You just mentioned one or these businesses popping up where you can just go in, get a blood test and like, hey, you got low T, here’s testosterone and maybe they don’t. So you mentioned two things you look at to diagnose low testosterone, you’re gonna do blood work and if it’s below 400, coupled with if the patient is reporting symptoms of low testosterone, we’ll talk about the symptoms of low testosterone here in a bit, but let’s talk about blood work. ‘Cause I think a lot of guys out there, they think it’s a panacea, if you just take a test, you take the test and it says, oh well, your T is at 400. They’re like, well I got low T. Why isn’t one blood test alone sufficient to diagnose low testosterone?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, in general testosterone levels can have what’s called outliers. It’s the statistical phenomenon. But it’s especially true of testosterone where you could check it one time and your testosterone that morning could be low because the last two nights you’ve had poor sleep and poor diet and other lifestyle factors. Males that are generally seeking a TRT prescription know those very well because there’s various things that you can do to artificially make your testosterone level look low that morning. So in general, the recommendation is to recheck it two to three times after a good night of sleep and normal diet and whatever you’re doing normally not after you’ve dieted down to 7% body fat to do an ultramarathon or body building show, then your testosterone is certainly going to be low. But when you’re at a healthy body fat and there’s not an artificial something else that is going to make your testosterone look low. There’s a runner, his name is Nick Bare and he also is doing a body building show and I saw that he got his total testosterone checked and he’s a healthy guy. I’m not sure what his baseline testosterone is and his total testosterone was right at 100 before his body building show.

So that was obviously secondary to the caloric deficit. That wouldn’t necessarily count as a testosterone reading that you could put stock in assessing TRT or not. But for most people they probably won’t be in a scenario like that. But it is important to get at least two readings. If you’ve been sick before, then maybe just postpone the blood test by a week. That way you get an accurate reading.

Brett McKay: Let’s move on to the symptoms. So you do the blood test, what symptoms are you looking for to diagnose low testosterone?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, could be through any system. So it could be anything from depression, anxiety to low libido is certainly classic. Low muscle mass is not really one that we look for. Testosterone levels that are naturally produced are not as correlated as people would think with body composition and muscle mass and athletic performance. So it’s not uncommon to see a pretty high level athlete have a total testosterone of let’s say 450 and let’s say someone that has very low muscle mass and maybe even 20%, 22% body fats have a total testosterone of 1000 and there’s not as much correlation. But other things that you would look for seriously is, for example, erectile dysfunction, sexual health in general, sperm production. So if there’s a patient that is having even sub-fertility, just a little bit of trouble getting pregnant, that individual should certainly have a test of his testosterone as well.

Brett McKay: So with low libido, how does a guy know if he has low libido? Because that seems like it’d be pretty subjective.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, libido obviously has a lot of psychosocial factors as well. It’s usually taken at a patient’s word and a lot of times when you’re testing these patients, you’ve known the patients for a while, sometimes you haven’t. But if they’re telling you that it’s low relative to what it usually is and no other factors have changed, for example, you know they’ve been married to the same person for five years, they’re not actively going through problems in the marriage, there’s not something else that would be affecting the libido. So that would usually come up in the social history. When you do a history and physical on a patient, it is important to dig into the social history to make sure there’s not something else that is affecting the libido.

Brett McKay: So besides the low libido, maybe the lack of drive, what are the consequences of suboptimal male hormone levels like chronically? Is it gonna affect your cardiovascular system? Is it gonna affect cancer? Does it affect things like that?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: It will. If someone is significantly hypogonadal for a long time, they’re at much higher risk of osteoporosis, which leads to bone fractures and even mortality as well. They’re at higher risk of neurodegenerative disease, likely largely due to low estrogen. If you don’t have a lot of testosterone, you’re probably not converting a lot of it to estrogen and if you’re not doing that then you’re also at risk of cardiovascular disease. Estrogen is very cardioprotective and helps with the production of good cholesterol to help take cholesterol out of the plaque. So they’ve done studies and you look at one group of people that have true hypogonadism, which is generally two levels under 264 or so, and then one group you give TRT and then one group you don’t give TRT, you would think that the group that you give TRT would’ve a shorter lifespan ’cause androgens do cause excess production of “bad cholesterol.” They do increase a particle called ApoB, which is the most important one to watch for cardiovascular risk. But the group that you give TRT actually has less heart attacks and strokes.

Brett McKay: Right, because what you were saying before, the testosterone creates estrogen and then the estrogen protects the heart. So let’s talk about the causes of low testosterone. What can be behind low T?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Most commonly, metabolic syndrome. So excess calories, excess carbs, insulin resistance, high fasting insulin leads to the liver not producing SHBG. So you might be producing a decent amount of testosterone but it’s being metabolized so fast that it’s difficult to use. That’s most common. The second most common I think is sleep apnea or obstructive sleep apnea. Obviously that kind of goes hand in hand with metabolic syndrome but often it goes hand in hand with PTSD. I saw a study on young men that had just gotten out of the military and they had been diagnosed with PTSD and they tested them all for sleep apnea and something like 80% of them had sleep apnea and they were all under under a BMI of 25. So there’s certainly a lot of stress component as well. The limbic system includes places like the hypothalamus and the amygdala and downstream to that is the hippocampus and the amygdala, downstream of those is the hypothalamus and that’s some of the places of the brain that are involved in sleep regulation and breathing.

So the theory is that apneic episodes don’t just come from having a huge neck and excess body fat, but there are other factors like trauma at play. And when you have a patient with severe sleep apnea, they have a score called a AHI score and if that score is very high, like 100 or 200, you almost always see deficient testosterone levels.

Brett McKay: Okay, so having metabolic syndrome, being overweight, sleep apnea, any other causes of low testosterone?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, so theoretically xenoestrogens could be a cause of low testosterone. These are things like phthalates. These are also things like bisphenol A, also known as BPA, you might see BPA free on water bottles from time to time. These do bind various estrogen receptors and are likely suppressive. By suppressive, I just mean they shut down the production of the hormones that lead to testosterone production to some degree. Heat damage is also kind of an honorable mention. Some people might be familiar with what varicose veins are. Varicocele is where there’s varicose veins in the scrotum and some people with varicocele can have venous cooling very well. The testes wanna be about 91 to 92 degrees where the body is 98.6 degrees. So if you can’t keep your testes at 91 or 92, then you’re going to have less testosterone production and less sperm production. And in the more severe cases you’ll have atrophy, which is shrinking because, think about them as factories. If you’re not using the factory, they start to shut down.

Brett McKay: And besides these lifestyle factors and environmental factors, you could also have just an issue with your pituitary system, right? You might have a tumor or something in pituitary gland that’s dysregulating the release of hormones.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Correct. I suppose that would be likely one of the more common less modifiable risk factors. There’s not a lot that you can do about that. You can take supplements like vitamin B6 or like vitamin E, but a lot of times pituitary microadenomas or even macroadenomas, basically it’s a small tumor in the brainstem. The pituitary gland is where you make a lot of different hormones like growth hormone and like LH and FSH. But LH is the main hormone that’s produced there that leads to testosterone release. So there’s two different types of hypogonadism. There’s primary and secondary. So primary is where the testes are not functioning. And then secondary, think about it, it’s two steps instead of one step. So the LH can be low in secondary hypogonadism and if your LH is very low and a hormone like prolactin or IGF-1 is very high, then that might be a sign of a pituitary micro adenoma. In which case you need MRI.

Brett McKay: And LH, that’s Luteinizing Hormone, correct?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Correct. LH is Luteinizing Hormone. FSH is follicle stimulating hormone. They do crosstalk to some degree, but LH mostly helps with testosterone production and mostly binds to the Leydig cell in the testicle. And FSH mostly binds in the seminiferous tubules and helps with spermatogenesis.

Brett McKay: So I mean listeners have probably heard reports that T levels in men have been declining in the past few decades. Do we know what’s causing this sort of general decline? Is it just all these lifestyle, like people are getting fatter, there’s not sleeping, they’re stressed, and the stuff in the environment is that kind of what we’ve decided is the cause of the lower T levels?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: The various causes that we’ve already discussed are likely the primary causes of what is causing declining testosterone levels. But I think there is another factor, and a lot of that has to do with what I’d call epigenetic drift. Some people might call it natural selection, I might call it unnatural selection, where individuals with higher testosterone levels are no longer being selected for as early. And also a lot of individuals are having kids later on in life, for example, in their 30s or even 40s, when you might have very different maternal and paternal hormone profiles. That’s one of the reasons why I recommend if men are taking medications like Finasteride or Dutasteride, that they stop their Finasteride 90 days before attempting conception and they stop Dutasteride, depending on what dose they are, usually six months before conception. By the way, spermatogenesis takes about 60 days or two months. That way they have enough time to wash out before they start producing the sperm in the germ cells so that they wouldn’t pass down any epigenetic changes to potential offspring.

Brett McKay: Okay, so maybe this is… The idea is that… Again, this is theoretical, right? The testosterone increases aggression and risk taking behaviors and that’s not as adaptive in our safe high tech modern landscape. So men with lower testosterone might be more successful these days and women choose those men for their partners and then when they have children, the men pass down his genes and then his children have lower testosterone too. And that just perpetuates, just lower testosterone in the male population overall. Also, this idea of selection, I’ve heard that, I read this somewhere, correct me if I’m wrong on this, that women on birth control, they’re not attracted to higher testosterone men. Is that true?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, that is one of the major players of what I would call unnatural selection. Another interesting unnatural selection, I suppose, if you look at, not very recently, but the World Wars, certainly in World War I and World War II or in the Korean War or Vietnam War, but especially wars that… Even if a war has a draft, the individual that has higher testosterone and also more sensitive androgen receptors, so this is probably true throughout all of human history, you would… And this obviously cannot be proven scientifically, but theoretically that individual would be more likely to volunteer to go to the front line or to very risky positions. And if that male passes away at age 18 or age 19, then that is likely a fecundity rate of zero. So no offspring from that individual and then you start to have genetic drift.

Brett McKay: Okay, so again, this is theoretical, what you’re saying is that men with very high testosterone, they’re gonna take more risk and in doing so, that may take them out of the gene pool by taking those risks. And there’s more opportunity for that sort of risk taking during big global conflicts like the world wars, right? More high T men die, they lose the chance to reproduce and pass on their genes. And then that just contributes to the declining testosterone in men in general. And that’s gonna have echoes through the generations. And on top of that, we have selection factors going on in the mating market as well.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yes. And it’s not like it’s an be all end all. All or nothing. You select for high testosterone or you select for low testosterone. There’s a lot more psychosocial factors at play, but we are certainly seeing that there’s likely a decline in testosterone even a bit more than could be accounted for by just metabolic syndrome and sleep apnea. Maybe things like heat damage to the testicle, maybe things like xenoestrogens are playing some part in this, but we’ll probably never know. But it’s very fun to speculate about it.

Brett McKay: Well, the heat damage to the testicle, what would… Causes like keeping your laptop on your lap, sitting down a lot, would that cause heat damage?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Probably not significantly enough, but if you already had a Varicocele and you already spent an hour in the jacuzzi, keeping your really hot laptop and phone directly over your scrotum is certainly not gonna help. I suppose someone could prove this at some point. They’ve actually done a lot of studies where they look at the scrotal temperature and they’ve randomized two groups of usually, college students and one group they have wear basically like a sock around their scrotum that has something really warm in it. So they warm up the scrotum artificially to 98 degrees instead of 91 or 92 degrees. And in the individuals that don’t have varicocele, they can still overcome that heat damage because their venous pooling mechanism is so good at buffering that heat damage. So that did not affect their testosterone production and it did not affect their spermatogenesis. However, in individuals that already have impaired venous cooling, for example, with varicocele or varicose veins then it did.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Let’s talk about optimal levels of testosterone. So below 400, and if you’re experiencing low testosterone symptoms, that’s not good. Is there an optimal level, as like a level that guys should reach for or is it gonna differ from man to man?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: It certainly differs, but that’s kind of an easy answer. So I’ll get into it more than that. A lot of times people have told me that I say individualized, I say that word a lot because health is individualized. We are all unique, we have different genetics, we have different epigenetics and we have different growth and development past that as well. But for most men, an optimal testosterone level is between about 500 and as high as you can go naturally. So there is some individuals with a total testosterone of 1500, they almost always have really high SHBG. So a lot of times their free testosterones only 20 or 25, between about 550 and whatever you can produce top in endogenously naturally without medication.

Brett McKay: But you also said it could be lower. I mean you mentioned there are athletes who are at 450 and they’re healthy. So if you get a blood test and it’s below 500 a little bit, you probably… I mean, I guess you shouldn’t worry too much about it if you’re not experiencing any symptoms.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Correct.

Brett McKay: Okay, that’s good to know. So let’s say a patient comes to you reporting symptoms of low T, you do a series of blood tests that show yeah, that your T levels are low, they’re below 400. What’s your first line of attack in helping this patient get his T levels up?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: First thing to look at would be LH and FSH. If those are really low, then I’m worried about the pituitary or the brain. If those are really high, then I’m worried about the health of the testicles. If they’re in between, then I look for another pathology like diabetes, metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, sleep apnea, etcetera. I also look at prolactin and IGF-1, make sure you assess their tumor risk. And then I also look at estradiol. If it’s a very high estradiol, then estradiol is likely what is suppressing the production of LH from the pituitary. So you have estradiol, which is your main estrogen, which is causing less testosterone production. And in that case, I look at things like alcohol consumption that can up-regulate aromatase or consumption of excess calories or fat that can up-regulate aromatase, which converts testosterone to estrogen by the way. So those are the first things.

Brett McKay: Beyond that, what are you looking at?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Beyond that, I’d like to, if pertinent, do an exam, make sure, especially if this individual is developing, if they’re an adolescent or whatnot, you need to make sure that they’re through all the tanner stages. Basically tanner stages one to five, five is done, when you’re essentially adult growth and development to make sure that they don’t have some unusual or unlikely syndrome. And then after that I’d like to look at their fasting insulin, their A1C, see if there’s something that I can correct. I look at their cortisol. If their cortisol is high, then there’s a lot of lifestyle factors and also supplements that can help control cortisol like Ashwagandha or Emodin. I look at their prolactin. So if their prolactin is just a little bit high, then maybe I do start them on some Vitamin B6 or some Vitamin E. If their estrogen is high, maybe I start them on some Calcium D-glucarate that helps with estrogen glucuronidation and metabolism. It basically helps you excrete it through your stool and then repeat labs in one, two, maybe even three months and see if we can improve those things along with, as always, diet and exercise.

Brett McKay: Okay. So it sounds like the first line of attack, if it’s not a pituitary problem, you’re gonna be primarily doing lifestyle changes, right? Quitting drinking, getting better sleep, diet, exercise to help get that insulin sensitivity back online. So yeah, lifestyle stuff would be the first line of attack and then will it take maybe one to two months before you start seeing results from that?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, often it does. A lot of times you feel better the first week and a lot of times your testosterone production recovers very quickly. But occasionally, I use medications as well. So some people utilize a short course of HCG, which essentially binds the LH receptor, takes the place of LH and occasionally, I’ll utilize very short courses. By very short, I mean, a week or maybe two weeks of selective estrogen receptor modifiers or sometimes longer in the right patient, especially very young patients that you’re trying to stimulate endogenous production, these are often patients that desire fertility within the near to mid near future.

Brett McKay: Besides diet, exercise, sleep, managing stress, you mentioned a few supplements that you recommend men taking to optimize male hormones. Are there ones that you recommend for just any guy who… Maybe they don’t have any problems with testosterone but they just want to feel good? Are there ones that you like and that are safe?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Creatine 5g-10g a day would be a great start. L-carnitine would be a consideration, especially if they’re interested in athletic performance optimization or body composition optimization, L-carnitine would be reasonable. Consider checking a TMAO to make sure that it doesn’t convert to that in too high of a rate. Another reasonable addition if someone has high estradiol would be Calcium D-glucarate to make sure that they’re binding up extra estrogen and excreting it.

Brett McKay: I’ve heard that Boron can impact testosterone. How does boron increase T levels?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Boron works okay for people with really high SHBGs. It increases free testosterone by decreasing SHBG. The effect wears off to some degree if you take Boron for a very long period of time. If you have very low levels or you’re insufficient or deficient in Boron, it works extremely well and a lot of people consume Dates or Raisins because they tend to be relatively high in Boron.

Brett McKay: There’s another something I’ve been hearing about lately, Tongkat ali, I think that’s how you pronounce it. What’s going on with that one?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Tongkat ali is also known as Longjack. So Tongkat’s active ingredients are Eurypeptides, one of which is Eurycomanone. And Tongkat is helpful because it upregulates a couple different enzymes in the steroidogenesis pathway. There’s been plenty of human study on it, with mixed results and it looks like the cause of the mixed results is, sometimes people have great activity of those enzymes. So that’s not the rate limiting step in testosterone production. So think of it as a signal, think of your testicles as a factory. Tongkat is a signal to that factory to ramp up production, but if your factory is already operating at maximum capacity or it’s limited by something else, then that’s not going to improve your testosterone level. Tongkat works on very similar enzymes that are also upregulated by insulin and IGF-1. So in general, if you’re in a caloric deficit or if you’re trying to lose weight or body fat, Tongkat will work better. If you have a low fasting insulin or a lower end IGF-1, Tongkat will also likely work better. And I’ve seen this anecdotally as well.

Brett McKay: A couple years ago, I remember ZMA was a big supplement that was pushed for increasing testosterone levels. Anything to that?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: ZMA is very reasonable to add if you have a low alk phos. So if you look at your CMP, which is your metabolic panel, there’ll be an enzyme called alkaline phosphatase. Alkaline phosphatase along with GGT are two intracellular enzymes. And the lower these two are the more likely you are to have insufficient levels of Zinc and magnesium. That’s why when I have input to various companies designing a supplement to optimize testosterone, I almost always put in Zinc, Magnesium and Vitamin D. You just wanna make sure these aren’t the right limiting step. Think about trying to optimize your testosterone is like trying to get into a fraternity. You’re not just making best friends with one of the people and then just hoping that nobody else will blackball you. You wanna make sure that you address each individual because if you… Let’s say you forget your Vitamin D and forget your Zinc, you’re deficient in Zinc, you’re deficient in Vitamin D, those two things will hold you back.

Brett McKay: Once you start down this path of increasing your testosterone or getting them optimized, is there any benefit to getting them higher? So let’s say you started off at 400, you had low T symptoms and then through lifestyle changes and maybe taking some supplements, you bump it up to like a 700. Are you gonna get any more benefit from testosterone by getting it up to 800 or 900?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Past about 600, there’s little to no benefit, other than bragging rights.

Brett McKay: At what point would you have a patient go on testosterone replacement therapy?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: At any point when the risks outweigh the benefits and they understand both the risks and the benefits in their own terms.

Brett McKay: So what are the risk of TRT?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yeah, one of the risks is it causes more fluid retention and swelling. One of the risks is if you hyper convert to estrogen, estrogen will then bind to the liver and cause more SHBG and platelet production. And if your platelets go very high past a certain point, we know that people on oral estrogen, the blood clot risk is associated with how high their platelets and SHBG go. It’s likely the same for TRT. So if you go on TRT and you go into a huge bulk and you start consuming a bunch of alcohol and your platelets skyrocket, then it is gonna increase your blood clot risk. So TRT is not in and of itself going to improve health, it’s just going to be a tool to help you achieve a lot of your goals. Another risk of testosterone is if people have heard of medications called statins. Those work by decreasing the activity of an enzyme called HMG-CoA reductase. Any androgen including testosterone increases the activity of this enzyme. So often people’s cholesterol and it’s not actually cholesterol, they are lipoproteins, but people’s “bad cholesterol” gets worse. That’s why we watch that ApoB number very closely because we know that ApoB is the particle that is going to lead to plaque formation in areas like the coronary artery.

Brett McKay: And I guess the benefits of TRT is that you’ll mitigate those symptoms of low testosterone?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Correct. And there’s of course other benefits as well like the benefits of estrogen, that we discussed earlier, being it’s cardioprotective benefit. And one of the main benefits of testosterone in a lot of individuals that I see start is they might have a… Let’s say they have an A1C of 5.7 or 5.8, which is technically pre-diabetes. You’re very unlikely to get diabetes on testosterone compared to if you are not on TRT. So a lot of individuals, perhaps they’re, I wouldn’t say doomed, but very likely to get diabetes and TRT can make a huge difference, especially when combined with other insulin sensitizing medications to prevent that.

Brett McKay: Do you keep people on TRT indefinitely? Is it like once you start to keep doing it or are there periods where you’re like, “Well, we’re gonna take you off and see what happens” or well how does that work?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Most individuals are on indefinitely, but not everyone. Occasionally there’ll be a patient that is profoundly hypogonadal and the benefit of testosterone at that time is just huge. Let’s say it’s a patient who has a BMI of 40 and they weigh 400 pounds and they also don’t have a huge amount of lean body mass to lose in proportion. Everybody who weighs 400 pounds is gonna have a lot of lean body mass, but just less relative to your average person and they wanna maintain as much of that as possible. They need that tool in order to exercise, even if it’s somewhat of a placebo tool, that still helps. So if it gets them having a very healthy lifestyle, they go on that medication, perhaps they go on another medication like a GLP-1 for a short period of time and then they don’t really know what their baseline testosterone is. So maybe after two years they’ve learned those lifestyle interventions. They very slowly are ready to come off of every medication and then you can use a medication like HCG to help restore natural production. Perhaps one week of a medication like Enclomiphene or Novedex or even Raloxifene. And then you see what their natural production capability is. You give them a few weeks and perhaps they restore to a total testosterone of 600s, which is likely quite good in that situation or perhaps they go down to 100s again.

But a lot of people would want that chance to go back to producing their testosterone naturally. And in some cases it does work. I would say 90% of people that start on testosterone are going to remain on it indefinitely. But I would also say that 90% of people that go on testosterone can very likely regain at least their previous level of testosterone if they were to want to come off.

Brett McKay: Well, here’s a question. With female hormone therapy, you might start taking it during menopause to help with symptoms, but at a certain point, once menopause is over, I think you’re supposed to get off those hormones. Does something like that happen for men? I mean, you might do TRT throughout your 50s and 60s and then at a certain point you’re in your 70s and you’re like, Well I don’t need to do this anymore. Or are there 80-year-old or 90-year-old guys taking TRT?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: There are 80 or 90-year-old guys taking TRT. Occasionally, you’ll do a dose adjustment. It just kind of depends on the situation, but a lot of times when males reach that age, they are less likely to have as much benefit and they are more likely to have slightly more harm. So it’s a moving target over time where you get out the scale and you’re weighing the risks and the benefits and at that point when a patient’s already on TRT, you also weigh the risks of how difficult it would be to come off, which is not extremely difficult. But it is difficult because there’s medication regimens that you have to go with and even with those medications often there is a short period of time when you don’t feel great.

Brett McKay: So we’ve been talking about optimizing male hormones in grown men, but let’s say we got some dads and moms out there listening and they’ve got boys who are about to start or are in the middle of puberty. What can they do for their sons? What can young guys do to make sure they set themselves up for a lifetime of male hormone optimization?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: First and foremost, no huge dirty bulk in early adolescence. What I mean by that is, I mean, let’s say there’s somebody that’s trying to put on weight for football or whatever other reason, can’t think of any reasons where it would be worth it, but they’re putting on weight and also putting on fat. Adipose tissue in fat, adipose tissue is fat, that is going to increase the conversion to estrogen and estrogen is gonna close the growth plates of the bone. So that’s gonna prevent you from reaching full stature, both in height and other areas of your skeletal developments as well. So that’s a great initial recommendation. Thinking about gut health and fiber consumption is also very important. That’s gonna prevent, again from over, it’s called intrahepatic circulation of estrogen. Estrogen is not necessarily the enemy. In fact, a little bit of estrogen is neat to what’s called priming the pituitary in order to fully kickstart adolescence.

And that’s one of the reasons why boys with very high body masses have higher estrogens. The pituitary gets primed too early and something called precocious puberty is happening, which is too early of puberty. So that’s another thing to consider. In addition to that, you wanna have a reasonable balance between cardiovascular exercise and resistance training. You certainly want to do both because adolescents can be thought of as your free endogenous steroids of, I’ll say cycle, just because people understand it. But your free endogenous steroid boost where you know you are going to be one, super sensitive to all the androgens that are released, probably most people remember puberty and you’ll also be having a lot of androgen around, regardless of what you do, even if your health hasn’t been great. So when that endogenous steroid burst happens, that is the perfect time to take advantage of those lifestyle tools to build up very high bone mineral density and very high lean body mass without putting on excess body fat.

Brett McKay: I imagine young people getting plenty of sleep is important too.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Yes, extremely important. And that might be one of the most common causes of suboptimal hormone profiles in adolescents.

Brett McKay: What about supplementation? Is supplementation something you encourage in young people to optimize their hormones or is you just focus on the diet and exercise?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: With the oversight of a doctor, I do encourage supplementation, if it makes sense. For example, let’s say there’s a young person and they get a stool test and the beta-glucuronidase enzyme is very high. We know that that individual is just recycling their estrogen over and over again, that makes something like a Calcium D-glucarate or with the oversight of the doctor maybe even a very low dose of an aromatase inhibitor, a very reasonable addition. And then if you get blood tests, you can actually check the hormones to make sure that they’re increasing at the correct rates, that your DHT is optimal, your testosterone’s optimal, your estradiol is optimal, your IGF-1 is optimal, and then you can tweak a supplement. Supplements are just like medications, they have pharmacologic effects so they have an effect on the body and the body metabolizes them.

So things like Creatine can be very reasonable. Creatine does not affect the development of the kidneys. I did a podcast with my good friend James O’Hara recently. We get a lot of questions from pediatricians because the AAP, which is a society of pediatricians, still recommends no Creatine supplementation whatsoever up to the age of 18. So not even, not even a 17-year-old. So I just kind of thought that was… And it’s been 15 years. So they’re gonna update their recommendation within the next couple years whenever they have a joint meeting. But that’s definitely a vestige of times past when we thought that Creatine was harmful to healthy kidneys. You just check a Cystatin C because Creatine makes your creatinine blood marker look abnormally high. Falsely high. So Creatine can make sense in a lot of kids as well. And then if there is a kid that has really low insulin IGF-1, sometimes Tongkat makes sense in that individual.

And then in some kids that do have optimal hormone profiles, let’s say there’s an athlete and he’s developing or she’s developing and they have very high testosterone, very high IGF-1, that’s great, you know that Myostatin levels are gonna be really high after you have that burst of androgen during adolescence. Myostatin is gonna stop the muscle from developing and cause you to start putting more fat into the tissue. I think that Myostatin inhibitors, week ones like Fortetropin, which comes from fertilized egg yolks or Epicatechin. CocoaVia is a good source of Epicatechin. Different cocoa powders have a lot of Epicatechin. Green tea has EGCG, which is another Epicatechin. Basically, those take down the levels of Myostatin. Those are also very reasonable to take for the right patient.

Brett McKay: What about, should parents be sweating about xenoestrogens in their kids? Like, make sure they get certain types of deodorants or cosmetic products and avoiding plastics?

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Bisphenol A and phthalates. Yes. That’s kind of where I personally draw the line, where if you are worried about every single thing, we live in an unnatural environment, more so than ever. So those are usually the ones that I say to avoid. If you live in an area that more likely has contaminants and microplastics, a lot of times I do recommend testing your water. There are a lot of services that do this. I personally used MyTapScore to test both the water, from the tap and the water through my Berkey filter. If you have young children. And that seems like a very reasonable time to use a water filter if you don’t know what the contents of your water is. And then as far as foods, of course, avoiding ultra processed foods, I think, it was ultra processed mac and cheese that got a bad name for having high phthalates. I assume they fixed that by now, but I actually don’t know. So a lot of times it’s the same recommendations as any other whole food diet. And then know your sources, try to avoid contaminants at very high levels and use the Pareto principle, try to do right most of the time and you’ll get most the benefit even if you’re just doing it some of the time.

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

Dr. Kyle Gillette: My hub is on Instagram, kylegillettmd, and it’s Gillett Health on all other platforms. I do have a podcast that we fairly recently have, I guess, gotten pretty good audio and video of, but that’s on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. We have a clinically, I guess, a clinical grade podcast. And then we have a layman’s podcast that we’re gonna call After Hours, which should provide good entertainment.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Dr. Kyle Gillett, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Dr. Kyle Gillette: Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Dr. Kyle Gillett. You can find more information about his work at his website, gilletthealth.com. Also, check out his podcast, Gillett Health podcast and check out our show notes at aom.is/optimalt where you’ll find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic.

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

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A lot of self-improvement advice and content feels empty. And there’s a reason for that. It often offers routines and habits to practice, but doesn’t offer a strong, overarching reason to practice them.

That’s why the self-improvement advice of the Founding Fathers is particularly compelling. Though they were imperfect men, they had a clear why for trying to become better than they were. For the Founders, life was about the pursuit of happiness, and they equated happiness with excellence and virtue — a state that wasn’t about feeling good, but being good. The Founders pursued happiness not only for the personal benefit in satisfaction and tranquility it conferred, but for the way the attainment of virtue would benefit society as a whole; they believed that political self-government required personal self-government.

Today on the show, Jeffrey Rosen, a professor of law, the president of the National Constitution Center, and the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, shares the book the Founders read that particularly influenced their idea of happiness as virtue and self-mastery. We talk about the schedules and routines the Founders kept, the self-examination practices they did to improve their character, and how they worked on their flaws, believing that, while moral perfection was ultimately an impossible goal to obtain, it was still something worth striving for.

Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support!