The Art of Manliness
The Art of Manliness Podcast aims to deepen and improve every area of a man's life, from fitness and philosophy, to relationships and productivity. Engaging and edifying interviews with some of the world's most interesting doers and thinkers drop the fluff and filler to glean guests' very best, potentially life-changing, insights.
Turn Your Anxiety Into a Strength
Anxiety is typically thought of as a disease or a disorder. My guest has a very different way of looking at it, and says that rather than being a burden, anxiety can actually become a benefit, and even a strength.Dr. David Rosmarin is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, the founder of the Center for Anxiety, and the author of Thriving with Anxiety: 9 Tools to Make Your Anxiety Work for You. Today on the show, David explains why …
Counterintuitive Ideas About Marriage, Family, and Kids
There are a lot of popular ideas out there around marriage, family, and culture, like, for example, that living together before marriage decreases your chances of divorce, people are having fewer children because children are expensive to raise, and society is becoming more secular because people leave religion in adulthood.Are these ideas actually born out by the data?Today we put that question to Lyman Stone, a sociologist and demographer who crunches numbers from all the latest studies to find out …
The Cues That Make You Charismatic
Note: This is a rebroadcast.Charisma can make everything smoother, easier, and more exciting in life. It’s a quality that makes people want to listen to you, to adopt your ideas, to be with you.While what creates charisma can seem like a mystery, my guest today, communications expert Vanessa Van Edwards, says it comes down to possessing an optimal balance of two qualities: warmth and competence.The problem is, even if you have warmth and competence, you may not be good at …
The Japanese Practice That Can Give More Meaning to an American Holiday
A focus on gratitude is typical this time of year. But more often than not, the cognitive or behavioral nods we give gratitude around Thanksgiving can feel a little limp, rote, and unedifying. If you feel like this American holiday has been lacking in meaning, maybe what you need is to infuse it with a Japanese practice.The Naikan method of self-reflection grew out of Buddhist spirituality and has been recognized by psychologists as a way to develop greater self-awareness, gratitude, …
The Leadership Qualities That Will Set You Apart From the Pack
For the last 15 years, William Vanderbloemen has run an executive search firm that helps non-profit organizations find leaders. Over the course of conducting tens of thousands of interviews with top-tier candidates, he's tracked and recorded what qualities the best leaders — the people he calls "unicorns" — possess that set them apart from everyone else in the field.William shares what he's learned in his new book Be the Unicorn: 12 Data-Driven Habits That Separate the Best Leaders from the …
The Lesser-Known Philosophy of the Iron Age Greeks
When we think of Western philosophers who pondered questions about the good life, we typically think of the classical era of Greece and the likes of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. But my guest would say that the poets and philosophers who came out of the preceding period, Greece's Iron Age, also have something to say about the nature of existence.Adam Nicolson is the author of How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks. Today on the show, Adam takes …
10 Unchanging Ideas for Navigating an Ever-Changing World
To figure out what will happen in the future, we typically make guesswork predictions and look to particular periods in the past that seem like potential parallels.My guest says that to figure out what will happen next, and how best to navigate that coming landscape, the best things to consider are those that have been true in every time, and will be true until the end of it.Morgan Housel is a venture capitalist and the author of Same as Ever: …
How to Avoid Death by Comfort
Nietzsche's maxim, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger," isn't just a sound philosophical principle. It's also a certifiable physiological phenomenon; toxins and stressors that could be deadly in large doses, actually improve health and resilience in smaller, intermittent ones. The ironic thing, my guest points out, is that it's the fact that we're not getting enough of this sublethal stress these days that's really doing us in.Paul Taylor is a former British Royal Navy Aircrew Officer, an exercise physiologist, …
The 3 Types of Failure (And How to Learn From Each)
People often think of failure in one of two ways: as something that hinders the pursuit of success, or as something that's a necessity in obtaining it — as in the Silicon Valley mantra that recommends failing fast and often.There's truth to both ideas, but neither offers a complete picture of failure. That's because there isn't just one kind of failure, but three.Here to unpack what those three types are is Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership at the Harvard …
What Lifting Ancient Stones Can Teach You About Being a Man
For millennia, stone lifting was an important part of cultures around the world, and its significance went far beyond feats of strength. Stone lifting was part of weddings and funerals, used as a job interview to assess someone's fitness as a farmhand, and included in rites of passage and tests of all-around manhood.Much of the world's ancient stone lifting culture has been forgotten, and rocks that used to be hoisted regularly in town squares and cemeteries have been sitting untouched …