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in: Behavior, Character, Podcast

• Last updated: September 28, 2021

Podcast #215: Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

A common complaint of the modern age is the sense of distraction and lack of focus that pervades our lives. We typically blame technology like the internet or smartphones for our inability to concentrate on the task at hand. But my guest today argues that the culture of distraction we face runs much deeper than that and actually began several hundred years ago with the Enlightenment. 

His name is Matthew Crawford, and he’s the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft as well as his latest book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Today on the show, Matthew and I discuss the origins of our distracted culture and the deeper implications of lives lived totally inside our own heads. We explore the idea that if we really want to live a life of focus, we need to go beyond just blocking time-wasting sites on our computers and phones. Are you ready to take that journey and discover the world outside your head? You’ll definitely want to tune in to this discussion.

Show Highlights

  • Why Matthew went from working at a D.C. think-tank to opening a motorcycle repair shop
  • Why skilled manual labor can provide a sense of meaning and purpose that you can’t get in an office job
  • How slavery can come wrapped in the ideology of freedom
  • Why technology isn’t the only source of our distracted age
  • Why having choices can actually make you less free
  • The societal consequences of the age of distraction
  • Why virtual reality makes it hard to create a coherent life
  • How the problem of attention originated with the Enlightenment
  • How rugged individualism can turn you into a conformist
  • How subjectivism makes the world bland
  • Why Mickey Mouse Clubhouse symbolizes everything that’s wrong with modern culture
  • Why friction and conflict are necessary to be an individual
  • Why skilled practice is the key to getting outside of your head
  • Why the submission to tradition and authority is necessary for individuality and meaning
  • And much more!

Resources/Studies/People Mentioned in Podcast

World beyond your head book cover by Matthew Crawford.

The World Beyond Your Head provides some much needed nuance and insight on our culture of distraction. This is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. Highly recommend picking up a copy.

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A common complaint of the modern age is the sense of distraction and lack of focus that pervades our lives. We typically blame technology like the internet or our smartphones for an inability to concentrate on the task at hand, but my guest today argues that the culture of distraction we face today runs much deeper than that, that it actually began several hundred years ago with the Enlightenment.

His name is Matthew Crawford. He’s the author of the book Shop Class as Soulcraft. His latest book is called The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming a Human in the Age of Distraction. Today on the show, Matthew and I discuss the origins of our distracted culture and the deeper implications of our lives lived totally inside our own heads. We explore the idea that we really want to live a life of focus. We need to go beyond just blocking time-wasting sites on our computers and phones. Are you ready to take that journey and discover the world outside your head? Stay tuned for a great discussion. After the show, make sure to check out the show notes at aom.is/crawford.

All right. Matthew Crawford, welcome to the show.

Matt Crawford: Thanks for having me on.

Brett McKay: I’ve long been a fan of your work. Your first book, that I really enjoyed, Shop Class as Soulcraft. Your latest book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction is out in paperback now and it’s very, very good. We’re going to talk about that today, but before we get there, can you talk a little bit about your background because I think it’s interesting first, but also, it will, I think, put some context in from where you’re coming from with the arguments you’re making today.

Matt Crawford: I tell a little bit of my story in Shop Class as Soulcraft. I majored in physics as an undergrad at Santa Barbara, UC Santa Barbara, and tried to get a job with that degree and couldn’t, so I fell back on being an electrician and did that for a while. Eventually, I got interested in philosophy. I went and I did a PhD in sort of the history of political thought at the University of Chicago and held various white collar jobs that weren’t doing it for me and found myself running a think tank in DC and pretty much hated it. I lasted about 5 months. I quit that to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia.

Brett McKay: Yeah, from there, that’s what you do, but you’re also right now, I guess, currently, it says on your back of your book you’re a senior fellow at the University of Virginia.

 

Matt Crawford: Yeah, right, so I don’t teach, but I’ve got this gig as a research fellow at the University of Virginia. What it means is I try to get out there about once a week and have lovely conversations with people. It’s a really nice, intellectual community. It’s just enough of a toehold in academia to give me what I need from that kind of environment, but there’s no obligation. I think there must be some clerical error at the heart of it, but I don’t ask too many questions.

Brett McKay: You spend most of your time working in your motorcycle shop?

Matt Crawford: Yeah. It varies. I should back up. I also do some writing, obviously, so depending on how much writing, so these days, it’s probably only 30 hours a week in the shop. That goes up and down. I’ve got an employee right now, so I kind of have to be there more.

 

Brett McKay: Got you. Your first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, you make the case that skilled manual labor can provide a person a sense of satisfaction and meaning when that often can’t be found in the world of knowledge work or information work, right? You felt it and I think a lot of other people felt it. It’s like the work I’m doing, I don’t really know what it’s doing, actually, pushing numbers into Excel sheets. It’s really a great book. For our listeners who haven’t read it, go out there and get it.

Your new book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, is this book a continuation of your thoughts in Shop Class and if so, how are the two connected?

Matt Crawford: I guess one really simple way to state the connection would be they’re motivated by being struck with the thought that various forms of slavery come wrapped in an ideology of freedom. In Shop Class, I was trying to make sense of my own work experience and why I always felt so stultified and sleepy, really, in the various cubicle jobs I had. When you’re working in an office, it’s often difficult to say exactly what you’ve accomplished at the end of any given day. The chain of cause and effect can be pretty opaque and confusing and so that feeling of individual agency can be elusive. By that, I just mean seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, whereas I’ve worked as a mechanic and electrician and when I flip the switch and see the lights come on, it’s like this incontrovertible experience of having done something that I can actually point to. I always found that really thrilling.

 

Brett McKay: Yeah, the connection in The World Beyond Your Head …

Matt Crawford: Yeah, okay. In The World Beyond Your Head, it’s the sense that we’re living through a crisis of attention right now. It’s become pretty widely remarked upon. It’s usually people complaining about technology in some way. Then I think one reason it’s become hard for us to resist all the enticements and all the appropriations of our attention is that they present it to us under the ideology of choice, right, just having more choices is always better and this idea that we get, really, from economics that to maximize your freedom requires maximizing the number of choices you face.

That’s precisely the condition that makes for maximum dissipation of your energies, so it seemed like it required a reflection on what’s at stake when we’re so subject to appropriation of our attention by often mechanized forces and by commercial forces because when it’s really bad, I think it often feels like what’s at stake is whether you’re going to be able to maintain a coherent self, just a self that’s able to act according to settled purposes and ongoing projects, rather than just flitting about.

Brett McKay: You touched on it a bit, some of the consequences of this attentional problem that we’re facing today, but it seems like in the book, it runs deeper. The argument that you’re making is it runs deeper than just being like, “Oh, man. I got to quit checking Facebook because I got to be productive in my job,” or whatever. It seems like the consequences, actually, are deeper and affect us on a societal level, as well, so what are some of those consequences?

Matt Crawford: As I had mentioned, a feeling of limitation, a feeling that your attention isn’t simply yours to direct as you will. Of course, it’s not as simple as some kind of … It’s not something coercive. It’s tapping into appetites we have for certain kinds of stimulation. We willingly invite into our lives all the things from Candy Crush to porn and so I think, really, this distractability points to a deeper cultural problem, which is agnosticism about what’s worth paying attention to. That really comes down to the question of what to value because what you pay attention to is what’s most present to you or most real for you.

I think part of the problem is that just the way we inhabit the world has really changed dramatically over the past, I don’t know, 20 years or something. You can trace the genealogy of this variously and push it back 100 years if you want, but in any case, when the natural way of inhabiting the world is in your body and the body gives us a center of orientation, so there’s things behind me and in front of me, to the left, to the right, above and below. What that does is it establishes a zone of relevance. What is actually within reach, literally within reach?

That’s important for attention because the whole idea of attention is that you select some things out from everything that’s available and not other things. When you’re encountering the world through representations, like on a computer screen, where you can take a virtual tour of the Forbidden City in Beijing or of underwater caverns, everything is lumped into a distancelessness that doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which to say this and not that pertains to me.

In that condition, I think it’s very hard to compose a coherent life on the basis of infinite options, infinite choice. Not least because whatever’s going on in your immediate environment with the people that you actually share your life with is likely to not be as amusing as whatever’s going on on the internet, so again, this feeling of being subject to centrifugal forces that pull us apart.

Brett McKay: There’s a lot to unpack there, but you started off talking about there’s this notion today that we have unlimited choices, which makes us free, but you argue that actually, it can actually stifle us because we become overwhelmed with the amount of choices. This is the crux of the problem of attention. You make an interesting case. Like you said, things have changed a lot in the past 20 years with the advent of the internet and smart devices where you’re constantly connected to a virtual world. You argue that this attention problem we have originated 300 years ago, you could say, with the Enlightenment. I know there’s a lot to unpack there, but how did Enlightenment thinking lead to this problem of attention that we have today?

 

Matt Crawford: Really at the heart of it is a set of ideas that emerged back in the 1600s about how we make contact with the world, how we grasp the world. The big idea was that we do so only through our internal mental representations of the world. In other words, you can’t really make contact with the things themselves, but you construct some picture in your head. It’s always through that mediating representation that we encounter the world.

Now there’s good reason to think that this is a more or less completely bogus view of how we grasp reality. I say that based on more recent philosophy and causative times, but the weird thing is that life has come to imitate theory so that in the 21st Century, sure enough, we increasingly encounter the world through these representations. As I hinted at before, I think that’s the basic reason why we feel a kind of lack of limit on our mental lives that has the effect of dissipating our mental energies because if your certain bodily way of being in the world isn’t providing a frame of orientation, then there’s literally no limit to what you can preoccupy yourself with.

Brett McKay: Right. That can be just psychologically exhausting.

Matt Crawford: Yeah, totally. It’s also we’re subject to this feeling like I’m missing out or I’m not completely optimizing my experience. There’s something more awesome going on in some corner I need to investigate. That’s connected, I think, to this feeling of individualism where it’s really up to everybody to make themselves into their fullest self. There’s a kind of existential heroism where you feel radically responsible for yourself.

Once upon a time, you might’ve had a hereditary occupation. You might’ve been born into some rigid social system where your range of possibilities for you were quite constrained. Of course, that’s bad in all kinds of ways, but what it meant is that I think the experience of failure it goes much deeper for us precisely because we feel like if your life isn’t everything you want it to be, it’s on you because we have so much freedom. I think that leads to a lot of anxiety and depression.

Brett McKay: Right. Even de Tocqueville, is that how you say his name?

Matt Crawford: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Brett McKay: The French guy, he noticed that in Americans. They had a lot of freedom, but they were some of the most miserable people at the same time.

Matt Crawford: Yeah. One thing, de Tocqueville’s great. He pointed out that Americans, we have this idea that everyone has to stand on their own two feet and reject any kind of example or custom, any kind of social authority. He’s writing … This is back in the 1830s and this was already true of America. He said that this has a strange effect because we actually sense, correctly, that we’re not really competent to judge everything for ourselves. We have this cultural imperative to do so and it makes us anxious, so what we do is we look around to see what everyone else thinks, our contemporaries. There’s a paradoxical way in which the rugged individualist turns out to be the conformist. In other words, we look to our contemporaries, rather than to some inherited tradition or some other forms of social authority.

Brett McKay: Going back to this idea that we’re agnostic about our attention, we don’t have … If you want to use Aristotelian because we don’t have a telos for our attention. I think you argue in the book that this originated in the Enlightenment, too, so there’s this idea that personal autonomy, freedom is the thing that’s most important. As a result, you can’t impose your beliefs on other people or your preferences on other people because that would rob them of their freedom. That sounds great on theory. It’s like oh, yeah, everyone wants to do their own thing, but you make the case that it actually leads to this blandness and flattening.

Matt Crawford: Yeah. Everything you just said, if you wanted to give a name to it, you could name it subjectivism, the idea that what makes something right or good or beautiful is how I feel about it and that all of these judgments are radically private. It’s like an itch. No one else can feel your itch or your pain, which means that they’re incommunicable in a way. We can’t really enter into a shared judgment about things.

One thing that does is I think it makes us retreat ever further into ourselves. There’s a kind of timidity about disputing with one another in a rational way and so instead, what we find is these people forming these self-selecting enclaves online, where we affirm one another and form these micro subcultures. We see this in politics, too, where it’s increasingly self-reinforcing echo chambers and the very idea of a shared truth, a shared world that we can talk rationally about seems to have been eroded a little bit.

Brett McKay: Right. It makes the world sort of bland. When we do interact with others who don’t share our interests, we have to keep things very neutral. You gave the example of the music at the gym where it was playing some sort of weird emo music. Bland emo music was being piped in. You went to the kid at the counter and said, “Play anything. I’m sure whatever you listen to is better than this garbage.” The kid was just like, “No, I can’t do that.”

Matt Crawford: Yeah, that was interesting. What he said was, “I wouldn’t want to impose my choice on anyone.” That sounds admirable in a way, but what it meant is that he had this automatic deference to the Muzak selected by some institutional Muzak provider. In a weird way in which this liberal notion of always respecting the majority can turn very easily into just conceding the whole field to whatever commercial forces are most energetic in taking over our public spaces.

I contrast that with when I was 13 lifting weights in the YMCA in Berkeley where there’d be a little boombox on the floor and people could fight over it to put their music on. Of course, the guys who dominated the weight room are these huge linemen guys who would squat like 600 pounds, so the scrawny, little white guy, obviously, I wasn’t going to be challenging anybody for the boombox. I really preferred that because the source of the music was right there. It was accessible.

There’s a kind of hierarchy in the weight room. It was clear to everybody and somehow, my current experience in the gym with the Muzak, it’s like it lays this blank, suffocating blanket of, I don’t know, lameness over the whole thing. Everyone then, of course, plugs in their ear buds because they don’t want to hear the Muzak. Then you can’t get a spot because you have to force someone to take their ear buds out, so I just miss the slightly more edgy environment of a gym where there was more interaction. There also was more hierarchy.

Brett McKay: People were outside. They had to engage with the outside. They weren’t inside their head, so to speak.

Matt Crawford: Yeah.

Brett McKay: I think you make an interesting argument, too, so this idea that we have. here’s an illusion that we have freedom and autonomy. We can go online and we can order shoes however we want them. We can have it delivered right to our door in 2 days, thanks to Amazon Prime. It seems like technology is making our world more frictionless, but why is it that this frictionlessness that we’re trying to achieve with what people try and achieve in Silicon Valley, how does that actually deter us from actually becoming an individual and actually experiencing real agency and autonomy? Your example of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, my kids are like … I’ve got a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old and I’ve seen that show and I’ve hated it. I’m just like this sucks. This is terrible. You use it as an example as like what we’re trying … There’s a sense of choice, but you really don’t have a choice.

Matt Crawford: If you have kids, it means you end up watching a fair bit of children’s television. It’s pretty horrifying. It’s hard to put your finger on what’s wrong. Everything’s so nice. That’s probably the problem. In the book, I contrast the old Disney cartoons with the current ones. In the old ones from whatever, 50 years ago or something, it’s all about slapstick violence. Material reality is constantly thwarting and frustrating people and injuring them and it’s funny. It’s funny to watch someone get slapped by a grandfather clock or retractable blinds that suddenly pull you up and around into the mechanism.

Contrast that with the current iteration where it’s got all the same characters, but the world depicted is full of all this amazing technology that always works perfectly and there’s no moment of frustration that’s allowed to arise. When there is some kind of difficulty that the character faces in the story, they say these magic words. I think it’s Meeska, Mooska, something, something.

Brett McKay: Yeah, or like, “Hey, Toodles,” is the other thing.

 

Matt Crawford: Yeah, right, and then hey, Toodles, so when you say that, it makes this I guess it’s called Toodle that condenses out of the cloud. It’s this computer-like thing and it presents a menu of 4 options, 4 solutions, for whatever problem you have. Then your task is to simply choose one of these solutions. Now in every episode, there are 4 problems that arise, so you are guaranteed that one of these solutions is going to be the one. It’s not just not funny. It’s somehow the opposite of funny.

If the old cartoons were depicting a certain kind of psychological reality, the new ones seem to be not concerned with depicting reality so much as adjusting kids to ask for help. Don’t give in to frustration. Pick one of the solutions that’s offered to you. It’s just super-creepy in the way that it seems to be educating kids into a kind of passivity and dependence. This menu of options and choices, I think, makes us more pliable to whoever is creating this little choice architectures. Yeah, I put that in the chapter with the title Virtual Reality As Moral Ideal. The idea is that the kind of creeping substitution of virtual reality for actual reality.

Brett McKay: Right. What this does, like you said, it puts this in our head and makes us think that some magic thing will come down and solve our problems for us without any friction. We don’t have to deal with annoying customer service. We don’t have to deal with stuff not working. If something doesn’t work, there will be options for us to pick from. As you said, giving us those options, it gives us the appearance of autonomy, but you really don’t have it because you have to choose one of those options.

Matt Crawford: The word I like is agency.

Brett McKay: Agency.

Matt Crawford: Yeah, and shift our concern from autonomy to agency, so this world depicted in the contemporary Disney cartoons is one where you don’t need any skill whatsoever. You choose something, but you don’t have any idea how your choice is actually realized in the world. I think skill only develops in an environment where you’re challenged, where you have to engage directly with material reality that isn’t geared to please you. In a world where everything is frictionless, it means you never develop skills. You’re then dependent on whoever is arranging this for you.

That really gets to the big idea of the book, The World Beyond Your Head, which is that it’s through skilled practices that we can reclaim a certain way of being in the world more directly. I present these case studies of short order cooks, motorcycle racers, hockey players, people who build musical instruments, can establish what I call ecology attention, where your perception is tuned to the particular features of your environment that show up for you through the lens of the activity. Extraneous information is just dampened or disappears and you get into the state of total absorption that can be really pleasing.

Brett McKay: When you say what these skills do or getting involved in a skilled practice, it forces you out of your head. You have to deal with the world as it is and not how you wish it were in magic Mickey Mouse Club land. Then also, you argue that skilled practices usually have these traditions and hierarchies, as you talked about earlier, that on the one hand, it seems like oh, wow, that’s stifling. You argue actually, no, it actually is the way you can have agency and express your individuality.

Matt Crawford: Yeah. To begin with, just physical stuff, to get good at playing the guitar, you have to submit to the mechanical contingencies of the instrument. You have to practice scales endlessly. Similarly, learning a foreign language is just a lot to learn. It provides a kind of authoritative structure within which you develop your powers of expression. I think it’s true in general that real agency only arises in the context of submission to things you did not need yourself. The terms submission and authority, those are really jarring to our ear, especially if it involves other people. It’s one thing to submit to a guitar, but if there’s other people involved, then we really get our hackles up.

The final chapter of the book, I’m talking about this shop where they’re building baroque pipe organs. They’ve inherited these forms of the baroque pipe organ that are hundreds of years old. What was really interesting about it to me is that they’re engaged in this … It isn’t simply a kind of loving antiquarianism, where they’re reproducing these static forms that have come down to them. It’s more like they’re engaged in this quarrel with the organ builders of the past. It’s a quarrel about how to best realize the musical potential of the pipe organ. It’s a conversation and it moves along and it has a point.

One reason it was so fascinating is that to begin with, they’re building their pipe organs to last 400 years. Literally, that’s their time frame. They’re putting these in churches, in music halls and so that alone shows you they’re working on a very different timescale than most of the economy. There’s this interplay between being oriented toward the past and being oriented toward the future. It means that the individual craftspeople working there, and there was maybe like 20 or 30 people working there, they’re developing in skill and understanding they see as part of this much longer historical arc, which is the history of their trade. It’s this kind of living tradition that they situate themselves in and really seem to give a meaning to their work and a kind of narrative coherence to their lives that I found really quite amazing.

One thing my observations there really it’s complicated this idea of the spirit of technology versus the spirit of preservation. We often think that technology just vandalizes the things that we care about or that it’s some kind of saving force that will lead the world into utopia or something, but here, it was this interplay of they’re constantly innovating. They’re trying new materials, but it’s with a view to keeping alive, again, this story arc they’re part of. I just thought it was really … It cuts so much against the image we have of the innovator as just gestating in a California garage someplace and then emerging like Moses with his new app or whatever it may be, which is this totally isolated moment that’s connected to the past and the future. It was interesting for that reason.

Brett McKay: Right. Just by embedding themselves in this tradition and this community, very small community of organ restorers and builders, it gave them a reference to which their changes meant something. They decided to use this material for the stop. They were being true to it, but at the same time, it allowed them to innovate, as well. It gave them reference for their innovation, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.

 

Matt Crawford: Yeah. It’s all these overlapping lineages of apprenticeship is what makes up this community. As a beginning organ maker, you have to just do things the way your teacher shows you without fully understanding the reasons for it. You learn by imitation. There’s a mentorship that happens. In America, apprenticeship is often criticized for being too narrow. In education, it’s often said that with the economy and demands, it’s workers who are flexible, almost that they shouldn’t be burdened with any particular set of skills or knowledge because you have to be ready to reinvent yourself at any time.

When you go deep into some particular art or skill, it trains your powers of concentration and perception. You become more discerning about these particular objects, in this case, pipe organs. If all goes well, you begin to care viscerally about quality, usually because you didn’t initiate it into a kind of ethic of caring about what you’re doing by the example of some particular person, some mentor, who embodies that spirit of craftsmanship.

I guess my point then is that this technical training that was certainly narrow in its immediate application can be understood as a part of education in the broadest sense, that is, intellectual and moral formation. There, I think there’s a larger point to be made about hands-on training for young people.

Brett McKay: Yeah. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a lady named Susan Wise Bauer. I think she lives in Virginia, I know. She wrote a book called the Classical Education You Never Had. She makes a similar argument that today in education in our schools, we think telling kids to memorize rote information like dates and who are the characters in books, we shouldn’t do that because in today’s economy, they need to know how to think and be flexible. She says when you skip over that, the very basics, and get people to developing opinions … That’s what she says. Kids are taught to develop opinions. They don’t have anything to build their opinion on, so the opinion’s shaky.

Matt Crawford: Yeah, that’s good. I think if you don’t have actual knowledge, then it’s very hard to think because you’re just moving around vague abstractions. I think that’s really true.

Brett McKay: Matthew, this has been a really fascinating conversation. We really scraped the surface of it. I’m curious. What’s the takeaway for us guys who maybe we’re not going to start a baroque organ shop or become a custom motorcycle guy? What’s the takeaway for us? Is it to get in touch with the real as much as possible and stay away from representations?

Matt Crawford: I think any activity that brings you into cooperation and conflict with other people gets as a lot of this, so just playing sports, playing music with other people, cooking a meal. This is just very obvious kind of advice that won’t come as a shock to anybody. There’s nothing new here, but it does seem like the real satisfactions we get in life are when we’re doing stuff that’s real in the sense that it’s not some manufactured experience that’s been designed around you simply to gratify your mood for certain kinds of stimulation. It seems like we need some kind of big, grand point here to end.

Brett McKay: No. It makes sense. It’s a nice reminder for people. Reading it not only has helped me, but it’s made me think about how I parent and being cognizant of okay, am I letting my kid spend too much time on the iPad, even though he only gets a limited amount of time? Maybe I need to shut that off and get him outside and experience stuff that frustrates him. I guess the other takeaway is don’t let your kids watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

 

Matt Crawford: God, yes. Get some old Three Stooges or those old violent Roadrunner cartoons because for one thing, they’re actually funny.

Brett McKay: They are funny. It also teaches you something that the world isn’t always going to save you. Matthew, where can people learn more about your work?

Matt Crawford: I’ve got a website. It’s matthewbcrawford.com, no period after the B as in boy. I’ve got links to some of my shorter writings, so they can get a little taste if they want. Then from there, there’s a link to my shop. If you’re looking for custom motorcycle parts, yeah, hit me up.

Brett McKay: Cool. Matthew Crawford, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Matt Crawford: Yeah, thanks for having me, Brett.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Matthew Crawford. He’s the author of the book The World Beyond Your Head. You can find that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about Matthew’s work at matthewbcrawford.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/crawford for links to resources where you can delve deeper in the topics we discussed today on the show.

That wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. If you enjoyed this show and have got something out of it, I’d appreciate it if you’d give us a review on iTunes or Stitcher as that will help us promote the show. As always, I appreciate your continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

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