It’s summertime, which means a lot of you will be loading up the car and hitting the highway for vacation.

I love road tripping. I prefer it over flying because flying is for the birds. When you’re on a road trip, you’re in control. You’re not getting herded through a terminal like cattle, packed into a metal tube, and told you can’t use the bathroom because the seatbelt sign is on. You can be leisurely. You can watch the scenery change from plains to mountains to desert. You can pull over to see some Cadillacs stuck in the ground.

But a great road trip doesn’t just happen. Over years of driving my own family across the wide expanses of the United States, I’ve figured out a few things that separate a smooth haul from a miserable one. I also solicited some tips from a friend who’s done likewise.

To make your long drives this summer more enjoyable, here are 30 rules of the road to follow:

1. Do a pre-drive check the week before. Check the tire pressure, oil, coolant, and washer fluid and make sure they’re all good. You want to avoid those breakdowns and tire blowouts where you’re left stranded on the shoulder of I-40 between Amarillo and Tucumcari.

2. Start with a clean cabin. Declutter your vehicle, vacuum its interior, and wipe the dash. Sure, after 500 miles, the inside of your car will look like a tornado touched down inside a Love’s Country Store, but there’s something about starting a trip in a clean environment that makes it feel a bit more pleasant.

3. Pack a real paper map. Even in the cell-tower-dotted landscape of the modern age, you’ll still encounter dead zones along your drive. GPS is great right up until you’re crossing one in the desolate West. A Rand McNally Road Atlas never drops to one bar. Also, looking at it is a great way for your kids to pass the time instead of staring at a screen.

4. Stock an emergency kit. We’ve got a whole article on what every man should keep in his car, and a road trip is exactly the scenario that list was written for. Stock jumper cables, a flashlight, basic hand tools, flares, and a solid first-aid kit at the least.

5. Download what you need for entertainment and navigation, and charge devices completely the night before. From podcast episodes to playlists to directions, download everything you want to have access to, even when your phone hits SOS, before you depart. Make sure the kids have downloaded episodes of Bluey or Gilmore Girls, and that everyone’s devices are fully charged the night before.

6. Prep for quality conversation. A road trip is a great time to get in some quality conversation (QC). But QC doesn’t just happen. You have to prep for it. For the adults and older kids, send them an article or podcast to listen to before the trip so you can spend some time discussing it while on the road.

7. Bring more wet wipes than you think you need. The gas pump handle is filthy, hands will end up coated in Cheeto dust, and the public restroom soap dispenser will be empty exactly when you need it. There’s no such thing as too many wipes.

8. Take it nice and easy. One of the advantages of driving over flying is that there’s no pressure to leave at an exact time. There’s no worry about missing a flight. So take it easy. Sure, have a general time you’d like to leave and arrive by, but there’s no need to get stressed trying to stick to a strict agenda and lapse into little irrational bouts of Dad anger.

9. Drive while the little ones sleep. If you’ve got infants or toddlers, the dawn patrol and the late-night push are your best friends. A mile covered while a toddler is unconscious in his car seat is worth roughly three covered while he’s awake and restless.

10. Everyone gets a turn being the DJ. Either rotate through passengers’ respective playlists of choice, or take turns picking each song.

11. Gas up at a quarter tank. Around town you can ride the needle down to E and play chicken with the fuel light. When you’re out in the middle of nowhere and the next gas station might be 50 miles away, play it safe, and make a quarter tank of gas the minimum you’ll get to.

12. Stick to the mega travel centers for pit stops. When the family needs to use the bathroom and restock on snacks, look for the towering signs of a national chain like Love’s, Pilot, Flying J, or — if you’re blessed enough to be in their territory — a Buc-ee’s. You are guaranteed a high baseline of restroom cleanliness, an elite, wall-to-wall snack selection, and brightly lit spaces. Leave the sketchy, dimly-lit, one-pump stations as pit stops of last resort.

13. Clean the windshield at every fill-up. A smudge of bug guts might not bother you in town, but staring through a kaleidoscope of dead gnats while driving into the setting sun is a recipe for annoyance and impaired vision. Grab the squeegee while the pump is running; it takes 60 seconds and drastically improves visibility.

14. Everyone pees when you stop. Whenever you take pit stops, everyone must go to the bathroom. No exceptions. No “I’m good.” Because the kid who was “good” will announce 30 minutes later that he was, in fact, right on the cusp of being not good and now needs to go.

15. Everyone moves when you stop, too. Your bladder isn’t the only thing that needs attention when you pull off — so do your hips. Eight hours folded into a driver’s seat will turn your lower back into a rusted hinge. Walk a lap around the gas station, do a few toe-touches or squats by the pump — get the blood flowing again.

16. Run a dedicated trash bag. One designated bag for trash keeps the footwells from turning into a landfill by the afternoon. Empty it at every single gas stop. Replace with a new bag.

17. Pad the timeline. If the GPS says eight hours, plan for ten and a half. Kids move slow, bathroom stops run long, and the surest way to ruin the drive is to chain yourself to an arrival time you were never going to make.

18. Treat screens as a tool, not a crutch. While it’s tempting to just let your kids zombify in front of their screens the entire trip, resist the urge. All kids need to experience the boredom of a road trip and the pleasures that can come with watching the landscape move past them. Put them on a rotation, like two hours off screens for every one hour on.

19. Have an arsenal of games ready. Road trip bingo, 20 Questions, Shotgun, the alphabet game, magnetic checkers. Cycle through them throughout the trip.

20. Kids must play Mad Libs. At least once. It’s a kid road trip rite of passage.

21. The left lane is for passing. Treat this as an unbreakable law of the universe, obey it religiously, and teach it to your kids by example. If you’re not passing somebody, get over. The republic of the road depends on it.

22. Use cruise control. Ensures you keep a steady pace the entire trip and keeps you from drifting up to 90 without noticing, which is how you end up explaining yourself to a state trooper while your kids watch terrified from the backseat, thinking their dad is going to jail.

23. Take the dumb detour. See a brown sign for a state park, a roadside museum, or a giant fiberglass something-or-other, and you’ve got the time? Take the exit. The World’s Largest Ball of Twine may become a core memory.

24. The hotel pool is non-negotiable. If you’ve got to stop at a hotel for the night, picking one with a pool is essential — at least if you have kids. After being strapped into a seatbelt for eight hours, your kids will have the pent-up kinetic energy of a coiled spring. Throwing them into a heavily chlorinated rectangle for 45 minutes before bed is the absolute best way to ensure they actually sleep through the night.

25. Curate the snacks. Beef jerky, almonds, pretzels — elite road fuel. Anything powdered, crumbly, melty, or sticky will end in regret. Powdered donuts in particular are an interior-ruining liability, and you will be vacuuming that white dust out of the seat seams six months from now.

26. Embargo “Are we there yet?” Ban the question outright. We get there when we get there.

27. No farting. Have some decency. Passengers are locked in a confined space and can’t escape.

28. Find an audiobook for the whole cabin. Eight hours of screens will turn their brains to mush. A good audiobook the whole family can sink into — or even some vintage spooky radio shows — unites everybody and vaporizes a couple hundred miles.

29. Embrace the silence. You do not need a podcast, audiobook, or Spotify playlist pumping through the speakers for all 1,000 miles. Let the cabin fall quiet for an hour. It gives the driver a break from sensory input and often leads to the best, most organic conversations of the trip.

30. Remember the drive is the trip. If all you care about is getting there, you should’ve bought plane tickets. The arguments, the inside jokes, the gas-station weirdos, the Killers singalongs, that’s the vacation, too, and often the stuff you remember most.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Summertime is here, and we couldn’t be happier. As author Benjamin Alire Sáenz put it, summertime is a “book of hope,” filled with the promise of freedom, adventure, and dreamy idleness. It’s a time for sloughing off the heaviness of winter and soaking in the hot, rejuvenating sun.

It’s also a time for diving into certain pastimes and rituals. Seasonal traditions provide a natural rhythm and change to life that’s often missing in our modern world of fluorescent-lit, temperature-controlled sameness.

Below we offer 18 suggestions on things to do to make the most out of the season of summer and inject more of its mirth and charm back into your life. Do them all by Labor Day and you’ll have created enough hazy memories to keep you warm the next winter through.

Enjoy!

Here’s how to keep score with pen and paper.

Learn how to wear one with style.

Check out our video tutorials on summer grilling!

Need an idea on what to read? Check out our book lists!

Learn how to make your own rope swing with our illustrated guide!

Here’s why they’re still worth sending.

With our archives now 4,000+ articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in June 2014.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

There’s a great meme that’s gone around in different forms for the last few years:

Jesse Case’s observation is one that many middle-aged adults can relate to, including myself. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, but there was definitely a moment a few years back when I went from rolling my eyes at the bird pictures I’d get from both my mom and mother-in-law, to being genuinely interested and, dare I say, even excited about that goldfinch or Western tanager. Before long, my wife was making a sport of taking pictures of me taking pictures of birds:

Getting acquainted with a pileated woodpecker, North America’s largest woodpecker, in Duluth, Minnesota.

Reader, you may poke fun at birding now, but I’m guessing it’s because you haven’t tried it yourself. Birds are incredibly intelligent wild animals that you see multiple varieties of on a daily basis. (Even cooler, birds are literally in the dinosaur family.)

Birding is a fantastic pursuit because it’s remarkably easy to get into and your hobby can go with you anywhere — whether you’re visiting family, going on vacation, or even just going about the course of your daily life. Birds are everywhere. And as with plenty of other pastimes, you can level it up or down according to your available time, budget, and lifestyle.

In this article, I’m going to give you the low down on dipping your toes into this satisfying hobby and hopefully convince you to give it a shot.

Tools to Get Started Birding

One of the things that’s great about birding is how low the barrier of entry is. You really don’t need much in order to start watching and identifying birds, no matter where you are. At the most essential level, there are two things I use most regularly: a quality pair of binoculars and the Merlin app from Cornell Lab of Ornithology (a world-renowned institution).

There are definitely ways to invest more — cameras, dedicated journals and guidebooks, high-end binocs, and more. For the few years that I’ve been casually birding, though, I’ve gotten by just fine with my Nocs and iPhone (for both IDing and taking pics).

Binoculars

Binoculars are your one truly essential physical piece of gear to get started birding. This 200-year-old technology allows you to scan the ground, the greenery, and the open air with the eyesight of an eagle.

While you can go cheap, I highly recommend not skimping on binoculars. My first couple pairs were real cheapos from Walmart and REI, and they just weren’t comfortable or very easy to use. When my wife finally got me a pair of Nocs as a Christmas gift, I could immediately tell the difference — somewhat to my surprise, honestly. Not only were they more comfortable, but the field of view and zoom capacity were noticeably better.

Be sure you know how to dial in those binoculars once you get them:

Merlin App  

The Merlin app is one of the coolest pieces of software I’ve ever played with and is by far the most popular app in the birding community, with over 10 million active users. Whether you’re in the forest or your own backyard, you can open the Merlin app to help you ID birds in a few different ways, all of which I’ve had great luck with.

1. Take a picture of the bird. Even with a blurry photo, Merlin will analyze the photo in question using cues about size, color, shape, and your location to provide its best guess. If you can see the bird, I’ve found this to be very effective, as you can compare the results with what’s right in front of you.
2. Record the birdsong. If you can hear a bird, but can’t get a good picture or can’t see it at all, you can record a short audio clip and the app will ID the most likely bird(s) in real-time. I’m not kidding when I say it’s quite a thrill when you open the app at a local park and see way more species pop up than you would have thought. I think my record is 9 species from a single 60-second audio clip.
3. Answer a short questionnaire. If the photo or audio aren’t working for whatever reason, you can answer a few questions about the size, color, and behavior of the bird; Merlin will then provide a short list of the best-matched birds.

It’s truly a game changer for the hobby. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you learn to identify birdsong and get to know the common species of your area. I defy you to use the app for a couple weeks and not come away totally hooked.

One way to take it up a notch is to also get the eBird app from Cornell, which acts as more of a birding log. For any birding session, whether on a hiking trail or in your own neighborhood, it allows you to track the species and number of birds spotted, which gets added to their database and will then be viewable by other folks using the app. This can be fun to check out because you’re able to see, for example, if folks recently spotted uncommon or rare birds at a local pond or park. If Merlin is a Birding 101 tool, I would call eBird a 201 tool.  

Where to Look for Birds

A great blue heron taking off from a small neighborhood lake in Arvada, Colorado.

Part of the low barrier to entry for birding is simply that you can do it just about anywhere. No matter where you live, even in big cities, there are birds all around you once you start paying attention. Birds are such a part of our visual and auditory experience of the world that we hardly notice them anymore — but when you stop and look around, you’ll be surprised at what you find.

That said, there are definitely birding hotspots where you can reliably find more species than others. A good rule of thumb is that anywhere there’s water, you’ll find birds. And it doesn’t take much — in addition to lakes and rivers, smaller ponds and streams will attract avian friends too. Any park or greenspace you find on a map is also a sure bet for good birding.  

When you bring your kid to a park (many of which also have water nearby in some form), break out the binocs. When you’re out on a hike, open the Merlin app and see what birdsong you can catch. If there’s any greenery in your backyard, have a sit on your porch and just look around for 15 minutes.

You can get more nuanced when you factor in seasonality (spring and fall offer big migrations across numerous species), time of day (it’s not always dawn), and where things are in the breeding cycle — grab a guidebook if you’re interested in digging deeper.  

The reality is that birds are everywhere, at nearly all times, when you simply start looking for them.

An American redstart, found in Gooseberry State Park, Minnesota. 

Okay, Great, But What Do You Do?

One of the things that I initially couldn’t figure out about birding is that there’s no real outcome as a result — you’re not creating anything, you’re not in competition (not in a real way, at least) with other birders, you don’t even really have an end goal. You may keep a “life list” (simply a list of species you’ve spotted in your lifetime) or a journal/log of some kind, but that’s about it.

You’re just out there, enjoying the thing for itself.

And that’s actually the beauty of birding. In a world that’s goal-oriented and focused on results, it’s a rare activity that’s simply about the process. Birding forces you to be present — to slow down and observe the landscape around you. Birding gives you a sense of wonder at the natural world, whether you’re in some far-flung locale or just watching a chickadee at the feeder in your yard.

Grab a pair of binoculars, download the Merlin app, and do some bird watching.  

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

American football is so big — so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture — that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole.

In his new book, Football, Chuck Klosterman helps us see the game from unexpected angles, and argues that football isn’t just a sport, it’s a kind of national operating system. Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America, despite having elements that should count against it. We then explore football as a simulation — of war, of reality, and even of itself — and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport itself. We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT (hint: it’s not Tom Brady), and the difference between achievement and greatness. At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #248: Why Football Matters
• AoM Podcast #1,061: Are You Not Entertained? The Myths and Truths About Roman Gladiators
• AoM Podcast #1,044: What Sports Betting Is Really Doing to Players, Games, and Fans

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. American Football is so big, so braided into our weekends, our language, and our culture that it can be hard to see it clearly as a whole. In his new book Football, Chuck Klosterman helps to see the game from unexpected angles and argues that football isn’t just a sport, it’s a kind of national operating system.

Chuck explains how it became the dominant televised spectacle in America, despite having elements that should count against it. We then explore football as a simulation of war of reality and even of itself and how its simulation through video games has actually fed back into the sport. We also talk about who Chuck thinks is the GOAT (hint: it’s not Tom Brady) and the difference between achievement and greatness. At the end of our conversation, Chuck lays out a compelling argument for why football may be headed for a steep and surprising fall. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/football. All right, Chuck Klosterman, welcome to the show.

Chuck Klosterman:

Hey, it’s great to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you have written several cultural explorations during your career and in your latest book Football, you dig into the game of American football and try to suss out how it has influenced American culture in different ways and how American culture has influenced football. The publisher’s description of the book calls football a hyperobject. What is that and why is football a hyper object?

Chuck Klosterman:

A hyper object basically is sort of this philosophical term that means something is so large and so intertwined and imbued in every aspect of society that it’s impossible to see the thing in totality that we only are really understanding the part of it that we’re engaging with. Everything around it is still happening. Everything around it is still sort of informing that idea, but it is pretty much invisible simply due to size. I mean, I suppose an obvious example would be like to say the internet. The internet is a hyperobject. It’s so large that we all understand what it is, but it is impossible to sort of understand it in an all encompassing way unless you step back and say almost nothing in specific. And I think that accurately, that’s sort of an analysis of how football sort of operates in American society, that we certainly feel like we understand it, we can see it on a one-to-one basis and really engage and do it in a really personal way, but it is involved in the larger culture in a way that is not only impossible to see, but sort of unconsciously understood even by those who don’t really care about it as a game.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, football is the most popular sport in America. I mean, you highlight the fact that if you look at the most viewed shows on TV, I think it’s the top 25 are football games basically.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, yeah, in 2023 of the hundred most watched broadcasts in the United States that year 93 were NFL games. And then I think three more were college games

Brett McKay:

And then I mean also just the football metaphors have just seeped into our everyday conversation. I mean, we make analogies to it all the time in work, in life, et cetera.

Chuck Klosterman:

Sure. There’s obvious examples like people using things like a political football or whatever. That’s kind of the straightforward use of it. This popularity thing though, it’s actually more fascinating I think, than people accept, even though we all know it, right? There are very few, I can’t think of anybody who would be a more than casual follower of sports who would not concede that football is the most popular sport in the United States. 

But its popularity, it’s like a different version of it. I mean, there are many countries in Europe or it is very obvious that not only is soccer the most popular sport in some ways it is all their sports. It is almost their combination of football, basketball, and baseball all put together to this one thing that’s really shared, and yet you would not find 93 of the hundred most popular television broadcasts in France be a soccer match. It just doesn’t happen. I mean, baseball is beloved in Japan. Yet at the same time its popularity is in no way a mirror of the way football is popular here, and that’s also particularly interesting because football is an ethnocentric sport. It’s played in the United States, Canada, a little bit in Germany here and there. There’ll be a few places that’ll play it, but it’s really just in this country and in a sense that makes it particularly reflective of our society, kind of along the idea of American exceptionalism or whatever. It’s like only in America does this thing exist and only in America could this thing have the magnitude that it does,

Brett McKay:

And what’s pretty crazy about football being the most popular sport in America. You talk about this in the book and I was nodding my head the entire time, it’s a really complicated game. You note that football is probably the only sport that you can’t play recreationally. They aren’t pickup football games either. They’re touch football games, there’s flag football, but it’s not actual pads on pad football with 22 players. I mean, I played football in high school. The last time I played football was in high school. I remember my last game as a senior. My coach said, for a lot of you guys, this is going to be the last time you played football. And I was like, wow. And it’s true. What was your experience with the sport? Did you play football when you were in high school?

Chuck Klosterman:

I did. Now I went to a very small high school in North Dakota, so I played nine man football. Now that is a version of 11 man football where on offense, you essentially remove the offensive tackles and on defense you essentially removed the cornerbacks. Okay. The idea of course is to have it be as close to 11 man football as possible. So schematically, it’s actually very similar. It’s just for schools with extremely low enrollment, people play both sides of the ball of the punter as well. But beyond that, coming from a town of 500 people where the high school is really the center of the town, even more so than any of the churches, the town is really built around its school in a place like that, and our football program was strong and it just sort of imbued every aspect of life. It’s hard to even, I can’t really imagine what the experience of high school would’ve been like without sports and particularly football involved.

Now my kids are going to have the opposite experience. It’s not going to be the way it is for them, but I mean that’s how it was for me. Then I went to college and I got into journalism and initially I was a sports reporter and I covered the football team. I then moved into this phase professionally where I was a rock critic and a film critic and more of a straightforward cultural journalist. I never stopped watching football though. That was always there. And then about 20 years ago, I started thinking about the idea of football as having a meaning that despite being impossible to escape is still somewhat underrated, particularly as a way to understand the last half of the 20th century and what you’re saying in general is it’s a very true thing. 

So soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Everyone understands that. One of the keys to this is that it is the easiest sport to play in the sense that all you need is one kickable object and two teams. You can go to the most remote place on any continent except Antarctica obviously, and you can see people playing soccer. That’s very easy to do. Basketball is a sport you can play by yourself. The idea of shooting a jump shot alone in a gym, it’s not like being in a basketball game, but the mechanics of that activity are identical. Baseball takes space and a lot of guys, but yet we’ve built this whole super structure of recreational softball to simulate that through life. If you’re somebody who was a track star in high school, you can still go running. If you were a swimming star, you could still go to the pool. You could bowl your whole life.

You can play golf your whole life, but not football. You and I could go out in my yard and throw a football around. We could even get two more guys and run little patterns, play offense, defense. It has no relationship to the game for real. The only version of football that really matters is the official version. It can’t really be simulated and that should be a detriment If you were inventing football for the first time, if we didn’t have these sports and we were inventing them, the fact that it’s impossible to recreationally simulate should be a real problem. It should make people feel distant from the game, but it appears that the opposite has happened. It feels that this distance has sort of in a weird way democratized the experience of watching it, that we’re all kind of in the same position where we have this understanding that is not really inherent to who we are. It’s not our own experience. It’s just learned information that we sort of all pretend is something that we can easily sort of understand

Brett McKay:

And very few people have actually played football. I think you did the numbers. It ended up being maybe 0.2% of the population in America.

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, way lower, way lower,

Brett McKay:

Like 0.02.

Chuck Klosterman:

There’s maybe a million kids playing in high school and then you have a couple thousand playing in college and a small number, whatever roster size times 32 in the NFL, if you include the practice squads, you got some people in Canada and that’s, it is not a universal experience in any way. It’s exclusionary by design.

Brett McKay:

So maybe we’ll get to this through our conversation, but first blush, why do you think so many people like watching football if they’ve never played football and it’s this kind of complex game that, I mean even talk about it, there’s not a lot of action in it. I mean, it’s action packed, but there’s a lot of standing around walking between downs while the chains get moved.

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, so this is the mysterious thing, okay. I’d mentioned earlier if football was being invented now, we would see its exclusionary nature as a detriment. An even greater detriment would be seen during the theoretical pitch meeting if we’re trying to all come up with new ideas for sports is if something were to say, well, in a three-hour game there’s actually 11 minutes of action. There was this kind of famous Wall Street Journal article where they did research on all these NFL games and they realized that the average three hour NFL football telecast involves 11 minutes of activity. Now on paper, that just seems insane. If someone said, Hey, I made a three hour movie, but actually there’s only things happening in 11 minutes of it, people would be like, what is that? That’s the antithesis of what entertainment is. But what is strange is that the way those 11 minutes are broken down into these little bursts of activity with these gaps in between where you can think about what you saw, you can think about what you’re going to see next and you can think about whatever you want, even if it’s divorced from the game you’re experiencing.

That is part of almost the magical quality of football as a television enterprise. It doesn’t seem like what we should want, but, and the evidence of that is overwhelming.

Brett McKay:

You mentioned television, okay, football is a television enterprise. This is one of your main thesis in the book. It’s this line. I loved it. I have a friend who’s a media theory professor here at the University of Tulsa. He loved it. The line is this, you said “football is a purely mediated experience even when there’s no media involved.” What do you mean by that?

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, yeah. Okay, so that’s the key point to this whole idea. Okay, so football is invented a little bit after the Civil War and the reason for this, it’s arguable, but there’s this sort of built-in belief that there were people in the wake of the civil War who was like, our sons are not going to fight wars. They’re not going to face adversity. Our society will be a failure because they’ll be too soft. We’ve got to create some simulation for this, and they kind of came up with this support of football. Now, whether or not that’s exactly true or partially true, it doesn’t really matter. Regardless for the next 70 or 80 years, football evolves into something that’s close to what we imagine now, and then it intersects with the inception of television and by chance no one made this happen. It just worked out this way.

Football is the perfect product for the television experience, and television is the perfect vessel for showing what football is. No one has ever constructed a better TV experience than the way football worked out accidentally, and it kind of begins with each kind of famous championship game between the Colts and the Giants. The greatest game ever played where even though the game was blacked out in New York, like 46 million people or whatever, for the first time saw this game, and it wasn’t that they were seeing something they’d never experienced before, they just never experienced in this way. It was the merging of those two mediums, and since then, football’s relationship to television is really the driving force between how it has become this kind of cultural monolith. Our understanding of football is through the TV experience, even for people like you and I who have played, if someone were to say to you, imagine a football game, I am guessing the first thing you imagined was the way it looks on television, even though you’ve played it that you almost imagine that shot from that midfield where you can’t really see depth and the game is being played horizontal across the screen.

You can’t even see the free safety. It’s not even the ideal way to see it if you really care, but it is the way we understand it, and this is part of the reason why I really think that in some ways football is the perfect metaphor for understanding America from say 1950 to the year 2000. It may not be going forward in part because of our changing relationship to television.

Brett McKay:

So what makes football the perfect game for television?

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, so with almost any other sport, the idea of the televised version of that sport is how can we transmit the live experience into the TV experience? Hockey is the one game that we all sort of understand to be better live because part of hockey is the sound and the feeling of guys smashing up against the plexiglass and you just can’t simulate that on that. Now, almost every other sport, it’s kind of debatable. Baseball can be better live if it’s a beautiful day and it’s just like the ballpark is great, but it can also be in some ways harder to watch if you really care about the outcome than when you see it on television. Basketball is great if you’re next to the court, it’s bad if you’re in the rafters. The best seats tend to be actually the ones that simulate the TV camera boxing, auto racing.

Those have palpable energy and it’s like the sound of it’s incredible, but at the same time, you can’t always see everything. Golf and tennis. There’s an intimacy to being live, but it can be monotonous. All these other sports, there’s sort of like a debate, is it better live or better on television to see the actual sport. With football, there is no debate. It’s always better on television. There’s a million reasons to go to a live football game, but one of them cannot be, I need to really see what’s happening. Even the guys in the game, even the coach on the sideline cannot see the game the way a person on television can, and as a result, our understanding of this mediated event is almost like a full-time mediation of the experience that you think about football means to think about how it is presented on TV, and if you want to get down to real specific things, I mean, it’s the fact that unlike other sports that kind of happen when they happen, we know when football’s going on.

We know it’s college games on Saturday, pro games on Sunday, and there’s a Monday night game. We know this. That’s why part of the reason fantasy football that while not as maybe illustrative of the game is fantasy baseball is more popular. People like fantasy football because it’s very easy to do because you understand when you need to watch these games. There’s also the aspect of that when you’re seeing football from its televised perspective, there’s moments where no one knows what’s happening. The quarterback drops back and he throws the ball deep. There’s a split second where the camera has not followed it yet and we don’t know if the guy is open, is the guy covered? It’s this fleeting moment of complete unknown that is kind of an exhilarating rush. The starting and the stopping is a huge part of it. It seems like something we shouldn’t want, but we do. With nonstop action, say like a sport like soccer or whatever, that can be exhilarating when the play is incredible, but it can also be sort of monotonous and almost hypnotic when the action is kind of a lesser vintage and football doesn’t have that problem. The worst football game is still watchable.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I’ve noticed in my experience, whenever I go to a football game in person, I typically spend a lot of time watching the jumbotron. You can’t see what’s going on. Like you said, it’s complicated.

Sometimes there’s a misdirection and you want to see, okay, well how did this running back end up in the end zone? Well, okay, I’m going to watch the instant replay up on the TV because from my vantage point, I completely missed it, and when I look back at the live games I’ve been to at the University of Oklahoma, I remember there’s maybe one instance where I had a great view of Adrian Peterson making this amazing 90 yard run, but that’s it. The other football games I went to, I saw some good games, the Sooners won, but I really didn’t see in person live in real time what was happening. I had to look at the jumbotron.

Chuck Klosterman:

Okay, the thing you’re saying is almost a perfect encapsulation of something I write about. So you had this one play where you see, I’m guessing, my assumption is that Adrian Peterson was running the ball and he was running right at you for whatever, right?

Brett McKay:

Correct.

Chuck Klosterman:

He’s coming at you and you were the only person maybe or maybe the people in your very close vicinity who had that specific experience as if this amazing play was actually built for your vantage point by chance because that’s where your seat were. But for the rest of the game, in all likelihood, what you were usually doing, again unconsciously, is seeing something from your seat and mentally transposing to how it would look on television

Brett McKay:

Yeah.

Chuck Klosterman:

We see these things and we triangulate it in our mind and put it into that kind of television scope, that shot from midfield kind of in the downward angle as the players are moving, sort of like I said, across the field horizontally. Now, there’s some people listening to this podcast who are probably saying, well, that’s not how it’s for me. You can’t get inside my brain. That’s not how it is, that’s true. Okay. This is not something I’m able to really prove. I can’t get inside another person’s head and say, this is how the experience is, but I’m confident that that’s how it is for most people, including most of the people who deny that this is their experience. 

I think that in general, and in fact maybe in totality, the experience of a video screen of the monitor overwrites our understanding of reality. I think that’s just either a consequence or a problem or maybe even a benefit of modernity that we have now sort of experienced a mediated world so fully that the things we like most are the things that best fit into that sort of technological experience, and football is one of them.

Brett McKay:

Well, if football’s better to watch on TV or on a screen, why do people still go to live football games? 

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, there’s a lot of ancillary reasons to go to an event besides, I want to see it in the most lucid way. I mean, in the same way, if you really love Steely Dan, you were never going to get a better experience than you were on the record. You were never going to hear something live that would be as perfect as the way you’d hear it on the record, but you still might even want to go see the show. I mean, you go to a football game, there’s a whole bunch of things going on. There’s the collective feeling of being with a bunch of people with the same ideas and that suddenly you have a relationship with strangers because you all kind of like the same thing, and it is interesting to be in a large crowd, there’s a palpable exchange of energy when that happens.

It might remind you of maybe having gone to a game when you were a kid and now you’re bringing your own kid. I think in some people’s mind, the ability to cheer and sort of act like a different person in a live event is extremely attractive and many live events sort of allow this to happen. These are all reasons. It’s like the idea that maybe if I yell help my team or whatever, that’s sort of an insane thing to think, but people think that, right, and that’s totally fine, but to see the game, if someone says, I’m going to the A FC championship because I really want to see what happened, I mean, that’s insane. That would never be if you really wanted to see it would be the television experience.

Brett McKay:

I was just thinking, so television has made football viewing better. You can view the game better on TV, but I do think in some ways television has made live football viewing worse. Here’s an example, so a few years ago we went to the Oklahoma State-BYU football game. It was cold, it was sleeting, it was raining, the game went into overtime and it was televised, and we were just ready to go home because we were just like, oh my gosh, we’re just soaking wet and it’s cold. But we had to do the stupid TV timeouts. It wasn’t like a timeout because the team needed a timeout. It was like, we need a timeout so we can show commercials on television for the people at home, and it just made the game longer than it needed to be.

Chuck Klosterman:

Oh, absolutely. I think the first time any kid, an 11-year-old kid who likes football goes to his first pro game. It’s always very weird to see that there are these long stretches where nothing is happening. The players aren’t even talking to each other. They’re just kind of waiting around while the sound system plays Guns N Roses or something and just we eat up two minutes and then the game starts again. That’s true. Television has made the live experience worse, but I mean, I guess there’s a lot of people who would say that that is one of the hallmarks of all technology, which is that it detracts from the organic experience. I mean that, this is probably a crazy thing to point out, but go back and read what the Unibomberi, Ted Kaczinski, was writing about. One of the things he was writing about was that technology puts a ceiling on our freedom that we can’t even recognize because we assume the ceiling is normal, that our ability to imagine or experience the world is sort of limited by our mediated understanding of it, and that’s what happens with television and all sports in a way.

I mean, it is interesting to say, go to an NBA game that’s not being televised by TNT or ESPN. When I go to a Blazers game here that’s just being shown locally, the game feels fast. They’re not building in all these breaks. It’s a better experience, but then it is sort of like a risk reward thing. I mean, it’s like if you’re from the NFL, from their perspective, what is more important, the 65,000 people who are in a stadium maybe or the 6.5 million people who are watching it at home, and in many ways subsidizing this sport in a way the people in the stadium are not. Yes, the people in the stadium are buying tickets, they’re paying for parking, they’re eating hot dogs, revenue is being generated, but all sports now, all major sports are built around the television contract with various networks and platforms, and those are the people who matter.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, so this is a perfect example of how football is a hyper object that when we’re talking about football, we’re talking about something bigger than football. I mean, in our conversation, I didn’t see this coming up, but we name dropped the Unabomber.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

There you go. Yeah,

Chuck Klosterman:

I do that a lot.

Brett McKay:

So in the book you mentioned that football is an unreality, that it’s a simulation on multiple levels. You mentioned it earlier, football is often seen as a simulation of war. The founding legends that it was started after the Civil War, people were anxious about masculinity, the whole muscular Christianity movement. Teddy Roosevelt’s strenuous life, so the guy we got to develop this game to toughen boys up simulates war, so they have experience with it. I mean, I think Dwight Eisenhower, he played football at West Point. I think he coached at West Point.

I think he even said that football’s the best game to prepare men to fight in war. What do you make of that idea of football as a good simulation of war? Is there anything to that or is that kind of overblown?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, it’s a tricky thing. Is football the best game to prepare young men to later fight in war? I mean, among sports, it probably is. I don’t think that we look at sports necessarily as that should be their purpose, certainly not now. It would be weird in a modern context if someone wrote a book promoting the idea of football based on the idea that this could help us militarily moving forward or whatever. But the same time, it’s an interesting thing. I mean, the thing that I argue in this book is football is a simulation of war. There is no question about it, but it’s a simulation of ancient wars. It’s not a simulation of modern warfare. It’s a simulation of the way wars would’ve been fought in the 19th century or the way that they would work and the board game strati or whatever. It’s not like Don DeLillo had a book come out in 1972 called End Zone, and it’s a football book and it deals a lot with the idea of nuclear holocaust and people, they didn’t really love this book when it came out because they were like, well, it’s kind of too on the nose to say football is like war.

But he was actually arguing something that was really prescient that the other people didn’t get, which is that he was essentially saying that football’s relationship to war kind of ended with the advent of the atomic weapon, that football’s relationship to war is the way wars were once fought, and I think that is the draw. It’s not the draw that I’m seeing something that’s like a war. The draw is I’m kind of seeing a modern incarnation of military history and military history is, I mean, it’s the fascinating thing, particularly to middle-aged men. 

Brett McKay:

It’s true.

Chuck Klosterman:

That as you reach a certain age as a guy for whatever reason, you tend to become more interested in history and particularly the conflicts of history and the modern version of football, even though it in many ways completely divorced from that, you can watch a football game. It’ll never come up, and yet there is a tie back to that because what’s the thing about military conflict? It’s like the stakes could not be higher. You live or you die. A mistake you make isn’t something that you regret. It means that you were killed or the people around you were killed. Responsibility is high. There’s a version of that in the football game as well where you can’t talk your way around getting leverage on the tight end. You can’t make an argument that says, I can run this guy down even though he’s faster than me in football. A lot of the sort of visceral things about being alive are present. It’s a very intellectual game. It’s a very sort of rehearsed and orchestrated game, but when two guys are running at each other and they’re going to collide, the outcome is based on physics. It’s not based on what we want to have happen. What football does in a lot of ways. Football eliminates the possibility of us saying, well, I want the world to be this way. It’s like, this is how the world is.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think that’s a great point that football is a simulation of war, how it used to be because now with the nuclear bomb, it’s like, well, everyone’s hosed. Even the fans, they’re hosed. You can’t do anything about it. 

Or even in a smaller scale, drone warfare or whatever, so drones do real damage, but it’s almost like it would be sort of like if all wars were fought with robots, would the outcome of those wars still matter? I don’t know. There has to be sort of that human consequence and football is a reminder that human consequences are not just constructions. It’s real.

And maybe that’s why I love trick plays because it’s almost like gorilla warfare. You’re flipping the script. You’re not following the typical script. That’s what gorilla warfare their advantage is. You don’t follow what you’re supposed to do. You don’t follow the typical rules of engagement. You do something out of the ordinary. Maybe that’s what a trick play is like, ah, I love seeing that flea flicker. It might not work, but if it works, it’s just devastating.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, because that is sort of the counterbalance where the idea that this is really just a game about size and speed, not on this double reverse. It wasn’t on this, it was schematic. It was strategic, it was intellectual. We have these sort of ideas about what the culture of football means, and very often it’s seeing a pejorative weights that the culture of football is almost like everything we’re trying to erase from the world, but it is a complicated game. It is a game based on sort of an understanding of your opponent and analytics and how much practice you’ve put into it and sort of your own pure originality and creativity. I mean, it’s football art. Well, I suppose technically not because usually when we say what qualifies something as art, there’s all these things that have to intentionality and all these things have to sort of be recognized, and football doesn’t necessarily do that, but the expression of football, the way football is as something we watch works in the same way. It is an artistic experience.

Brett McKay:

There’s a woman that wrote an essay about the forward pass, I forgot the name. It was really good, and she just talked about how it’s just the most beautiful thing in the world to watch an amazing long bomb forward pass, and it’s artistic, unintentionally artistic. But yeah, I mean, I appreciate whenever a team uses artistry. I mean, I’m an OU fan. I still think about that game. I guess it was 2007 when they played Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl and they ran the hook and lateral the Statue of Liberty. It sucked because OU lost, but I’m like, man, that was awesome.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah, I mean, I think it could be argued if somebody said to me, what was the greatest five minute span of football in the 21st century? It would be the end of that game. It would be the play, the touchdown, the two point conversion, the player proposing to his girlfriend in the end zone afterwards. The only time, in many ways, an upset of that magnitude has happened on that stage. I mean, obviously there have been bigger upsets, a small school beating a big school, but that was the biggest game of the year for both teams. It was almost everything that we want football to be in that little encapsulation.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so football’s a simulation of war. Another thing you talk about, and I thought this was really interesting, there’s like this reverse dynamic going on is that video game football, which is a simulation of football, has actually changed the real game of football. Tell us about that.

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, it’s strange, but in some ways, I guess it’s also predictable. There was a period in the nineties when there was a realization that the goal of a football video game or really any sports video game, basketball, baseball, soccer, all of these was an attempt to somehow find realism. This was a big part. When Madden, that football game became this kind of juggernaut, John Madden was involved with the creation of that, and his thing was, I want this game to be, I want it to look the way football looks. In fact, EA sports, when they made that game, they wanted to have it be seven on seven because it would be less stress on the computing, it would be less guys, and John Madden was like, no, it’s got to be 11 on 11 or it doesn’t count. So this whole thing became this idea.

It’s like, well, let’s try to make a football game that’s realistic. Now, there are limitations. Of course, you make a football game on a video screen, you’re going to have capabilities that don’t exist in real life, and that’s what any kid or anyone playing the football game does. What are the limits of this? What is fascinating is that many of the things that were only attempted or would’ve only been attempted in a video game in 1997 are now part of football for real. 

A lot of the throws Mahomes makes, for example, in the past, they would’ve only been seen as something that could be done in a video game. You wouldn’t have seen a guy, the throws Patrick Mahomes makes in the past would’ve got a quarterback benched, and now not only does he do it, but a lot of guys do it. If you watch the Ole Miss game in their play, it was like their quarterback made three throws that to me seemed like they would’ve only happened in video games in the past, and in fact, a friend and I, we’ve been playing the college football game for years, and I used to always criticize what he was doing as being too unrealistic that that would never happen. 

Now, a lot of the things that he did in the past are actually part of the way the game is played now, the idea of okay, going forward on fourth down as often as teams do. Now, a lot of people credit that to analytics. They say, well, we’ve just done the math and the value and the risk reward and all this. In some ways, that started with people whose introduction to play calling came through playing video games. I mean, those people are adults now, and they were sort of of the belief that giving my opponent possession of the ball, even if I gained 35 yards on this punt, is not as valuable as the 50-50 odds of me gaining two yards on fourth and two. These are things that start in these video simulations by amateurs, move up to the high school level, eventually are adopted by college coaches and then become part of the NFL. 

Like I say, in some ways it seems strange. It seems weird to imagine that some high school kid in the nineties is affecting football now, but in another way it is predictable because that’s what simulations do. Simulations teach people of new ways to think.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I mean, I love playing NCAA college football, and my go-to is if it’s fourth down and I’m in my own territory, like 10 yards from my own end zone, I’m not punting it. I’m just going to do a Hail Mary and see what happens, and oftentimes it works. 

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, what’s weird to see, I’m kind of the opposite when I, I’ve played this game now thousands of times. I dunno how many hours I’ve spent for real, but the guy I play against, the same guy, he’s another sports writer named Michael Winery. He’s the only person I’ve ever played against in my life, I think. But it drives him crazy because I am, he feels I’m just so conservative. If it’s late in the first half and I have the possession of the ball and I’m deep in my own territory, I’ll have my quarterback take knees and go to the locker firm, and he just finds that maddening. He’s like, this is a video game. Why are you doing this? We can do whatever we want. You’re just trying to make it less fun for both of us. But I love the idea of trying to make it as real as possible.

What is interesting in society at least, or the culture of football, has advanced faster than me. I still think that way. I still think like a coach from the seventies. I still think that way. That’s the way when I watch a football game, that’s how I am, and the game itself has moved way past that. Now, if you watch, watch the Rams play whatever McVay is doing things that are far more innovative than I sort of believed were even possible when I sort of got into football, but that’s also kind of in a weird strange way, the conservative draw of the sport is that football is always about the past. In a way, it is tied to the world that we’ve left and it’s still operating in the world that we now inhabit.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so another example of the medium changing football. So television changed, football, video games have changed football. Another simulation of football that’s having an effect on the game that you talk about is fantasy football and then fantasy football. It’s kind of morphed into gambling essentially. What do you think is the appeal of fantasy football leagues? I’ve done one or two when I was in high school. I never really got into it, but some guys, they live for this stuff, and the thing about fantasy football, it is a complete simulation because you’re creating these imaginary teams of players who are not on the same teams trying to create a winning team based on real gameplay. What’s the appeal of this weird simulation of football?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, okay, so fantasy football is really an outgrowth of fantasy baseball. Fantasy baseball starts in the seventies, late seventies and early eighties, and I mean it may have existed before that, but that’s when people started. I mean, there was a big story about it in Inside Sports Magazine. It went a long way to sort of popularizing it, and then when baseball season would end, because baseball is well suited for the fantasy realm, even though it’s a team sport, individual batting, individual pitching, they’re separate from everything else. So statistically, it actually was an accurate reflection. A good fantasy baseball team would’ve been a good baseball team, so football kind of comes out of that. Guys who play fantasy baseball are like the season’s over now what do we do? I started playing fantasy football in 1990, and that was a very, very different time for lots of reasons, but particularly for something like this, it was no yardage, no reception, nothing like that.

It was just touchdowns and field goals. All the math was done by hand from taking the newspaper on Monday and Tuesday and going through all this stuff and what that was at the time. Initially it was almost like, here’s just one more way to experience football. It was additive. You can watch the games, you can read about the games, but now you have this other thing you can kind of play your own little version of it. It was not at the time that connected to gambling, like gambling in 1990, 1991. That’s kind of like when Pete Rose was getting banned from baseball. It was still seen as something only really degenerates did because it was illegal and you have a bookie and all these things. Well, it’s not very clear that fantasy football was sort of priming the pump for this coming world of gambling we now live in.

Because what fantasy football did was something that was really novel. It could appeal to the kind of person who loved football and didn’t necessarily care about the outcome of the game that you could watch a game and care about the tight end. He was on your fantasy team and it didn’t matter to you if they won or lost. In fact, you might want them to lose because that might force the team to throw more in the fourth quarter and your tight end might have more receptions. It individualized the sport and allowed people to think about football in this different way that was divorced, sort of from what used to be the only thing that should have mattered who won or who lost you. Now see this all the time. I mean, that’s what gambling is. I mean, anybody out there, I’m not a gambler really.

I don’t really have the right constitution for it, but I really follow it because I’m really fascinated by it. There’s something very strange about picking a team to win by more than five and a half points and watching them in the fourth quarter when they’re up four and just trying to figure out ways, well, how can they get one more field goal. Here you’re watching this completely different game. It’s still the same game that you would be watching if you had no money involved at all. But now it’s a completely evolved thing where there’s a game inside the game and really the main player is you. Fantasy football sort of did that in a way without now, it was also just, I think in a lot of ways a way for people to connect through a sport even though they might have asymmetrical interest in that sport.

And what I mean by that is I’ve been in fantasy football leagues that are in an office. I’m working in an office and someone wants to start a fantasy football league, and the 12 people involved all have different levels of interest in football. There’s a few people who live and die for it and would watch it every weekend in their life if they could, and a few people who wouldn’t watch it all and only follow it because they have a fantasy team. And yet the way fantasy football operates, especially through the internet, everyone is equal. The internet does the work for you. It tells you who to draft. It tells you to start, so you don’t need to be an expert to win your fantasy league. I’m in a college football fantasy league. The league is called Chanology, we call it we named after Lane Kiffin. This was back when he was not now, this was years ago when he was a totally different kind of figure and a guy who dominates that league. The name of his team is who is Lane Kiffin. He had no idea who Lane Kiffin was when he joined this league, and yet he’s become by far the best owner in this thing because it’s not really about knowing about football. It’s being able to understand the outcome of past games.

Brett McKay:

If television has changed, football, video games have changed football. Do you think gambling, fantasy football is changing football, the actual game?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I don’t know if it is changing the actual game between the lines on the field. It’s changing everything else though. I think that all the sports leagues, including the NFL, understand that they need to have a relationship with gambling not just to flourish, but potentially to exist in the future. That right now, the NFL is this monolith due to wealth that is mainly acquired and accumulated through advertising that because football is so popular and because it’s a live event and it’s the only thing that if you make Pepsi or you make Volvos or whatever and you want to reach the largest possible audience and expose them to these ads, football is the best means for that. I don’t know if that will always be the case, and if that starts to change, there’s going to have to be a way to continue not just this level of revenue we have now, but to keep increasing it.

Because football can’t operate in a static sense. It can only get larger, and I think gambling might be the only way to keep that happening. I mean, I felt that one of the very, there were many very instructive things about COVID, but one of them was, it was like they still got to play all these football and basketball and baseball games. They got to still play these big 10 football games to no one in the stands. They got to do it, and it was like, wow, this is a little more fragile than I realized that the entire world can essentially shut down, but we still have to make sure Rutgers plays Iowa. It has to happen. I mean, that just shows you how much of the foundation of these things is brittle because it’s not that it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to stop. It’s got to keep going.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about the fragility football, maybe the potential future of the game, but before, one question I want to ask because I thought it was really interesting. You have this whole chapter about who’s the greatest player of all time in football. Most people would say Tom Brady because he’s won all the Super Bowls. You make the case that it was Jim Thorpe and as an Okie, I was ecstatic to see this because growing up in elementary school, middle school, high school, you learn about Jim Thorpe, greatest athlete of all time. You hear the story of him rummaging through the trash can to find a track shoe so he could run this race and win it. He played football, he didn’t play football for very long. We don’t have any footage of him playing football. How did you then determine that he was the greatest football player of all time?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, that’s an interesting section of the book that a lot of people bring up to me because on the surface, it’s kind of like chock full of football discussion, discussion of players, discussion of Randy Moss, discussion of Tom Brady. But in a larger sense, it is kind of an ideological point about the concept of greatness and how does one gauge that, right? If we go simply by who would be the most outstanding physical specimen to have on your team right now, it kind of becomes a completely irrelevant argument because what that’s going to mean is that the best player of all time is always going to be who is the best player right now? I mean, any average quarterback in the NFL right now, if you put him back into the 1980s, and he’s a legend. I mean, he’s going to be on par with Marino and Elway and those guys just because the way that physicality changes and skills change and all that stuff.

It’s like modernity is always going to reward whatever is the greatest thing in the moment. But that to me is kind of the wrong way to think about greatness. To me, greatness is the creation of archetypes. It’s the first elite version of something that is still contained through all the latter versions. In other words, it’s almost the invention of the idea of what being a great football player is, and that to me does seem to be Jim Thorpe. Okay, so Jim Thorpe was playing in the 1920s. It’s an 11 man sport at that time. It’s four downs. It’s six points for a touchdown. Yes, the guys aren’t wearing face masks. It’s a primitive version of the game compared to what we do now. It’s a primitive version of the game even compared to the 1950s. But yet, what was great about Jim Thorpe we’re the core characteristics of what we think about a great football player now, which is basically speed, strength, agility, the ability to understand these positions and master them to be the person other players aspire to be like that is the foundation of what a football player is. It kind of goes back to Jim Thorpe. I mean, that is sort of what I’m talking about in that section. That’s sort of the idea of that our understanding of what a great football player is or what a great football player looks like was kind of in the DNA of Thorpe, the experience of Thorpe. 

Brett McKay:

I like how you make the distinction in that chapter, the difference between greatness and achievement. So you mentioned the fragility of the game. People might think, well, how is football fragile? It’s the most popular thing on television. It makes billions of dollars, billions and billions of dollars. There’s no way that this thing could go away, but you make the case. We might have a world where football, it might exist, but it’s not going to exist how it exists today. So why do you think football 30, 40, 50 years from now might not be a hyper object anymore?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I mean the simplest answer is that the world’s going to change, and when the world changes, large objects have a harder time transitioning than small objects. It’s like the largeness of football is both. Its sort of value in the present and its danger in the future. Like I said, football, it’s not just a football’s so big, it can’t in any ways collapse, but it’s like it needs to keep expanding. It’s only set up to become a bigger and bigger thing every year. The revenue has to go up every year, the popularity needs to go up. They need to play games in England and in Germany and in Mexico City. They need to make it larger and larger and larger because the way it is created in the amount of money it consumes, the amount of money the players consume and the franchisees consume consistently goes up.

It just keeps going up and they’re never going to go back. There’s never going to be a point where the players’ union would say like, okay, we’ll take a pay cut because it’s good for the league. That will never happen. So with the NFL and pro football, and all pro sports in general are dependent on is that the amount of money that they earn from ad revenue is always going to be able to outstrip the costs, and that every year, the contract for who gets to show the NFC and the AFC that Fox or NBC or CBS or these places, they’ll always pay more because it’s worth so much to them. But that is dependent on advertisers seeing advertising as the same value it has. Now, I think that this is going to change. I predict that over the next 40 or 50 years, there is going to be a pretty massive sea change over what is seen as the value of a commercial and the value of advertising.

We’ve never really been able to prove that advertising works at all. We know it does in terms of introducing a product to people that if someone has never ever heard of Budweiser before and they see a Budweiser commercial, now they know it exists, but then if they see 15,000 more commercials for Budweiser, it’s not going to necessarily make them thirsty. It’s just the best thing we have. We don’t know that advertising works, but there’s kind of tautology, well, the most successful places spend a lot on advertising. It must work or whatever. I think that’s going to shift, and when it shifts, it’s going to shift really fast that suddenly there’s going to be an understanding that spending a bunch of money on a commercial and then spending more money to have that commercial shown during the Super Bowl or whatever is going to evaporate, and when that happens, there’s going to be this real sort of grinding moment of friction where it’s like, well, now the NFL has to work.

We’re not going to be able to expand. We’re not going to be as much money as we used to do. We contract teams? Do we change these contracts? The players will strike. Now, there have been strikes in the past before in the eighties, but this will be a combination of a strike and a lockout because the owners will see the same thing. They’ll see, well, we’re going to lose money by playing these games, and the players still want more money. They still want to raise, so they’ll be this big stoppage. Now, if that happened right now today, there’d be a national freakout. If football was suddenly gone every weekend, people would be like, what am I going to do on Sunday? What am I going to do on? What am I going to gamble on? What about my fantasy team? What about my, it would be that might not be true, and I don’t think it will be true in 40 or 50 years because the personal relationship to football that we had for most of the 20th century is kind of disappearing.

There’s a bifurcation now between the very small sliver of people who have a personal relationship to the game and the many, many more people who just kind of see it as an entertaining distraction, an entertaining distraction they love, and which that they see as something that’s maybe intrinsic to who they are, but not in a way that sort of touches who they actually are. I guess it’s like it’ll be something like, well, I watched football. My dad watched it. He didn’t play either. My grandpa maybe did. It’ll just separate and separate and separate, so when this sort of work stop, it occurs. People are going to care much less than we would expect them to, much less than they would care today. The comparison I use in the book is how in 1920 or whatever horse racing was one of the three biggest sports, and that was because people still had a relationship to horses in all walks of life.

Even if they lived in an urban area, they had grown up in a rural area and their father had owned horses, or they had a blue collar job where horses did the labor. I mentioned out in Chicago in 1900, it was called the city of Horses. Even if you lived in Chicago, horses were everywhere. So horse racing was a natural extension of that. We had a relationship to the horse for a long time. Most people in America had some relationship to football. Even if they didn’t play, it was something that their friends played or that meant a lot in their high school or college or all these things. It was the one time their family was all together on Sunday watching the same thing. I think when that disappears, a super lucrative hyper object becomes extremely fragile.

Brett McKay:

So fewer people are playing tackle football, so people are going to have less of a personal connection to the game, and I think too, people are going to lose a connection to the game just because with NIL and portal transfers, people are just going to lose their connection to the college game. The teams are always changing. It’s all just so mercenary, so you lose that connection to your hometown team or the team you root for, and then the leagues rely on the networks paying tons of money for the rights to air football games. I think it’s something like 12 billion for the NFL. It’s billions to Air college games. And right now networks are willing to pay that money. They’re willing to pony up because the advertising is valuable enough to justify it. But eventually advertising won’t have the same ROI. So networks won’t pay as much. And the NFL its model is based on the bright’s cost going up and up and up. So when the money stops going up, it all start to collapse. And this reminds me of a guy we had on the podcast a while back ago who’s an expert on roaming gladiatorial games. And he said this is one of the reasons why they disappeared. They just got bigger and bigger and more and more elaborate and eventually they were too expensive to put on so they went away. Yeah.

Chuck Klosterman:

They were trying to do things like they would fill a coliseum with water and have naval battles on this. It was like, I’m sure that was essentially the Super Bowl of its time.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s funny because people often kind of compare football games to gladiatorial games and the same fate might happen to football, American football. Well, Chuck, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Chuck Klosterman:

Well, I mean, if you want to learn about the book, you got to buy the book, I guess in terms of learning about it and learning about me, I don’t know. I guess all my old books, I don’t really view much social media anymore. I do these podcasts when people ask me to be on them, but yeah, I don’t dunno. 

Brett McKay:

You’re a hermit. I love it.

Chuck Klosterman:

Yeah, kind of.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Alright, well Chuck Klosterman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Chuck Klosterman:

Thanks.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Chuck Klosterman. He’s the author of the book Football that’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/football where you’ll find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. If you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it. 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 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 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.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Winter gets a bad rap.

I know I often treat it like a season to be endured rather than enjoyed, but there’s plenty of fun to be had when the temperature drops. And there are plenty of small winter rituals that make the cold months feel less like a slog and more like a season worth savoring.

To help you make the most of the cold and darkness, here’s a list of 21 things every man should do before the leaves start budding again on the trees.

Complete each one before the spring equinox, and you’ll create a batch of memories that’ll carry you through the rest of the year, but more importantly, make this winter feel a lot more enjoyable.

Let the winter adventures begin!

Hit the Slopes. Even if you’re not a graceful skier, there’s nothing more invigorating than strapping on a pair of skis and hurling yourself down a mountain. You get the pretty alpine views from the top of the lift, the rush of trying to maintain your balance as you zoom over the snow, and that bracing feeling as cold air hits you in the face. Skiing is winter in motion. And the food in the lodge (even if overpriced) always tastes better after a few hours on the slopes.

Read a Long Book. Winter is primetime for reading that really long book you’ve told yourself you’d read one day. The nights are long, and you might not be going out as much. Instead of slumping on the couch to watch Netflix, recline by the fireplace with a big ol’ boy of a book. War and Peace, Moby-Dick, a Ron Chernow biography. Pick up a tome and finish it before winter ends.

Cut Down Your Own Christmas Tree. Instead of grabbing one from the Home Depot parking lot, go to a tree farm and cut your own. The walk through the rows, the sawing, the hauling. It all makes the experience feel more organic and the decorated finished product feel more earned.

Once you set up your hand-cut Christmas tree in your house, check out our guide on how to keep it fresher, longer.

Have a Snowball Fight. Speaking of things you don’t have to abandon in adulthood, a good snowball fight when you’re a grown man reawakens the part of you that used to spend entire afternoons outside in the snow without noticing your fingers were frozen. Follow our guide from Buddy the Elf on how to make the perfect snowball, and remember, NO SOAKERS!

Go Sledding. A plastic sled + a decent hill = guaranteed good time. Sledding isn’t a pastime you have to leave behind in your childhood. Bonus points if you build a small jump to catch some air.

Shovel a Neighbor’s Driveway/Walkway. When the snow piles up, grab a shovel and not only clear your own driveway/walkway, but someone else’s who could use the help. Don’t make a fuss about it or text them afterward to announce your benevolence. Just do it and head back inside feeling warmed by both the exercise and the good deed.

To save some time and your back, check out our guide on the most efficient way to shovel snow.

Go Ice Skating. Ice skating is like skiing in that it requires a little skill to actually enjoy it. But once you get the hang of it, it feels awesome to zoom around the rink or pond. Especially while holding hands with your best gal.

Build a Fireplace Fire. During the winter, there’s nothing like building a cozy fire in your fireplace — a warm, crackling oasis you can sit beside in your man chair while you read thick, leather-bound books and ponder manful thoughts. It makes you feel like Frog and Toad on Christmas Eve. So dang cozy.

Build a Snow Shelter. You probably built snow forts when you were a kid. This winter, try making one that’s genuinely serviceable. There are various models to follow, but the quinzee might be the most efficient and accessible. Just pile up a bunch of snow and hollow out the inside. Then make like outdoor instructor Micah Mortali: bring in a camping mattress, a sleeping bag, and a beeswax candle, and sleep in it on the winter solstice.

Make Homemade Hot Cocoa. Ditch the little paper packet and make the real deal on the stovetop. Milk, cocoa, sugar, a pinch of salt, and a splash of vanilla. Stir until smooth. Add whipped cream or marshmallows as a finishing touch.

Play Card Games. Winter is prime time for indoor pursuits, which makes it prime time for playing cards. Round up the family or a couple buddies, crack open a pack, and play a few hands to wile away the time.

Host a Dinner Party. We can sometimes want to be by ourselves more in the winter, and while leaning into a little reflective solitude is fine, socializing is one of the best ways to keep up your spirits during the dark months. And one of the best ways to socialize is to host a dinner party. It doesn’t have to be fancy: make a simple meal, light a few candles, and invite friends to enjoy some cozy fellowship.

Do a Polar Plunge. There’s been plenty of ink spilt about the health benefits of cold plunges of late, but it’s worth doing for purely ineffable reasons; the bravery points required, the invigoration, and the sheer novelty. Whether it’s a ring-in-the-New-Year’s ritual or just a random dip in February, a polar plunge shocks your system in the best possible way. You’ll feel like you can wrestle a moose afterward. For extra winter points, pair your plunge with a sauna session.

Listen to a Record. Winter is the perfect season for vinyl. Put on a record, sit down, and just listen. No multitasking. The warm crackle of vinyl pairs nicely with the warm crackle of a fire. If you’re looking for albums to listen to, check out our suggestions for jazz albums for beginners; for some reason, jazz pairs especially well with long winter evenings.

Make a Big Pot of Chili. Cold weather calls for soups, stews, and, of course, chili. Big batches of it. Enough leftovers to feed yourself for days. Whether you’re a no-beans purist or a “throw everything in the pot” guy, chili is one of winter’s great comfort foods. Don’t forget the Fritos and cheddar cheese.

Visit a Museum. When the weather outside is frightful, museums make for the perfect indoor recreation spots. Art, history, science — whatever strikes your fancy. Wandering through exhibits is a great way to spend a winter afternoon, and you’ll learn something new to boot.

Check out our guide on how to make the most of a museum visit.

Sit in the Sauna. Cultures that live with real, bone-cold and super dark winters, like Finland and Norway, figured out long ago that the best way to handle months of cold is to get in a sauna on the regular. A sauna session warms you up and offers both physical and psychological benefits. Pair the sauna with a polar plunge or just step out into the cold air and let that contrast hit you.

Start a Winter Project. Winter is ideal for tactile projects that you can work on in the great indoors. Whether it’s a small craft, like whittling a figurine or making a leather belt, or it’s something bigger like making a dining room table, there’s something satisfying about projects you can chip away at, day by day. Slow, steady progress feels good when everything outside is frozen.

Make a Winter Cocktail (or Mocktail). Whether alcoholic or non, winter drinks were invented to make cold nights more pleasant. Mulled cider, hot toddies, wassail — anything warm and/or spiced really hits the spot.

Go on a Night Walk. There’s something magical about walking at night. And that’s especially true in the winter. The atmosphere is stiller. The air is sharper and more bracing (and even smells better!). The stars seem brighter. After a walk in the inky winter dark, you feel more alive.

Dream About the New Year. In winter, trees look dormant, but underground they’re quietly growing roots that will support next spring’s surge. We can take the same approach. Use the seasonal slowdown to think about where you want to head once the weather warms up. Grab a notebook, jot down a few hopes for the coming year, and mull on them a bit. No need to make specific resolutions. You can wait until spring when the sap starts running — an even better time to make goals than January — to do that. For now, just cast a wide vision across the cold landscape.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

You’ll find them lurking in the lobbies of grocery stores, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and arcades: the claw machine, that glass box of childhood excitement and elusive dreams. Whether your kids beg you to win them a stuffed narwhal, you’re feeling nostalgic, or you just finally want to enjoy the satisfaction of outwitting this frustrating machine, you’ll want to approach the game with grownup savvy. 

The first thing to know is that claw machines are often rigged. Many are programmed to grip tightly only every few turns, loosening their hold mid-lift unless the machine’s payout threshold has been met. That’s why you see so many plush toys piled near the chute, a testament to the claw machine’s most common outcome: close, but no cigar. 

Still, winning is possible — if you know how to play smart. You can do so by following the tips above.

Illustration by Ted Slampyak

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Over the Christmas break, our family took a trip to New York City. While we were there, we visited two of NYC’s most famous museums: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History.

We had a great time but found the experience pretty overwhelming. There’s a lot of great art and exhibits in these museums, and they’re freaking huge. After spending a couple of hours at each museum, we were all pooped, though we hadn’t even scratched the surface of these cultural institutions.

It got me wondering if I could improve my approach to visiting a museum. What was the best way to do one?

I knew just who to ask to get the answer to that question: Nick Gray. Nick was on the AoM podcast a couple of years ago to discuss his book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. Besides encouraging people to host short cocktail parties, he’s spent part of his career as a private museum tour guide in New York City and has led hundreds of tours. The man is passionate about museums. One of his life’s slogans is: “Museums are F***ing Awesome.”

I hopped on the horn with Nick to get tips on how to get the most out of your next museum visit. Here’s his field-tested battle plan.

Preparing for Your Museum Visit

Download the museum’s app. Nick told me that most big museums these days have their own app that you can use to enhance your visit, so check if they have one before you arrive. Many of these apps provide interactive maps as well as self-paced tours right on your phone. For example, the Museum of Natural History’s app has a map that can help you navigate its 1.2 million square feet. This would have come in handy on our visit; we got lost trying to find our way from the space section of the museum to its human history area.

Consider joining a tour group (but don’t be afraid to ditch it). I asked Nick if he recommended signing up for a guided tour at a museum. He told me that guided tours can make the experience more enjoyable, but he did provide this surprising caveat: “If you decide to join an in-person guided tour, you need to think about it like a magazine. Just like you can pick up a magazine and put it down without finishing it, you don’t need to stay with a tour for the entire time. Feel free to leave that tour if it’s no longer serving you.”

Nick did advise that you should leave with tact and grace. Just sort of fade away without making a big scene of it. Like an Irish goodbye.

Pack like you’re going on a day hike. A museum visit is more physically demanding than most people realize. You’re going to walk about two miles during a typical two-hour visit at a large museum. One of the biggest mistakes Nick sees people make is underpacking for their visit. He recommends you gear up for a museum visit like you would for a day hike or a trip to an amusement park. His essential packing list:

• Comfortable shoes
• Water bottle
• Light snack
• Headphones (for audio tours from your phone)
• Light layers (museums are climate-controlled and often chilly)

Nick especially emphasized the importance of bringing some snacks like nuts or a granola bar on your museum visit. “There’s an actual known phenomenon called ‘gallery fatigue’ where you just feel really wiped out mentally and physically from looking at exhibits,” Nick told me. Gallery fatigue seems to be caused by a combination of walking a lot and your brain having to choose what to pay attention to and process an endless stream of novel stimuli. Nick always kept snacks on hand for the folks in his tour groups to help stave off this condition.

Arriving at the Museum

Beat the crowds. If you’re looking to avoid the crowds, Nick recommends not visiting museums on Sunday afternoons (especially rainy and cold ones). That’s when museums are the busiest.

If you want to visit a museum when it’s less crowded, Nick suggests arriving when the museum first opens, but with this caveat: “Get there about 20-30 minutes after the museum opens. If you get there right when it opens, you’ll be standing in a long line, but usually 20 minutes after opening up, that line is gone.”

Don’t look at the exhibits (at first). Once you’re inside the museum, the first thing Nick counterintuitively recommends is to NOT look at the art. Instead, you’re going to do this:

1. Get a map from the front desk.
2. Walk the entire floor plan of the museum without stopping.
3. Keep moving even when interesting pieces catch your eye. Don’t read any wall text or take photos.
4. Complete this initial walkthrough in 10-30 minutes.

This quick initial walkthrough will give you a mental map of the museum, which will help you plan the rest of your visit.

Nick did have a caveat to his initial walkthrough advice: “For large museums like the Met or the Louvre, even a quick walkthrough would take an hour and a half, so don’t do this for those types of museums. This strategy is great for medium-sized museums.”

Take a short break and plan your visit. After your walkthrough, head to the café and have a seat to recharge for a bit. During this time, have a drink and a snack. Study your map and plan which galleries you want to revisit and spend more time in.

When planning, Nick recommends focusing on eliminating things you won’t see. If there’s a type of art or an era in history that doesn’t interest you, don’t visit that wing. It’s okay to not like or be interested in certain things.

Also, Nick recommends avoiding special exhibits: “If you’re just visiting for the day, don’t waste your time with special exhibits. These are better for locals who can come to the museum regularly. If you’re on vacation and only have two hours to visit a museum, stick to the permanent section highlights.”

Download an audio tour. Once you’ve winnowed down what you want to see on your visit, Nick recommends downloading an audio tour to your smartphone. They’re a great way to stay engaged on your visit and learn more about exhibits than you would wandering around on your own.

As mentioned above, many museum apps have these pre-loaded. Nick also told me that Bloomberg Philanthropies offers free and very well-done audio tours for your phone for many of the big museums in the United States and even a few in other countries.

If you’re visiting the Met, Nick recommends Bloomberg’s “Highlights” tour, which will take you on a guided tour of some of the Met’s most famous pieces.

Enjoying the Exhibits

Once you’ve established your game plan, start enjoying the art/exhibits. If you’re visiting an art museum, Nick offered the following tips to make your viewing more enjoyable:

• Ask yourself, “What’s your favorite piece in this gallery?”
• Play “Buy, Burn, or Steal” with companions (which piece would you want in your home, which would you rather never see again, and which would you steal if you could?)
• Give yourself permission to dislike certain pieces or galleries. You don’t have to like everything you see!
• Take note of a piece’s accession number. You’ll find this on the placard next to the piece. It’s a unique identifier for an object in a museum’s collection. If a piece really interests you, you can look it up on the museum’s website for more information.

Talk to the museum guards. In most museums, you’ll find guards patrolling the galleries. They’re there to make sure people don’t touch the art. Nick told me that the guards often have deep knowledge about the collections they protect. Don’t be afraid to strike up conversations with them — they can offer unique insights and perspectives you won’t find in any guidebook.

Take breaks! While you’re touring the museum, Nick recommends taking regular breaks every 45 minutes or so to avoid gallery fatigue. Sit down, drink some water, have a snack.

Practice good museum etiquette. To help ensure everyone has a good experience at the museum, practice good museum etiquette:

• Follow any rules the museums have about photography. Most museums these days allow you to take pictures, but it’s always good to double-check.
• Don’t be loud. Don’t touch stuff. Duh!
• Only eat and drink in designated areas. While you should bring snacks, make sure to only bust them out in designated areas. Most museums prohibit food and drink in the galleries.
• Be aware of your backpack radius. If you’ve got your backpack on your back, be aware of your radius. The last thing you want to do is swing your backpack into a priceless vase from third-century China. The risk of bumping into art with your backpack is why the Met asks patrons to wear their backpacks to the front.

If you’ve been avoiding museums because they seem overwhelming or boring, give Nick’s approach a shot. Pack some trail mix, download an audio guide, and play “buy, burn, or steal.” Focus on what interests you, take plenty of breaks, and maybe chat up a security guard or two. You might be surprised to find that museums are, indeed, pretty f***ing awesome.

Make sure to check out Nick’s website for even more tips on how to get the most out of a museum. He’s also got a great travel guide to visiting NYC in general, including additional advice on how to make the most of the Met.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Even if you’re not very into jazz, you probably know Kind of Blue, the jazz album that’s sold more copies than any other and is widely considered one of the greatest albums ever, in any genre.

Among the sextet of musicians who played on the album, three stand out as true jazz geniuses: Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and John Coltrane. Today on the show, James Kaplan, author of 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, unpacks the stories behind these towering figures. We discuss their background, their demons, their passion for musical greatness, and what they contributed to the evolving world of jazz. And we discuss why, when they got together to record Kind of Blue, the result was the most timeless and beloved jazz album in history.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• James’ last appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #186 — The Legend and Reality of Frank Sinatra
• “Miles Davis Blows His Horn” — James’ 1989 Vanity Fair profile of Davis
• AoM Article: A Crash Course in Jazz Appreciation
• AoM Article: Want to Get Into Jazz? Listen to These 10 Albums First
• Albums mentioned in the show
  • Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
  • Portraits in Jazz by Bill Evans Trio
  • Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
  • Giant Steps by John Coltrane

Connect With James Kaplan

• James’ 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 Manliness Podcast. Even if you’re not very into jazz, you probably know Kind of Blue, the jazz album that sold more copies than any other, and is widely considered one of the greatest albums ever in any genre. Among the sextet of musicians who played on the album, three stand out as true jazz geniuses; Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and John Coltrane. Today on the show, James Kaplan, author of 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, unpacks the stories behind these towering figures. We discuss their background, their demons, their passion for musical greatness, and what they contributed to the evolving world of jazz. And we discuss why when they got together to record Kind of Blue, the result was the most timeless and beloved jazz album in history. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/blue.

Alright, James Kaplan. And welcome back to the show.

James Kaplan: Brett, I am thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your biography of Frank Sinatra. You got a new musical biography out, and it’s about the artist who created one of the most influential, most popular jazz albums of all time, and that is Kind of Blue, headed up by Miles Davis. What led you to take a deep dive into the artists behind this album?

James Kaplan: Well, truth be told, I had lunch with my editor a few years back, and we were talking about what book I might do. I had had a suggestion for a book idea, which went nowhere. I won’t tell you what it is. [chuckle] But he had a comeback, and his idea was, “What about a book about Kind of Blue?” And I love Kind of Blue, and I had Kind of Blue, and I, like so many other people, was crazy about the album. But there is a wonderful jazz writer named Ashley Kahn who wrote the definitive book about that album, but it’s more of a technical book and more of a jazz book. Strictly a jazz book.

And what occurred to me when my editor, Scott Moyers, proposed this idea was, tickling around in the back of my mind was this amazing thing that I had in my pocket, Brett, which was that in 1989, when I was a young pop of a reporter, I snagged an incredible assignment from Vanity Fair to go and interview Miles Davis, and this was on the occasion of his about-to-be publication of his new memoir, then new memoir, called “Miles,” and I wangled my way into this interview. Actually, my brother helped me do it. My brother, the late newspaper editor, Peter W. Kaplan, great editor of the New York Observer, Was talking to this editor at Vanity Fair, who was looking around for a writer for Miles Davis profile, and my brother, my wonderful brother, said, “Well, my brother, Jimmy, knows everything there is to know about jazz,” [chuckle] which was an exaggeration, to put it very mildly. I knew nothing whatsoever. I had maybe three jazz albums at that point.

But Vanity Fair sent me, and with my knees knocking and my heart thumping, I rode up the elevator to the 17th floor of The Essex House, Central Park, South New York City, and walked into the apartment of Miles Davis. And I was terrified, because his reputation preceded him, but he turned out to be a total pussycat. And despite the fact that I knew absolutely nothing, I managed to get through an hour talking with him, and then he asked me to come back. And so I had the piece I did for Vanity Fair and these years ago recordings I did with the great Miles Davis, and I thought, when Scott, my editor, proposed this book about Kind of Blue, I thought, that’s interesting, but what about a book about the three geniuses of Kind of Blue? There were six musicians, but three of them arguably geniuses. Miles and John Coltrane and Bill Evans, what about those three guys before, during, and after the recording of that great album? What about writing about them not only as musicians, but as men? And Scott heard that, he loved it, and we were off to the races.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’m glad you went down that route of doing a biography of these men, because I love reading biographies of great musicians, ’cause I find it incredibly inspiring. I know you did a biography of Irving Berlin. And Irving Berlin, the thing that inspired me about him was how much of a workhorse this guy was. He was just cranking stuff out all the time. And that was a big takeaway for me. A lot of success in life if you’re a creator of, whether you’re a writer or a musician, it’s just putting out a lot of stuff.

James Kaplan: It’s not just putting out a lot of stuff, but it is having the courage to fail. Irving Berlin wrote 1500 songs, and he’d like to say, “I wrote more bad songs than anyone.” [chuckle] And it’s true. He wrote a lot of bad songs. And John Lennon, Paul McCartney wrote bad songs. And Miles Davis made bad recordings. All these guys had artistic skeletons in their closet, but they all were incredibly hard workers. Miles and Coltrane and Evan’s practiced and practiced and practiced until their fingers practically bled.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve been reading a biography of Bach. That was another workhorse. That guy was just constantly putting out stuff. And like you said, he failed a lot. We don’t know about all those bad stuff that you wrote, but you wrote a lot of bad stuff, but we remember the good stuff.

James Kaplan: His disco period, it’s a little no. Yeah.

Brett McKay: Alright. So I think to understand what makes Kind of Blue so singular, we have to do a bit of jazz history, and we’re gonna have to condense this. And it’s gonna be hard to do, ’cause jazz is a very multi-faceted art form. But I think the short story is, before the 1940s, jazz was primarily dance music. You went to a jazz band so you could dance to it, whether it was a Charleston or the Lindy Hop, whatever. But after World War II, you started to see the shift away from jazz as dance music to jazz as more of just an art in and of itself. Who were the musicians leading this shift away from jazz as dance music, and what innovations did they introduce?

James Kaplan: Right. And the thing I really wanna do here, Brett, is I want to avoid any… I don’t wanna put anybody to sleep. I don’t wanna talk about the snoozy history of this or of that. What I would like anybody listening to imagine is I’d like them to think about the greatest rock musicians, the greatest rap musicians they can think of. I want you to think about young, in this case, almost all young men. There were certainly women in jazz, but few. But I want you to think about young guys, primarily, young, Black guys, back in the 1930s. And this happened, actually, before World War II and during World War II. This new music called bebop sprang up. There was a recording ban for various reasons. There was a strike during World War II, and so the origins of bebop didn’t get recorded.

But I’d like you to think about these amazing young, Black guys, brilliantly gifted, guys like the guitarist, Charlie Christian, the saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet, Lionel Hampton, the vibraphonist, and in particular, trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, and alto saxophonist, Charlie Parker, those two guys. Young men, really young, and they’re really like rock musicians, they are full of juice, and they’re full of innovations, and they’re coming up with this new music that’s moving in a way that’s different to the way that jazz had moved before; different rhythms, different harmonies, wild and kind of angular. And these guys all played in conventional big bands, swing bands, before the war. And they would get in a certain amount of trouble with the band leaders, because they really wanted to play this new style of music, and the band leaders were making their money off of people dancing. So there began to be this kind of clash between these young turks and the old guard band leaders. And what happened during World War II was the big bands, the swing bands, got phased out. A lot of it had to do with wartime scarcity, no gasoline, the bands couldn’t afford to tour, there wasn’t enough money, the big bands began to go out of business, and suddenly, there were the small bands of these young turks playing this crazy new music called bebop.

Brett McKay: I think that’s an interesting point about the impacts. We often don’t think about this when it comes to art, we just think that, “Oh, an artist is just, they’re alone in their head, and they’re coming up with this stuff, but they’re being shaped by macro factors. And the economic factors of the Depression and World War II, that was driving… I mean, if it weren’t for the World War II and the Depression, we might not have had these innovations.

James Kaplan: Yeah. But we also need to think about these musicians struck by genius, as though they had been actually hit by pitchfork bolts of lightning; John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Bill Evans. All guys born in the 1920s, coming up as young men and loving the music, the jazz that existed already, but full of their own weird ideas about where they could take the music.

Brett McKay: For those who aren’t familiar with bebop, how would you describe it? How is it different from, say, a swing song, like In the Mood? How would you describe that?

James Kaplan: Well, I would say that bebop is to big band swing music as Cubism is to impressionism, maybe, where you look at Cubist paintings, great paintings of Picasso and Braque, and you’re seeing something in the very early 1900s, something totally different from anything that had ever been done before. You’re seeing this angular, crazy-looking stuff on canvases. And at the time, people reacted violently against it. They just thought it was nonsense and almost sinful. It was so terrible-looking to so many people. It wasn’t beautiful. A lot of people had a similar reaction to bebop when it came in. You had this new music that was moving fast, that was moving in a crazy way, that was being played faster than jazz had ever been played before, that you couldn’t dance to. It had a beat, but you couldn’t dance to it. [chuckle] But a lot of young people and the people who weren’t absolutely set on dancing began to be fascinated by this new music. They would stand, and they would listen in awe as Diz and Bird, Charlie Parker, were playing these new bebop songs, and it began to turn into art music, began to turn into music that you could… As Dizzy Gillespie said, “You don’t necessarily have to dance to a song to really feel it. Sometimes you can hear a groove so strong it’ll make your back crack,” is what Dizzy said.

Brett McKay: And yeah, bebop, heavy on the improvisation. Swing, not so much. You’d have a little bit, but it was pretty much set, bebop, a lot of improvisation.

James Kaplan: Yeah. Bebop was, by definition, improvised. It was what they called “head arrangements,” arrangements memorized by the musicians and improvised on the stand. And it was very small groups. It was quartets, quintets, sextets at the most, playing in these little, tiny clubs on 52nd Street, the street as it was known. All these brown stones in the one block between 5th and 6th Avenue used to be speakeasies, turned into jazz clubs in the 1940s. And with these little, tiny, smoky clubs, little, tiny groups playing this wild, new music, you had a scene that had never been seen before and never been seen since. Bebop was really synonymous with New York City and synonymous with the street, with 52nd Street.

Brett McKay: As you said, I think it’s important to point out, these guys, they’re very driven, they’re very ambitious. And what’s interesting about jazz music, particularly bebop, it is collaborative. You’re working with a group. But at the same time, it’s almost competitor too. It was actually extremely competitive. These guys were always trying to outdo each other.

James Kaplan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a lot of that began in Harlem, at the great clubs, at the Savoy, at Mittens Playhouse with Thelonious Monk and Dizzy and Bird and Miles, played up there, and so many other great musicians. And yes, absolutely. There was this tradition called “cutting,” and one musician is playing up there in the bandstand, another musician would just jump up on there with the same instrument a guy had been playing and play his own solo and try and better him. And you could put the other guy to shame if you played better than he did. It was an accepted tradition, and it was not battle of the bands, it was battle of the players, and it was Darwinistic, determine who’s gonna come out on top.

Brett McKay: Yeah, sometimes those musical beefs turned physical. They’d actually get… There’d be fistfight sometimes with these guys.

James Kaplan: It was all really physical. It was all about sweat, it was about thrill, it was about excitement, it was about this music that nobody had ever heard before, and it was powerful, it was sexy, it was vital, it was brand new.

Brett McKay: Alright. So this period of the development of bebop jazz, this was the period where Miles Davis and these other musicians, who eventually were on Kind of Blue, this is when they came of age. This is when they were… This was the stew they were in when they were in their early 20s, when they were… The formative years. So I think we start exploring these individual members of Kind of Blue. Let’s start with Miles Davis first. He’s the coolest of the cool when it comes to jazz musicians. What’s interesting though, is that his upbringing was more affluent and conventional than a lot of people might think.

James Kaplan: Miles was well off, and there’s no two ways about it. Miles’s father, Miles II… Miles Davis that we know was actually Miles III, Miles Dewey Davis III. Miles’s father was a dentist. And as such, he was a professional man, well respected, successful, made money, had a horse farm. Miles grew up as a young prince. He rode horses at his father’s farm, he had beautiful clothes, he was a handsome, young kid, and his musical genius was recognized early. Miles had a unique upbringing, in that, it was so privileged. But at the same time, Miles knew that he possessed this strange and powerful gift of musical genius, and he knew he had to take it some place, and the place he knew he had to take it was New York City. He had to get there somehow.

Brett McKay: The way he got there, I think maybe this is how he convinced his parents to get him there, he was a student at the famous Juilliard School of Music. He got to Juilliard, which is very about formal music development. How did he go from there to becoming this jazz musician that we know today, that just added all these innovations to jazz?

James Kaplan: Miles’s father was very traditionalist, and he wanted his son to succeed in a traditional way, maybe even become a classical musician. And so Miles came up with this great strategy. The strategy was, “Let me go to New York and enroll at Juilliard, and I will develop myself and become an educated musician.” Well, [chuckle] there was a certain amount of deception in this strategy. What Miles really wanted was to get to New York City and to hook up with, to connect with Dizzy and Bird. He had met Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in St. Louis, Miles’s hometown, when Bird and Diz came through playing with a band, and he wanted to get back with them, get to New York.

So he enrolls at Juilliard. He goes to New York City in 1944. He’s 18 years old. And after a couple of months at Juilliard, everybody around him is White, all the other students are White, all the teachers are White. And there was one day in particular in a classroom when a woman was teaching a class, started talking, holding forth about the blues and saying that Black people sang and played the blues because they picked cotton and they were miserable and they were down-trodden, and they had been slaves, and Miles finally couldn’t stand it anymore, and he stood up and he said, “Listen. I play the blues. I’m not down-trodden. I don’t play the blues because I’m down-trodden, and this stuff is all ridiculous.” Miles felt that he was learning from White people about White music, and to a certain extent, those lessons meant something to him. He was studying the great modernist, like Stravinsky and Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff, but Juilliard turned him off. And he got together with Dizzy and Bird as quickly as possible and very quickly got hired by Charlie Parker to join his band. An incredible thing. Here is this young kid out of the Midwest who everybody thought couldn’t play that well, but Bird heard something in Miles and hires him, and before long, Miles is playing great.

Brett McKay: Well, going back to this idea of the ambition of these men Miles Davis, he was super ambitious. And the way he got with Charlie Bird, he had to go look for him. He was constantly… He was on the prowl. He was hitting the pavement, trying to get in touch with Charlie Bird Parker, which just reminds me now when a lot of young men are young, they’re willing to just go and just relentlessly pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue until they get what they want.

James Kaplan: That’s exactly right. [chuckle] There was no internet, no Google, no Google Maps in those days. Charlie Parker, who was a major heroin addict and a major hedonist, was at large in Manhattan doing heroin, drinking, having sex with many, many, many women all over the place, there one night, here another night, sleeping wherever he felt like it, so he wasn’t that easy to track down. And Miles searched all over Midtown, searched the street, went up to Harlem, searched all over Harlem, couldn’t find Bird, then one night, he’s standing outside a jazz club and he hears a voice back of him and said, “Hey, Miles, you’ve been looking for me?” And it was Bird.

Brett McKay: Did Miles Davis drop out of Juilliard?

James Kaplan: He dropped out of Juilliard after one year. That was it for miles and formal education. But he really did keep on educating himself, and he took some of the lessons from Juilliard, again, listening to these great, modernists of Western classical music and the new harmonies they were bringing to the music. Miles, thought a lot about that, listened to a lot of it. So no more formal education, but for Miles from then on, it was the education of the bandstand.

Brett McKay: How did his father take him dropping out of Juilliard?

James Kaplan: Well, listen, another thing happened, which was that after World War II Miles went to Europe, went to France to play jazz, and found there a welcome that he had never found in the United States. Found white people who weren’t seeing him as a black man, but just as another human being, fell in love with this great singer, Juliette Gréco but then had to come back to the States and back to being a second class citizen, so depressed by coming back to having to be a black man in the America of the late 1940s that he fell into a heroin addiction. And Miles and his father, Miles went back home more than twice actually, to try and kick heroin. His father helped him with this but eventually, Miles had to do it himself. Miles’s father was disappointed that he dropped out of Juilliard. At the same time, Miles’s father understood that his son was a great musician and a troubled young man. He did his best to help Miles, but again in the end, miles had to do it himself.

Brett McKay: Going back to Miles Davis’s heroin addiction, heroin is a character that keeps reoccurring reappearing in your history, what was going on? Why was heroin such a heavily used drug amongst jazz musician during this time period?

James Kaplan: Before World War II, the drugs of choice among jazz musicians had been two. They had been marijuana, and a lot of songs about reefer in jazz prior to World War II and alcohol, of course. And a lot of musicians suffered from alcoholism and even died from alcoholism. During World War II, and especially immediately thereafter, a lot of heroine came into the United States. A lot of this had to do with organized crime. Suddenly there were pushers pushing heroine on jazz musicians. And then there was Charlie Parker. And Charlie Parker was the biggest heroine addict of all of jazz music. He was also a transcendent musical genius. And this awful myth arose, that among musicians, among young black and some white jazz musicians, that if you wanted to play like bird, you had to do like bird. In other words, if you used heroine, maybe you could achieve that transcendent high of musicians ship that Charlie Parker achieved. And it was a myth. It was this terrible falsehood, and a lot of guys died. But heroin addiction became widespread in jazz, right after World War II and stayed for about the next 15 years.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The way you described it the use, I mean, with Charlie Bird, he would sometimes just be passed out on the stand. And then when it was his turn to do his solo, he’d just get up and just crank it out like nothing was wrong. And then he’d go back.

James Kaplan: He was a phenomenon. He was an absolute phenomenon. He was a big strong guy. He had the constitution of a horse. But even in the end, Charlie Parker couldn’t overcome heroin. He didn’t die of overdose, but he really died of overuse of heroin. He died in 1955, at age 34. And when the coroner came to examine his corpse, he estimated Charlie Parker’s age as the mid 50s, 34 years old.

Brett McKay: Wow. So with Miles’ss heroin addiction, he goes from making it, becoming part of Charlie Bird’s Band. He becomes a success. Then he starts heroin and goes to being totally unreliable, nodding off on the stand when he was playing, when he did show up, his hair would just… Clothes would just be a mess. And that was a big change because before that, he took a lot of pride in his appearance, and sometimes he just didn’t even show up to gigs. I mean, he basically almost flushed his career down the toilet. But he did finally go cold Turkey on heroin, though he did continue to use cocaine and alcohol throughout his life. And that was partly to deal with some of the pain he had because he had sickle cell anemia. And he’s also just really brooding throughout his life. People called him the Prince of darkness, but when he put heroin behind him he became a more reliable artist.

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And now back to the show. So, when Davis has finally kicked heroin, this is when he started making a lot of the innovations to jazz that he’s famous for, during this time in the ’50s when he starts developing what’s been called cool jazz. How would you describe cool jazz? And then how did the jazz community initially receive these innovations?

Miles knew a guy named Gil Evans, this brilliant arranger and conductor from Canada, who Miles met on the street on 52nd Street. And in Gil Evans, he found a kind of a musical co-equal, a guy who loved the same kind of jazz and the same kind of modern western classical that Miles loved and Miles loved this guy. And they formed this very tight bond of friendship and musical friendship. And Miles and Gil Evans started to create this music together. Gil Evans was arranging this music. A lot of people were writing arrangements, were writing songs for a new kind of jazz that involved a lot of musicians, sometimes as many as eight or nine or 10 or more orchestras. But charts, written arrangements, and the kind of jazz that was something similar to what came to be known as Third Stream.

James Kaplan: It was almost a marriage of Western classical and jazz written down on charts. And the initial recordings that would later come to be called The Birth of the Cool were done by Miles in conjunction with Gil Evans, and were received early on, there’s no other word but to say coolly. [laughter] They were not met with warm affection by jazz musicians or by the public. The records didn’t sell at first. They weren’t even called the Birth of the Cool at first. And in particular, dizzy Gillespie was kind of scathing about this new arranged classical sounding jazz. He said that jazz was really meant to make you sweat. I don’t know if I can say this, I’ll say it anyway. Jazz was supposed to make you sweat in your balls, and this music didn’t make you sweat in your balls. A dizzy wanted a music that was improvised and not written down on charts, or if it was written down on charts, something that really had the power to, as he said earlier, to make your back crack, to be a strong groove. These were not strong grooves. They were smoother, they were cooler. And so it was a different branch of jazz, and it was an important branch of jazz, but not received warmly at first.

Brett McKay: Did it eventually get warmly received?

James Kaplan: It eventually became called The Birth of the Cool and Cool Jazz, and it was much admired by west Coast musicians. Jerry Mulligan, Chet Baker went out to the West Coast, became West Coast Jazz, and which became, very, very popular. Dave Brubeck out there. Cool Jazz achieved its own success during the 1950s, and especially after the fading of bebop, which really happened with the death of Charlie Parker in 1955.

Brett McKay: How did Miles Davis handle the cool reception to his innovation, like Dizzy Gillespie and these all the other guys, like he admired them when he was a young man. How did he feel like, “Oh, I got this new thing”, and everyone’s like, “This is not good.”

James Kaplan: Well, he was playing both sides of the street. He was playing the Cool jazz, and he was playing his own quintet and sextet jazz coming up with these great new innovations in jazz. As Bebop was starting to ebb, a new kind of jazz was rising up. And Miles not only was creating cool jazz, but he was one of the innovators of what came to be called hard bop. Now, hard bop in a certain way means absolutely nothing. What’s hard about it? What’s bop about it? It was a new kind of jazz that was much more soulful, much more based on gospel, on blues. People like Horace Silver, for example, came up, Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It was a jazz that was unlike bebop, which was like cubism. This was more deeply felt. It was more emotional, it was more bluesy. It was kind of a return to swinging and maybe you could even dance to a lot of it. So Miles was innovating both ways. And when you ask what his reaction was, Miles never particularly gave about what anybody’s reaction was to his music. Miles went his own way at all times.

Brett McKay: Constantly innovating. And what was his work ethic like? Was he just constantly performing as much as he could? Is that how he approached these innovations? Did the innovations come in practice, or did they really come out when he performed live?

James Kaplan: Miles was a guy, I’ll tell you a little story about Miles. Miles once was on the road with his quintet, and he heard late at night in the hotel, he heard one of his musicians practicing behind the door of his hotel room. Miles bangs on the door and barges into this guy’s room, and he says to this guy, “I pay you to practice on the bandstand, not in your room.” Miles wanted spontaneity. Now, this may sound paradoxical, he worked with Gil Evans on these arranged charts that were the birth of the Cool, but in the music that he played with his groups, with his small groups on the bandstand, he wanted everybody to be finding new ways right on the bandstand. So he had perfected his technique through playing thousands upon thousands of hours. Miles wasn’t one to woodshed as much as Bill Evans, for example, or as John Coltrane. John Coltrane was an insane incessant practicer, but miles treasured spontaneity above all things.

Brett McKay: Okay. So another artist that played on Kind of Blue was the pianist Bill Evans. Another one of my favorite musicians. I got his album Portrait and Jazz, I love listening to it. What was his background as a musician?

James Kaplan: Bill Evans was a glasses wearing white guy from New Jersey who could have been and maybe should have been in some ways, a great classical pianist. He studied classical piano, he loved classical piano. He had amazing technique, but something else happened when he was a teenager. He fell head over heels in love with jazz. And this is in the 1940s, Bill Evans is hearing all these great new sounds and jazz, falls in love with them. He goes to college to study classical music, but at the same time, he has also… Even before he goes to college, he has turned himself into the fastest boogie Woogie player in New Jersey. He keeps up this romance with jazz. He keeps playing jazz even as he’s studying classical music in college. And finally, when he is in his mid 20s decides to go to New York and he’s gonna make it in jazz, or he is gonna die trying.

If he doesn’t make it, he’s just gonna have to go home. He plays a lot of dances and weddings, bar mitzvahs, the way all jazz musicians have to do to make a dime when they’re coming up. And one night, Bill Evans had a gig at the Village Vanguard great jazz club in Greenwich Village. There was a famous group at the time called the Modern Jazz Quartet, who were playing the vanguard. And Bill Evans was the in-between player. When the modern jazz quartet were taking a break, Bill Evans would play piano in between. When the modern jazz quartet were playing the whole club would go dead silent. Reverend listening to Modern Jazz Quartet, when Bill Evans would start playing in between, everybody started eating and drinking and clinking glasses and plates. Anyway, one night, bill Evans is playing his in-between piano, and he looks down at the end of the grand piano, and there is the penetrating gaze of Miles Davis staring at him. Miles is looking at Evans. He’s listening, he’s taking it in. He’s hearing things he had never heard before in jazz piano. And a few months later, Miles hires Evans.

Brett McKay: What did Davis see in Evans? What was Evans doing that caught his attention?

James Kaplan: Evans, despite the fact that he looked like this nerd from New Jersey was bringing harmonies and textures out of modern Western Classical out of Stravinsky, out of Shostakovich, out of Rachmaninoff, that nobody had brought to jazz before. Miles had genius ears. And he was hearing in Evans a kind of jazz piano that Miles felt that was brand new and Miles really wanted to bring into his group.

Brett McKay: Evans talked about how he really wanted to bring feeling into his piano. He wanted you to feel something when he played and the way he played he just kind of like hunch over his head down. You could tell he was really trying to bring in the emotion to the piano.

James Kaplan: Yes. Evans deeply felt all that he played. He deeply loved the Western classical that had informed his jazz playing. And he couldn’t perform unless he was in a kind of emotional reverie. Unfortunately, the thing that happened as soon as Evans joined Miles Band, there was a huge backlash suddenly in the biggest small jazz group in the United States, in the most successful small jazz group in the United States. There was a white guy among black players, and among black audiences, and among black jazz musicians, a great backlash against Evans. It was psychically extremely damaging to Evans. He was a highly sensitive guy. Miles reassured him, but at the same time, miles had a way of continuing to haze Bill Evans Miles. Miles had a sense of humor. Somebody once asked Miles what his hobby was, and Miles said, making fun of white people on TV.

Miles liked to make fun of Evans too. Sometimes when Evans would hazard a musical opinion, Miles would say, “We don’t want no white opinions here.” But Miles also deeply respected Evans as a musician, and Miles used to say he didn’t care what color his musicians were. And so Evans had these conflicting forces working. He was accepted by Miles, unbelievably, by the great Miles Davis and Evans set about as soon as he joined Miles’ss Band. Evan’s set about turning himself into the biggest junkie in Miles’ss Band. And even though Miles wasn’t using heroin anymore, some of his other musicians were, and Evans joined them and then surpassed them as a heroin user. And this had unfortunately a huge effect on Evans’ music, on his life, on his career. And it shortened his life. He died at age 51 in 1980.

Brett McKay: So was Evans using heroin as a way to, I don’t know, kind of be accepted? Was that maybe he was thinking?

James Kaplan: Yeah. I mean, it was sort of a corollary of the Bird rule, right? To play like Bird you have to do like bird. It was this ridiculously conformist idea that Evans picked up on. If you’re gonna be a hip jazz musician, you gotta do heroine. And it was insane. It was crazy, but it got him a kind of acceptance among musicians that he had never had when he was the nerd wearing glasses from New Jersey.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that maybe it’s a lesson even amongst groups who consider themselves iconoclast or non-conformist. There still is gonna be a sense of conformity that you have to be aware of, or it’s another musician that played on Kind of Blue was John Coltrane. We’ve been talking about him a little bit throughout this conversation. What made him such an amazing saxophone player?

James Kaplan: Well, again, it’s that bolt of lightning. It’s the same thing with Sinatra walking around Hoboken at age 12 and hearing the music of the Spheres. There’s young John Coltrane growing up in North Carolina, and then Philadelphia walking around and sensing some kind of genius in himself that he was too shy. He was a deeply shy, deeply reserved, very, very modest human being. So he was conflicted. He was conflicted. He had a terribly sad childhood, boyhood and early and young manhood. He lost his father when he was very young, which was terribly painful to him and some other important male relatives. And so he became sad. He became withdrawn. He went within himself. He knew he had this musical talent, and he wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. The thing he mainly did was practiced and practiced and practiced. He would play his saxophone. Everybody said, everybody who knew him as a kid, as a teenager, as a young man would talk about, they would hear him practicing behind closed doors at all hours. And if anybody complained, Coltrane would sit on his bed and practiced the fingering of his saxophone. So an insane over practicer. But he was also so modest that he began to play in bands that were beneath him, really, playing R&B, walking the bar. And he didn’t really come out of himself, emerges as himself until he was recognized, until he was seen and heard by Miles Davis.

Brett McKay: And Coltrane, he made a lot of innovations to jazz.

James Kaplan: As soon as Coltrane was able to rid himself of the need to imitate Charlie Parker, and there was a whole generation, dozens upon dozens of saxophonists who needed to rid themselves of the towering, mountain-like influence of Charlie Parker. As soon as Coltrane was able to find his own voice, he found a way of playing saxophone again, as Miles said, louder and faster than anybody else, and then beginning to explore chords, beginning to explore music in a way nobody had, even Charlie Parker had never explored before, playing tunes in a way that didn’t necessarily go with the way people had heard these songs before. When you listen to Charlie Parker play, when you listen to a great saxophonist like Dexter Gordon play, they were so wonderful, so beautiful, Sonny Rollins too. They would often quote from popular songs of the day or other jazz songs. One thing I say about Coltrane was that Coltrane only quoted from God. He heard things and played things nobody had played before.

Brett McKay: All right. So in 1959, all these guys synced up along with Cannonball Adderley to…

James Kaplan: And Cannonball, I just wanna interject. So, on Kind of Blue, you had not just these three geniuses; Miles and Train and Evans, but you had three other great players. You had Cannonball Adderley, and you had Paul Chambers, great bassist who died tragically young, I think 36 years old, again, heroin. You had Jimmy Cobb, great drummer. Cannonball Adderley was a terrific musician, terrific alto saxophone player who was soulful in a way that Coltrane was the great experimenter, and Cannonball was the great soul player. And Cannonball was itching to go out on his own and lead his own band, and very soon after Kind of Blue would do exactly that. You may remember the terrific jazz standard, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, that was Cannonball’s song. And that’s a clue of what Cannonball brought to the music. But six great musicians on the album.

Brett McKay: So they all came together and they produced Kind of Blue. It’s considered a day to be modal jazz, the way they describe it. How would you describe modal jazz and what Kind of Blue is?

James Kaplan: Well, again, I don’t want anybody to snooze on us. Don’t want anybody to go to sleep. Modal jazz sounds mathematical, it sounds academic, it sounds, I don’t know. What Miles wanted to do was something nobody had done in jazz before. Jazz, from the time of its formation at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, all the way up to 1959, jazz had been full of chords. It had been blues chords or it had been based on songs of the American songbook, standard tunes, T for two and stuff like that. And what you had was music that was based on a lot of chords. And it was beautiful, but Miles was restless. He was a restless artist, he was restless his whole life. He was always throwing off styles, he was throwing off friends, he was throwing off lovers, always changing. And Miles wanted to create something brand new and very, very simple. And so he wanted to throw out all these chords and he had gone to a performance of Les Ballets Africains, African Ballet, where they were playing all these African instruments, and he was enchanted by it.

And he was enchanted by the music too, a lot of which was kalimba, African finger piano. And so it was a whole different style of music, a whole different sound of music, and it wasn’t based on chords, it was based on just a couple of chords. And so Miles had this idea of creating an album that would be more about just a chord or two, sometimes just one chord for bar upon bar of the music with people improvising over that single chord, or maybe just two chords, as in the great linchpin of Kind of Blue, the greatest, arguably one of the greatest jazz tunes ever recorded, so What. So What is just two chords, listen to it. One chord, then another chord, and you have these amazing improvisations, including Miles’ss, over just these two chords. Miles wanted something that was quieter and simpler.

Brett McKay: Yeah. In the back of Kind of Blue, the jacket, Bill Evans wrote this thing called Improvisation in Jazz, and he talks about the making of Kind of Blue, and he said that basically Miles David had this basic framework that he wanted to have, but he conceived of these settings only hours before the recording dates, in a ride with sketches which indicated to the group what was to be played. And then he says, Bill Evans says, therefore you will hear something close to pure spontaneity in these performances.

James Kaplan: And an amazing thing about Kind of Blue, and it’s hard to wrap your head around, but every full take on Kind of Blue was a first take. And I’m gonna say that again, every full take on the album was a first take. So totally spontaneous. And yeah, built on these tiny little sketches. Miles would bring in a piece of paper, not even staff paper, not even music paper, but just a piece of regular white paper with a few notes drawn on it, and show it to the guys. And these, again, Miles was somebody who really needed anybody who played with him to be able to instantly get it, and to improvise beautifully right on the bandstand. And somehow, Bill Evans later said, every musician has recorded dozens of times. You never know, you go into a recording studio on a Wednesday morning, and you never know what’s gonna come out of it. Something good, something bad, something great, maybe. Nobody knew walking into these two sessions for Kind of Blue that greatness would result. Somehow or other, lightning struck, and these six guys all came together, all got in this incredible groove together, and played these historic first takes.

Brett McKay: Is that why you think Kind of Blue has endured? Like, I never get tired of listening to this thing, and I think it’s because it’s all first takes. Like, when you listen to it, you think, like you just feel like I’m listening to something that’s never happened before, and never happened since.

James Kaplan: Never happened before and never happened again. It’s really hard to say, Brett. There’s something very mysterious about it. Going back to Sinatra for a second again, you listen to Sinatra, I listen to Sinatra, as annoyed with him as I can get sometimes, for all kinds of reasons. The guy always gives me goosebumps. What is it that’s giving me goosebumps about Sinatra? What is it about Kind of Blue that gives you goosebumps? There’s a mystery to it. There’s a mystery to this album. There’s something about this album that you can’t, there’s a quiet, what I call it, I call a quiet majesty to Kind of Blue that you can’t put your finger on. It’s really hard to define, but it’s the best-selling jazz album of all time and arguably the best-loved. Why is that? There’s just this quiet to it and this mystery that just puts you in a different place. It takes you to a different place.

Brett McKay: And what I love about Kind of Blue, you have to listen to the whole thing. It’s not one of those things where you can just listen to songs, but you could, but to get the full effect of it, you have to listen to the thing in its entirety.

James Kaplan: Yeah. And you have to and you want to.

Brett McKay: Yeah, yeah. So they make this singular album. What happened to these guys after they made Kind of Blue?

James Kaplan: The three guys of my book all wanted to go out in different directions. Miles had already, of course, led many of his own groups and would continue to do so. Coltrane, Coltrane very much wanted to become a leader and very quickly became one. One month after finishing Kind of Blue, Coltrane recorded the great transformational album Giant Steps with that amazing number on it, Giant Steps, and very soon thereafter would make A Love Supreme and other great albums and become this pivotal, iconic, it’s an overused word, but there’s nobody like Coltrane. Coltrane wanted to be Coltrane. He loved playing with Miles, but he wanted to be Coltrane. He had to be. And Evans had to be Evans. Evans went out. He wanted to play trios, piano trios. He did that for the rest of his short career. Some would argue that Evans didn’t go as far musically, artistically, as Miles or Coltrane did. Some have argued otherwise. One of the great musicians I interviewed for my book was Jon Batiste. And Jon Batiste talked about an amazing album that Evans recorded called Conversations with Myself. What did Evans do? He double tracked.

He played piano and then on another track, he played along with himself playing piano. And Jon Batiste argued, that’s a real innovation. So Evans didn’t play music. He never played music that was difficult to understand. He felt deeply, he played beautifully lyrical music for the rest of his career. But it was a lyrical music, unlike piano music that other people were playing. So they all needed to go in their own directions.

Brett McKay: And did Miles Davis continue to try to push the envelope with jazz?

James Kaplan: Constantly. That’s all he ever did was push the envelope. But the thing about Miles was that Miles loved to sell records. Miles loved money. He loved living the good life. He loved having Ferraris and he loved fine wine, beautiful women, great art. He loved having his own big apartment on the Upper West Side. He loved all the things that money could buy. And so he had to sell a lot of records to do that. So he was always looking out for commercial opportunity. And when rock and roll music upset jazz’s apple cart and then some, it really dropped an atomic bomb into jazz in the early 1960s. Night of February 9th, 1964, the Beatles play Ed Sullivan, and that was the end of jazz, really, in many ways. Really, jazz started dying that night. Miles had to find a way forward. And so one of the ways he found forward was something that came to be known as fusion. It was a combination, a blending of jazz and rock and roll, electric instruments, electronic instruments, electric guitar, electric piano, electric organ. And a lot of people hated it. A lot of jazz purists hated it. But Miles recorded Bitches Brew, which was another huge success for Columbia Records and for Miles Davis. Miles found a way forward commercially, which wasn’t always popular with the gate guardians of jazz.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I’ve heard fusion jazz was jazz’s last ditch effort to make jazz popular again.

James Kaplan: Well, that’s one way of putting it, but I would say that a lot of it holds up. You listen to Bitches Brew today and it’s a powerful album. You listen to that beautiful, beautiful album, Filles de Kilimanjaro of Miles Davis, with a lot of electronic instrumentation on it. And that is gloriously lyrical music with a lot of electric and electronic instruments on it that holds up. So some of it holds up. And jazz just it changed. It transmogrified throughout the 1960s. Unfortunately for jazz, a lot of what happened in American culture impacted jazz. It was not only rock and roll music that beat jazz down, but it was the fragmentation of American culture. In the 1950s, Miles Davis was an American superstar. You could go up to a student on a Midwestern college campus and say Miles Davis, and they would know who you were talking about. And they would like jazz and they would think jazz was hip and jazz was the music of the future. What happened in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, and then when the internet came in was the fractionalization of American culture, we became a nation of 10,000 tribes.

And so jazz continues to exist, but today it’s niche music, like so many other kinds of music, and it has its passionate adherents and it has its geniuses. There are great jazz players today and singers today. People like Robert Glasper and people like, Jazzmeia Horn, Esperanza Spalding, Aaron Deal, Brad Mehldau, all these wonderful, wonderful vocalists, instrumentalists, but jazz is, you know, in 1957, everybody in the United States would know who Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis were, how many people today know who, I’m not going to name any musicians, I just named because I just named them, but they’re wonderful musicians. They’re great musicians, but they are known to the comparatively few who love jazz these days.

Brett McKay: Are these musicians today who are playing, are they innovating like Miles Davis did, or have we reached the edges of innovation in jazz? And now it’s just, we’re perfecting it. It’s kind of like classical music. Like there’s not really much innovation going on. We’re just perfecting what’s there.

James Kaplan: Yeah. I don’t think it’s ever possible within your time to know exactly where you are. I think it’s really only possible years and decades afterwards to know where the music is going. And so as an example, where Coltrane went after Giant Steps and after Love Supreme, he began playing up and down these chords into reaches of chords that nobody had heard before. And people, even jazz aficionados who had loved Coltrane’s music began to get very impatient with him and feel this music is too difficult to listen to anymore. And then people like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor came in playing what was then called free jazz. And this was jazz that didn’t even have any chord structure. There were no melodies anymore. It sounded to so many people just like a lot of noise. It was one of the things that drove a lot of people away from jazz. But in retrospect, a lot of people think it’s great music. Is anybody doing anything like that today? I would say that you have people doing things today that may fall with difficulty on some years. But I think it’s going to take a long time before we know, before it all gets sorted out.

Brett McKay: Well, James, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

James Kaplan: Ah, well, they can go to my website, jameskaplan.net. They can go to Penguin Press’s website. And they can go to your terrific podcast. This terrific conversation we had right here, Brett.

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

James Kaplan: My pleasure, too.

Brett McKay: My guest today is James Kaplan. He’s the author of the book ‘3 Shades of Blue.’ It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jameskaplan.net. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/blue, where you find links to resources where we delve deeper in this topic and make sure you give ‘Kind of Blue’ a listen. It’s a great album. It’s available in full on Spotify. Check it out. 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. 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 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 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 AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

The ancient Greeks believed that the human soul, or psyche, was composed of three parts: reason, appetite, and thumos. While we still understand the first two elements of this triparite model, the concept of thumos has largely been forgotten in the modern day.

Interestingly, there is no direct translation for this term in our language. 

According to the Greeks, thumos was crucial for andreia (manliness) and was viewed as a complex and powerful energy. It can be described as a person’s life force — the force that instills a lofty spiritedness in the young and an evergreen vitality in the old.

Thumos is a source of discernment. It’s related to gut feelings and intuition — what Jeffrey Barnouw calls “visceral thinking” — and also has a prophetic quality, giving you a sense of foreboding about where a decision may lead.

More fundamentally, thumos is the motivation that drives a man to take action, strive for success, and fight for what he believes in. It also encompasses his courage, determination, and ability to persevere in facing challenges. It’s the “fire in the belly” that pushes someone to leave behind comfort and security, reject mediocrity, seek honor, and strive to be the best among his peers. 

Thumos, in short, is heart.

The ancient Greeks would listen to a poet recite the Iliad to fill them with thumos. Men living in Elizabethan times would likely feel thumos course through their veins while watching King Henry give his St. Crispin’s Day speech in Shakespeare’s Henry V. 

Today, film is an artistic medium that can inspire thumos in the hearts of men. Below, we highlight ten films that show what thumos looks like when lived out, and more importantly, inspire thumos while you watch them. Whenever you need to get pumped up, queue up one of these films, and then don’t let the feelings they fill you with go to waste: put your renewed spiritedness to work in taking manly action.  

Braveheart

There’s so much going on in this film that stokes the thumotic fire. 

The sweeping shots of Scotland. The stirring bagpipe music. Dudes in warpaint holding broadswords. 

But what really sets one’s heart afire after watching Braveheart is seeing William Wallace rouse his men to battle and lead them in fighting for freedom, love, and honor even when the odds are against them. If thumos had a mantra, it would be the movie’s tagline and most famous quote: “Every man dies; not every man really lives.” 

Gladiator

General Maximus Decimus Meridius was a good man, and good at being a man. 

He loved his family and his country, and he had the strength and skill to fight for them. 

But most importantly, he was filled with thumos, a spiritedness that moved him to action and to know how to outmaneuver the morally bankrupt Commodus. 

Maximus also knew how to inspire others with thumos. You can’t help but walk a little taller after hearing him yell: “What we do in life echoes in eternity!”

Warrior

Sports movies are prime for inspiring thumos, and perhaps no genre does it better than the boxing film, which places two men directly in the arena to battle it out mano-a-mano.

Warrior is an excellent entry in this category and tells the story of two estranged brothers, Tommy and Brendan Conlon, who enter a mixed martial arts tournament for their own personal reasons. Tommy, an ex-Marine with a troubled past, seeks redemption, while Brendan, a high school physics teacher, fights to save his family from financial ruin. Thumos guides both men as they prepare for their climactic confrontation in the ring. Watching them will inspire you to tap more into your own thumos. 

The Lord of the Rings 

Most of the characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy don’t have the masculine bravado of those that populate the other movies on this list. But the films still have thumotic verve, and it’s actually no surprise that they do. The author of the books on which the movies are based, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a scholar of the classics and understood the importance of thumos in helping a man do great deeds. As his friend C.S. Lewis would put it, Tolkien understood that men need “chests” to live a flourishing life.

In this action-packed and beautifully filmed trilogy, the characters display examples of loyalty, duty, and bravery. The story’s main protagonist, Frodo Baggins, teaches us that we often don’t choose our calling in life; it chooses us. And when it does, you give it all you got. 

The Last of the Mohicans

A Mohican father, his son, and his adopted son attempt to maintain neutrality during the French-Indian War in colonial America. But the men are pulled into the fray after rescuing two daughters of a British officer during a skirmish and escort them to their father’s fort. As the impending battle builds around them, the men remain devoted to the daughters, going to great lengths to preserve their lives. 

Nothing stirs a man’s blood like watching Daniel Day-Lewis running through the forest while “Promontory” plays in the background. 

“I will find you!”

Zorba the Greek

A film that perfectly captures man’s need to get in touch with his thumos is Zorba the Greek. Zorba is a man who lives life fully. He’s earthy and fiery. 

Zorba befriends Basil, a buttoned-up British gentleman who’s the Cretan peasant’s very opposite. Basil always says and does what’s proper and what’s expected of him. He’s lifeless, dull, and predictable.

Basil hires Zorba to oversee his lignite mine on Crete. During the film, Zorba teaches Basil how to unlock his thumos and live with a bit more passionate wildness. 

The iconic ending of this film will have you up and dancing like no one’s watching, except your less-inhibited ancient ancestors. 

Rocky II

While the original Rocky may get the most acclaim, Rocky II is the most thumos-inspiring (and the best overall installment!) of the Rocky canon. 

The main driver of the thumos engine in Rocky II is Rocky’s crusty trainer Mickey, who puts his protege through an epic training montage that includes chasing a chicken and offering encouragements like, “You’re gonna eat lightning and you’re gonna crap thunder!”

The viewer’s thumos really soars when the franchise’s iconic theme, “Gonna Fly Now,” starts playing. As soon as you hear those horns, the hairs on your skin stand up, and your heart starts beating faster. Just like Rocky, you’re ready to step into the ring and come out the victor.

The Last Samurai

Set in the 19th century, The Last Samurai follows Nathan Algren, a disillusioned and alcoholic American soldier who’s tasked with training the newly formed Imperial Army of Japan. When his army of peasants is routed by samurai, Algren is taken prisoner and taught the samurai’s ways. Immersed in their culture of honor and duty, Algren overcomes his alcoholism, and reignites his thumos. He fights alongside the samurai in a last stand battle against the industrial Japanese army. Your thumos will start burning red hot when you watch the final scene in which Algren presents his sword to the Japanese emperor, urging him to remember the noble history of the samurai. 

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

Captain Jack Aubrey commands the HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars. Given a mission to intercept the French warship Acheron, Aubrey leads his crew through treacherous waters, fierce battles, and moral dilemmas. Master and Commander is a masterclass in leadership, camaraderie, and the relentless pursuit of victory against the odds. Aubrey’s thumos drive his actions and guide his decisions. After watching this movie, you’ll be ready to hoist your sails and set off to uncharted waters. 

The Last Dance

While not technically a film, this docuseries about the Chicago Bulls 1997-1998 season definitely deserves a place on this list. Michael Jordan’s tenacity and competitive drive, his ambition to become the best and always play his best, is incredibly inspiring. His level of performance rises to the almost magical, leaving you wanting to attain your own worthy, if less godlike, greatness. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Reflect on something for a second: when was the last time you had fun? Are you having trouble remembering, and if you think about it, is it actually kind of hard to even describe what fun is?

Don’t worry, if you feel like fun’s gone missing from your life, and are feeling a little dead inside as a result, Catherine Price and I are here to offer you a fun-tervention.

Catherine is the author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again, and today on the show, we discuss the three elements of true fun and how it differs from fake fun, how to conduct a fun audit so you can identify your personal fun magnets, how to get a greater kick out of your life, and why you really need to have a Ferris Bueller day.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price
• AoM Article: The Case Against Scheduling Your Fun
• AoM Article: A Lesson From Ernest Hemingway in Why You Should Plan Your Weekends
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Connect With Catherine Price

• Catherine’s Substack: How to Feel Alive
• Catherine’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. Reflect on something for a second. When was the last time you had fun? Are you having trouble remembering? And if you think about it, is it actually kind of hard to even describe what fun is? Don’t worry if you feel like fun’s gone missing from your life and are feeling a little dead inside as a result, Catherine Price and I are here to offer you a funtervention. Catherine is the author of The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. And today on the show, we discuss the three elements of true fun and how it differs from fake fun, how to conduct a fun audit so you can identify your personal fun magnets, how do you get a greater kick out of your life and why you really need to have a Ferris Bueller day. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/fun.

Alright, Catherine Price, welcome to the show.

Catherine Price: Thank you so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a whole book about how to have fun. I’m curious, what caused you to take a deep dive into how to have more fun? ‘Cause you look at the research out there that’s on this topic, what was going on in your life where it made you think like, man, I need to have more fun and I need to learn how to do it.

Catherine Price: [laughter] I think the short answer to that is that I’m a huge dork and I wasn’t having enough fun or maybe in the opposite order, I was not having enough fun and I’m a huge dork, so I decided I’d write a book about it. But the contextual response is that I had written my previous book, which is called How to Break Up with Your phone, Which is about creating better boundaries with our devices and I had gone through the steps of my own book myself, and I was feeling pretty good about myself ’cause I’d created more space from my phone and other devices. But I really hadn’t realized that that was gonna open up a new challenge, and that new challenge was that once you reclaim time from your devices, you actually have to figure out what to do with that time. And I began to realize that I had lost sight of what I actually wanted to do with my time. And so I actually had a kind of existential moment in this very room that I’m speaking to you from, where I was sitting on the couch, taking a break from my phone, my kid was then a baby, she was asleep. My husband was out of the house, and I had this glorious hour in front of me to do whatever I wanted to with.

And I realized, oh my goodness, I actually don’t know what I want to do. And I ended up, yeah, having an existential crisis for a minute there, and then asking myself this question that I had been asking people who helped me research How to Break Up with Your Phone. And that question was, what’s something that I say I want to do, but I supposedly don’t have time for? With the idea, and I encourage people to ask themselves that as well, but the idea is that we actually have a lot more time than we realize. We’re just frittering a lot of it away on meaningless things. And my answer was, I wanted to learn guitar. And so I ended up signing up for this guitar class, and it was a group of adults who met on Wednesday nights. BYOB, very informal, and I realized that I was experiencing this kind of sense of joy and energy in that class, that felt at that point in my life as a new parent who’s pretty exhausted, it felt very foreign and really wonderful. And I got very curious about what this feeling was, and in a revelation, that sounds kind of a dumb revelation in retrospect. It took me a little while to realize, oh, it’s fun.

That’s the word. It’s fun. This is so fun. And I got really curious about what exactly what was going on. I’m a science journalist by background, and as I said, I’m also a huge dork, so I basically got intrigued by trying to figure out, was my experience unique? Was this just ’cause I was so fun starved or is this feeling of fun something that is deeply energizing and nourishing and powerful for other people too? And anyway, those questions led me on this journey that resulted in my book, The Power of Fun.

Brett McKay: Okay, so because you’re a science journalist and because you’re a dork, you went to the scientific literature to see what researchers had said about fun, and one thing you discovered, there isn’t a lot of research out there about fun. In the research that does exist, how do psychologists and social scientists, how do they define fun?

Catherine Price: Well, yeah, it was fascinating. So yes, as you’re saying, like any good science journalist dork, I went to PubMed and I looked up fun, the database of biomedical literature. [laughter] And at that point, it actually was the top hit, now I think it’s just one of the top hits, but one of the top hits that popped up when I put fun in was an article that was called… The title was Putting the Fun in Fungi, and it was about toenail fungus. And I just remember laughing when I saw that and thinking, oh my God, if that’s actually one of the top hits on PubMed about fun, then this might actually be worth looking into. And so then I did more searching and there’s really not much at all research has been done about fun. And what has been done is it’s fun adjacent or it’s about toenail fungus, but it’s not really about this feeling. And I realized that probably part of the reason that there’s not much research on this as opposed to other kind of nebulous psychological concepts like happiness or joy, is that there’s not a good definition of fun. And when I looked it up in the dictionary, it said that it was just light-hearted amusement or pleasure.

Light-hearted pleasure. But when I reflected back on my own experiences of things that really stood out to me as having been so fun, truly fun memories, it wasn’t just light-hearted pleasure or amusement, they were something much deeper going on. And I decided to ask the people on my mailing list if they would share fun memories with me, ’cause again, I was trying to see, is this just me? Am I just so fun starved at this moment that this is affecting me more than it is other people? But I ended up collecting literally thousands of stories from people around the world, and when I read through those stories, I was just astonished by the depth of the joy that people were expressing in these stories and the meaning. You know, it quickly became clear that these were some of the most treasured memories they had from their lives, and they weren’t all dramatic, which I think is a really important point. It wasn’t all people on vacation or in an exotic spot, it was these mundane moments, in many cases, that still had this radiant joy coming through them. One that stands out to me and in my mind was someone who told me that they’d had a ton of fun just going out in the rain with their grandfather without umbrellas and just allowing themselves to be deliberately soaked.

And I just love that. There was something very poignant about it, and I’m actually in the process of doing another, what I call funtervention, with the subscribers to my How to Feel Alive mailing list. And just this morning, I was looking through some of the stories that people shared with me about past experiences of fun, and I had the same personal experience that I had when I was looking through the initial batch of stories that people shared, which is that I read through these stories and I have this big smile on my face, but I’m also actually welling up, there’s something very emotional about it. So all that is to say that the dictionary definition of fun, the idea that it is just light-hearted pleasure or amusement doesn’t capture the depth of what the feeling of Fund truly is.

Brett McKay: Fun seems like something we just intuitively know and feel, and that’s inherently free-flowing. When you started this project of researching fun, did you think, am I risking? Am I doing vivisection here, where by intentionally thinking about fun and studying it, I’m gonna kill it in the process.

Catherine Price: I didn’t consciously think about that, although now I have a very vivid image of fun is this personified things played out on an examining table and then I’m standing there with a scalpel murdering it. So thank you for that. No, I think it’s kind of similar to romance or sex where there’s something natural about it, right? But you also could perhaps stand to benefit from thinking about it a bit too. Maybe not in the moment. I don’t think you should be in the middle of a fun experience and be like, okay, hold on guys, let’s talk about what’s making this fun.

You don’t wanna pull people out of the moment flow, as we can talk about is one of the three components, I believe, is part of the definition of fun. But I think there is a real benefit to paying more attention to fun, because a lot of times we have these fun moments and we enjoy them, but they kind of slip away because we don’t identify them as fun. We don’t really pay attention to them, and that means that we don’t really enjoy them as much as we could by reflecting back and savoring them afterwards, but we also miss out on learning about what made it fun for us, in hopes that we can actually put ourselves in more situations where fun might occur in the future. So I think you don’t wanna take yourself out of the moment, but there is actually a benefit to thinking about it and not just kind of assuming it’s going to happen because especially as we become adults and our lives get busier and we take on more responsibilities, it doesn’t happen as often. Or we don’t notice it happening as often, so I think it’s actually a skill that’s worth developing.

Brett McKay: Okay, so science doesn’t have really good definitions of fun. There’s fun adjacent definitions, it’s joy, it’s amusement, but during your research and talking with your fun squads that you’ve developed through your mailing list that you have, you made a distinction between true fun and fake fun. What’s the difference between the two?

Catherine Price: I’m gonna get very dorky here, so thank you, thank you for that question. Yes, so I wanted to come up with a better definition of what fun is that better matched the experiences that not only I, but the people on my mailing list were having and were expressing when they told me stories about fun. And I noticed that there were three factors that popped up again and again and again in people’s stories, three psychological states they seem to be in when they had these moments of fun. And the three states are playfulness, connection and flow. So I touched on flow a minute ago, but flow is the state you get into when you’re completely actively engaged and present in what you’re doing. You’re in the zone, you know like it’s an athlete in the middle of a game, it’s a musician playing a piece of music. The psychologist who coined the term did a lot of work studying rock climbers, so you can imagine if you were actually scaling a rock face, you’re totally actively engaged in what you’re doing. We can get into flow in a conversation, when we’re working on something, there’s many opportunities to be in flow. The important thing about flow is that it’s active, so time passes very quickly when you’re in flow and a lot of times people will say, oh, that happens when I watch Netflix.

And it’s like, yes, you lose track of time when you watch Netflix, but that’s what’s considered to be junk flow because it’s sort of passive consumption. True flow is this active, engaged, present state. Then playfulness, I always like to clarify for adults, because a lot of adults kind of clench up when they… I can see it when I give talks, you say playfulness and there’s all these grown-ups who kind of get a little bit more like rigid in their seats. It doesn’t mean that you have to be childish necessarily or silly, or play charades or make believe or something like that, those are two of my personal nightmares. It’s really about the attitude that you bring to situations, so coming at life with a light-hearted attitude, finding ways to laugh, not taking yourself too seriously.

Letting your guard down, there’s actually something beautifully vulnerable about being in a state of playfulness and fun, so it’s really the attitude that you’re bringing to things. And then connection was very interesting because I noticed in the vast vast majority of stories that people shared with me, another person was involved in their experience of fun. Then I followed up the request for stories by actually asking people on the mailing list like a series of questions, and these poor people actually answered them. So this was my research project here, but I gave ’em this list of descriptors and I asked them to pick ones that would apply to what they had just told me. And the two top choices that people picked were laughter, which I thought was very telling, but also special shared experience, the feeling that you had a special shared experience with someone else.

There were times when that someone else was a dog, there were occasional times when it was a sense of connection with the physical environment or the activity or with yourself, but really, most people told stories with other people in them, and that was true even for introverts. In fact, a number of people said something along the lines of, I’m a self-proclaimed introvert, and yet all of the stories that I just told you involved another person. So I came to believe that true fun, as I call it, is the confluence of these three states, is the center of the Venn diagram of playfulness, connection and flow. And as we can talk more about, if you’d like, I think that it is actually a really useful definition, because once you break fun down to these three components of playfulness and connection and flow, it gives you a much more accessible entry point in terms of figuring out ways to have more fun in your daily life. And then to go back to your original question of why do I say true fun instead of just fun?

It’s because I have this other concept that came to me when I was doing my research called fake fun, because I realized, oh, we use the word fun really casually in our everyday speech to describe all sorts of feelings and activities, some of which are truly fun that lead to this energizing, nourishing state of playful, connected flow. But others that are almost like junk food, they’re very appealing, easy to spend time on but you don’t end up feeling nourished afterwards, and that, the biggest culprit by far I would say is social media in that regard. And then things like binge-watching television beyond the point of enjoyment where you end up feeling gross afterwards. So I decided to refer to those types of experiences and activities as fake fun, meaning something that’s marketed to us as fun, but it doesn’t actually result in playful flow. And then I do like to clarify too, those are two big buckets. You have things that produce true fun, things that lead to fake fun, but I also think there’s another third category of things we do with our leisure time, which are things that are just enjoyable and nourishing, maybe relaxing, maybe more solitary, that don’t lead to true fun, but they’re still really worthwhile. And those would be things like going for a walk or watching a TV show before you end up feeling gross about it or reading a book.

Something that’s a little bit quieter, and I think that that’s useful, useful to make this distinction about these three categories, ’cause it means that you can come into your leisure time much more consciously and you can be more aware of the fake fun so that ideally you can reduce or eliminate it because it ends up feeling like a waste of time. And then you can ask yourself, well, do I need something that’s really energizing right now? In which case, maybe I should do something that might lead to true fun. Or do I just mean something that’s going to help me decompress and relax and nourish myself in a different way, and then you can choose from your list of enjoyable activities. So for me at least, it’s really helped me make much more intentional use of my leisure time.

Brett McKay: Something you talk about, and this goes along with your last book that you wrote about breaking up with your phone, is that a big reason we default to fake fun over true fun in the modern world, is that our phones are always ready to distract us into just passive scrolling and passive amusement that it isn’t really fun? You have to be present to have flow. So you say that anything that distracts you is gonna prevent you from having that true fun. But then also something you say that prevents us from having fun is just being over-committed, being busy with all of this stuff that’s going on in our life, work, school, kids. And the other issue with having fun is that it takes other people to have fun, but those other people are also busy with their lives, and so it’s hard to get together with people. And I know I’ve seen this in my own life, and I’m sure that people can relate where you wanna get together with some friends for something, but then you have to plan for it like three weeks in advance.

Catherine Price: It’s like 237 texts go back and forth.

Brett McKay: Yeah, ’cause everyone has different schedules ’cause one kid’s doing basketball, another kid’s doing some other thing, and yeah.

Catherine Price: Yeah, I think youth soccer, maybe that’s one of the major impediments to adult fun.

Brett McKay: Yeah, right, exactly. The traveling team. You say another thing that gets in the way of our fun is that we think it’s just frivolous. It’s a nice thing to do when you got the time but it’s not important, it’s not something worth prioritizing, but not only… You make the case that not only is fun something valuable in and of itself, you can make a utilitarian case for being proactive about having fun. When you highlight all these benefits that come with having fun, they can keep you present. It can unify a group of people, it can boost your happiness, it can make us more creative, and it can actually ultimately make us more productive. And then you also talk about that fun has a bunch of benefits for our physical health.

Catherine Price: Yeah. I found this to be absolutely fascinating. So as I said, I’m a science journalist by background. That was inspired by the fact that I have type 1 diabetes, and so I’m constantly thinking about how our environments and our behaviors affect our physical health. And I realize that two of the biggest factors that are impeding our physical health these days are stress and loneliness, loneliness and isolation. And the reason that those two factors are so bad for us is that emotional stress and loneliness and isolation, spike our levels of cortisol, which is a stress hormone that’s there to help us respond to physical threat. So cortisol does stuff like increase our heart rate or our blood pressure or our blood glucose, and it empowers us and enables us to flee from a physical threat, but it’s not good if it’s elevated chronically over time in response to emotional stressors. And when you recognize what cortisol does in the body with the heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar, among other things, you can see why it’s associated with an elevated risk for things like heart attack and stroke and type 2 diabetes and obesity.

So the reason I bring that up is that if you buy my definition that fun is a state of playful, connected flow, it is by definition a relaxed state in which you are not experiencing emotional stress. And it’s also a state of social connection, so you’re not lonely and isolated when you’re having fun. So I just thought it was fascinating because again, while I don’t know of any research studies that have looked directly at this definition of fun and could give you a footnote on this, I think it stands to reason that by relaxing us and putting us into more situations of social connection, fun could actually be considered to be a health intervention.

Brett McKay: No, I’d agree, and I’ve seen that in my own life where when I do make time for fun, I think your definition is on. It’s that playful connection, the flow state. You make plans for things that are fun and you’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s going to be a lot of work. Getting ready for a camping trip, getting ready for a cookout or something like that. That’s…

Catherine Price: That’s true. The gear. The gear. But some people find that fun. But yes, I agree with you. The packing list.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And that’s why you put it off. Actually, we’ve got some friends that one of their saying is having fun is a lot of work, but it’s worth it. But I noticed when I make the time for fun, I see these benefits in my life. I just feel energized with my work. I get new ideas. I’m more relaxed. Even if I stayed up late talking with friends, the next day I feel great.

Catherine Price: Yeah. And I’m curious. I mean, when you’re talking about the times in which you have fun, can you share an experience that stands out to you as having been truly fun?

Brett McKay: Oh, sure. Just random getting together with friends on a weeknight and just talking and having conversation. I find conversation very fun. You get in the flow. There’s a playfulness to it, and there’s that connection aspect. Backpacking is another one our family likes to do. Again, backpacking is a lot of work, so you have to get the gear and then plan where you’re going to go and get the food and travel there. But once you actually do it, it feels great. Those are the ones that stick out to me off the top of my head.

Catherine Price: Well, I think it’s interesting, too, because you kind of alluded to something that I always like to point out to people is that it’s not necessarily… People tend to think that the fun is the activity itself, but what I’ve realized reading through people’s stories and reflecting on this, is that the fun is the feeling that results from the activity, which I think is really important. Going back to what gets in the way of our ability to have fun as adults or in modern life and this busyness. People kind of assume that if they’re going to have more fun, then they need to do more things like backpacking trips. And I do think if that typically leads to fun for people, you should prioritize it, but you don’t necessarily need to do that. If you recognize that, oh, I can also have this feeling of fun, like you’re saying, from talking with friends or maybe there’s particular friends who are particularly fun to talk to who produce this feeling. Because what I realized for myself, it’s like you can do the exact same “fun activity”, and sometimes it’s really fun, and then sometimes it’s not fun at all, and then sometimes it’s just in the middle. Like I’m sure with your backpacking trips, you could probably rattle off like a few that fall into each of those categories.

And I think that’s just an important insight. It has been, for me at least, to be like, oh, okay, I need to put less pressure on the activity itself and just seek out situations where I can get this feeling. I mean, with that said, I also think that there’s what I call fun magnets, which is a term I totally made up that refers to each of our personal collection of activities and people and settings that are more likely than others to produce this feeling of fun for us.

So, for example, one of my fun magnets is playing music with friends, and it’s a particular group of friends. So that very often, if not always, results in some level of true fun for me. And so I make a point to prioritize that. My husband, on the other hand, he doesn’t play an instrument, so that’s not a fun magnet for him at all. That’s kind of a boring night out. And then for him, he loves overnight camping trips.

I have bad knees, and diabetes does not lend itself well to trail mix and pasta. I love being outside, but I’m not as much of a fan of overnight camping trips. Those are much more of a fun magnet for him. And so I encourage listeners to kind of think back on your own fun memories and ask yourself, are there any themes that stand out? Any activities that stand out to you or people or contexts or settings? Because those are probably your fun magnets, and it’s important to then prioritize them. And also, if you’re in a relationship, get to know your partner’s fun magnets or your kids fun magnets or just other people’s fun magnets. And now I’m veering into couples therapy mode. I’m not a couple’s therapist, but I think it’s really important for people in relationships to recognize each other’s fun magnets and to give the other person space for theirs and to encourage them to prioritize it, in addition to figuring out what fun magnets you share and doing those together. But I’m so grateful to my husband that he recognizes how important music is to me, and he’ll take care of our kid when I am out playing with my friends, it makes such a difference. It’s so good for our relationship and honestly for me in terms of my ability to be a good partner and parent.

So when people ask me, how can I have more fun? I think about it in two angles to it. I feel like I’m starting to sound like an engineer. Just engineer your fun magnets. You can make more fun in your life. So there’s that side of things which gets back to your vivisection analogy, but I think it’s very important. It’s like, okay, we’ll figure out what’s likely to lead to fun for you and the people in your life and then create space for it. That’s the one side. And then what I’ve also realized is that you also then have this element of fun, as you were also alluding to, that’s spontaneous, that can’t be planned for.

So I think that we need to come at it from two different angles. One is, all right, what are your fun magnets? What typically generates fun for you? How can you prioritize it? How can you make space for those things in the life of someone you care about? And then on the other side, how do you open yourself up more to spontaneity? And that’s where I think it’s so important to ask yourself, okay, well, how can I make more space in my life in general? If it’s by saying no to some obligations that are no longer essential or enjoyable, or if it’s by making a point to look up from your phone instead of down at your phone, just so you can kind of present yourself to the world as someone who could be interacted with.

I mean, that, I think, is enormously important, is just to be more present in the world, because there’s actually opportunities for little moments of fun around us all the time if we start to become better at kind of paying attention to them and seeking them out. There was a story someone told me once. He was a comedian, actually, and he told me this story about how he had had what he described as two hours of true fun with his nephew. And he said all they were doing was sitting on this park bench and they were trying to catch leaves as they fell off of a tree.

And when he told me that story, I was like, oh, my God. It’s like a perfect literal metaphor because you were literally catching little moments of leaves off of a tree. But the metaphor is that there actually are these opportunities for fun floating around us all the time. We just need to be better at reaching out and grabbing them. So I was very appreciative to him for telling me that story. It really created a lovely image in my own mind.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Well, I’m going back to this idea that fun isn’t necessarily the activity that you do, it’s the feeling you get from an activity. Because fun is subjective, right? As you alluded to, one person can think one activity is fun, and the other person can think, boy, this is terrible. I need to stop this. And I’m sure we’ve all had that experience where we’ve seen something that looks like fun. Like, you see other people having fun doing said activity, and then you’re like, well, I’m going to go do that. And you’re like, oh, man, are we having fun yet? This is terrible, what is going on here? So let’s talk about, you do have this idea of a fun audit. Like, figure out what brings fun in your life. So are there questions that you found that are really useful to help you figure out what are the factors or what are the magnets in an activity that allow me to have fun? Some people might be listening. I can’t remember last time I had fun. So I don’t know. And I’m not in touch with it.

Catherine Price: And it’s okay. You’re not alone.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So how do you figure this out? How do you figure out getting in touch with what’s fun for you?

Catherine Price: Yeah. Well, I mean, I really would say, don’t worry if you’re listening to this and you’re like, oh, my God, my life is so lame. I don’t even know what fun is. You’re okay. You do know what fun is. Maybe you’ve never thought consciously about it. Totally fine. We can help you through this. I would suggest the first thing to do is what we’ve been talking about, which is actually set aside a little bit of time and think back. Even just on 2023, just think, what’s a fun memory that stands out? Don’t put too much pressure on it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the most fun you ever had in your life, but just, like, what stands out as fun? And just start with this kind of, like, low bar.

Because once you start tapping into this type of memory, you may find that you start to come up with more and more. It becomes easier. I also would recommend doing that with someone, a friend or your spouse, your partner or your kid, whoever, just actually have a conversation about, let’s think back, what were some fun memories that stand out to us? And if you’re the kind of person who likes taking notes, you can actually just jot down some of these memories. I think that can be useful. And then what you want to do is not only notice what it feels like in your body and in your mind to think about past fun and to hear someone else talk about past fun. It’s a joyful experience, I found.

But then you can look at your stories, and as I was saying earlier, you can ask yourself, is there any themes that come out? So you’ll take the story, and then you can ask yourself, okay, what are some of my fun magnets? What people just really help me get into this state of playful, connected flow? Or are there particular settings. For me, I loved camp as a child or as a teenager, and even as an adult, I organize camp weekends for groups of my friends. And going back to what you were saying, total pain in the butt to organize these weekends, it is not fun to do all the logistics.

But I know that summer camp is, for me, a context in which I tend to have a lot of fun. It leads to this playfulness and this connection. And then you can also ask yourself, like, what are the activities that typically lead to fun? That might be the easiest one, because all of us, I think, can identify activities that we typically enjoy. We’re normally not too horrible about that. It’s just recognizing that, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a fun magnet. Like, I actually should prioritize that because of the fun. But you might also want to ask yourself for the non obvious activities.

For example, what you just said, like hanging out with friends at night and having conversations doesn’t sound like an activity you list on a list of hobbies per se, but it’s something that leads to fun. So it takes some time to try to figure out these themes so that you can pull out these fun magnets. And again, the benefit of that is that then you can actually reserve time for those things on your schedule.

Actually prioritize them in the same way you’d prioritize, I would hope, a doctor’s appointment or some kind of important meeting. And then if you want to take it a step further, I think it’s kind of fun to try to figure out what I call your fun factors, which is the characteristics of those people and settings and activities that make them fun. So, for example, if one of your fun magnets is backpacking trips, maybe one of your fun factors is nature. Like being outside in nature. Maybe it’s the particular type of group you’re with when you’re out in nature. Maybe it’s the physical activity that tends to lead to fun for you. Like for me, clearly music is a fun factor for me because when music is involved, I tend to have more fun. There’s the element of community and creation that tends to lead to fun for me. But just as an example, if we use me playing music with friends as an example that we can draw from, another fun factor for a lot of people is performance.

You might find the performing aspect really fun. And I’ve realized for me, that’s actually really not what it’s about. It is about creating something with a group of people and feeling very connected to them in the moment. And if we perform, that’s kind of like an added bonus. That might be fun, might not be fun, but it’s not a primary driver for me in terms of fun. And so I’d recommend kind of figuring out these characteristics, these fun factors, because it can help you generate new ideas for things to try. Because one of the shortcuts and kind of hacks to fun is to try new things, ideally with other people. If we wanted to condense our conversation into just like, a sentence, and the people are like, how can I have more fun? I’d say, okay, well, try something new with another person. And also more situations where you’re laughing.

If you’re laughing, you’re probably having fun. So if you want, like, a tell for when you’re having fun, it’s probably you probably laughed. Anyway, so I think that those are some of the steps I’d recommend starting with, in terms of trying to figure out what you can actually prioritize and plan for and kind of play around with, what can you experiment with? I’ve done a bunch of that myself.

One of the things that this whole process has led to, as I said, I took up the guitar. I already played piano, but I don’t know. I got invited randomly to a drum class one time, and I was like, oh, okay, I don’t know, I’ll try drumming. That sounds like it could be fun. And now that’s like, my obsession. I love drumming. It is so so so so fun. Even though it was a little scary to start, it’s like a hard thing, and trying anything new can be a little bit intimidating. But I’m so grateful I did.

So I would play around with that. And then on the flip side, again, in terms of figuring out ways to invite more fun into your life, we do need to create a little bit more mental space. And I do think that starting with your phone is a very, very good place to start, is how can you create better boundaries with your phone, whether it’s by reducing notifications or creating physical boundaries where you, for example, I charge my phone at night in the closet, creating no phone zones where your phone just isn’t around.

So if you’re with people, put your phone away because if your phone’s out, it’s going to kind of distract you a little bit, and that’s going to get in the way of your potential ability to lose yourself in the moment and to have fun. Or if you’re in an Uber, for example, like, maybe don’t have your phone out. I’m not saying that you have to get into a conversation with the Uber driver. It might not lead to true fun, but it’ll at least give you a little bit more of a moment to engage in the world. Just as a side anecdote, this is kind of sad, but I try to do that myself when I’m taking rideshare and things, and I’ve had now three separate drivers ask me if I’m okay because I’ve been looking out the window. And I’m like, yeah, I was looking at a cloud, and they’re like, okay. I’m just checking.

I’m like, oh, my God. So maybe that’s inspiring because it’s like very low-hanging fruit. Anything you can do to create better boundaries with your phone is probably going to make you more present and open yourself up to more opportunities. But one more concrete example of that, I’ve had two separate people recently tell me about past experiences of true fun when they were waiting in the airport for a delayed flight.

Brett McKay: Oh, my goodness.

Catherine Price: And I think that really speaks to the fact that it’s a feeling and not an activity, because literally nobody would say, you know what’s on my list of fun times, airport delays. But in both cases, it was because they ended up having some kind of engagement with the people around them. One guy told me he had gotten into this very funny conversation with some of the other people in line with him, waiting for the customer service desk. I mean, he was, like, glowing telling me about this.

And then someone just told me about the adventures they ended up having with their family when they were stuck in the airport. And they kind of went on this exploration, and they were like, I never would have chosen to do this. It doesn’t sound like it would have been fun at all, but we ended up actually having a really great time together.

Brett McKay: That reminds me of a time my family, we landed in Chicago, it was a layover because we’re on our way home to Tulsa. But then my wife, she realized that she accidentally booked an itinerary that had… It was a seven hour layover in Chicago. And at first, we were just like, oh, my gosh, this is awful. This is the worst news ever. But then we decided to take a taxi to see the Chicago Children’s Museum, and we ended up having a blast on that layover. And what else do we… Oh, yeah, we got a great hot dog. A great Chicago hot dog as well. So, I mean, you’re not at the mercy of circumstances. You can convert what seemingly seems like a bad circumstance into fun. Okay, so in this fun audit, look back on the past year, and you also recommend having people look back when they were a kid.

Catherine Price: Yeah, I think that can be useful too. Like, what did you love doing when you were nine years old? When you were 13 years old? When you were 17 years old, what did you used to be passionate about before life got in the way? And that can be really useful because you probably can tap back into some of that. If you used to play a lot of music. I mean, sorry, I keep talking about that. I’m like, literally looking at my guitar. But there’s probably a way to do a little bit of that. Or if you loved a sport, like, is there a way to get back in touch with something that’s physical, even if it’s not necessarily that sport per se. But yeah, look back on your own life. Because, again, I think we’ve all had fun, thankfully, at some point. So it’s a matter of paying more attention to it so you can kind of identify it. You can probably identify most of the moments from your life in which you were truly terrified. Because our brains are very good at remembering negative, frightening things. That’s an evolutionary strategy to keep us alive, is to be very attuned to threats. It takes much more conscious effort to attune yourself to things that make you feel good.

Brett McKay: And so when you look back, look for signs of fun, of that playfulness, connection, flow. So you talk about signs. You’d mentioned some of them, laughter, feeling like you’re connected to other people, losing track of time, feeling childlike excitement and joy is another sign. So if you see those things in those moments as you look back in your life or your year, then that’s how you can figure out what those fun magnets are and what those fun factors are. As you said, there’s certain people, it might be just certain people that you spend time with that allow you to have fun. I know my wife and I, we’ve got some good friends of ours, they used to live here in Oklahoma, but then they moved. But we have a lot of fun with them, so, like, we still, once a year, try to get together to do something with them because we know we’ll have fun with them.

Catherine Price: Yeah. It’s so important. I think that’s so easy to let slip. It’s just we’re going to have to figure out the logistics and so years can go by and you don’t see some of your favorite people. That’s something that’s changed for me in the past couple of years. The reason I started organizing these summer camp weekends for friends was that a friend of mine from college, a dear friend whom I don’t see as often as I should, although I will say we did a summer camp this summer together. But his dad died, I think, in 2016, and I went to his memorial service and there were 200 to 300, I don’t know how many people. He was a professor and he was quite beloved, celebrating him. And I thought, oh, my God, this is both amazing, but it’s also so sad that he’s not here and that it took his death to bring these people together. And I mean, not to get all existential, but I’m like, why are we not doing this when we’re alive?

So that’s when I started organizing these weekends, and it’s been wonderful. So, yeah, I would say definitely think about who you have fun with, who do you love being around and make it happen. And on the flip side, there’s probably people in your life that are not fun.

And obviously, there are some people like that you’re just gonna have to deal with if it’s a co-worker or your boss or whatever, or a family member that you just don’t enjoy being around. But there are other people whom you do have more choice with, and they might even be people that you were friends with for a long ago, and you’re just actually not that good friends now, but you’ve kind of… You’re keeping it up just ’cause. Maybe let some of those go because again, our lives are very full and it’s, our time and attention are both zero sum. When you pay attention or spend time on one thing, you can’t spend time or attention on something else, so you need to clear out space. So I’d also encourage that kind of reflection like, “Oh, does someone consistently actually bring me down when I’m with them, ’cause maybe I wanna try to spend a bit less time with them.”

Brett McKay: Okay, so once you figure out what your fun factors are, your fun magnets are, you gotta start trying to be more intentional about having fun. So you have this acronym, SPARK on How to Have More Fun. S is for make more Space, P is for Pursue passions, A is for Attract fun, R is for Rebel, K is for Keeping at it. And we’ve talked about some of these things, we’ve talked about making space, so if you’re over-committed, see if there’s things you can get rid of in your life so you can have more time for fun. You talk about changing your relationship with your phone, ’cause that just will suck you into fake fun so spend less time on your phone and make more time for actual true fun. The things that really bring you joy. But I want you to talk about this idea of attracting fun. ‘Cause I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far is how to have big fun, like those things that might take a lot of planning. So like a backpacking trip, or maybe you’re gonna go see a concert with some friends, but what about just like that spontaneous fun, how can you attract more of that just sort of like day-to-day life, you have more of those feelings of fun where it’s playfulness, connection and flow.

Catherine Price: Yeah, so attract fun part of that involves what I call adopting a fun mindset, which is a play off of growth mindset. And so it’s basically like opening yourself to opportunities of fun that might already exist, and then also seeking out ways that you might be able to create those moments of fun by which I mean moments of playfulness, connection or flow. They don’t all have to happen at once. If you hit… I think of it as being like a target and you’re playing darts, you just wanna hit anywhere. Well, if you’re me playing darts, you wanna hit anywhere on the board, you’re pretty psyched. And then the closer you get to the center, the better. So if you are in a moment of flow, that’s great, and if it’s also playful, even better, and if you’re also connected in that, great. Then you hit the bullseye. So one way to do so is to adopt the practice that improv comedians talk about a lot, which is yes, and… Which basically is not just shutting things down automatically and trying to both be open to new ideas and to build on them. So in an improv comedy setting, if someone makes a suggestion on stage, if they say like, I’m Santa Claus.

Your response should not be, no, you’re not. It should be, oh, you are. And here’s a present, I don’t know. You do something else. The reason that stands out to me is because I took an improv comedy class once, and it turns out I’m horrible at improv comedy. I love it, but I’m horrible at it. And someone did say, “I’m Santa Claus,” and my response was, “No, you’re not.” And then they called scene, so it’s a little traumatic, not fun for me that anyway, but if you can kind of adopt this attitude where you say yes to opportunities or you say yes to ideas, I’ve got one friend who tries to do this, like she does this all the time. I remember thanking her for saying yes to some weird invitation I had extended to her, and she just goes, “I always try.” And I just thought that was so beautiful. It’s like, try to be that person who says yes, and try to be that person who then builds on it and brings a bit more playfulness to the situation or a bit more connection or what have you, or someone who invites other people to do stuff.

So that’s part of adopting this fun mindset. The other way is to adopt practices where you’re just trying to help people. I mean this is a little specific, but the practice of noticing and sharing things that delight you as a way to kind of, a shortcut into having a fun mindset. So the idea there, and this is an idea I got from The Book of Delights by the poet Ross Gay, which I highly recommend. It’s basically just instead of allowing your brain to naturally tune into all the negative scary things out there, you make a conscious decision, you’re just gonna scan your environment throughout your day for anything that delights you. And when you notice something that delights you, it doesn’t have to be deep. I get a lot of delight out of squirrels. You put a finger in the air and you say out loud, delight, which sounds ridiculous. Perhaps not inherently manly, but I will tell you, I’ve suggested this at a number of conferences, and I had a very funny experience where I walk past some men who were coming out the men’s room, and one of them saw me and he goes, “We were just talking about delight at the urinals,” and I was like, “I have so many questions for you, but I also delight.

That is itself a delight, I am delighted that you told me that and that whatever happened in there happened.” So my point is that if you get to this practice of noticing delights, it really can boost your spirits and it can help train you to get into a fun mindset by noticing these moments of levity and absurdity and beauty and what have you that exist. And if you take it a step further and you share your delights with other people, and I think this is a lovely thing to do with your family in particular, like I do this with my daughter, she’s eight and we share delights with each other. Another thing you can do is to think about ways that you could just bring delight to other people, like how could you do something that would brighten someone else’s day, because chances are it’ll brighten your day too. And you can actually become a “fun person” simply by shifting your attitude, and I think that’s the deeper message here, is that when I asked people, ’cause I did this in my big survey that I sent to my mailing list when I was researching my book. I said, describe someone from your life that you think of as a fun person.

And then tell me what makes them fun. And I guess I’d kind of assumed like I think many people would, that people would describe people who are “the life of the party” or the class clown, or someone who was kind of exuberant and boisterous, and that was not always the case. There were a lot of examples where the person who was “fun” was considered to be fun because they did things like say yes to things, or make people feel comfortable in their presence, or laugh along with people, not necessarily be the source of the laughter, but be the person who laughs. And I thought that was really interesting because it shows that you don’t have to be extroverted to be a “fun person.” It really is all about adopting this fun mindset. And just to go back to the delight example, like an example of how I decided to spread delight is at some point, I was at a talk and someone showed me these pictures of portable disco balls that they had been using to great effect in their own life, and I realized that said disco balls were like 999 on Amazon.

And so I went online and I just bought four of these disco balls, obviously one for myself, but then I just sent them to friends with no explanation, just as a way to delight them, and it was just such a treat. Then people wrote back to me, my best friend from journalism school was like, oh, thank you for the disco ball, my daughter loves it. And I wrote back, I was like, that was not for your daughter. But it’s like, what can you do to just brighten someone’s day? And then also, what can you do for yourself to help you get a kick out of your own life? It’s okay to enjoy your own life, it’s actually really important because you’ll be able to bring so much more positive energy to everything you do if you’re enjoying your own life, and that’s part of the fun mindset, and it’s also a part of the R in the SPARK acronym, which is Rebel, which actually was probably my favorite one of all five of those letters because I noticed in stories that people sent me, there often was this element of playful rebellion in them, this kind of breaking the rules of responsible adulthood, just a little bit. Not doing anything illegal, but just doing something you wouldn’t expect a “responsible grownup” to do.

So for example, the woman who showed me the disco balls, the context was that she worked for a financial, a major financial firm, and she was showing me a video of her and her co-workers in their 40s in one of their basements, it was an unfinished basement, and they all were on roller skates doing a disco party. And they had these balls on and one of them was dressed as a butterfly, I don’t know. It was very odd. Totally delightful. And I was like, “Wow, that is not what you would think.” And I don’t think that they were incredibly drunk or anything, they were just having a fun time being playful and just doing something goofy together. And I just love that as an example of a form of rebellion, not what you would expect these people to be doing. And I think there’s an element of the sense of rebellion that itself generates fun, just doing something a little bit, naughty might be too strong even, and even something like instead of listening to the news when you drive home today, like turn on a song that you loved when you were a teenager and just sing along to it, maybe even like air drum, do something like that, where you’re just like doing something that you get a kick out of just because you get a kick out of it. And then notice what difference it makes in your own mood to just seek out opportunities to do things like that for yourself and for other people.

Brett McKay: Yeah, this idea of rebel made me think, I wanna do this with my kids. And I need to do it more in my life. Have a Ferris Bueller day.

Catherine Price: Oh yeah.

Brett McKay: Where you just, you call into school, you call into work, you just say, “Hey, I’m not coming in today.” And it’s not because you’re sick, it’s ’cause you just wanna go do Ferris Bueller stuff. You wanna go to a baseball game in the middle of the day, you wanna go to museum. That could be fun, so like yeah, find a Ferris Bueller day for yourself.

Catherine Price: I think that’s a great… That’s also why it pretty much my favorite movie of all time, but yeah, exactly. And I think that’s why people love that movie because it’s like the condensation like that is fun, Ferris Bueller is fun. That day is fun. We all of the generation that grew up with that movie, can probably quote numerous things from that movie, and the whole twist and shot everything about that is fun. So yes, I would highly recommend finding a way to create more Ferris Bueller moments.

Brett McKay: It’s just like playing hooky, people need to play hooky more often.

Catherine Price: We need to play hooky, and the irony is that you think it’s gonna make you less productive or whatever, but it’s not because you’re gonna come back refreshed, you’re gonna have a wonderful time, it’s going to energize you. And those are the moments that you remember, like I remember Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I was not in the movie. But any time you do that…

Brett McKay: Cameron, yeah you’re right. Ferris Bueller is the fun movie.

Catherine Price: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. There’s playfulness. There’s connection. And then there’s flow.

Catherine Price: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s like a perfect example of it. Yeah, I guess rebellion, I don’t know how he, like when he goes in and pretends that he’s the sausage king of Chicago, that’s rebellious. The whole thing obviously is rebellious. Oh, I wanna go watch that movie now. Okay.

Brett McKay: Yeah, recently I came out with my son just watched it, he’s 13, and he watched Ferris Bueller and he thought it was the greatest movie ever, and I think I was 13 when I watched Ferris Bueller.

Catherine Price: Yeah, I was wondering. Okay.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Catherine Price: I was like, is it still funny to people that didn’t grow up with it?

Brett McKay: No.

Catherine Price: It’s good to know.

Brett McKay: It still is, it stands. Well, Catherine, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Catherine Price: Well, I would love it if people would sign up for my newsletter, it’s called How to Feel Alive, and if you search for Catherine Price and how to feel alive, you will find it. It’s technically on Substack, but if you want like a one-stop shop for all of my stuff, including the sign up for that, it’s catherineprice.com. Yeah, you can learn about my books, the newsletter, I also have courses based on both of my books or both of my most recent books, How to Break Up with Your Phone and The Power of Fun that walk you through the steps of the book. So I’d love to have some of your listeners join the community. Yeah, and just my whole goal is to help people scroll less and live more, and I myself am definitely included in that, the list of people who need that intervention, so I’d love to have your listeners come along.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Catherine Price, thank you for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Catherine Price: Thank you so much. This has been truly fun, and you know I don’t just say that.

Brett McKay: Well, thank you. My guest here is Catherine Price, she’s the author of the book, The Power of Fun. It’s available on amazon.com and book stores everywhere. You can find more information about her work at her website, catherineprice.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/fun, where you find links to resources where you 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, make sure to sign up for our newsletter, we have a daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free, and it’s the best way to keep on top of what’s going on at Art of Manliness. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you take one minute to give us a review of the podcast on 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 and until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to The Art of Manliness Podcast podcast, put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.