#292： The Road to Character
Episode Stats
Summary
We often lament the loss of good character in our society. Why does this sense of moral enemy exist, and what can we do about it? My guest today has written a book exploring these questions. His name is David Brooks, and in his latest book, The Road to Character, he takes a look at exactly what we mean when we talk about character and why there seems to be a lack of it today.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast we often lament
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the loss of good character in our society there's a sense that our leaders and even members of our
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community can't be trusted to do the right thing and are only out for themselves the collective
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good be damned why does this sense of moral enemy exist and what can we do about it my guest today
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has written a book exploring these questions his name is david brooks he's columnist the new york
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times and in his latest book the road to character he takes a look at exactly what we mean when we
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talk about character and why it seems like there's a lack of it today david and i begin our discussion
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with the crooked timber view of humanity that people had in previous generations and how it
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shaped moral development he then takes us through the cultural changes that got rid of this perspective
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of human nature and how it led to a loss of a moral vocabulary that makes it hard for people
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today to even talk about character we then take a look at the lives of several imminent individuals
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from history and what they can teach us about character formation from general eisenhower's
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battle to harnesses uncontrollable anger to george marshall's inner fight for discipline and the
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ability to put big picture goals ahead of personal ambition we then end our conversation talking about
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the mindsets and actions we can take to live a life of character this is an important interesting
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and edifying episode i hope you'll tune in after the show is over check out the show notes at aom.is
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david brooks welcome to the show good to be with you so i'm sure many of our listeners are familiar
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with your column at the new york times and your other books but your latest book out now out in
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paperback is the road to character and it's about the deeper values that should inform our lives to
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give us a life of meaning and significance i'd like to talk about the inspiration behind the books
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you start your book talking about that you were listening to an old a rebroadcast of an old radio
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show from the 1940s called command performance something you talked about how you were you were
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struck by the the tenor of that show what was it about the show that that stuck out to you and
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caused you to start thinking about this idea of character formation yeah that show was a variety
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show that went out to the troops in world war ii and they replay old radio shows on npr on sunday
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nights where i live and i happen to hear the show that was broadcast on vj day the day the americans
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learned that the japanese had surrendered and it was broadcast live just hours after the japanese had
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made this announcement and bing crosby who was the host of the show got out there and said um i guess at a
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moment like this uh we don't feel too proud we're just humbled and i was struck by that tone of
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humility which was just continued throughout the program uh somebody um burgess meredith if anybody
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remembers the manager from the movie rocky he was a character actor and he read a passage from a work
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correspondent ernie pile that said you know when we didn't win this work because we're better than
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anybody else we just have to be blessed with a lot of material abundance we had some good allies
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we should just try to stay modest and be worthy of the peace uh and so i was just struck it could
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have been a moment of really chest-thumping celebration but instead people felt humbled
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and modest then i went into my house and i turned on the tv and i turned on a football game
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and i watched quarterback throw a pass to a wide receiver who was tackled after a two-yard gain
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and the defensive back did what all athletes do in these moments he did a little dance and celebration
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of himself and it occurred to me i'd heard a bigger i'd seen a bigger self-puffing victory
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dance after a two-yard gain than i'd heard after winning world war ii and so that suggested to me
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a shift in culture a shift from a more modest culture that says i'm no better than anybody else
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but nobody's better than me to a more um achievement oriented culture that says look at me look what
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i've done right it's that little me big me dichotomy you talk about throughout the book
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yeah and you know i think in between somewhere between world war ii and and the present um we
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went from we went from a culture of self-effacement to more uh self-celebration and a lot of that had
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to happen because there were a lot of people in especially back in world war ii who had been taught
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by society to think too lowly of themselves especially minorities and women and so you needed
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to go through a self-esteem movement but part of the argument of the book is that we've sort of
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overshot the mark and now we've entered a culture where we're too self too much self too much
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narcissism and not enough humility for real moral development right well let's talk about the title
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of your book the road to character character is a loaded word it means different things to different
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people in your book how are you defining character yeah i've come to think of it as um first of all i'm
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not crazy about the world word uh because it has it connotes sort of um stuffiness sometimes and
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pomposity um and it also sometimes for some people it's like iron self-will and that's sort of a
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joylessness but i would say uh i use the word because we really have a starved vocabulary when it comes to
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the inner life when it comes to moral things and so very often if you're going to try to figure this
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stuff out you've got to rely on words you don't really like because we just don't have a lot of good
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words um that's a problem with our civilization or at least western culture so to me character
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is two things first um a settled disposition to do good that you just have you've built in through
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habits and other things tendencies to be honest to be courageous and you're not going to be honest
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and courageous in all circumstances at all times we sort of have a disposition in that direction
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in part because of how you were born but in part because of the habits and the way you've lived
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your life and then the second thing uh is um being faithful to your commitments you all make
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commitments to friends to spouses to a job to a community and i think our our character is determined
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by how faithful we are how we um how we serve our community how we you know stay loyal to our friends
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put in time uh with our kids and it's really a the act of living up to your promises so as i mentioned
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earlier throughout the book you use these dichotomies to talk about the the different world views this
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worldview moral worldview that existed you know world war ii and then what exists now pre-world war
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or after world war ii and one you talk about is kant's um the philosopher kant uh his crooked wood view of
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humanity what is that view and how did that encourage character formation the way you're talking about it
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you know the contrast is with rousseau's version that we are good inside um and we're so you know he
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argued that we're basically noble inside and when we get corrupted we get corrupted by society and so
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inside ourselves is this little angel and if we can only get in touch with ourselves and be true to
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ourselves and be authentic to ourselves then uh life would go well and kant and other people in this
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crooked timber school of humanity said no that's not really true we've got some good inside we're
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splendidly endowed but we're also deeply broken and we tend to be selfish we see the world from our own
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point of view and so being authentic and sincere to yourself is often the wrong thing because often
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yourself is uh is you know selfish and slightly dishonest and so people with a crooked timber view of
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humanity which i am believe that one of the core things we have to do in life is to identify
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our course in what's really wrong with us um some people have a tendency to be afraid some people
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are vain some people are materialistic some people are shallow some people are people pleasers
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and then sort of work on that problem and the book has like 10 characters and a lot of them none of
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them were born good they were all kind of pathetic at age 20 but by 70 they were kind of amazing
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and i wanted to know how they did it and they regarded the inner fight against their own weaknesses
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as pretty much the central drama of their life and on days when they did something to defeat
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their weakness some some of them were just hyper emotional and insecure some of them were desperate
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for love some of them had tempers on days when they defeated whatever their weakness was they felt
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really good on days when they didn't they felt horrible and so it was a constant battle and they lived
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their lives as sort of a moral struggle against sin if you want to use that word so another dichotomy
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i thought was particularly incisive and i've it's made i've been thinking a lot about lately is this
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idea of adam one and adam two so we're talking about the biblical adam here what's the difference
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between adam one and adam two yeah this is a distinction made by a guy named rabbi joseph soloveitchik
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who lived in the first half of the 20th century up in boston and he says we have two sides of our
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nature which are in competition the adam one which is what he calls the majestic side and that's the
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career side wants to build and create things and you know be successful and then adam two is the
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humble side and that's the side that wants to seek goodness and seek virtue to feel like you're connected
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to an unconditional love that you've fulfilled your spiritual nature and he sees these two sides of our
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nature our intention and the way i put in the book just to sometimes get out of his categories is to
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divide between the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues the resume virtues the things that make
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us good at our job and the eulogy virtues other things people say about us after our debt we're dead
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like whether you're honest courageous capable of love and so he says these two different sides of our
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nature are sometimes in conflict because they operate by different logics the resume side operates by a
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straightforward logic which is input leads to output effort leads to reward and the moral logic of the
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eulogy side of our nature is sometimes reversed you've got to forget yourself to really find yourself you
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got to sort of surrender to get what you really need failure can lead to a great success whereas success
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can lead to arrogance and pride which is a great failure and so i think the distinction is useful because
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that so much of life is focused on adam one or on the resume side and the sort of to sort of separate
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out um how moral development happens it's just a useful reminder to live in that other universe um
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part of the time because i think most of us would regard it as the more important side of life right
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yeah you mentioned earlier about that we we've we've lost a vocabulary of morality and that's why it's so hard
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for us to to talk about these things because we have a hunch about them you know there's a part of
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like we understand it but we have a hard time describing it because we lack of vocabulary so
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what do you think this vocabulary of morality consists of and and why do you think we lost touch
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with that yeah i think you know for most of human history there was a vocabulary but it was within
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religion uh and if you go to religious contexts of any religion they still have the words and they use
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them with great felicity and their words like sin and redemption and grace and resurrection
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and but in our secular conversation a lot of people just withdraw those words i just do not like those
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words uh like sin if you use that um in public conversation they think you're talking about original
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sin or the deep depravity of the soul or they think you're talking about sex and you're going to crack down
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on sex but i think it's really hard to know what's going on inside unless you use those words
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uh or at least or find other words for them it's like trying to describe um colors of a painting if
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you only know two colors but if you know you know all the 36 colors in the crayon box you can just
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describe it better and i think you you lose the ability to describe what's going on inside if you
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don't have a concept like race and sin and i think you know i'm a secular writer and uh i speak in the
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secular sphere and i think it's possible to come up with secular definitions of this words um grace for
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example um sometimes if you get suffered a trauma some of your friends who you think are going to be
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there for you actually are not they sort of vanish but then other people who you barely know they
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totally show up for you and when somebody you barely know totally shows up for you that's
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unmerited love that's grace and so you can if you have that concept you can appreciate it when it
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happens and you you know the central role grace plays in all our lives sin is another one to me
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the best way to say it is disordered loves that we all love a lot of things and some things are higher
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than others like our love of truth is higher than our love of money and if say a friend tells you a
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secret and you blab it at a dinner party then you're putting your love of popularity above your love of
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friendship uh and we all know that's wrong and that's what a sin is and so if you have a sense
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of the times you sin and you are all of us are proclivity towards sin then i think you just got
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a richer understanding of what's going on in day-to-day life so as you mentioned you you dedicate the book
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to doing these sort of plutarchian analysis character analysis of different individuals from all walks of
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life you got dorothy parker you got eisenhower augustine and what we can learn from them about
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developing character and sort of this adam 2 way of life and you mentioned that a lot of what they
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had in common was sort of this this moral struggle within themselves trying to straighten out this
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crooked timber of of their humanity and it took them a long time it didn't happen overnight let's
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talk about some of these individuals in specific dwight eisenhower the guy who commanded d-day president
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we see him kind of remember as sort of this affable guy sort of even keeled character but you
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described he had this this great character struggle throughout his life what was that and
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how did he overcome that that character for so eisenhower's uh core problem was his temper his
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anger and his passion and the story that i think illustrates it that i tell in the book is when he
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was nine his he wanted to go trick-or-treating and his mom wouldn't let him apparently she's pretty
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strict and he threw a temper tantrum and punched the tree in his front yard and he punched it so hard all
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this he rubbed all the skin off his fingers and his mom sent him up to his room had him cry for an
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hour and then came up to heal his wounds after an hour and as she was binding him she told him a verse
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from proverbs which is he who conquers his own soul is greater than you take up the city and six years
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later when eisenhower wrote his memoir he said that was the most important conversation of his life
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because it taught him that he had a problem which was his temper and then too he was going to make
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anything of himself he was going to conquer that and so he really spent all his life really fighting
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it and we think of him as this sort of happy-go-lucky as you say country club guy but he was inside
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especially during when he was beating the troops in world war ii and as president he was filled with
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anger at night he was up late he was smoking he was drinking he had throat infections blood pressure
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spikes but he had learned a way to battle that some of them his devices were very shallow he would
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he was a big hater so we'd write the names of the people he hated on pieces of paper and just rip
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them up and throw them in the garbage can just all his ways to purge and control his anger so he could
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be a good leader and a good father and a good president and he managed to do it quite successfully
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but he was not a sincere person the eisenhower we see on the surface is very different than the
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eisenhower that actually existed inside and you also talk about how his military career it was
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stymied for most of his career you know he wanted to he saw himself as this great leader he wanted to
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to serve in that capacity but it just seemed like he was just getting shunted to different areas where
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he was acting as the subordinate how did his military career and the struggles of advance advancing
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kind of refine eisenhower yeah i'd say it made him sort of stifle his ambition and serve an institution
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and so he was at west point when world war one happened and he sort of missed that and then he
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got stunted off to staff jobs so he was people's chief of staff he was douglas macarthur's chief of
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staff for a long time and macarthur was sort of an egomaniac and it was very frustrating to be
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underneath him because you were basically underneath a um a guy with a monstrous ego and very histrionic
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and eisenhower was not but he basically served uh believed that i'm going to serve the military
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when i'm given an assignment that i don't want i'm not going to get mad i'll just say well what's what
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can i do here that'll be of service to the military and service to the country and it was in many ways
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until he was probably 45 or 50 it was just a very frustrating life but he filled it with acts of
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service just doing the job as best as he can and it shrunk his his self his sense of self his sense
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that this is all about me and i think when he then became allied commander and had to balance all these
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delicate alliances between the u.s and britain and the french and etc he was able to take himself out
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i have a friend who has a concept called at stake and when she's at a meeting she and they're having
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an argument about some policy or whatever she wants to know who's at stake that is say if you
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criticize the position they're taking do they interpret it as a criticism of themselves and
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the goal is to not be at stake it's just to say here's my idea it could be wrong if you don't like
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it it's not about me it's just about the idea and i think eisenhower had a great facility with that
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and so when people would cross him uh he had the ability to say well this is really not about me this is
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just about the cause really taking make himself small even in a big role so yeah that idea of
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thinking institutionally that eisenhower had and that's a big point you make in your book that we
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don't really think institutionally as a society anymore why is there a decrease in thinking
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institutionally and what are the downsides of that yeah i think there's a decrease simply because
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we're a lot more individualistic and we see our life is about fulfilling our own individual mission
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but you know another person who thought institutionally in the book is george marshall
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who was also general in world war ii and he basically the basic mindset is you know when i'm
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born i'm not born into some virgin earth with no institutions i'm born into a crowded place where
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people came before and they built all these institutions and most of what i do in life is i just
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inhabit an institution uh you could go to a certain university you could work at a certain company
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you could follow certain professions and when you enter an institution you are shaped by the
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institutions by the standards of excellence the codes of conduct uh and then when you um try to
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live up to those codes you're sort of shaped by it many say hey this thing was here before i was born
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it's going to be here after i was dead and i'm just going to try to be a steward of it and pass it
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along in better shape than i got it and i think that's accurate that's actually how we live
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we don't we don't like totally create our own lives we inhabit posts and we're called to different
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stations and so i do think it's a it's a calmer more selfless and ultimately a happier way to live
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just because you know what you're here for you know what's expected of you and you're connected
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with other people to a common cause and you're just happier being connected to other people in that
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way and the idea that we're all a bunch of easy riders out on the highway by ourselves i think is a
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bit of a recipe for for unhappiness and there's sort of a debate in american movies between it's
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a wonderful life and and that movie easy rider and one has a definition of happiness as really
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being locked down in a community and sometimes can be frustrated because there are restrictions
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the other has a vision of happiness of total freedom of no restrictions and i think it's a
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wonderful life is actually a more accurate version of what happiness looks like i mean i guess one
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argument people have against thinking institutionally is that it can sometimes suffocate the rights or
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the needs of an individual right sometimes you put the institution first it can cause harm to
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individuals i'm thinking things like the you know sex abuse cover-ups at penn state for example people
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are thinking about the institution of the football program so i mean how do you balance the needs of
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the individual against the this idea of thinking institutionally yeah well i guess i would say two
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things one sometimes it can liberate you if you serve an institution like an orchestra if you're a
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musician then you're probably going to enhance your ability to play and increase your happiness
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but i guess the other thing i'd say is we all have different commitments to different things
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and one of the arts of life and there's no rule that this is balancing your commitments so i'm very
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suspicious of people who are only committed to one thing if you're only committed to an institution
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and you're not committed to a larger moral system or you're not committed to your friendships
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then you're going to turn into sort of a totalitarian personality and you're going to sacrifice
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everything even common decency to that institution so one of the arts of life is balancing your
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commitment and it could be a commitment to the say serving the catholic church but hopefully you've
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also got a commitment to theology and and good conduct and when the catholic church is violating your
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your sense of what's right and wrong hopefully you're gonna pick right and wrong over the church
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uh the i mean the institutional church and so to me uh if you see yourself as balancing your
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commitments then it it doesn't always solve your problems which commitment is more important at any
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one moment but it at least gives you a sense that there's sometimes going to be tension and you're
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going to have to decide which is higher this idea about tensions that's you make a point in the book
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about there's a study done amongst college students they didn't really understand the survey show that
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they really understand what moral dilemmas were right they thought it sort of saw them in these
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sort of black and white things as morality but you argue in the book that yeah these moral dilemmas
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are all about tensions of competing competing values that might be good but it's trying to figure out
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when you put an emphasis on one over when you put the emphasis on the other yeah this uh sociologist
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christian smith asked all these students name your last moral dilemma and he found that the answers
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were typically well i pulled into a parking space but i didn't have a quarter or i really like this
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apartment but i couldn't really afford it and he had to point out these are not moral dilemmas they
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may be problems but a moral dilemma is when to value systems clash say uh the system that makes you want
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to value freedom but the system that makes you want to value cohesion uh and community and these two
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things often clash and uh often there's a there's a clash between justice and mercy uh we want to be nice
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people but we also want to tell them the truth when they're doing something wrong and be a little
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hard and so there's there's a tension between these two things and so in my view we're constantly living
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within these tensions there's no rule that's the problem if you think you have you can set one rule
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and it's going to apply in every situation you're just going to become cruel and heartless and so the
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art of living is the art of sort of navigating the boat and figuring out when you're sort of tipped over a
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little too far one way and when you're tipped over too far the other way right it's aristotelian trying
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to find that mean so another character speaking of aristotle you highlight in the book is augustine
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catholic theologian you mentioned this earlier this idea of ordered love and augustine talks about this
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in his confessions how can augustine's idea of ordered love help us develop our character he was
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more or less a successful young ivy leaguer that's more or less what he was he grew up in a town in
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northern africa the town recognized how smart he was they raised some money they sent him to
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university and carthage and so he was rising successful and he had a very successful career
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but he was desperately unhappy his heart was restless is how he put it and he just found himself
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he was like a jealous lover he became a little hedonistic at least by his standards and he would
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just was unfulfilled and he just felt empty inside he went in for some radical philosophical systems he
00:23:59.600
was just searching around for a way to find inner peace um she finally showed him the way but he
00:24:04.980
still didn't want to give up the life that he was leading he didn't want to give up some of the worldly
00:24:09.900
pleasures he loved he didn't want to give up sex he didn't want to give up um money and sort of the
00:24:17.400
high professional career success he was enjoying and then he had a scene in the garden where he said and
00:24:24.780
he saw a vision of a goddess more or less what was interesting about the goddess was she was not
00:24:29.580
some pristine otherworldly figure he describes her as sort of a goddess of fertility and the message is
00:24:37.040
that you know you think you want sex but i'm offering you a pleasure that's even better than sex
00:24:41.800
you think you want money but i'm offering you wealth that's even better than money and so the emphasis
00:24:47.720
is that you always move from a lower love to a higher love and life is not about self-denial
00:24:53.340
and it's not about being strict and puritanical uh it's about seeking higher joys and that's sort
00:25:00.120
of the sweetness of life and so we move from lower loves to higher ones and the central argument is we
00:25:07.320
we our longings our desires are too paltry we should go for the big ones not the little ones
00:25:12.760
and if you're shooting your life for money or for facebook likes you're shooting for something small
00:25:18.280
and you should aim for something big right it's that he was trying to uh focus on adam one instead
00:25:25.540
of adam two and he yes and and you know it's you know he wrote one of the first confessions in western
00:25:33.020
civilization the first really autobiographies that was really a journey into his inner life
00:25:38.160
and he spent a lot of time in introspection and he just found himself unsatisfied and sort of
00:25:43.880
wandering about without any without really much joy until he found an organizing purpose well david i
00:25:50.320
think there's a lot of people who are listening to this and they might be thinking yeah i like what
00:25:53.940
i'm hearing i want to develop character i want to live this life of adam too i want to recapture that
00:25:59.400
little me mentality that has humility and puts institutions first when it's when it furthers a good cause
00:26:06.580
but there's always that but like how am i supposed to advance my career in a hyper competitive
00:26:12.060
adam one world where if i don't toot my horn and develop my personal brand on instagram and linkedin
00:26:18.880
and all that stuff how much to advance my career if i'm focusing you know on these these adam two
00:26:23.300
things i mean it's like if everyone else is doing it and i don't do it right i'm gonna be a sucker so i
00:26:28.460
mean there is sort of like a almost a moral tragedy of commons going on here right like if if everyone's
00:26:34.840
doing it and like you don't do it then you're going to miss out so what's your what's your
00:26:38.700
response to that but yeah i guess uh first the the 10 people in my um in the book uh were very
00:26:45.700
successful i died as an irish president united states george marshall was top general augustine
00:26:51.660
was a big bishop um so it's not i don't think it's always either or the second thing to be said is
00:26:57.960
sometimes it is um the the hard part about some of these eulogy virtues is sometimes they do make
00:27:04.760
you worse at your job if if getting ahead is going to involve lying or it's going to involve a lot of
00:27:10.660
bragging then um a lot of these virtues will end up hurting you and that's just a fact and it's also
00:27:17.200
a fact even in um just time management you know a lot of people decide they rather spend time on family
00:27:24.520
and other relationships and less time on the job and it does hurt their careers but they think it
00:27:30.120
makes for a more joyful life and i i do think that's generally the right choice but the final
00:27:35.580
thing to be said and i've noticed this just in my own life is that when i was in my 20s i knew a lot
00:27:41.320
of people who were hyper ambitious and transparently ambitious and they had good 20s they were stars in
00:27:48.700
their 20s but a lot of them have sort of dropped out of my profession i have no idea where they are
00:27:53.320
and they sort of burned through relationships and they were using other people and eventually
00:27:59.940
people just didn't want to be around them they didn't want to hire them and i could think of
00:28:03.880
several examples of people who were who were seen like hyper go-getters at 25 and by 45 they had
00:28:12.600
fallen and i think that's generally true of life that most of us want to work with people um who we like
00:28:19.180
and trust and those who are users those who are treating other people as objects i find in general
00:28:25.860
in life that doesn't really pay off maybe they're we can all think of counter examples of people who
00:28:30.320
are really rotten and really successful but i find in my line of work most of the people who are really
00:28:35.920
successful they can basically you want to spend time with them and because they're pretty much
00:28:40.840
genuine they seem to have some sense of caring about you and caring about the people around them
00:28:45.920
so i in real life i actually don't see a huge conflict between being a good person and having
00:28:52.340
it you know a pretty decent career so you in the book with this code of humility and it's just sort
00:28:56.900
of these bullet points of ideas actionable points on how you can put these things you were talking
00:29:01.520
about throughout your book i mean are there a few points in your code of humility that you think
00:29:06.000
provide a lot of bang for their buck just sort of if you start thinking about it and trying to act
00:29:10.560
on them that you'll you'll see a change not maybe right away but eventually yeah well i i think you
00:29:16.300
know one of the arguments we could have our discussions is what's the most important virtue
00:29:20.080
to have and a friend of mine had this argument he knows tony morrison the novelist and she said
00:29:25.940
courage is the most important because if you don't have courage then you can't act on who you are and
00:29:31.340
what you want to do but i would say humility is the most important and humility is not thinking
00:29:36.620
lowly of yourself my favorite definition in the book of humility is radical self-awareness from a
00:29:41.400
position of other-centeredness that is to say being able to step outside yourself and see yourself
00:29:45.920
both in your strengths and your weaknesses and humility is not modesty abraham lincoln was very humble
00:29:52.540
but he knew he had some special gifts and he was not modest he didn't not deny those gifts
00:29:57.480
but he also knew he had big weaknesses and so to me if you start with that if you start with an
00:30:03.960
honest excavation of where you're strong and where you're not and basically an honest accounting of
00:30:09.960
how you're doing on any given day if you lie at night on the pillow and think well how did i do
00:30:14.720
today at this or this what's my if i'm materialistic was i materialistic today i do think that's the
00:30:21.040
foundation of everything else and so a lot of those traits have to do with just cultivating humility in
00:30:25.920
oneself i guess the other point too is be patient with yourself because this is going to take a long
00:30:29.480
time to to straighten yourself out yeah there's a one of the greek definitions of character the word
00:30:35.580
they use is engraving and it's like engraving stone or engraving in metal it's something that that does
00:30:42.140
it you have to sort of hone the contours over time through repetition and that's why so much of it is
00:30:47.920
about habits about cultivating the right habits until something becomes natural aristotle again right
00:30:52.720
there well david is there a place where people can go to learn more about your book the road to
00:30:56.780
character uh only in the bookstore or on amazon yeah i mean if they can google it they'll find
00:31:01.600
reviews i guess but i have a web page called road to character right but it's been a little while
00:31:06.140
since i've looked at it honestly well david brooks thank you so much for your time it's been an
00:31:09.400
absolute pleasure oh thank you it's been fun my guest today was david brooks he's a columnist of the
00:31:13.080
new york times and his latest book is the road to character it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:31:18.200
everywhere you can find more information about the book the road to character at
00:31:21.400
the road to character.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash road to character
00:31:27.080
where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into this topic
00:31:29.780
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:31:41.020
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy this
00:31:45.040
show and have got something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher it
00:31:48.940
literally takes one minute and helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued support and
00:31:52.720
until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly