The Art of Manliness - Why Modern Convenience Feels So Inconvenient

00:00:00.000 Things are getting busy in the McKay household, between sports and school activities,

00:00:03.660 we're running around most afternoons and evenings, and some nights there's no time for a home-cooked

00:00:07.820 meal. But we don't want to eat fast food either. That's kind of gross all the time. That's where

00:00:12.180 Factor comes in. Factor makes chef-crafted, dietician-designed meals, so you don't have to

00:00:16.720 choose between real food and convenience. There's no prep and no cleanup, and a meal is ready in two

00:00:21.340 minutes. So even the days the schedule is out of control, you can still eat well. Factor bans over

00:00:26.440 175 ingredients and every meal is built around what supports a healthier lifestyle. There are

00:00:31.120 over 100 menu items every week, plus new options like salmon and burgers, shredded pork, collard

00:00:35.720 greens. They're always adding stuff to it. My favorite lately has been the roasted garlic

00:00:39.560 chicken and 97% of users agree factory meals help them live a healthier life. I use factor and you

00:00:45.280 should too. Let's eat real head to factory meals.com slash manliness 50 off and use code

00:00:50.700 Manliness 50 off to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies

00:00:56.440 last until October 31st, 2026. That's code Manliness 50 off. So it's M-A-N-L-I-N-E-S-S

00:01:02.920 5-0-O-F-F at factorymeals.com slash manliness50 off. Again, that's factorymeals.com slash

00:01:10.080 manliness50 off, code manliness50 off. See website for more details. Hard to believe,

00:01:15.380 but the holiday season is knocking on our door. I'm already starting to take stock of our Christmas

00:01:19.480 decorations to see what needs to be updated because they just, they're ratty after a decade

00:01:23.720 of service. Wayfair has a huge selection of holiday decor. So that's where I've been looking.

00:01:28.320 First on the list was some new pre-lit garland because the ones we have, they've had it. What I

00:01:32.440 like about buying from Wayfair is that you're not guessing. They've got thousands of products across

00:01:36.560 every style and budget, whether you're replacing one worn out wreath or redoing the whole house

00:01:41.320 for the holidays. And you can use filters, customer photos, and more than 20 million verified five-star

00:01:46.660 reviews to figure out if a piece is going to look like the picture and hold up in real life.

00:01:50.580 If you got some ratty decorations of your own, I use Wayfair and I think you should too.

00:01:55.040 Find pieces made for real life and even get more value with Wayfair Rewards.

00:01:59.060 Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase.

00:02:02.680 Head to Wayfair.com to shop all things home.

00:02:05.380 That's Wayfair.com.

00:02:06.540 That's spelled W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com.

00:02:09.820 Wayfair.com.

00:02:11.380 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:02:13.480 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:02:16.660 which since 2008 has featured conversations with the world's best authors, thinkers, and leaders

00:02:20.960 that glean their edifying, life-improving insights without the fluff and filler.

00:02:25.340 The AOM podcast is just one part of the McKay mission to help individuals practice timeless

00:02:28.880 virtues through thought, word, and deed. Also be sure to explore our articles on

00:02:32.600 artofmanliest.com, read the deeper dives we do in our sub-stack newsletter at dyingbreed.net,

00:02:37.000 and turn our content into real-world action by joining the Strenuous Life program at

00:02:40.400 strenuouslife.com. Now on to the show.

00:02:46.660 modern life is filled with conveniences designed to make things easier we can order dinner without

00:02:54.940 leaving the couch check ourselves out at the grocery store communicate instantly with anyone

00:02:59.040 and stream nearly every movie and song ever made so why do we often feel busier more stressed and

00:03:04.680 more well inconvenienced than ever my guest today argues that many supposed advancements don't

00:03:09.960 actually save us time money or energy and that even when they do they can eliminate forms of

00:03:14.920 friction that made life richer, more enjoyable, and more human. His name is Gabe Bullard, and he's

00:03:19.380 the author of Against Convenience. Today on the show, Gabe and I discuss how self-checkout,

00:03:24.160 mobile ordering, digital communication, streaming services, food delivery, and even smartphone

00:03:28.900 cameras can paradoxically make life more annoying and less satisfying. Gabe also shares questions to

00:03:34.260 ask yourself to decide which convenience is worth keeping and why deliberately adding a little

00:03:38.120 friction back into your life can sometimes make it better. After the show's over, check out our

00:03:42.340 show notes at awim.is slash convenience. All right, Gabe Bullard, welcome to the show.

00:04:01.760 Thanks for having me. So you got a new book out against convenience. You're making a critique

00:04:06.920 against many of the tech-driven conveniences of modern life.

00:04:11.600 Why critique convenience?

00:04:13.120 Aren't conveniences supposed to be good?

00:04:15.200 Yeah, they should be.

00:04:16.220 And when they work, they are, generally.

00:04:18.520 So my critique comes from the fact that they're not working.

00:04:21.300 I don't think that I have more time or energy

00:04:23.900 than I did a few years ago,

00:04:25.180 even though I've got all this tech around me.

00:04:27.300 And as I was thinking about this idea,

00:04:30.120 talking to other people,

00:04:31.100 it really seemed to be the case

00:04:32.580 that people feel busier, more stressed,

00:04:34.980 like they have less money than ever,

00:04:36.280 even though we have all these things that should be saving us time, energy, or money.

00:04:40.860 And that's how I came to define convenience is something that saves or purports to save

00:04:45.360 time, money, or energy. And that purports to is key because, you know, it's one thing for

00:04:50.300 a convenience just to cut out work that we don't want to do to be kind of a quick shortcut or

00:04:54.700 something. It's another for it to just sort of offload that work or to replace one chore with

00:04:59.060 another. So instead of, you know, doing a task, you're now using a machine that does the task

00:05:03.580 and it's taking you just as much time.

00:05:05.520 What are some examples of good conveniences?

00:05:07.200 Like, oh, okay, this thing actually saves us time,

00:05:09.520 energy, or money.

00:05:10.760 You know, so I think it varies sort of person to person

00:05:13.140 and experience to experience.

00:05:15.120 But I think certain things like being able to send an email

00:05:19.300 instead of writing a letter,

00:05:20.760 though I do like writing paper letters

00:05:22.240 and getting paper letters and everything,

00:05:23.920 it is clearly much faster and much easier to send an email.

00:05:27.100 There's a lot of problems with email too

00:05:28.300 that come along with it.

00:05:29.360 And so, you know, there's always going to be trade-offs.

00:05:31.380 I think also I mentioned a few things in there that I use a lot. I mean, headphones, just being able to take music or podcasts on the go and listen and sort of have that control is is great. But then problems can come about if you're overusing it, if you're just sort of mainlining podcasts that have really toxic conversations or if you're using them to drown out time that you could be spending with another person, that sort of thing.

00:05:56.120 So it's all sort of a trade-off, and the problems come about either when they get overused or when they're really not providing the convenience they should provide, or sometimes if we just stack them up so much and have so many conveniences that we've sort of isolated ourselves from anything out in the world and all the other people and things that we might want to do or want to be around.

00:06:18.120 You start off the book using two examples of modern tech-driven conveniences that when you look at them, you're like, yeah, this should make life more convenient.

00:06:27.100 But then when you actually see how they played out, you're like, oh, geez, this actually made my life harder.

00:06:31.580 It was self-checkout at grocery stores and then the Starbucks app.

00:06:36.180 Yeah.

00:06:36.460 Tell us about these.

00:06:37.140 Like, walk us through.

00:06:38.040 How are these conveniences – how did they end up not being convenient?

00:06:42.300 it. Yeah. So I think those two and the reasons I chose them to start off the book is because I

00:06:47.740 think they represent a lot of the different sides of convenience and sort of the way that modern

00:06:54.180 technological convenience is working. With self-checkout, there's kind of a grim idea

00:06:59.420 behind it if you dwell on it for a while. This idea that it's going to be saving you time because

00:07:05.000 you're going to be doing the checkout at this machine, that it might save you energy, though

00:07:09.940 it doesn't really because you're going to be doing the checkout, but maybe the energy is not having

00:07:13.980 to talk to a clerk. And then there's also this idea that it might save you money because, well,

00:07:18.300 there's not a person there anymore. You're doing the work. And it ends up not really doing any of

00:07:24.080 those things. Like you are scanning your groceries. I'm not good at scanning groceries.

00:07:28.940 Somebody who is paid as a professional to scan groceries all day and trained to do that is going

00:07:34.580 to do a faster job. They're going to do a better job than I'm going to. And I'm sure anyone

00:07:39.700 listening who has used self-checkout enough has probably had some experiences where it doesn't

00:07:44.200 work, the machine crashes, it scans something multiple times, all of that. So it doesn't

00:07:49.200 really do any of those things, but it seems like it should. And it sort of has this allure of

00:07:54.780 technology of, well, this is the future. This is what is going to really save me, save me everything

00:07:59.960 and usher me into this computer age. With the Starbucks app, it is really convenient. You do

00:08:05.560 save time. You can get whatever you want, but it ends up erasing some frictions that were

00:08:11.740 essential to getting coffee and having a pleasant experience with it. It was essential to have a

00:08:19.580 person to talk to, to maybe prevent you from just running wild with the customizations and getting

00:08:24.940 some awful gloopy drink that's going to taste bad. You know, I talked to some baristas who said

00:08:29.440 they get these orders coming in through the app that are so complicated and so strange and so

00:08:36.040 precise. They just think, you know, this is not going to taste good at all. And the person comes

00:08:41.060 in and they taste it and they say, what's wrong with this? And the barista has to explain, you

00:08:45.200 know, well, that's what you ordered. And, you know, had you been here in person, I might've

00:08:48.480 tried to talk you out of something or, you know, asked you to confirm some of these ideas. The

00:08:53.260 other part is that going and standing in line in the store was maybe a little bit boring,

00:08:57.820 but it was essential to the way that the stores were set up to function that there was one line

00:09:05.200 per register you waited in that line people went through the line they ordered and people behind

00:09:10.100 the counter made the drinks with the app it adds this additional line that leads to the workers

00:09:15.820 sort of constantly making drinks because there are people ordering online and there's people in the

00:09:20.240 store who are placing orders so it sort of throws everything into chaos the baristas are working

00:09:24.760 really hard, sort of constantly slammed. And then for the customer, you don't know when your drink's

00:09:29.940 going to come out. You don't know which of the cups on the counter is going to be yours. And

00:09:34.560 then there's just sort of always people coming in and out, names being shouted out constantly,

00:09:39.020 and it stops being this sort of pleasant experience to be in. On sort of a different

00:09:43.920 level, I think it's good to actually have that time away and waiting in line to be a little bit

00:09:49.800 bored to sort of zone out, let your mind wander, that sort of thing. I think that a lot of times,

00:09:54.660 you know, this is the way when I was using the Starbucks app that I used it, I would be at the

00:09:58.560 office and then I would just stay and work a little bit more. And I found I was feeling more

00:10:02.060 stressed. I didn't have a coffee break. I was just using the app so that I could walk out the door,

00:10:06.620 get the coffee, come right back and really have no other interactions with people and just keep

00:10:10.780 working. And so it sort of ends up backfiring on Starbucks to a degree. I had tried to get the

00:10:17.660 company to comment, but you do see the CEO had put out an open letter saying he noticed that

00:10:22.840 stores had changed. The former CEO had made some comments as well. You know, as to why we keep

00:10:27.580 using them, I think this is the other thing that's inherent to a lot of conveniences that made me

00:10:33.160 want to write the book. One is that the choice goes away. I was in the grocery store the other

00:10:38.060 day and there were like a dozen self-checkout kiosks and only one or two lines with people

00:10:43.600 working. And those had huge lines. And I thought, well, I really have no choice because I'm in a

00:10:48.400 hurry. I have to catch a train. I have to use the self-checkout. And it was not a very good

00:10:53.480 experience. It didn't scan right, all of that. But the human staffed line was becoming more

00:10:59.180 inconvenient and just kind of fading away entirely in some places. And then with the Starbucks app,

00:11:04.560 it's just kind of not nice being in the store. And so it makes sense to use the app then. Like

00:11:11.020 it becomes unpleasant because of the app, but then you want to use the app so you minimize the amount

00:11:15.600 a time that you have to be inside the store and ordering. And so the world just starts to kind of

00:11:19.740 warp around these conveniences, not necessarily because they're better for us, they're good for

00:11:24.120 business. And so the businesses kind of keep pushing them. And I think that's one of the big

00:11:28.440 problems with a lot of these conveniences is they're being pushed when they're not necessarily

00:11:32.200 better. They seem welcoming. And they also tend to erase the work of the other people who we rely

00:11:38.580 on for this. Like you start to erase the baristas because you don't have to talk to somebody to

00:11:42.520 place an order. You start to erase the grocery store employees because you don't have to see

00:11:46.620 them to check out. And that's part of that isolation that convenience can lead to. Extremely

00:11:51.300 complicated. Yeah. With the self-checkout, I've noticed myself in recent years, I use it less

00:11:56.460 and less. I might use if I have like one or two items, but if I have more than five, I'm just

00:12:01.740 going to a manned station or manned cash register because they just do a better job. They can get

00:12:06.700 it done fast. Especially if I have produce, they can type it in really fast. They bag it better.

00:12:11.660 I don't have to worry about me double scanning things or having to delete something or having to call a clerk to show my ID because I'm buying, you know, medication that requires an ID.

00:12:22.180 So I just I've been using the self-checkout less and less.

00:12:26.320 Yeah. And have you noticed, I see this all the time.

00:12:29.500 If I'm in a self-checkout line, it seems like people are really mad at each other if they're going through the line together.

00:12:34.380 Like, I feel like I see so many sort of like couples or families kind of, you know, not

00:12:38.520 like fighting, fighting, but sort of, you know, bickering or snapping at each other.

00:12:41.940 And it's like, yeah, it's a frustrating experience to have to do.

00:12:45.300 Yeah.

00:12:45.560 And also with the self-checkout, we think, okay, it'll save us money because the store

00:12:51.220 has to pay fewer employees.

00:12:54.440 But I think you talk about, if you do the math, it hasn't really saved stores all that

00:12:58.500 much money because the machines require maintenance.

00:13:00.640 there's a lot more theft going on or people just forget to scan something and walk out so they're

00:13:07.680 losing a product and that that that's a cost to the company that they have to pass on to the

00:13:12.820 customer so you think it'd save you money but you know maybe not yeah exactly because yeah these

00:13:19.280 machines cost a lot they have to be maintained they get replaced every so often and you know

00:13:24.560 a person drew a salary but at the same time you know i haven't seen grocery prices go down really

00:13:30.540 significantly, uh, for anything, you know, the story is always the groceries are getting more

00:13:35.440 and more expensive. And so I think if these machines were, you know, really following through

00:13:39.180 on that idea, I think that a lot of things would probably be a lot cheaper. Something else you

00:13:43.240 highlight, and I've noticed this too, my own life is we do have all this great tech because of our

00:13:48.420 smartphone. We can do so much with our smartphone. We can summon a car with our smartphone. We can

00:13:52.760 get food delivered. We can watch any movie, listen, any music that we want. We can get

00:13:57.720 same-day Amazon Prime delivery. And you'd think we have all this stuff. We should feel like we're

00:14:03.360 living in the age of the Jetsons. And sometimes I do. There's moments where I'm like, wow,

00:14:06.780 this is really cool that I can do this. But most times it's like, ah, I don't feel like that. I

00:14:11.700 feel mostly just frustrated and blasé and not awed by our technological progress. Why is that?

00:14:18.360 So I think a lot of that is design. And I think we're in a place where we're just kind of stuck

00:14:24.940 in sort of a dead end of design.

00:14:27.800 I was watching earlier today some of the Apple Keynote

00:14:30.260 and I used to love to watch those,

00:14:32.220 but this one was, it was kind of depressing to watch

00:14:35.240 because it's like, wow, all these new products

00:14:36.880 and nothing that really is that exciting.

00:14:40.620 So my general theory is that I think a lot of tech

00:14:43.200 moves in these sort of giant leaps and then small steps.

00:14:45.960 So like having a refrigerator, that's a giant leap.

00:14:49.060 And then there's a bunch of small steps

00:14:50.280 like an automatic ice maker or whatever.

00:14:52.540 and these have a business case because if you're making appliances, it behooves you like with a

00:14:58.840 car or something, you know, make the old model seem obsolete by offering sort of something new

00:15:03.080 and convenience is a great way to do that, but it's not really the same kind of giant leap forward.

00:15:08.060 And now a lot of the small steps are just sort of all screen-based, like there's a screen on

00:15:13.060 the fridge for weather or that tells you, you know, your shopping list or whatever,

00:15:16.360 an app for the dishwasher, and then basically everything on your phone. And this I think is

00:15:22.280 the design dead end because the screen doesn't do something new all the time. It just sort of

00:15:27.200 changes how you do something that you already did. And so, you know, there's the business model

00:15:32.600 because it's really profitable to keep getting people to upgrade. If something is more computer

00:15:36.600 based, the software can become out of date really quickly. And, you know, you might need to not

00:15:40.940 really invent something so much. You just say, oh, well, you know, to run the new software,

00:15:45.100 you have to buy the new phone or the new device, that sort of thing. The other is, I think just a

00:15:50.060 limitation, you know, we're reaching this point maybe where the screen has done everything it's

00:15:55.320 going to do or done most of what it's going to do. There've been over 50 models of iPhone since

00:15:59.880 the first one. And you look at what was announced at the Apple keynote. One was the Duo, which it

00:16:06.060 folds and that's cool. You know, the purpose of the fold seems kind of unclear. Folding phones

00:16:10.560 have existed for a while. So I'll, you know, withhold judgment and see what happens there

00:16:14.520 and what that use case might be.

00:16:16.600 But then the other one was the 18 Pro.

00:16:19.820 And I just think it's not a very inspiring design.

00:16:23.060 You know, on the front of it,

00:16:24.620 it's basically the same as the first phone.

00:16:26.240 There's a little more screen.

00:16:27.320 It takes up the entire device.

00:16:28.740 There's not a button or anything,

00:16:29.720 but it's a rectangle.

00:16:30.720 It's a screen.

00:16:31.600 On the back, it's got that bulky camera lump

00:16:34.240 because the cameras need more space

00:16:35.760 than the other guts of the phone,

00:16:37.460 which makes the phone sit awkwardly.

00:16:39.460 It's a little odd.

00:16:40.700 I was watching it and at the same time,

00:16:42.760 I have a neighbor who's really into classic cars and he has friends who come over with their cars

00:16:46.540 and everything. And you see like the designs of the cars are really sleek. And a lot of times,

00:16:51.060 you know, it's aesthetics, but then it's also based on what's inside the car. Like the hood

00:16:55.540 has to be a certain way because of where the motor is, all of that. And you see a lot of

00:16:59.120 creativity and everything versus, you know, with the phone, it's just kind of a big block. And now

00:17:03.380 with, you know, sort of lumps sticking out of it, that isn't all that exciting. And going back to

00:17:08.340 the screen, it's just like, well, what is this phone doing that it couldn't do before? The camera

00:17:13.100 is a little sharper, the processor is a little faster. There's a couple of AI features, that

00:17:17.020 sort of thing. But it's not significantly, it's not the same leap that the first iPhone was or

00:17:21.880 that some of the iPhones in the middle have done. One thing in the keynote that really brought me

00:17:26.700 down was this. It's a feature on the Apple Watch where if you don't hear something, you can sort

00:17:32.200 of get a recap of the last 15 seconds. And, you know, there's accessibility benefits to that. And

00:17:36.320 I'm not going to knock that at all, but the demonstration they show is a person's at a

00:17:41.300 restaurant and a server comes by and reads the specials and he doesn't quite hear.

00:17:45.060 And then instead of asking to repeat, he just immediately looks at his watch.

00:17:48.080 And I thought, you know, this is a extremely rich company.

00:17:51.880 This is an amazing device.

00:17:53.320 They've put so much production work into making this video into the watch itself.

00:17:57.880 There's all this advanced technology and this is the best they could come up with.

00:18:02.000 It just kind of brought me down.

00:18:03.780 Like, I don't know.

00:18:04.660 I really, I really want some sort of like gee whiz innovation here and not having to ask a

00:18:10.060 person in a restaurant to repeat themselves is not, uh, not necessarily high on my list of

00:18:14.460 problems I need solved right now. Yeah. So yeah, things seem stagnant. Like there's,

00:18:18.780 there's improvements, but usually improvements in software or just innovations in software,

00:18:22.900 if you want to call them that, but nothing really big has happened. Like my phone, I have a,

00:18:28.440 an iPhone 17, but I got it because my iPhone 13 or whatever, you know, the screen cracked and just

00:18:35.400 went on the fritz and it was time to get a new phone. I was like, well, okay, I'll just get this

00:18:38.220 one. And there's really no difference between my 17 and my 13. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it, you

00:18:46.800 know, you mentioned the reason for upgrading too. It just always blows my mind how central the phone

00:18:52.660 is to everyday life and how fragile it is. Like a lot of us have experiences probably of, you know,

00:18:57.820 dropping our phone and it doesn't break or something like that. But you know, my wife bikes

00:19:01.680 to work and one day it was raining and a little bit of water got into her bike bag and that got

00:19:06.340 into the phone and the phone was ruined and she had to replace it. And I thought, you know, like

00:19:10.580 our entire lives are on this device that can so quickly be just destroyed. And between the phone

00:19:18.840 breaking and, and getting it replaced, she can't log into her bank account, can't do a number of,

00:19:25.040 you know, pretty vital things that we need to do for life. And they're all sort of on these

00:19:28.500 devices that can break so easily. Yeah. I hate that when I, my phone goes on the fritz and

00:19:32.680 doesn't work. There's that period where you can't do anything because it's like, right,

00:19:36.520 I need a text message to get in my bank account. Cause you have to do the two factor authentication

00:19:40.400 or do the authenticator apps. Like, well, I can't do that. What am I supposed to do? So yeah,

00:19:45.180 it is convenient to have all that stuff in one place with you all the time, but it's one single

00:19:50.240 failure point that can just blow your whole life up. Make it really frustrating for maybe a few

00:19:55.760 hours or maybe a couple of days. Oh yeah. Like flight delays too. There was one time, I mean,

00:20:00.820 many times I've been waiting for a flight and it's delayed and my tickets on my phone and my phone

00:20:07.040 is just dwindling and dwindling and dwindling. And it's like 4% power. And I'm like, okay,

00:20:11.800 I need to just go ask them to print out my boarding pass because my phone's going to die

00:20:15.380 before I get on this plane. And that's going to be a whole other problem. Yeah. Well, in the rest

00:20:19.760 the book, you talk about specific areas of our lives where we've had these conveniences introduced

00:20:25.560 to us thanks to technology, typically digital technology. And we think, oh yeah, this should

00:20:30.120 make our life easier and better. But then you explore, well, actually let's take a look at this.

00:20:34.300 Maybe it's not. One aspect of our lives is communication. It's much easier today to

00:20:40.260 communicate with each other than ever. And I feel like at the dawn of the internet, there was this

00:20:44.880 feeling or this, this promise that by making communication easier, we'd end up connecting

00:20:50.100 more with others. We'd feel more intimate with people, but we've all seen that hasn't happened.

00:20:54.460 We're all feeling lonelier and angrier than ever. And I, I think one of the issues is that

00:20:59.540 by eliminating friction, that's what digital communication does. It reduces friction and

00:21:03.920 communication. It makes our relationships worse. Why do you think that is? Yeah. So I think they

00:21:09.560 did erase a lot of friction and I think some of that friction is valuable, but I think they

00:21:13.000 introduced another type of friction too. And so for me, you know, I text friends all the time. I

00:21:19.020 now live in another country for most of my friends. So I'm sort of constantly in a group chat or

00:21:23.420 having these conversations. But I find that when I'm texting, I really can't get out everything

00:21:28.140 that I want to say all the time. Like I don't want to be sarcastic or ironic because the tone

00:21:33.900 might be misinterpreted. And I'm just sort of different in how I engage with text. And I don't

00:21:38.840 know, it doesn't feel like as satisfying as actually talking to a person over time because

00:21:42.680 it's, it's asynchronous. Maybe the person takes a while to reply. I can be a little bit neurotic

00:21:47.460 and I start thinking, okay, I've clearly offended this person. And that's why they're not getting

00:21:50.720 back to me when in fact, you know, they're just at work or they're doing something and can't look

00:21:54.480 at their phone or they, you know, forget about the conversation, that sort of thing. And I think

00:21:58.660 that the friction that ended up being erased was, was pretty valuable. Like it's nice to be

00:22:04.140 in front of a person and kind of having having that conversation, you can convey stuff in body

00:22:09.340 language and everything. The friction was finding the time to get together and getting to a place

00:22:13.420 where you can meet the actual communication. I think it's so much more efficient and so much

00:22:17.980 smoother just to have a conversation in person and read somebody's body language and facial

00:22:22.820 expressions and see how they behave in public, all of that. And I think also that the smoothness

00:22:29.300 of communication kind of I don't know, I don't want to project too much. And I'm curious what

00:22:33.440 you think on this. I feel like it tends to make us think the worst of everyone. I've been posting

00:22:38.420 like some videos to Instagram to explain parts of the book and like promote it and everything.

00:22:43.020 Every comment I get, I immediately read as negative. Like I think the person's trolling.

00:22:47.360 I think they're critiquing me in some way. And then I read it and I think like, oh no,

00:22:51.240 this person is just agreeing and bringing up like another point. They're not saying I missed a point.

00:22:55.360 They're saying like, oh yeah, here's how I've noticed, you know, this idea or something like

00:22:58.460 that. But I've just sort of internalized this idea that people are just sort of like inherently

00:23:02.980 being nasty. And I don't like that that's kind of how I'm just inherently seeing other people now.

00:23:08.640 Yeah, I've had that experience too with online communication. I typically view it with a

00:23:13.300 jaundiced eye, like in the most negative light possible. I don't know why that is. I wonder what

00:23:17.980 it is about digital communication that makes you do that. I mean, I guess it's because it's just

00:23:22.840 so flat. It's just text on a screen and there's no, unless you add an emoji or some caveats of

00:23:30.920 what you're thinking or feeling, like you can't really tell what the person is thinking or

00:23:35.980 feeling. I think our tendency when there's uncertainty in anything, like we assume the

00:23:40.120 worst. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. And I don't know, it just seems like that's not really

00:23:45.120 a healthy way to go about, uh, go about interacting with the world. Yeah. Another way

00:23:50.840 the ease of communication has made our lives more inconvenient is that there's just so much of it.

00:23:55.700 it's so easy to communicate. We can do more of it. And that causes all sorts of problems because

00:24:01.120 now we have to manage this inflow of information and you have to juggle different communication

00:24:06.460 baskets that you might have. I know this is like a reoccurring hobby horse on the podcast where I

00:24:10.440 complain about it, but I mean, as a dad, it's amazing the number of apps I have to have in

00:24:16.240 order to get information about my kids doing. So like there's an app for the school and the

00:24:21.740 teachers use this app to communicate to parents about what's going on at school. And then there's

00:24:24.960 like an app for each individual sports team that my kids are on. And then we have a group me,

00:24:29.620 different group me's for sports teams and then church groups. And I have to download all those,

00:24:34.740 all these apps. Like there's no choice, like you have to do it. And of course I turn off the

00:24:38.980 notifications because I don't want to get pinged all the time. And so I had to like juggle this

00:24:43.120 thing in my head. It's like, all right, I had to spend 20 minutes at the end of the day or just

00:24:47.740 check these things periodically. So I know what's going on. And we've had instances where, you know,

00:24:52.640 coaches will at the last minute change the plans for a practice and it's too late. Like I didn't

00:25:00.000 check the thing in time. And so now my kid's not going to make it to the practice. And it's because

00:25:04.240 it's just so easy. It's like, well, yeah, I can change the practice because all the parents will

00:25:07.640 see this at once. And so you don't have to think about coordination anymore. Like you used to

00:25:11.920 before, if you're a coach or something, you'd have to think about the schedule and be very

00:25:15.840 deliberate about it because you'd have to make phone calls. Now you can make these changes the

00:25:20.680 last minute on the fly because, well, I can just send out a group me message. And when it works,

00:25:26.000 it works. But when it doesn't, it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I, as you were saying that I was just

00:25:31.080 thinking about, you know, I played soccer when I was young and, uh, and then refereed soccer for

00:25:35.400 a while in my teen years. And we always had a phone tree where it's like, all right, the coach

00:25:39.300 is going to change practice or like, there's a change. The coach calls one person, that person

00:25:44.320 calls another person, that person calls another person. And you have a backup plan and everything,

00:25:47.640 but it's just like you know it's taped to the wall next to the phone or whatever and it worked

00:25:52.760 it would be rare that an announcement wouldn't get out that way there would just be enough of a

00:25:56.440 you know enough of a community kind of coming together and it's not like it was a ton of

00:25:59.800 effort it's you know one person calls one person yeah i remember the phone truths those were fun

00:26:04.900 another thing with these communication apps they promise that we can meet new people whether that's

00:26:10.880 friends or romantic partners more easily, but it hasn't really worked out that way. Why is it

00:26:17.720 harder to make friends and find potential dates or spouses with our communication apps?

00:26:26.100 Yeah. You know, I, I, I am fortunate that I met my wife and we started dating and everything before,

00:26:32.040 uh, dating apps took off or anything, but yeah, every single person I know or every person who's

00:26:36.500 been sort of dating, it says it's gotten worse. And I think part of it is because of what you

00:26:41.100 mentioned, you know, it's sort of like flattens the experience. And so you're on an app and you

00:26:45.840 see statistics, you see a profile, you don't really see a person. They're just sort of like

00:26:50.400 a product on Amazon or something that people are choosing between. And, you know, the other side of

00:26:55.200 that too, like you're not getting the full picture of the person. You're also not really like there's

00:26:59.840 this implication that there's going to be a million more people there. And when you read articles or

00:27:05.120 talk to people who do a lot of dating, one thing they say is like, you know, they feel like they

00:27:09.440 reject people super fast, either in the app or in person over some of the smallest details,

00:27:14.400 because they have this idea of, well, yeah, there's like a million other people on the app,

00:27:18.380 eventually I'll get a match. And I think it sort of drives this idea of, oh, we're going to have

00:27:24.020 this, you know, perfect connection right away. And I think that the fact that it's being done

00:27:27.540 through technology probably suggests that too, that, you know, like, oh, it's this high tech app,

00:27:32.240 Of course, it's going to work.

00:27:33.440 Of course, it's going to connect you to a person right away and you're going to get

00:27:35.960 along perfectly.

00:27:37.260 And so we go into it with these super high expectations that are never really going to

00:27:42.260 work.

00:27:43.780 I think the other thing, too, you know, the apps that are supposed to connect us to find

00:27:47.460 friends and everything, they're sort of built around this algorithmic similarity that like

00:27:52.900 this is what is going to connect you.

00:27:55.600 And when I think about the best friends that I've made, we're not the same type of person.

00:28:01.020 Like, I don't know if an algorithm would have really connected us in any sort of way.

00:28:04.720 Like, we have a lot of different interests.

00:28:06.700 We have a few things in common as well.

00:28:08.500 But, you know, like, it's not something that I think I would really be looking for.

00:28:12.520 Like, I don't want to be friends with a person who's just like me.

00:28:15.440 Yeah.

00:28:15.700 All right.

00:28:16.200 So our communication is much more convenient.

00:28:19.160 And it can be convenient.

00:28:20.220 Like you mentioned earlier, email is much more convenient than writing a letter.

00:28:23.680 A text can be convenient.

00:28:25.260 But if you overdo it, and that's the problem with convenience, when something's easy, we

00:28:29.600 want to do more of it.

00:28:30.660 That's the natural tendency. It just ends up making things more inconvenient for you.

00:28:36.260 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like you start piling these things on top of each other. And all of a sudden,

00:28:41.440 you know, you realize that you've not had an in-person conversation with somebody in a long

00:28:45.160 time. You've not left the house in days, perhaps because you're getting everything ordered. You're

00:28:49.320 working remotely. You're talking to people. I think that's the part of it that's difficult

00:28:53.600 because some people might really benefit from a certain convenience and then not want to give

00:28:58.720 that up. And I don't want to say, you know, like, oh, you shouldn't text, you shouldn't do this,

00:29:02.060 you shouldn't do that, because everyone's going to have a different relationship to it. I think

00:29:06.020 the thing is just, you got to think about how you're piling these things up and what you're

00:29:10.080 cutting out of your life. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:29:14.500 I've been using the Great from Caldera Lab consistently for over a year now,

00:29:18.080 and I've really seen an improvement in my skin. It looks a lot fresher, less dull,

00:29:21.880 even my wife Kate has noticed. And the reason I've stuck with it for over a year is that it's so

00:29:26.140 easy to use. I'm not going to do some 10-step skincare routine. I want one thing that works,

00:29:30.920 and this is it. The Great is an anti-aging serum designed specifically for men's skin,

00:29:35.100 which is 25% thicker and oilier than women's and ages differently, so it needs formulas built for

00:29:40.020 it. It helps reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles and helps skin look firmer, smoother,

00:29:44.160 and more refreshed. It's lightweight and absorbs fast. I put it on after I wash my face in the

00:29:48.600 morning and at night, and that's the whole routine. And I'm not the only one seeing results.

00:29:52.060 In a four-week study of men ages 40 to 60, 97% agreed the overall appearance of the skin was visibly improved.

00:29:58.420 If you're looking for one simple product that actually makes a difference, that's the great.

00:30:02.140 Visit calderalab.com slash manliness and use code manliness for 20% off your first order.

00:30:07.720 That's calderalab, that's spelled C-A-L-D-E-R-A-L-A-B.com slash manliness and use code manliness for 20% off your first order.

00:30:16.920 If you run a small business, at some point you also got to be the payroll department.

00:30:20.220 I don't know anybody who got into business for that part, but it's got to get done right

00:30:23.740 because getting payroll taxes wrong is expensive.

00:30:27.020 Gusto has online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses.

00:30:30.360 It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use.

00:30:33.960 So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere.

00:30:37.680 It handles automatic payroll tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, workers' comp,

00:30:42.060 401k, you name it, and there are options for nearly every budget.

00:30:45.940 You get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price with no hidden fees and no surprises.

00:30:49.740 and plenty of people agree.

00:30:51.520 Gusto is ranked number one

00:30:52.500 on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026

00:30:55.280 and over 500,000 small businesses use it.

00:30:58.360 AOM is a mom and pop operation right now,

00:31:00.140 but if AOM ever decides to become a media empire

00:31:02.180 and we need to hire a team, I'll be using Gusto.

00:31:04.940 Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash AOM

00:31:07.800 and get three months free when you run your first payroll.

00:31:10.940 That's three months of free payroll

00:31:12.280 at gusto.com slash AOM.

00:31:14.440 One more time, gusto.com slash AOM.

00:31:16.980 That's spelled G-U-S-T-O dot com slash AOM.

00:31:20.020 We've run the AOM store on Shopify for years.

00:31:22.720 So if a friend asked me how to start selling something online,

00:31:25.020 that's what I would tell them to use.

00:31:26.660 What I love about Shopify is how easy it is to get a business

00:31:29.300 where you're selling stuff up and running quickly.

00:31:31.780 You don't have to be an e-commerce expert.

00:31:33.860 Shopify walks you through launching a store

00:31:35.420 and taking orders in a few simple steps.

00:31:37.440 And the pre-built themes in AI Site Builder

00:31:39.600 handle the part most people dread,

00:31:41.560 which is making the site look professional.

00:31:44.240 Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant,

00:31:45.840 can help with business tasks along the way,

00:31:47.580 from store setup to planning your holiday promotions.

00:31:50.580 And once you're live, Shopify checkout with ShopPay

00:31:53.140 converts up to 36% higher than the competition.

00:31:56.400 So more of the folks who make it a checkout

00:31:57.840 finish the order.

00:31:59.340 Shopify's mobile app helps you handle inventory,

00:32:01.660 customer support, and payments from anywhere.

00:32:03.640 If you're thinking about launching your business,

00:32:05.260 do it before Black Friday. 0.85

00:32:06.740 That's the time of year when more people

00:32:07.800 are already shopping and ready to buy

00:32:09.100 and you want your store ready when they show up.

00:32:11.320 If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday,

00:32:13.720 go to Shopify.com to start your free trial.

00:32:15.880 that's shopify.com go to shopify.com today to hear your first you guys know the deadlift is my

00:32:23.200 favorite lift but something i've noticed whenever i deadlift in regular athletic shorts something

00:32:27.180 always happens is like once the bar gets up to my thighs it starts bunching up the fabric as i'm

00:32:32.360 pulling up the bar of my thighs and so by then it's just like i'm pulling the bar up against my

00:32:36.020 bare skin and my skin's sweaty and there's a lot of friction it's just uncomfortable the interval

00:32:39.980 short from 10 000 has fixed that for me their liner stays put so there's fabric for the bar to

00:32:45.520 slide across the whole way up. It's super comfortable. And they got a lot of mobility,

00:32:49.420 so they're great for deep squats. They're also good on cardio days. They're sweat wicking,

00:32:53.060 quick drying, and cut so they don't ride up or chafe while you're running. Same pair for the

00:32:57.340 barbell on the road, which is why I think they're the best training shorts on the market. And with

00:33:01.260 open hip pockets, a secure side zip pocket for your smartphone, and a spot for your keys,

00:33:05.520 they work outside the gym too. Check out the interval short at 10,000.cc. That's 10,000.cc,

00:33:12.520 So the two letters CC and use code podcast 15 for 15% off your first order.

00:33:18.800 That's 10,000.cc code podcast 15, 10,000 built for however you train.

00:33:26.860 And now back to the show, going back to our phones, they've become these powerful cameras

00:33:32.400 and it's a camera that we have with us all the time.

00:33:35.280 And it's really easy to take really good looking photos these days.

00:33:40.000 And you think this would be great.

00:33:41.220 Oh, fantastic.

00:33:41.700 I can capture more memories, capture more of my life.

00:33:44.640 But you talk about how this convenience counterintuitively might be making our lives more inconvenient.

00:33:51.060 How so?

00:33:52.460 Yeah.

00:33:52.840 So in a few ways, and this was, I love this question because this was one of my favorite

00:33:56.800 parts of the research to dive into.

00:33:59.240 And it sort of broke open how I think about just kind of multi-use devices as well.

00:34:03.960 And so where it started was I just always assumed that digital photography was cheaper

00:34:08.820 than film because you're not paying to buy film.

00:34:11.060 you're not paying to get it developed, all of that. And then I saw this photo editor and writer

00:34:15.960 Emily Keegan had posted this story saying, you know, that's not necessarily the case. And the

00:34:21.140 way she thought about it is if you have nothing and you want to take a picture, you could get a

00:34:25.380 camera, a roll of film and pay for processing. You could buy a digital camera, you could buy a phone.

00:34:30.480 And with the film, you're getting a printed piece of paper that you can pass around, you can make

00:34:36.480 copies of, you can frame it, all of that. But with the digital device, you're going to need a data

00:34:42.100 plan. If it's on your phone, you're going to need, if you want to do anything other than look at it

00:34:45.760 on your phone, you might need Wi-Fi, a computer, a memory card reader, all these different things.

00:34:51.020 And then you can share the photo more widely. You have this great photo, but you're paying for the

00:34:55.300 device. You're paying for the data. You're paying for all these ancillary things. And now a phone

00:35:00.340 can do a lot more than be a camera. So maybe the camera costs nothing, but maybe it costs the entire

00:35:05.920 price of the phone, if the camera is the main thing that you use your phone for.

00:35:10.180 So it's just sort of impossible to determine what the value of the actual device and that

00:35:15.360 function is.

00:35:17.100 And I think that happens with a lot of tech.

00:35:19.140 But then over time, we start to lose the value of anything that the device can do.

00:35:24.540 So like with photos, when it's a physical object, there's something really nice about

00:35:28.300 it.

00:35:28.460 One, it just kind of looks nice, but also you can pass it down.

00:35:31.660 You could save it.

00:35:32.820 All of this, it exists as this physical object.

00:35:35.260 with a digital photo, they're so fast and easy to take and to share. We're just sort of awash in

00:35:40.880 photos all the time, like constantly looking at photos, constantly seeing images. And I think

00:35:45.680 that that has started to deplete the meaning of images. Like you can look at the news and see

00:35:51.700 some shocking photographs from around the world, photographs that the equivalent 30, 40, 50 years

00:35:57.900 ago would be the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph that, you know, shifts public opinion on an issue

00:36:02.820 on on war or something like that and now we just sort of are constantly scrolling through images

00:36:08.380 and now with ai and everything like that manipulation has gotten so much easier there's

00:36:12.660 almost like not a trust of it and so photos what used to be and and still are depending on what

00:36:17.720 they're of these dear valuable things that you would pass down and preserve are just sort of

00:36:22.400 this almost kind of meaningless digital file that passes in front of our eyes thousands of times a

00:36:27.320 day. Yeah. I've noticed with digital photography and with my phone, both my wife and I aren't

00:36:33.500 really big picture takers. So it hasn't been a big issue for us being inundated or having our

00:36:40.300 phones just overwhelmed with all these photos. But we've got friends that have like hundreds of

00:36:44.540 thousands of photos on their iCloud drive. And I'm thinking like, how do you even go through that?

00:36:50.160 Like, how do you go through your memories when you have that many? And like, what do your kids

00:36:54.700 do when you're dead? Well, I got mom's iCloud drive. What do you want to do with these photos?

00:37:00.300 And it's like, well, I guess I don't want to go through that. I'm just going to delete it.

00:37:03.400 But like before, you know, if you had a photo album, like, okay, look, grandma made this great

00:37:08.760 photo album, curated it. It looks great. We can look at this and enjoy this, but that's hard to

00:37:15.080 do with digital photography. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there, there are like tech solutions that

00:37:21.380 come up like I think most of the photo apps now and there's time hop and everything they have this

00:37:25.260 like memories feature where it resurfaces stuff but that's not how our memories work really time

00:37:31.460 hop for me is a ton of screenshots of things that I saw online that I thought were kind of funny

00:37:35.540 that I sent to a group text and it's like I open the app and I scroll through and it's like I don't

00:37:40.360 know you know for every one meaningful photo I'm just reminded of all these kind of pointless

00:37:44.920 digital files I took that aren't serving any purpose and then at the same time you know I'm

00:37:49.500 I'm like your friends. I have thousands upon thousands of photos. I don't want to take the

00:37:53.220 time to go through all of those. You know, I barely look at them after I take them a lot of

00:37:56.660 the time or after I send them to somebody versus, you know, there was an advantage to getting an

00:38:01.600 envelope full of photos and thinking, all right, well, these are the ones I want to keep and I'm

00:38:04.980 going to set them aside. And, you know, the others just go in another box that'll be forgotten about

00:38:09.260 or something like that. Yeah. I mean, something that I do every week is on Sunday, I go through

00:38:14.800 my camera roll on my iPhone and I delete stuff I don't need anymore. So yeah, screenshots and

00:38:22.500 just random pictures that I took. And then every few months, my wife and I will go through our

00:38:26.920 photos on our phone and then print out the best ones. And she puts them in a photo album.

00:38:32.360 It's nice because my kids love it because when they're bored on a Sunday, they'll just pull that

00:38:36.080 thing out and they'll look at pictures when they were a baby, when they're a toddler. I don't think

00:38:41.160 they would do that with our phones. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I really like that you're doing

00:38:45.920 that. I love the intention of doing it and revisiting those because I don't know, like I,

00:38:51.860 I need to have sort of better digital behavior there. And then I was thinking of, you know,

00:38:56.080 like the equivalent of if you were getting printed photos and they started piling up that way,

00:38:59.900 you'd eventually think like, all right, I got to do something with these, but it's so easy to just

00:39:03.020 kind of ignore those files as they sit in cloud storage. Let's talk about entertainment. You have

00:39:08.220 the whole section about entertainment. So as I mentioned earlier, music, television, movies,

00:39:14.300 easier to access than ever. You can watch a movie on your phone, then you can continue watching it

00:39:18.780 on your smart TV. So why does it feel like our entertainment has gotten worse? I might be

00:39:24.780 speaking for myself. Some people might think, oh, it's never been better. But then also,

00:39:28.260 here's another question. Why do I have such a hard time figuring out what to watch on the

00:39:33.880 multiple streaming services that I have? I have this moment every night, I'm like, I should watch

00:39:37.660 and TV. And I ended up not watching anything because I can't figure out what to watch.

00:39:42.480 Yeah. Yeah. Streaming is for me personally, like that's the biggest disappointment of,

00:39:47.560 of so much of this tech, because it should be great. Like if you had said to me at any point

00:39:53.560 in the past, Hey, there's going to be an infinite database of music, movies, television, everything.

00:40:00.120 And there's going to be a super smart robot that tells you what to watch or like that learns your

00:40:04.980 taste and recommends things to you like that sounds amazing i think a lot of these problems

00:40:09.540 though are more of the business side than the tech side everything kind of took a different path to

00:40:14.800 just being this like streaming thing you know on the music side you have napster came along and

00:40:19.980 sort of told people that music was free in fact you still had to pay for an internet connection

00:40:24.040 you had to pay for a computer and everything you're just paying a tech company devastated the

00:40:27.500 music industry apple tries to help with the itunes store and everything like that streaming comes

00:40:32.400 along. But streaming doesn't just replace buying a CD like streaming replaces owning a catalog of

00:40:38.120 CDs. It replaces owning an iPod. It's your library. It's all the new releases that would

00:40:43.140 be at the record store. It's the radio. It's everything. And it's such a great value for that

00:40:48.700 to pay, you know, 10, 12 bucks a month or whatever to get all of that. There's huge profits for the

00:40:53.720 record companies and the labels and everything. But it's not trickling down to artists like a lot

00:40:59.100 of artists say, hey, you know, we get like a third of a cent every time somebody streams one of our

00:41:03.080 songs. And, you know, there's different debates over why that is and everything. But it's, you

00:41:08.220 know, the money gets split among a bunch of different rights holders. There's this pro rata

00:41:12.380 system that's kind of complicated for how everyone gets paid, but it really is leading to artists not

00:41:17.720 getting as much money for many artists as they feel like they deserve for the music that they're

00:41:22.100 getting and for the listenership they have. And what that's translated to is if you want to make

00:41:26.440 money from your music, you have to have millions upon millions of streams. Like you have to have

00:41:31.240 so many listeners that you can't really be like in a local scene anymore. You can't be selling CDs

00:41:36.040 at a table after a show, that sort of thing. So you see a lot of artists are trying to go viral

00:41:40.780 on social media, or they're trying to make music that's going to fit into playlists. And that's

00:41:45.600 not really how you make great music. Like that's how you make something that's going to sound like

00:41:49.120 everything else. You know, with TV, it's a little bit different. And then movies followed TV, but

00:41:53.560 you know there was cable before which was frustrating because it was really expensive

00:41:56.920 and and i think that's where the convenience of streaming really came in is that you know

00:42:00.800 netflix was a lot cheaper to stream than to pay a cable bill but the cable business model more and

00:42:05.960 more is looking pretty great because you know i i think madman's one of the best shows ever made

00:42:10.280 i was able to watch madman because amc had the money to produce that in part because they ran

00:42:14.900 ads but in part because they got all this money from people who were paying for a cable package

00:42:19.160 that included, you know, ESPN and the History Channel

00:42:21.820 and all these other things.

00:42:23.460 And, you know, at first streaming shows were really good.

00:42:25.620 They were taking risks, but the streamers wanted signups

00:42:28.380 and then they have to make money.

00:42:29.880 So they start cutting back.

00:42:31.420 And unlike with cable, you know,

00:42:32.820 you don't have to watch a streaming service.

00:42:35.400 You just have to pay.

00:42:36.980 And so the goal of a streaming service

00:42:38.640 is not to make new stuff that you're gonna tune in and watch.

00:42:41.640 It's to just kind of keep you signed up.

00:42:43.820 And I think that's why you're not seeing

00:42:45.140 sort of these big creative swings

00:42:46.560 Because like, you know, to try to make this huge risky movie or this kind of, you know, experimental thing or just anything that might be sort of like one of these big movies, even if you make a blockbuster, that's going to do the same for your bottom line on a streaming service as people not watching it, basically, unless you get a ton of signups.

00:43:05.520 So it's just really not an incentive to do anything different.

00:43:09.260 It just sort of encourages doing something that's the same, doing something that is going

00:43:13.140 to be really easy to consume, really easy to have as, you know, like a second screen

00:43:17.700 experience while you're looking at your phone.

00:43:19.780 And there's more and more conversation about the way streaming shows look because they're

00:43:23.780 shot to look decent enough on every device or maybe even be clipped to be like vertical

00:43:28.340 video, that sort of thing in clips.

00:43:30.440 And so I think that, you know, that's one reason why just things don't seem as good

00:43:34.340 anymore because they're not really made to be sat down and watched directly and engaged with

00:43:39.980 and thought about in the same way. Like they're made to sort of be half ignored or split up and

00:43:44.600 thrown all over the place to try to get more signups or to keep you signed up. And then as for

00:43:49.580 why it's hard to choose stuff, I think the algorithms aren't really working to recommend

00:43:53.020 things. I open any of my streaming apps. I've got hundreds of options and nothing really seems that

00:43:57.560 appealing. Yeah. Yeah. With the streaming services, especially for television movies,

00:44:01.560 I've noticed that in order to watch the stuff I want, I have to like sign up for multiple

00:44:05.940 streaming services. And then, so I might sign up for Hulu because I want to watch this one thing.

00:44:10.300 And then I've done watching it. It's like, I want to delete that. It's just, it's another thing to

00:44:13.400 juggle. I didn't have to worry about that with cable. And I'm actually probably spending more

00:44:16.460 on streaming services than I was with cable. Maybe I haven't really looked at that. And then,

00:44:22.120 yeah, I've noticed too, with even with my own kids in their entertainment consumption,

00:44:26.160 they don't listen or watch a lot of new stuff like my daughter's spotify playlist is mostly

00:44:31.920 stuff from like 2000 and before and then my son the shows he watches he's watching suits right now

00:44:40.680 and then he's been watching friends but i'm like okay friends wasn't that good but whatever

00:44:44.960 in seinfeld too and he's not watching the new stuff like why aren't you watching the new stuff

00:44:49.300 it's like well it's not very good yeah yeah and i think that's the way that a lot of these streamers

00:44:54.360 keep people signed up is you know they have this deep catalog of of stuff and what kind of blows

00:44:59.380 my mind is the business model around reruns so like i remember as a kid watching a news show

00:45:04.540 where they were talking about everybody loves raymond was about to have its hundredth episode

00:45:08.580 and they were saying that's a milestone in tv because that means it's enough episodes to sell

00:45:12.900 for syndication which is a way just to kind of keep a show going because all these other people

00:45:17.200 are going to pay money to have the reruns and that that sort of like basic scheme seems to just

00:45:22.780 dominate streaming like i forget the exact figure how much warner brothers paid to get friends on

00:45:28.060 hbo and like how much i think peacock runs the office now like they're paying huge sums for

00:45:33.460 these reruns like more than they might be putting into an original show to have it and then you look

00:45:38.580 at the ratings i mean yeah like everything's like like your son like everybody's kind of watching

00:45:42.420 these old shows i know there's a remake of it of little house on the prairie but like the 70s 80s

00:45:47.300 little house on the prairie was at one point i think if it were a streaming show by viewed minutes

00:45:52.520 it would be like the fourth most popular original show.

00:45:55.540 Like it's more popular than all these shows

00:45:57.380 being made by the original streamers.

00:45:59.860 And I think that's just because it's more valuable.

00:46:02.980 Streamers know, you know, it's a tested thing.

00:46:04.820 It's something somebody is just going to watch.

00:46:06.480 They can start recommending it.

00:46:07.980 But I don't know, that seems really bleak.

00:46:10.160 Yeah.

00:46:10.640 I want my kids to have their version of like new movies.

00:46:14.740 Like, you know, I remember in high school,

00:46:15.640 I'd go to the movies all the time.

00:46:16.980 I remember 1989 was a great year of movies.

00:46:18.860 And that doesn't really happen all that often for my kids.

00:46:21.500 And I want them to have that. And the same with like music. I want them to have their version of Weezer or Cake or whatever. And I don't want them having to have to listen to Weezer and Cake because like that's the good stuff.

00:46:34.520 Yeah.

00:46:34.960 Yeah. Let's talk about one more thing that you highlight in the book where we've gotten more convenience, but maybe it's made our life more inconvenient. And that's food.

00:46:43.800 So like we can have food delivered to our home from pretty much any restaurant in town

00:46:48.160 with the tap of the button.

00:46:49.300 And the pandemic just exacerbated that because everyone had to shift to delivery mode when

00:46:54.180 we were doing a stay at home and all that stuff.

00:46:56.380 How does this convenience end up not being very convenient?

00:47:01.500 Yeah, I mean, I mean, one, the food's just not as good.

00:47:03.800 Like going to a restaurant is great.

00:47:05.980 You know, somebody comes and brings you food that you asked for that they just cooked.

00:47:10.000 It's sort of marvelous.

00:47:10.820 And, you know, delivery is kind of cool and it's convenient that you don't have to go, but this food isn't really made to travel.

00:47:17.300 Like one thing I looked at is pizza and American Chinese food were like the two big delivery foods for the longest time.

00:47:24.480 And restaurateurs had figured out how to make containers that would help this travel, all of that, which didn't really happen with a lot of delivery food, you know.

00:47:33.340 And there was this big rush in the pandemic and all that.

00:47:35.600 So you just have an experience where it's not really faster.

00:47:38.900 It's certainly not cheaper.

00:47:40.020 It's way more expensive because the restaurant has to upcharge to pay the fee to the app.

00:47:45.140 They have to pay the driver.

00:47:46.460 They have to pay for the container, all of that.

00:47:48.920 So it's not cheaper.

00:47:49.740 And it's, you know, it's maybe a little bit easier, but it's not a better experience with

00:47:54.000 a lot of this food.

00:47:55.580 And for a restaurant, that's a big problem, too, because now customers expect that they're

00:47:59.580 going to offer delivery.

00:48:00.820 They might have to change their menus.

00:48:02.220 They might have to do any number of things to try to appeal to people on an app that

00:48:06.440 isn't going to be as appealing if you're inside the restaurant either.

00:48:08.920 And so you go to sit down in a restaurant and you're at war with the people who are

00:48:12.540 getting delivery, you get delivery and you're at war with the people who are going to sit

00:48:15.580 down.

00:48:16.200 Yeah.

00:48:16.360 I had this experience this weekend, actually, and I just finished up your book and saw this

00:48:20.780 was top of mind.

00:48:21.780 My family and I went for some pasta at a local restaurant, Italian restaurant here in town.

00:48:26.180 It's basically like local Olive Garden.

00:48:29.260 So, you know, not great Italian food, but it's cheap, relatively cheap, decent, and you could

00:48:36.500 get it fast.

00:48:37.240 And so we thought we'd go in, we get our food fast. We're just ordering pasta. So just throw

00:48:41.860 some sauce, put a protein in there. You're good. We go in and we ordered our appetizer,

00:48:47.020 which is pepperoni bread and our food at the same time. So we were ready to order.

00:48:51.720 And it took 40 minutes to get our appetizer and then another 20 or 30 minutes to get our meal.

00:48:59.840 And I'm like, what is taking so long? Like the restaurant wasn't packed,

00:49:03.560 but then I looked over to the kitchen because there was one of those kitchens where it's open

00:49:07.220 so you can see the chef's cooking.

00:49:09.580 Yeah, yeah.

00:49:09.940 And you just see this big stack of delivery orders.

00:49:13.940 And I'm like, yeah,

00:49:14.820 they're probably just working on all those to-go orders

00:49:17.160 from the apps and I'm waiting on that.

00:49:20.680 Yeah, and it's sort of like,

00:49:22.200 same thing with Starbucks.

00:49:23.380 Like you're ordering on the app,

00:49:24.360 you kind of cut in line in front of somebody

00:49:26.160 who's been waiting

00:49:27.100 because those online orders are always coming in.

00:49:29.900 I also experienced this,

00:49:31.460 there's a pizza place I like in the city I used to live in

00:49:34.460 and I noticed all of a sudden,

00:49:36.300 like the, it just didn't taste the same. Like the crust was different when we'd gotten some pizza

00:49:41.200 and I thought, oh, you know, maybe they just had an off night, something like that. And so a few

00:49:44.300 weeks later we get it again. Still not as good, tastes different sort of in every way, like

00:49:49.240 different texture to the crust and all that. And we thought, ah, you know, maybe there's some sort

00:49:52.240 of change. And then I thought, you know what, let me check something. And I put the address into

00:49:56.580 Google and immediately like five restaurants came up and it's like, oh, to even make their rent,

00:50:02.120 They're now functioning as like a ghost kitchen for like four other things.

00:50:05.540 And the reason the pizza is not as good is because three of their other restaurants are

00:50:08.800 offering flatbreads.

00:50:09.740 And I'm like, OK, yeah, like they're just making a bunch of flatbread dough and offering

00:50:12.740 it.

00:50:13.300 And then certain things were just all the same.

00:50:14.920 Like it was kind of the same tin ingredients, just repurposed in different ways.

00:50:18.920 But it was just such a bummer because it's like, OK, this pizza place like one, the wait

00:50:23.100 to get a pizza is extremely long.

00:50:25.260 And two, the pizza is not as good anymore.

00:50:27.520 And I don't know.

00:50:28.780 It was yeah, it was such a downer to experience.

00:50:30.840 Yeah. Another way these food delivery apps, not only for restaurant food, but for groceries as

00:50:35.520 well, can make life more inconvenient is that it adds more people to the transaction. So usually

00:50:43.060 when you go to restaurants, just you and the restaurateur. But when you have the app, the

00:50:47.220 delivery app, you have the app provider. They're now a middleman between you and the restaurant.

00:50:51.500 And then you have the app delivery driver. It's a third person. And so at any one of those points,

00:50:57.220 things could go wrong. And so, you know, if your order is wrong or doesn't show up, like, who do

00:51:02.340 you go to? I mean, before you just go to the restaurant, but the restaurant will say, well,

00:51:06.520 no, we handed it off to the driver. So like, well, I can't get in contact directly with the driver.

00:51:11.000 So I have to go through the app and I wait for that. It just makes things complicated. And then

00:51:15.080 you also have issues, you know, the app services, these app drivers, they're just kind of strangers.

00:51:19.940 I mean, they're, they're 1099 employees or not employees, but contractors. And, you know,

00:51:24.600 for the most part it's great they do a great job but then every now and then you get kind of a rogue

00:51:28.160 guy we had one guy said the food was delivered and we looked out the door and like the food wasn't

00:51:33.600 there and then we checked our text messages and like the guy had taken a picture of himself with

00:51:38.500 like a smirk on his face eating our food we're like what the heck so yeah i mean that's another

00:51:44.120 way i mean it just mucks things up makes things more complicated yeah yeah we one time geez we're

00:51:49.620 looking like 10 years ago now it was like my second or third time ever and then one of the

00:51:53.920 last time using a food delivery app we had ordered and we had like people over and everything and

00:51:58.140 just kind of ordered some snacks for everybody to eat and it wasn't showing up and it wasn't

00:52:01.440 showing up and eventually people were like going home and then the delivery pulled up and the

00:52:06.480 person had like a sticker for every possible service every possible ride share that sort of

00:52:11.640 thing and that was it like he was picking up ride share rides he was dropping off food he was sort

00:52:16.380 of doing like all this different gig work all at once and you know not to default him because he's

00:52:20.480 probably got to do that. Like he's got to make the money. Like the economy is so tough and you

00:52:24.600 know, like that's what he's got to do. I'm not faulting him at all, but it's just like, man,

00:52:27.620 what a, what a bleak world this is where it's like, oh yeah, I could get this delivery. But

00:52:31.200 at the same time, like the gig economy is such that the person who's delivering it also has to

00:52:36.420 be functioning as a taxi for two different taxi providers and making like 10 other deliveries at

00:52:40.540 the same time. Yeah. All right. So convenience can be inconvenient if we do too much of it,

00:52:45.580 or if we just do it in the wrong way, I don't think about it right. Well, let's talk about

00:52:49.380 how we can embrace some more friction in our lives while still holding on to the conveniences

00:52:53.400 that really do make life better. You highlight some questions that the late Wendell Berry,

00:52:58.480 the famous agrarian author, proposed asking yourself before you start using a new type

00:53:03.120 of technology. Can you walk us through those questions? Yeah, yeah. I've got the essay here

00:53:07.980 on my desk. I've sort of kept it here as a guide. So it's from this essay that he wrote in the 80s

00:53:13.500 called Why I'm Not Going to Buy a Computer. And he basically is saying, you know, he writes with

00:53:17.720 pencil and paper. He has this process. It works. So he has these rules for what a new tool should

00:53:23.060 do. And he says, you know, it should be cheaper. It should be at least as small as whatever it

00:53:28.020 replaces. It should do work that's better. It should use less energy. It should use some form

00:53:34.160 of solar energy or energy from the body. It should be able to be repaired by a person of ordinary

00:53:39.480 intelligence, as he writes, provided they have the right tools. You should be able to buy it and get

00:53:44.080 it fixed as close to home as possible. It should be from a small privately owned business or

00:53:49.300 someone who will take it back to maintain it and repair it. And then also that it shouldn't

00:53:53.280 replace or disrupt anything good that already exists. And this includes family and community

00:53:57.880 relationships. And that was, yeah, like how he closed out this essay. And then he wrote a

00:54:01.780 response to it a little bit later based on some letters that were written to Harper's when it was

00:54:06.540 published there. But yeah, those were his rules for adopting a new tool. And, you know, I use a

00:54:11.660 computer. I'm talking to you now on a computer. There's a lot of digital devices and everything,

00:54:14.800 but I find that list really helpful in thinking about, you know, when a new convenience comes

00:54:19.460 along, am I going to adopt it or not? Like, does it fit into my life in these ways?

00:54:23.460 Yeah. And you kind of developed your own list of questions for yourself as well, correct?

00:54:28.440 Yeah. Yes. I love a list-based ethos. I also quote Dieter Roms, the industrial designer. He had a list

00:54:34.560 of principles of good design. So sort of inspired by, by these two ideas, I have this list of

00:54:39.280 questions, you know, what does this save me? What does it cost me? What does it replace?

00:54:43.560 What problem does it solve? How will I be able to stop using it? What is it doing for me? And

00:54:48.700 is it necessary? Or sorry, who is providing it? And is it necessary? And you know, those are sort

00:54:53.400 of the questions inspired by Wendell Berry, inspired by Dieter Roms that I recommend all

00:54:57.280 of us kind of ask before we bring something into our lives, because maybe a convenience comes along

00:55:01.940 and it's exactly what you need to solve a problem. But maybe it's just something that, you know,

00:55:06.220 you kind of do because it seems like we need to be moving into the future or something.

00:55:10.000 Yeah. Just be more intentional about it. Because I think the default is just like,

00:55:13.300 oh, well, it's new. I'm going to get it. It's like, well, maybe not.

00:55:17.440 Yeah. And I think in that intentionality to like doing a deep level of thought of

00:55:22.060 like just kind of game out, you know, what is this going to do? Because as I was writing the

00:55:26.480 book and researching all these different conveniences, you know, sometimes things

00:55:29.840 kind of went out of hand in a way where it's like, oh, I don't know that I would have predicted that,

00:55:33.800 You know, that I don't know that getting all my news from Facebook might lead to, you know, a complete shift in the political stability of the of the Western world or something.

00:55:42.040 You know, there were plenty of other factors in that, of course.

00:55:44.880 But just kind of thinking of these little effects, it might be hard to predict, but I don't think that we're necessarily inclined to do a lot of that prediction.

00:55:53.760 Thinking about cause and effect and how our lives are going to change is not something that they can be comfortable to do a lot of times.

00:56:00.380 But I think, you know, when you see a new piece of technology, think, okay, what's going to happen if I do this? What's going to be day one? What's going to be day 10? What's going to be, you know, year three of using this? And do I really want that to happen? And sometimes you might approach something with a pretty rosy idea. And the more you think about it, and the more you think about what you're going to lose, or what you're going to give up, and how things are going to change, the less rosy it starts to look.

00:56:21.240 All right. So just be more intentional about the conveniences you integrate into your life,

00:56:25.240 but it's sort of practical, like brass tacks. What are some everyday things people can start

00:56:28.960 doing today to embrace a little bit more friction and push back against convenience slop in their

00:56:34.060 lives? Like what are, what are some things that you're doing? Kind of give people some ideas.

00:56:37.200 Yeah. So one thing I started doing, thinking about how much time and energy I'm saving

00:56:40.980 is just kind of taking stock at the end of the day of like, okay, what do I really need to do?

00:56:46.020 What have I done? How much energy do I really have? And thinking about like what I did. So

00:56:51.120 even, I feel like I should be because I write, but I'm not a very good journaler. I've never

00:56:55.180 been able to maintain keeping a journal, but I have sort of started at the end of the day,

00:56:59.320 taking stock and thinking about like, all right, what was really saved with all this technology

00:57:02.940 I used? Where did my time go? That's one of them. I think the other thing is if you're not happy

00:57:07.340 with something like with streaming or something like that, you know, you don't like the selection,

00:57:10.460 you feel like you can't make a choice, just get rid of it. You know, you're not going to overturn

00:57:14.440 a whole system by giving up one thing, by being like one person who does it, but you're going to

00:57:18.920 make your life better. And potentially, if a lot of people do it, you know, that's how change

00:57:22.760 happens. A lot of people kind of banding together. But just in your personal life, you know, think

00:57:27.020 about do you really enjoy scrolling that much or would you rather have a different experience? Do

00:57:32.320 you enjoy the things that you're watching, that you're listening to, that, you know, the food

00:57:35.840 delivery and all of that and think, you know, maybe it's worth just a little bit of extra money

00:57:39.720 or a little bit of extra effort, especially to do something, you know, go out to the restaurant

00:57:43.500 and set a delivery. And over time, I think your habits will just start to change. Like I've seen

00:57:48.240 And a lot of my habits start to change

00:57:49.460 the less I've relied on certain things,

00:57:51.320 particularly e-commerce.

00:57:52.340 Like I've just found a different way of doing things

00:57:54.100 that it really isn't that much less convenient.

00:57:57.540 Like it's pretty easy to be able to go into a store

00:57:59.200 and get what I need based on where I live,

00:58:01.320 which I'm fortunate about.

00:58:02.660 I think just the more you start breaking yourself

00:58:05.160 of some of these little habits,

00:58:06.300 the more a more productive habit starts to form.

00:58:08.740 And then the more you find that it's just more enjoyable.

00:58:11.960 Well, Gabe, this has been a great conversation.

00:58:13.200 Where can people go to learn more

00:58:14.360 about the book and your work?

00:58:15.800 Yeah, you can go to againstconvenience.com or you can go to gabebullard.com.

00:58:20.720 All right. Well, Gabe Bullard, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:58:22.760 Hey, thank you. This was great.

00:58:25.040 My guest today was Gabe Bullard. He's the author of the book Against Convenience. It's available wherever you can get books.

00:58:29.640 You can learn more information about his work at his website, gabebullard.com. Also, check out our show notes at awim.is slash convenience.

00:58:35.860 well that wraps up another edition of the a1 podcast if you haven't done so i'd appreciate

00:58:47.820 it if you take one minute to give us a review on the podcast player that you used to listen to the

00:58:51.480 show and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with a friend

00:58:55.260 or family member you think we got something out of it as always thank you for the continued

00:58:59.140 support and 10 likes times brett mckay reminding you to listen to the a1 podcast put what you've

00:59:03.480 into action.

The Art of Manliness - September 29, 2026

Why Modern Convenience Feels So Inconvenient

Episode Stats

Transcript