How to Make Your Clothes Last Longer & Why It Pays to Be Quiet - SYSK Choice

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0:43Zach Pozniak: Things that are surprisingly easy to miss on your own. And I found that once you actually see the numbers, you look at your money differently. If you've ever wondered, where exactly is all my money going? I think you'll find Monarch pretty eye-opening. Write your own money story with Monarch. Use code SYSK at Monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just$50. That's 50 % off your first year at Monarch.com with code SYSK. today on something you should know i'll take you on a little tour of the one dollar bill then washing and caring for your clothes if you're not doing it right it's costing you a lot of money

1:34Mike Carruthers: my one piece of advice was to never ever use fabric softener or dryer sheets with your synthetic clothes and things that you want to absorb water so your towels your sheets your

1:47Zach Pozniak: undergarments and your gym clothes. Also, what's the deal with those baby carrots? Are they really safe to eat? And the powerful benefits of simply adding some quiet time into your day.

2:00Mike Carruthers: So quiet isn't just like, oh, peaceful, tranquil, you know, restful feeling. It's about being deliberate about what am I going to do today? What's the most important thing for me to do today? It's about having that time. It's not even hours. It could be minutes to think about things more deliberately, more intentionally.

2:16Zach Pozniak: All this today on Something You Should Know. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear. and my wife and son buy from Quince too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price. Quince uses premium materials like 100 % Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, merino wool. Their cashmere sweaters start at just$60.

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3:41Zach Pozniak: Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was something you should know. It's the best way to support our show.

3:58Mike Carruthers: Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

4:11Zach Pozniak: If you can, as we get started here, take out a$1 bill. It'll make this first thing we talk about more interesting. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. I'm Mike Carruthers, and we're starting with the dollar bill today. There are a lot of 13s on a$1 bill. First of all, flip the dollar bill over so you're looking at the reverse side, and you will see both sides of the Great Seal of the United States. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all had a hand in creating that seal. And there is no question that they wanted the original 13 colonies to be well represented. Now, as you look at the reverse side of a$1 bill, on the right side of the reverse side, you will see the obverse, or front, of the seal of the United States.

5:01Zach Pozniak: That eagle holds 13 arrows, representing strength in war, and an olive branch with 13 leaves and 13 olives, symbolizing peace. He's under a constellation of 13 stars and is adorned with a shield with 13 stripes. To the left is the reverse of the seal. The unfinished pyramid symbolizes strength and stability with room to grow. The all-seeing eye of providence at the top of the pyramid symbolizes the divine help the early Americans needed in establishing a new country. The Roman numerals at the bottom of the pyramid is 1776, and if you were to count the layers of bricks of the pyramid as it goes up, 13.

5:52Zach Pozniak: And that is something you should know.

5:57Zach Pozniak: There is a pretty good chance that you're wearing clothes right now. Clothes you paid for, clothes you care for, and hopefully that last a long time. But there's a lot of confusion about how to care for clothes, and that confusion can be costing you a lot of money. Money in clothes that fade out and wear out too fast, clothes that get stained and you have to throw out because you can't get the stain out, Maybe because you're washing your clothes too much or using the wrong setting on your washer and dryer. And there's a really good chance you are wasting money to heat hot water that you don't need to.

6:35Zach Pozniak: And what's the deal with dryer sheets? I mean, I've already heard the conversation you're about to hear, and I have learned so much that's going to help me and save me money, and I think you will find this conversation just as fascinating and useful. Meet my guest, Zach Posniak. He is a fourth-generation fabric care expert and dry cleaner who provides great clothing care information on his social media channels. He owns the New York City branch of Jeeves, which is a luxury dry cleaner, and he is author of this monstrous best-selling book. I mean, this is huge because people are buying it because everybody is interested in this subject.

7:15Zach Pozniak: The book is called The Laundry Book, The Definitive Guide to Caring for Your Clothes and Linens. Hey, Zach, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I'd like to know, how do you do laundry? Like, when it's time to do laundry at your house, at the Posniak household, what's the process?

7:36Mike Carruthers: So when it comes to sorting, I think there's two really main ways to go about it. First, by color. So we want to keep our light-colored garments separate from colored and darker garments. And the main reason is because we don't want the dyes from the colored garments and dark garments making our whites look dingy. And in the same vein, we don't want the white lint from our light colors getting on our darker clothes because they'll look kind of covered in white lint, which is not really what we want. And then the next step of sorting, I would say do it by weight. You know, I think my favorite example is that, you know, a towel dries much faster than your gym shorts.

8:18Mike Carruthers: So we're going to be harming our gym shorts by subjecting it to the enormous amount of heat and time compared to something that dries pretty quickly, even just through an air dry.

8:29Zach Pozniak: Okay, so then they're sorted and now it's time to wash and you wash them.

8:34Mike Carruthers: How? I mean, my biggest piece of advice is just washing in cold water. I mean, it's the best thing possible for your clothes and the environment. It's the most sustainable way to do your laundry. My favorite little fun fact is that you can reduce your energy consumption by up to 90 % from switching from hot water to cold. And if you switch from warm to cold, you reduce it by 70%. So modern appliances and products have really come such a long way, even in the last decade, but let alone 50 years, that we don't need that really aggressive horsepower of hot water anymore. And hot water fades or closed.

9:13Mike Carruthers: So there's just so many wonderful benefits to using cold water. And look, don't get me wrong, there's still a place for hot water, but I kind of view it as it should be reserved for those really stained or stinky loads. And, you know, my analogy is like, you don't want to power wash your deck every other week, you know, do it once a year when it really needs it.

9:32Zach Pozniak: But the prevailing wisdom seems to be and continues to be that you need hot water to clean clothes or at least to clean them well.

9:42Mike Carruthers: Yeah, and I totally get that. You know, laundry has progressed so much in the last 100 years. And just, you know, 60, 70 years ago, we really didn't have many products. And you have to use hot water because water does do 80 % of the cleaning, right? Detergents there to kind of help move things along and break down some tougher stains. But look, it still has its place. Hot water is always going to clean better. I will never, ever refute that. But you just don't really need that much, you know, power sometimes.

10:12Zach Pozniak: It seems to me that people are more likely to wash whites in hot water, that whites to really make them white, you've got to use hot water.

10:22Mike Carruthers: I think with whites, hot water is going to cause premature fabric degradation. So, you may prematurely start to cause some holes in your sheets or some thread bareness, which is kind of letting you know that your sheets are kind of the end of their life. But what I would recommend using to keep your sheets and linens super white is oxygen bleach. And especially when you're using, if you're doing this in the washing machine, something like OxiClean, which is, you know, I think the biggest brand name of powdered oxygen bleach in the United States or Vanish if you're abroad. That stuff uses an active ingredient called sodium percarbonate, which is an oxygen bleach, also known as a color safe bleach.

11:08Mike Carruthers: And it basically attacks the color of the stain molecule to correct it through a pretty cool kind of reaction. But it's absolutely incredible. And I think it's one of those things where if you do that maybe once or twice a month with the hot water, you can get away with washing your whites and cold water to, again, hopefully preserve the integrity of the fabric.

11:32Zach Pozniak: So, I've heard this advice and I want to get your comment on it, that we overwash our clothes. that we basically throw our clothes in the dirty clothes pile because we wore them, not because they're dirty. And that much of the time, just a quick wash would do because the clothes just don't get that dirty. Yeah.

11:52Mike Carruthers: I mean, you're right on it. And that's actually something that a lot of manufacturers want you to kind of switch to. And in the business, we would call that a refresh load. Things that aren't really that dirty. Maybe you're trying to do some like preventative care for your clothes by washing away that body oil so you don't get those yellowed underarms and collars. But yeah, what you're saying, and you're also going to save a ton of money on your energy bill because you're not creating all this hot water. You're using much less water, using less energy, and you're saving your time. So I love the quick wash cycle.

12:22Mike Carruthers: I think it's amazing for just about everything. And, you know, I reserve the normal loads for things that really need that kind of deeper cleaning.

12:29Zach Pozniak: What is the difference, if you know, the difference between what goes on in the washing machine between a normal load and a quick wash other than the time spent? But what's taking so long in the normal wash that because the quick wash seems so fine?

12:46Mike Carruthers: Yeah, I mean, it's just really in a bridge cycle. So, you know, the main cleaning component of a washing machine, specifically front loader is mechanical action, which is a really fancy way of saying rubbing. And the longer that kind of start of the cycle, the wash cycle gets to work for, the more that fabric gets to rub against other fabric and you're likely going to have more stains that come out. And again, you're just tightening up the cycle time and it just really depends on how soiled things are. But I think more people should be using that express cycle.

13:21Zach Pozniak: So for the most part, is laundry detergent laundry detergent or are some really so much better than the others or what?

13:31Mike Carruthers: Yeah, there are some really, really strong performing detergents. One of my favorite performing detergents, what I use is Tide Hygienic Free and Clear. A free and clear detergent just means there's no perfume or dye. So really good for people that have sensitive skin or don't want their clothes to smell any type of way. It's an unbelievable product. It works really well. And then other than that, Kirkland, which is Costco's generic brand, is a wonderful value detergent that works really well.

13:59Zach Pozniak: So talk about the dryer, because we always talk about washing clothes. But drying clothes takes a long time, and I imagine the heat probably might do some damage if it gets too hot. So what's the recommendation on the dryer?

14:14Mike Carruthers: I would try and air dry as much stuff as you can. and to anyone living in the city, I apologize because I know you don't have a lot of room, but specifically your synthetics and really kind of delicate pieces, try and air dry them. Again, that dry heat on the dryer is just going to really just kind of break down those, especially synthetic fabrics quicker than they need to be, especially like elastic. So, you know, talking gym clothes, your workout gear and things like that. But I think the biggest thing when it comes with the dryer is to use a cycle, like a normal cycle that uses the moisture sensors of the dryer.

14:48Mike Carruthers: I think the worst way to use a dryer is using the time to dry because that's how you overcook your clothes. It's going to give you really bad wrinkling, if not creasing and cause you to have to rewash them or iron or steam. And then you're wasting your time, you're wasting energy and a whole slew of things. So I think for me, just use those cycles. A lot of science goes into those moisture meters and they work really well. And then my other kind of just random tip with dryers is I love using wool or acrylic dryer balls. And in my testing, I don't think they speed up the drying time, which is kind of how they're been sold in the past, but they do do a wonderful job of keeping the things in the dryer spread out and even.

15:30Mike Carruthers: And that's really important for things like sheets and towels, because I'm sure we've all taken out sheets and they're in one big wadded clump and then you got to redo it and they're wrinkled and things like that.

15:42Zach Pozniak: What about dryer sheets? I've heard some bad things about them, but people use them a lot and like the fact that there's no static and that, you know, maybe it makes the clothes a little softer. What do you say?

15:55Mike Carruthers: Yeah, so dryer sheets, not something I use, but I do think they have value. They're basically just paper towels coated in fabric softener and they do work at removing static, which is pretty amazing. I think that's their best functionality, but I think that's totally just a personal preference for people the same way using fabric softener is. But my one piece of advice was to never, ever use fabric softener or dryer sheets with your synthetic clothes and things that you want to absorb water. So your towels, your sheets, your undergarments, and your gym clothes, because that's quite literally, It's quite literally lotion and you're coating the fabric and you're clogging the pores.

16:36Mike Carruthers: And it's kind of going exactly against the functionality of those pieces and garments that you want your undergarments to absorb sweat. That's kind of what they're there for.

16:48Zach Pozniak: We're talking about how to take better care of your clothes. My guest is Zach Posniak. He's author of The Laundry Book, The Definitive Guide to Caring for Your Clothes and Linens. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday, I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility. Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless.

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18:45Zach Pozniak: So Zach, you're a dry cleaner. Can you explain to me what dry cleaning actually is?

18:53Mike Carruthers: I think it's important to start with dry cleaning is different than going to a dry cleaner. So a dry cleaner I like to kind of explain as the mechanic and body shop for your clothes and the dry cleaner has many different ways to clean your clothes. But dry cleaning specifically, you're still using a liquid, still going in a machine. So dry cleaning liquid used to start as a petroleum-based solvent way back in the day. And now there's been some really wonderful advancements. We have alcohol-based solvents and liquid silicone and hydrocarbons. But basically, it is a clear liquid that does not smell like water, but looks like water.

19:34Mike Carruthers: It sits in the bottom of these tanks of dry cleaning machines that look like really, really big, complicated front-loading machines. And you put your clothes in there. They go in dry. They get very wet and they're dried in there because the dry cleaning solvent has to be filtered and recycled within the closed loop system of a dry cleaning machine. We don't want that going down the drain. That's really, really bad. And then the clothes come out dry too. So there's no powders involved. I love asking people what they think dry cleaning is. I wish I asked you before. That's one of the processes dry cleaners have at their disposal and wet cleaning is water-based cleaning.

20:16Mike Carruthers: In chemistry, a solvent that is water-based is wet and a solvent that does not have water is dry. So that's where dry cleaning comes from.

20:24Zach Pozniak: So let's take a suit. You dry clean a suit and when it comes out dry, what's it look like? Does it look all pressed and nice or do you then have to iron it?

20:35Mike Carruthers: So a suit's a good example of an item that really, really needs to be dry cleaned that you can't handle it at home. And that's more, not so much as the materials, even though most suits are wool, which reacts poorly in water, but suits have interfacing, basically have structure within it. And that just doesn't really love getting wet with water. So that's why men's suits and blazers do much better and dry cleaning. But no, they still need to be pressed. And there's some really cool pressing equipment. So like there's something called like a jacket book, where you put the jacket on it and it, you know, it holds it taut and blows the steam through it.

21:13Mike Carruthers: So it gets rid of all these wrinkles and then it dries it out with the air that kind of blows it out too, which is, it's honestly quite satisfying to watch, but then you have the pressing team touch it up to make sure it's perfect.

21:24Zach Pozniak: And I've heard that the advice, I don't know if this is valid or not, but that, that you should not leave the dry cleaned clothes in the plastic, that you should get them home and air them out.

21:35Mike Carruthers: Correct. For long-term storage, you should absolutely be taking the plastic off. And that's basically going to prevent any types of yellowing. The main way, yellowing or oxidation, which is the same exact thing that happens when you cut into an apple or an avocado and it starts to brown. If there is a stain or maybe some body oil still on your clothes that didn't come out, when it's kind of in that sealed environment, it's going to promote oxidation much quicker than if it had just open air.

22:06Zach Pozniak: When a label says dry clean only, is it really dry clean only?

22:12Mike Carruthers: It's a really difficult question to answer because there are some things like higher end brands love saying that their pieces are dry clean only, or they can't be cleaned at all. And I'm talking about like a nylon hat, which I take, it might cost$500, but I'll take it if I'm cleaning it, and I'll put it in the washing machine because it's a synthetic that's not going to bleed. It's pretty strong. And I think it's twofold. I think it's one, this kind of artificial way to increase the value of a garment. And this is specifically on the higher end. When you look at that care label and says, oh, this only could go to the dry cleaner.

22:49Mike Carruthers: This must be really expensive and fancy and well-made and I'll just screw it up at home. But also kind of sheltering yourself and themselves being the manufacturers from any type of risk, you know, say, oh, you tried it at home? Well, I said dry clean only. That's kind of your loss. And it's really up to the manufacturer to test it and provide their consumer and their customer with the right information. And it's no man's land out there. And there's a lot of bad information on the care labels. And it's just, it's really disappointing because again, I'm the one who gets blamed and that stinks. So it's frustrating.

23:25Mike Carruthers: It's your fault. It's my fault.

23:27Zach Pozniak: It's always the TriCleanist's fault. We're the easiest people to blame. So let's talk about stain removal, because there's nothing more frustrating than, you know, having one of your favorite pieces of clothing get a stain that doesn't seem like it's going to come out. And let me start with, you know, those stain removal products like Shout. What do you think of those?

23:47Mike Carruthers: I think all-purpose enzymatic stain removing sprays, which is what you just described, are absolutely amazing. So their main two active ingredients are enzymes, which are very similar to the enzymes in our digestive tract that take these really big, complex molecules like proteins or carbohydrates. And when they're that big, they're really hard to remove from our clothes because they're quite literally wrapped around the fibers and they digest them and they make them smaller. and that's why I recommend if you do use something like a shout, you work it into the stain and you let it sit for an hour or two because it literally needs to eat that up, digest it, and then it's easy to wash away.

24:33Mike Carruthers: And the other end of it is the surfactants, which is a fancy way of saying soap that is very common in dish soap and laundry detergents and it actually physically surrounds a stain and allows water to wash it away.

24:47Zach Pozniak: Well, that's really interesting. So, just spraying Shout on a stain and then tossing it right into the wash is probably not very effective.

24:55Mike Carruthers: It's not. And something I really like to recommend is if you're doing laundry like once a week, I keep a bottle of Shout hanging off my hamper. If I got a coffee stain, I take my t-shirt off before I put it in the hamper, I spray it on. And basically, as long as you wash it before seven days, it's going to be so much more effective than giving it two minutes on the stain. If you let it sit for a couple of days, you should have no headache down the road. When it comes to stains, just a little bit of pretreatment goes such a long way and you can't really expect the washing machine and laundry detergent to do all of the heavy lifting.

25:30Mike Carruthers: You just need a little bit of, you know, specific focus on those stains and it's going to go such a long way.

25:36Zach Pozniak: I remember hearing some advice about stains that if you have a stain and you wash the shirt or whatever and it doesn't come out, don't dry it. Just wash it again and wash it again. And eventually, as long as you don't dry it, the stain will come out, particularly if you use one of those stain removals in between.

25:59Mike Carruthers: Yeah, you nailed it. Another common misconception that kind of falls in the same category is hot water set stains because you're quote unquote cooking it. Something I actually wasn't really sure about. And then I did some testing and it turns out that hot water doesn't set it. It's the hot air from the dryer. So yes, the worst thing that you can do when it comes to stain removal is to dry a stain in the tumble dryer before it's out. And like you were saying, Take a look at it after the wash. It's not out. Retreat it. And then maybe let the pretreatment sit for overnight if you only let it sit for an hour before.

26:33Mike Carruthers: And then maybe go up in water temperature. Now's a great time to start using warmer hot water because you do need a bit more heavy lifting. And then you can kind of slowly just start to increase. Because again, we also don't want to go crazy on it because we may rub the heck out of the stain, use hot water, and now we have a hole, right? And that makes it worse. So I think just kind of slowly getting more aggressive and risky with stain removal is kind of how to go about that.

27:02Zach Pozniak: Everyone listening to this has washed clothes and everyone listening to this who has washed clothes has learned at least one thing, probably more than one thing in the last 20 minutes that they didn't know before. And that's probably going to end up saving time and money. My guest has been Zach Posniak. He is a fourth-generation fabric care expert and dry cleaner and author of The Laundry Book, The Definitive Guide to Caring for Your Clothes and Linens. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Hey, thanks. This was really informative, Zach. I appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, thank you, Mike.

27:39Zach Pozniak: Really appreciate you having me on.

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28:45Zach Pozniak: Something I've noticed that's changed over the years. you used to see somebody, say, sitting on a park bench or sitting in a coffee shop or on a train, and they would just be sitting there, quietly, presumably alone with their thoughts. No stimulation, just quiet. Today, that's a rare sight. People are constantly on their phones, playing a game, being distracted by something else. And that's just part of the problem. We are bombarded by noise and distraction from everywhere. So the whole idea of just sitting quietly seems almost impossible, and for a lot of people, undesirable. You'll often see people seem very uncomfortable when they have to sit alone quietly.

29:32Zach Pozniak: Well, that can't be a good thing, can it? That's what Joe McCormick is here to discuss. In 2022, Joe launched the QuietWorks program to help people manage the noise in their lives. He's author of a couple of books. His latest is called Quiet Works, Making Silence the Secret Ingredient of the Workday. Hi, Joe. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me, Mike. So, I must not be normal, but I like quiet. I seek it out. And it seems to me that people need quiet. We used to have more of it. So, what is the issue here as you see it? Why is there so much noise and distraction and why do people crave it?

30:15Mike Carruthers: There's a number of problems. I think one of them is technology in how over the last 10, 20 years, we've consciously or subconsciously let it play a really prominent role in our lives where it dictates the distractions, the disruptions, the device itself dictates this is where I spend most of my time and my attention. I think that's a big part of it. I also think that people run from quiet. They are busy. They're running around doing a million things, but they don't ever stop to think and listen and reflect because busyness is seen as productive, meaningful. If you ask people how they're doing, you know, busy, busy, busy is an answer that you get all the time.

30:57Mike Carruthers: And I think that's kind of a default mode for a lot of people.

31:00Zach Pozniak: Yeah. That being busy is better, better than being alone and being with people and collaborating that you know it's everything's about collaboration and teams today that that's better than working by

31:13Mike Carruthers: yourself we pointed ourselves in the direction of like collaboration is king and being together means that's better and it's not to say that being with people is not great it's it's amazing but it's not the only way to define our life i mean whether it's at home or with friends or at work you always have to have people around to make it meaningful and you know certainly i don't have to make this argument to an introvert. The introvert is going to naturally go to silence or quiet more readily than an extrovert. But I think more collectively as a society, we define living as being around people and connected and being busy and accessing information and distributing information and being on social media.

31:56Mike Carruthers: It's like that's living. I want to give people another option, which is you can do that and be alone because the being alone part actually makes the being together part better.

32:08Zach Pozniak: So I get it. I hear your message and it sounds right. It seems like it makes sense, but how do we know this is true? Is there science behind this or is this just kind of an assumption or what?

32:23Mike Carruthers: Yeah, the best book to read on it, there's two books actually. One is called The Shallows, which is how technology has made people shallow thinkers. And another book is by Cal Newport called Deep Work. Both of those are incredibly well-researched books that talk about value in society as coming from not being shallow or superficial, but being a deep thinker and doing deep work. And deep work is defined in Cal Newport's book as being in longer states without distraction. And for a lot of people, that's just not the reality.

32:58Zach Pozniak: So I think most people would agree that distraction is a problem, that we're very distracted by so many things, and we should eliminate or certainly cut down on the number of distractions. But that doesn't necessarily mean quiet is good. You know, distraction's bad, but how do we know that quiet is good? I mean, in school, when you took a test, usually it was quiet, silence, no talking. But how do we know that quiet is really good for doing good work?

33:31Mike Carruthers: Concentration. Think collaboration together, concentration alone. For me, one of the biggest one is preparation. I have to have time to prepare what I'm going to do. And that requires no distractions, some quiet focus to be able to think about those things, to plan those things, to prioritize those things. And if I don't have that time, I don't do that. I'm not prepared. And I go into my life kind of aimlessly jumping around from thing to thing. And that's how a lot of people live their lives. It's just they don't have a plan. If you look at what the day looked like, it just sort of happened. So quiet isn't just like, oh, peaceful, tranquil, you know, restful feeling.

34:07Mike Carruthers: It's about being deliberate about what am I going to do today? What's the most important thing for me to do today? It's about having that time. It's not even hours. It could be minutes to think about things more deliberately, more intentionally.

34:20Zach Pozniak: Well, here's something I've noticed that I want you to comment on is I see people who are really uncomfortable with quiet, that they can't not get their phone out. They can't sit there quietly. They can't, it drives them crazy because they're so used to outside stimulation that to be alone with your thoughts is painful.

34:45Mike Carruthers: Blaise Pascal, a famous French philosopher, mathematician, once said, I'm paraphrasing, most of the world's problems would be solved if a person can sit alone in a room by themselves. And one of the things that people have with quiet is they run from it because they're afraid. I was the same way. I got on my phone all the time and I was just collaborating and I was really moving through my life pretty quickly, pretty briskly, kind of thoughtlessly. And when I started doing this, taking some time every day in quiet, it was difficult in the beginning. And what I discovered was that it was exactly what I needed because I needed that time and I wasn't giving myself that time.

35:22Mike Carruthers: It was explained to me by a person recently. We're talking about exercise. And if you think of collaborations like exercise, what you do before your exercise, you stretch. Quiet is like stretching before you collaborate. There's a connection between that time, very slow, like I'm going to spend this time thinking, and then I'm going to talk, or I'm going to collaborate, and people don't stretch before they work out, they don't do quiet before they collaborate. It's kind of a connection I made, and if you start doing it, it starts becoming really, really valuable.

35:52Zach Pozniak: So since you train people and work with people, when you make this claim that you need quiet, that quiet's important, that you need to get away from the distractions. Do they know that? Do people go, well, sure, I get it. Or do they go, gee, I can't imagine what you're talking about. This makes no sense to me. I've got to, I mean, do people know this is a problem?

36:15Mike Carruthers: I train a lot of different people. I train corporate leaders. One of the people I train is I train people in the military, specifically special operations folks, which ironically call themselves quiet professionals. And we do exercises in the courses I teach them. And I'm talking about like Green Berets, Navy SEALs, people like that. Very elite people. These are people that didn't wake up, you know, yesterday saying, I wonder what I want to do with my life. And when we do exercises, I'll do an exercise. Like, all right, take five minutes in quiet to prepare a meeting that you're going to have with your commander tomorrow.

36:45Mike Carruthers: And I set the watch. And after five minutes, I ask him before we start, okay, well, how did that feel? And you get some really surprising answers. Yeah, logically, people know that it's important, but they're habitually not doing it. And when you don't do it, then you start doing it. It feels weird in the beginning because you're running around all the time. You don't actually stop. You don't pause. And these are pretty elite people that know that it's important, but don't do it as a habit really at all during the day, maybe a little bit when they drive into work, but it's not a habit of their lives.

37:18Mike Carruthers: and when I introduce it and they experience it and it actually is valuable, then they're like, oh, I can see myself doing this. So it's not knowing it, it's doing it. It's kind of like stretching. You're like, yeah, logically it makes sense, but I don't do it. Well, let's stretch a little bit. And then they start seeing a difference in their lives.

37:36Zach Pozniak: What's the prescription, do you think? I mean, if people listening to this are thinking, yeah, see, I'm running around all the time. But where would you start? Do you need five minutes? Do you need an hour? When do you do it? what's a good way to put your toe in the water?

37:50Mike Carruthers: This was my first takeaway is quiet isn't a technique. It's an appointment. So the first reason people don't do it is because they don't know how to do it. And my argument is it's not about how you do it. It's that you do it. So the first thing is make an appointment. So start with five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the afternoon. Like schedule an appointment. Like from 8 to 8 to 5, I'm going to think about one thing, my day, or what's the most important thing I need to do today or I'm going to think about whatever. I'm going to read a book for five minutes. Whatever you do that's alone, that's just quiet.

38:23Mike Carruthers: And do it for five minutes and just treat it as an appointment that is a part of your day. It doesn't have to be like, it's like working out. You don't start working out with like an hour. You might start working out with like 10 minutes or whatever. So think of it like that and you just do it for five minutes and you make an appointment, let yourself experience it, do it poorly. I heard this quote a while ago. It really helped me a lot. It's anything that's worth doing in life is worth doing poorly. So don't give yourself a grade. It's okay to be terrible at it. Just do it as an appointment for five minutes.

38:55Mike Carruthers: But don't miss the appointment because it's time for you and only for you, by you, with you. It's like nobody else needs to be at this appointment other than you. And when I started doing that, it changed my day. Over time, I stopped canceling the appointment, which I was canceling all the time. And I started keeping it. And then the five minutes became 10. And then I started putting these pockets of quiet appointments during the day, not a million of them, you know, half a dozen. And it really helped me become much more deliberate about how I navigated my day.

39:25Zach Pozniak: And as you carve out more time to be alone with your thoughts and think about things and prepare things, what else does it do? What are the other benefits, if any?

39:36Mike Carruthers: The time alone makes the time that you have together with people better. So as I go home and I have a little bit of quiet in my car and I walk in the front door, I can be much more deliberate about, okay, well, what am I going to do and what am I going to say and how am I going to be versus just being in a busy mode? Or if I go to work in the morning and I spend my first 10 to 15 minutes of quiet alone planning my day, who am I going to talk to? What am I going to say? What's the most important thing? It will make my day better. And if you start to do that habitually, you'll communicate better, you'll work better, you'll live better because you have a plan.

40:14Mike Carruthers: And that plan has happened in that appointment that you made for yourself, with yourself and by yourself in quiet without distractions. And even if you did it poorly, it's still going to be good. Nobody will ever say after a minute of quiet appointment that it was a waste of time.

40:31Zach Pozniak: In this quiet appointment, though, what is it you're doing? Are you just quieting your mind? Are you planning your schedule for the day? Are you thinking about what to say to the boss? What is it you're trying to accomplish here?

40:46Mike Carruthers: The short answer is one thing at a time. You could do nothing. You can read. You can plan. You can reflect. You can think. You can prepare. You can complain. You can choose. I'll use choose as an example. If you're going to make a decision, for example, you're going to buy a house or buy a dog or take a big trip or invest money in the stock market, most people don't think a lot alone before they make a decision. and that's a really good way of using quiet like i'm going to make a decision about where i want to go to college or that i'm going to sell my house or whatever those decisions are those many decisions are not made deliberately they're made sort of impulsively and i'm not saying in a moment decisions like that are bad i'm just saying that that would be one list of among many of things that you use in quiet because it's something you do by yourself and that list goes on and on But those are a few things that I would do in quiet.

41:45Zach Pozniak: And what you do depends on what? Just whatever you think?

41:48Mike Carruthers: Your day, your circumstances, your life. Let's say that a person's going through difficulty. Let's say that they're going through like a relationship issue or they're having a problem with work or with a friend or something. That would be a good opportunity to use five minutes of quiet or ten minutes of quiet to think about it. You know, what's going on? What's happening? Why is this happening? What would happen if I didn't do anything about it? How am I going to approach it? But when you grab your phone and you start doing something else, then that thought's broken. And there's research that says as soon as you get distracted, it takes about 20 to 25 minutes to regain the thought.

42:25Mike Carruthers: So that thought that you were on a path to really being more considered, more thoughtful about that, most people don't wake up going, I'm going to be thoughtless today. I mean, they're not. They just go about their day from thing to thing to thing to thing. and the day becomes a blur. Quiet makes the day less of a blur because I can spend time thinking about this issue or this plan or this decision I need to make, or I want to learn something and I can dedicate time to do that without distraction and have a chance of it being possible. And I think a lot of people, that time doesn't seem like it's there.

43:02Mike Carruthers: And I look at time as like not in a scarcity, but in abundance, there's pockets of quiet all during my day. I just have to seek them out, schedule the time to do it, and I find that a lot of great things happen when I do it.

43:15Zach Pozniak: For those people who can remember a time when there was more quiet time, where you weren't connected, where you couldn't check your smartphone because there was no such thing as a smartphone, people remember that time fondly, I think, for the most part. You could escape the world and you could be alone with your thoughts. I think today, for those people who weren't around then, who've always been connected, they can't imagine that. That seems like, how do you function in the world if you can't be on your phone?

43:49Mike Carruthers: Well, one of the things in doing this, a belief that people fall into, whether they think about it or not, which is everything is an emergency. But in doing so, when they grab that thing and they don't have quiet, but they dive into noise, then something else happens and then they lose that opportunity and then they start their day that way. And I just think that when you look at how people start and live the day, having these little pockets during the day aren't just like someday that I'll have them because I think a lot of people don't have them at all. And then five years, 10 years, 15 years go by and you're like, what happened in your life?

44:25Mike Carruthers: And it's a blur. and what I started experiencing was my day started slowing down because I started slowing it down by making these appointments and keeping them and my collaboration got better. I got a lot more innovation, a lot more creativity. It inspired me to write more. I own a business. I'm doing new things, all of which I may have missed if I hadn't kept that appointment, kept those appointments.

44:48Zach Pozniak: I think too that, that we suffer in our communications with people. One of my real pet peeves is, you know, when I'm talking to someone and their phone goes off and all of a sudden that gets priority. Well, wait, we were just talking. Well, yeah, but my phone rang. Well, yeah, I don't care. I mean, I hate that. I turn my phone off or I try to. Somehow those distractions get right to the top of the list. And then, or if you've ever had that experience of you're talking to somebody and they start reading a text and they didn't hear a thing you said.

45:24Mike Carruthers: And I thought, God, that's so rude. When you were just talking about the, like, if the phone went off during the interview, one of the things that I was thinking about is you interview a lot of people and you talk to a lot of people. How many of those people spend enough time in quiet preparing for the interview and how much better the interviews would be if they did more of it? And I started thinking about things like that. And I'm like, well, that would be significantly better for you, for them, for everybody, for your listeners. But when you don't, it's not as good. And I think a lot of people's days are like that.

45:56Mike Carruthers: I think you're like, my day was pretty good, but would it have been so much better if I had just given myself permission to pause for 10 to 15 minutes to think about the most important thing? And one of the things that I suggest to people, it's a really simple thing. It's a sentence. And it says, you know, people have different roles in their lives, right? You have roles in interviewer. I have roles in author, entrepreneur, father, you know, uncle, whatever. And it's in my role as blank, the most important thing for me to do today is blank. In that, if you do that in quiet, like, all right, well, I'm just going to finish that sentence.

46:29Mike Carruthers: In my role as father, the most important thing today is to wish my son a happy birthday. It's not his birthday today, but let's say it were. Well, if I did that in quiet, it makes me more deliberate about how I put it. That's the most important thing I have to do today or to think about. And I think people miss those opportunities because they're too busy running around.

46:46Zach Pozniak: Well, it also seems that when you take some time to prepare, say, for an interaction you're going to have with someone else later, you plan what you're going to say, what you're going to do. When you give it some thought ahead of time, it makes you more effective in that exchange later. It also makes you more efficient. And people appreciate that, that you showed up ready to go.

47:10Mike Carruthers: When you think about how much time people waste other people's times because they don't prepare and quiet beforehand. It's absolutely mind blowing how little people think before they do things, before they say things, whether it's a leader or a parent or a coach, there's no quiet in the day. And if there's no quiet, there's no thought, there's no preparation, there's no deliberation. And then they just make it up on the fly. They're wasting an enormous amount of people's time.

47:40Zach Pozniak: You also talk about doing this, enforcing this kind of quiet time before a meeting with other people where everyone takes a few minutes to be quiet.

47:50Mike Carruthers: Which feels a little weird when you do it. But when you gather a bunch of people together in a room, you say, okay, we're going to have a meeting. Let's start with two minutes of quiet about what we're going to talk about today. You know, what's important? What do we want to get out of this time that we have here together? Let's take two minutes to do that. The conversation that ensues is much better because people have gotten their minds right. They've got a mindset of, okay, this is, I'm prepared. It's like going on a football field or playing an event. You know, like, I'm going to think about this thing for a second here before I start doing it.

48:20Mike Carruthers: It makes it better. It's never a waste of time. Even two minutes of it, it's never a waste of time.

48:24Zach Pozniak: Well, I'm certainly on board with this. I've been a practitioner of this idea for a long time, and I like to see that you're out promoting it to people who maybe haven't really thought much about it. I've been speaking with Joe McCormick, and his latest book is called Quiet Works, Making Silence the Secret Ingredient of Your Workday. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. And I appreciate you coming on and taking the time. Thanks, Joe.

48:51Mike Carruthers: Mike, it's great to talk to you again, and thanks for what you do. This is a great podcast. I really appreciate you having me.

48:59Zach Pozniak: There's been some controversy about baby carrots. Some people say that they're mini mutant carrots soaked in chlorine. Well, that's partially true. They're perfectly safe to eat. Cocktail-sized carrots are real carrots. Farmers have modified the regular tapered carrot that we know to grow specifically for cocktail carrots. They're less tapered and easier to cut and shape. They usually cut about three or four baby carrots from a bigger carrot. As for the chlorine, it is true that they're rinsed in a mild solution of water and chlorine to kill bacteria and extend shelf life. But in fact, most pre-cut vegetables are.

49:42Zach Pozniak: The amount of chlorine residue left on those carrots is about the same amount of chlorine as if you were to rinse them under your tap. Baby carrots can taste different from regular carrots because they're sometimes made from older carrots, which can be starchier and less sweet. And baby carrots are more expensive than regular carrots. They can also dry out and develop a white film called carrot blush. And the fact of the matter is, you can just buy regular carrots and cut them into smaller pieces. But in fact, baby carrots, the cocktail carrots, are perfectly safe to eat. And that is something you should know.

50:21Zach Pozniak: There are a couple of different things you could do to help support this podcast. You can share it with someone and help us get new listeners. You can share it on social media to help spread the word, or you could write a review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever platform you listen on. Anything you can do to help spread the word is greatly appreciated. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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