CARL HONORE: Living at the Right Speed

22:04right you know you're in the office it's a much more of a combative environment you get into that sort of fight or flight mode you come home you're serving dinner to your children you're still in fight or flight mode right you just never go out of it and and i think we need to build in little rituals whether it's meditation whether it's reading a bit of poetry it might be sketching whatever it is you know it's just some little ritual you build into your schedule that reacquaints you with slower, deeper rhythms and also acts almost like a, it kind of inoculates you against the virus of hurry. So you have those slow moments, whether it's during the workday where you just step away from your desk, you go sit in a quiet place and read a novel for a couple of pages, whatever it is, that just shifts you out of that fight or flight mode and allows you to come back into the fray with a mindset that is more still, more calm, more focused, more able to see the big picture and step away from the, let's face it, intense temptation of the quick fix.

23:03It is what it is, right? I mean, we go for them because they're very, it's a bright, shiny thing and it gives us a rush.

23:17One of the things I appreciated in your work is sort of the nuance that it's not entirely binary. It's not either fast or slow. And you talk about Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food, who told you if you're always slow, then you're stupid. Could you unpack that a little bit? When we talk about the slow movement or slow philosophy of the capital S, it's definitely not about doing everything slowly, right? I am not a fanatic of slowness. I love speed, right? Faster is often better. We all know that. I am a naturally fast person, right? Faster is often the solution. but not always. And that really is the key to unlocking this slow revolution, if you like.

23:58It's about doing things at the right speed. Musicians have a beautiful term for this. They call it the tempo justo, right? The correct tempo for each piece of music. So sometimes fast, sometimes slow, and just playing with all the different rhythms and tempos and cadences in between. And actually, if you go deeper with this slow mindset, with a capital S, it's a state of mind, right? It's a way of being. It's putting quality before quantity. It's being present, being in the moment. It's doing one thing at a time. If you remember those days, ultimately for me, slow is about doing everything not as fast as possible, but as well as possible, which really is a very simple idea, but at the same time, an immensely powerful one.

24:41Because if you arrive at each moment thinking, how can I get through this moment not as fast as possible, but as well as possible. I mean, that is a game changer with a capital G because you're going to do everything better and enjoy it more, which is why you mentioned slow food, which was really one of the original slow movements, if you like. Since then, the slow movement has mushroomed out into every field of human endeavor. So there are movements now for slow travel, slow fashion, slow education, slow medicine, slow media, slow policy, you name it. People coming to whatever it is and saying, how can I do this better?

25:14Enjoy it more by slowing down to the right pace, finding that tempo juicer, that correct tempo for the moment. You know, I'm sitting in here in our video studio and I'm looking at the soundboard and there are these sliders where you can adjust the volume. And it seems like it's more of a slider than a switch. And the appropriate sound, the appropriate volume is what's appropriate to the situation. I like what you said, do it as well as possible. That's a mindset shift. And if you, if it requires you going much slower and it usually does great.

25:47Michael:Well, and I think the thing we don't have the cultivated ability to do is go slowly, like fast comes naturally, you know, in our context, like that's the one that we've all like overdeveloped. We're like the bodybuilder with the teeny tiny calves and the giant biceps, you know, like the biceps are, that's a given. We got that. Now we need to work on the legs, And so I think that slow is like the thing we have to practice often because we're so overdeveloped on speed. Yeah, it's atrophied. And in my own life, you know, what I have found is that I need intentional practices that involve my whole body because I got to get out of floating head mode.

26:29Michael:You know, like in my professional life, I can just be like a floating head and I need to engage my body if I'm going to go more slowly and downshift and have access to a different speed. And so for me, that has been gardening and beekeeping and walking, which I used to do for like exercise. And now I walk very slowly and I absolutely love it. And I normally walk without listening to anything. And I'm watching birds and I'm talking to the neighbors. We have a bunch of neighbors that walk. You know, I'm looking at animals. The other day I was walking and there was this baby bunny that was right on my walking path.

27:03Michael:And I just, it was not scared of me. It was like too young to know that, you know, humans could be a threat. And it just sat there munching on some clover. And I just stood there and watched it for a few minutes. And I was like, this is so great because it's training my attention and training my body. It's like slow twitch and fast twitch muscles. You know, it's like I'm training the slow twitch part of myself. but I don't think that happens by accident. And if we want to have access to a different kind, if we want to be able to decelerate as well as accelerate, we've got to have things in our life where we practice so that when we get in the high dopamine, high adrenaline environments, it's like we actually have some muscle memory there.

27:44Michael:Otherwise, man, it's just hard. I love that. I mean, walking, I think it's one of the supreme act of slowness, right? It's, it's a wonderful way to reconnect and find your rhythm because I was talking about slow and finding the right pace and so on. And you were saying it depends on the context, which it very much does, but it also depends on the person, right? Each of us has our own internal metronome. So what's fast for me might be kind of a little bit too slow for you. And what's slow for me might be super fast, you know, so it, it's kind of very much a personal thing. And I think we get infected by other people's impatience and their pace, rather than taking that time to step back and reconnect with our bodies and say, okay, what's worked, what would work for me in this moment, right?

28:23And I loved as well the idea of that little rabbit, was it? Yeah. See, if you'd arrived along that pathway, power walking, I suspect that problem would have fled, right? You would not have had that little magic moment of connection with nature. It would have gone scurrying off into the undergrowth. But because you were moving at a natural pace, I think one of the best ways to find that deeper, slower, healthier, richer rhythm is spending time I'm in nature because nature is the ultimate cradle of slowness. I mean, nature, everything happens in nature at the right pace, at the tempo still, right?

29:01I mean, as humankind, we are constantly trying to accelerate nature and it always ends badly, right? Usually for us, sometimes for nature as well. But nature, that's one of the great lessons that nature can teach us is slowing down to find the right rhythm and pace for the moment. And actually, there's a huge library of research that's been put together recently that shows that simply spending time in green spaces slows us down, right? It reduces stress. It sharpens concentration. It helps us sort of be more fully in the moment. And it also allows us to sit back and think about the horizon and the bigger picture and feel less obsessed with the small stuff.

29:40I've talked earlier about sweating the small stuff. I mean, that's one of the great, I find as well, personally, I've spent a lot of time in nature. getting out into especially big, ambitious landscapes, all the things that are quizzing around in the back of your head, those little worries suddenly just vanish, right? They seem so minuscule and so trivial in this place of scale and majesty, right? And I think that scale and slowness of nature is such a gift to us, right? Especially if you live in a country, I mean, I live in London, England, we don't have a whole lot of big nature here. We have parks and so on.

30:13So that's something, but I grew up in Canada. You guys are in somewhere in the States, I'm assuming. Yeah. I mean, in North America, it's all around us, right? So that these, these it's, it's something that it's free most of the time too, just to go out and spend a bit of time, you know, take your shoes off, sit in the grass, lean up against the tree, like Isaac Newton did, right? You know, tap into those deeper rhythms. Well, speaking of England, you know, I think one of the first times I ever experienced this sort of expansive horizon and everything was in Scotland because the sky is so visible.

30:43It's not like they have huge mountains or even a lot of trees, but there was just something about it that allowed me to catch my breath. I love that. The slow fix is built around the end and rope. I want you to explain that whole situation with Toyota and how it applies to us today. Yeah. Well, the end on rope, I was actually going to call the book, the end on rope, but it was a long discussion about whether that was too obscure or not. So I lost that battle. But the Andon rope is this. In Toyota factories, they came up with a system whereby literally a rope, an Andon rope was hanging in all parts of the factory.

31:22And if any member of the team spotted a problem on the assembly line and couldn't fix it sensibly in the moment, would pause and ask questions about whether and what's going on, what's going on. Whatever your rank in the factory, you could pull the Anton Rope and stop the whole production line, right? So that people would stop, slow down, go deep, and get to the root cause of the problem, right? Which is not something you find in a lot of factories. Often, it's just a quick patch-up job. And then, of course, as we said earlier, the quick fix now turns into a big mess later on, further down the production line.

31:55So this was one of the secrets to Toyota partially taking over the world when it did all those years ago, right? It just had this incredible culture of everybody was empowered. Everybody was invited to slow down when they saw a problem and to seek the deep, slow fix rather than to skim along the surface with a quick fix. And I think that's a useful metaphor. You might ask for life in general. I think that's I think the idea of pulling the and on rope is that is a helpful image or a helpful metaphor for us, because very often we don't do that. We just put on the bandaid. We get the duct tape out.

32:31We go full MacGyver. Right. And we try to look for a quick solution. Which sometimes, of course, I come back to what we've been saying all along, sometimes the quick solution is the best solution, but very often it's not, especially in this immensely complex world we inhabit now and so many factors and things are interplay and interwoven. You really very often need to stop, join the dots, take a moment, take a beat to find what's going on wrong and then put it right. And that and on rope, I think, is a really – I often use that in my own mind when there's a problem in my own life and I can feel myself – perhaps I've got a team of people around me.

33:07They're all itching to get a solution quickly. I say to myself, this is a time to pull the and on rope. It's a helpful metaphor. I was wondering if there are any businesses that you could point to that have tried to make slow a strategic asset. And how do the leaders in those organizations do that when there's so much pressure from shareholders and the competition and just this moment with AI and everything else to speed everything up? I mean, everybody I know, every business owner that I know, and certainly the ones I coach. And that's a lot. That's a lot. They feel behind, perpetually behind.

33:46And so there's this constant game of catch up. But it'd be helpful to know if there's people that are doing this well, and if they're doing it well, how are they doing it well? Yeah, well, there was a big study that the Harvard Business Review did. I think they surveyed 343 companies across all sectors. And they found that companies that embraced this slow approach, that took the time when it made sense to take the time, over the medium term were operating profits, sales, were beating the fast companies hands down, right across the board. And this was across every sector of the economy. So there are examples out there.

34:21The funny thing, of course, is that maybe not that funny, not that surprising, is that a lot of companies now will embrace slow, but they won't say it out loud. It's almost like an in-house secret or because of what you were talking about earlier, that kind of shame or the guilt. the field. They think they don't want judgment or if they've got to talk to investors and investors here while you're slowing. We don't want you to slow down, but they realize on the inside that a bit of judiciously applied slowness can fire up creativity, can supercharge innovation, can deepen communication and esprit de corps in the company, can avoid costly mistakes.

34:54They understand it inside, but to explain it to people outside is a little scary. So I'll just give you an example. I can't give the name of the company. It's an American-based company. And it's one that I did some work with a couple of years ago. And one of the things, one of the levers they decided to pull in-house was to create a monthly prize for the slowest employee of the month, right? Exactly. You hear that and you laugh and you think, well, I don't want to be the slowest. You know, I win that award in April, you fire me in May, right? What they found was what they did it in the context of a, of a re calibration, a rethink a revolution around the idea of time.

35:31And they were asking staff and having, you know, workshops and dialogues and stuff about when it made sense to go fast. And when staff felt that they were more, they were thriving and doing things better when they could slow down. And that got out in the open as an open dialogue and having that little monthly ritual allowed people to say, okay, this month, this employee wins the award because he took the time to reread a big report. And as a result of that, spotted an error that saved the company, you know,$500 ,000, say, or next month, it was an employee who landed a big contract because instead of just trying to win over the client with a Zoom call, she drove across town, took a couple of hours, sat, had lunch with that person and brought that business to the company, right?

36:14So you're sort of every time you just pull out another story. You put something else on the table and say, look, slow allowed us to power up, allowed us to hit a home run. And here are the examples. That's the sort of thing that helps people get away from the taboo we were talking about earlier and to embrace slow when it makes sense to embrace it. Well, you know, the magazine Fast Company, how about a magazine called Slow Company? I don't know if there'd be.

36:41Michael:There actually is. I don't think there'd be market. to. I think it's called, it's either called delayed gratification or slow. Yes. Okay. I'm not surprised you know of it. Yeah. I think it's a British based publication if I'm not, and their whole premise is they're going to report the news a quarter after it happens. Most news wouldn't survive the weekly news cycle. Right. Isn't that fascinating though? But they do like this deep analysis on, I'll have to bring one to show you. I'd like to see it. Really helpful because so much of the modern media now is just hot takes. And you get a barrage of hot takes over a couple of days.

37:17And then that story vanishes. And a couple of weeks later, you think, what? What happened there? And you don't, there's no follow-up, right? Which I think explains quite a lot of our democracies are falling apart at the seams. Nobody knows what's happening. They can't fasten onto the narrative. It's this sort of constant bombardment of hot takes and distractions. You can't process it in real time. It's like the hot takes demand that you respond to the news as it happens. Yeah. But then the other half of the news is critiquing the people who had the hot takes that were wrong. Right.

37:48Michael:Never mind the fact that we don't have all the facts by the time, you know, we can't possibly assimilate and synthesize all the information that quickly. Let me give you another example of a company, right? So, again, this is a big company in the U.S. where the CEO has a practice where every day he, in his diary, his schedule that everybody can see in the company, he blocks off 15 to 20 minutes every day to have an interview with and each day it's a different name so one day it'll be i don't know sally shawcross and the next day it's john brown or something these people do not exist right they're just 20 minutes where he can shut the door and nobody can interrupt him for those 20 minutes and he just has time to slip into that kind of deep richer more nuanced slow thinking right psychologists call it slow thinking where you get into the weeds, you come up with creative ideas, blue sky thinking.

38:41He also uses that time sometimes to slip out of his office, walk around the company and have conversations with people he would not normally speak to. He'll just turn up at someone's desk and say, how's it going? And those are those little connections that fire off that cross-pollination. You learn what's happening inside the company. If you're just, you described earlier those heads of company who just felt like everything was just a rush and they needed, often people are trying to do too much, right? Rather than focusing on what's important, they're focusing on what's urgent. And that's a crucial life skill, well, in life, but especially at work, is being able to distinguish between what's important and what's urgent.

39:19Because the culture is constantly telling us, you need to attend to what's urgent. And what happens? Well, what's important just falls by the wayside. Well, I think when you couple that with the desire or the drive for more, it's like, I got to have more stuff and I've got to have it faster. And it's just like this ambition that's out of control.

39:38Michael:And not self-reflective. Right. It's a compulsive kind of ambition that we don't even know why. Like, why do I want or need that? And will it really make me happier? Like, what, what are the things that are actually going to make me have more joy and meaning and purpose and significance in my life? And I really come to believe that almost everything that matters has to be done slowly, you know, except maybe saving somebody's life. Like, you know, if they're, you know, stop breathing or something, but like whether you're raising children or building a business or a home or a legacy or a garden or, you know, anything, anything worth building is just going to take time over time.

40:21Michael:And there's not really shortcuts. There's a wonderful quote, which you're pretty much echoing there. One of my favorite from Mae West, the screen siren of the early 20th century, who said famously once that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. And that's pretty much what you said. Yeah. That's a great quote. Yeah.

40:43Michael:Sadly, we are about at the end of our time. I can't even believe it. It's just gone so fast. But I would love to just, yeah, ironically, ironically, our slow time has gone fast. But I would love to make this practical for our listeners, for the people who are probably listening to us in their car or maybe they're at the gym. They're sitting in a car line, you know, whatever it is, they're on their way to the next thing. And they feel that tightness in their chest and the next thing they're a little behind on. And yet they yearn for a slower pace. They want to downshift. It's not working like it used to.

41:22Michael:what's the next best right step for them that can move them toward this kind of life asking for a friend asking for a friend yeah yeah yeah well the first thing i'll definitely i'll give you a few quick hacks for slowing down as we as we close out but before i do that i just want to sort of underline an important data point here which is that i mean we're all so impatient now that we even want to slow down fast right so people hear the podcast think yeah man i i've got to reconnect with my inner tortoise and slow down and thrive. And then so, you know, they sign up for yoga and then they run across the street to do some meditation.

41:56They rush home. It doesn't work that way. And also the thing about slowing down, if you've been like I was, a card carrying road runner, it's a process, right? You don't achieve the inner calm of the Dalai Lama tomorrow morning. It's you, you take a few steps forward, then maybe you slip back, you have withdrawal symptoms. It's a process, but the direction of travel is clear and you will get there. So let me just get some straight up levers to pull, right? Let's talk about tech, right? We haven't talked about phones. Turn off notifications wherever possible, right? Just turn them off because if you leave notifications open, what you're effectively doing is letting other people control your time and attention.

42:32You turn them off, you decide. In this moment, I'm giving my full attention to, I don't know, this conversation or reading a bedtime story or this piece of work or this sunset, right? And then when it's time to look at my inbox, I look at it. And as someone, I'm a natural person, not as a journalist, but training. I want to know what's happening everywhere all the time. For me, turning off notifications, game changer. Another suggestion with phones, you know, going to gray mode. This is a wonderful thing. Whatever phone you have, there's a function somewhere to drain all the color from the screen.

43:03Why would you want to do that? Because one of the things that makes our phones so addictive, so alluring, so attractive is color, right? Take away the color and it just loses its seductive charm. It loses that grip it has. And it's incredible. I guarantee you scrolling through TikTok in black and white is just no fun, right? So take a day next week, maybe tomorrow and go gray. Like just go gray. And I guarantee if you're a power user or your phone, you will claw back. I was going to say time. You will claw back hours of time that you can then invest in balancing out the rest of your day, being able to slow down when you want to slow down because you've just got that time back.

43:42Those phones are a black hole if we don't use them wisely. A couple more quick ones. Again, with phone, this is a game I call hide the phone. Very simple, based on research showing that when two people are in a conversation together, two friends, two colleagues, parent, child, whatever, if there's a phone visible during the conversation, just visible, doesn't have to ring or light up or vibrate, just visible. Those two people keep the conversation at a more superficial level. So the next time you're in any conversation in the real world with anyone, hide your phone, right? Stick it in a bag or under a magazine, whatever.

44:14And that small act of slowness will have a big, big effect on the depth and texture and richness of the conversation you have with the other person. Coming back to doing less, I think do less, right? We're chronically trying to do too much. And one way to do that is to keep, we all have a to-do list, keep a not to-do list. Use it like this. So every day, or, you know, look at your calendar, find the least important thing, right? There will be something for all of us. There's always one thing at least in a day or two, get it off your to-do list, put it on your not to-do list, and then keep those not to-do lists in a drawer or your phone somewhere and revisit them from time to time.

44:51Because what you'll find is that things that today you think, oh no, I can't not do this. The sky will fall in. My career will go up in flames. My partner will hate. Six weeks from now, You'll look at your not-to-do list and think, man, I don't even remember that because it wasn't that important. And having a not-to-do list and using it over a longer term just gives you some perspective and allows you to realize that so much of the stuff that we rush to squeeze into our schedules is not that important. It really isn't. And this just allows you to free up time for what really, really matters so you could slow down into those moments and work better and live more fully.

45:26Carl, thank you so much for this conversation. I really feel challenged and stimulated and eager to go more slowly in my life. If people want to connect with you and with your work, where would you suggest they start? That's easy. I've got a single link, which is my name, carlhonore.info. So Carl, C-A-R-L-H-O-N-O-R-E.info. And I've got courses, videos, TED Talks, books, everything there. More than you could ever want to know about my work in one place. We will link to that in the show notes.

45:57Michael:Fantastic. Thanks again. Thanks, Carl. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

46:11I don't know about you, but I feel like I do better at this at some times in my life than others.

46:18Michael:Yeah. That is probably true for everybody, and it's probably going to be true till I die. Yeah, I feel like I have done consistently better more often for the first time in my life since I started incorporating what we would call practices of flourishing into my life. I've noticed that about you too. Yeah. I don't think this has come naturally to me. I don't think dispositionally, you know, like if you had known me as a, obviously you have, but you are audience, if you had known me as a 20 year old or a 10 year old or a 30 year old or a 40 year old, you would not say there's a person who knows how to go slowly and quite the opposite actually.

46:56Michael:and yet I hope this gives hope to all of you I think this can be learned but it's a kind of retraining I don't think it can be learned doing the same things we're already doing it's like we kind of have this is my opinion I should have asked Carl if he agrees with this but I think we kind of have to practice it in a different environment and then use that as a transferable skill in our current environment you know like for me at least my experience has been that through some of these flourishing practices, spending time in nature, for example, that's been the biggest one for me, tending to myself, my body, and oftentimes I'm doing those things at the same time, have given me a mechanism to slow down.

47:39Michael:It's not just like I'm saying to myself, I need to slow down. I'm actually doing activities that require slowness inherently, which is a kind of retraining. I 100 % agree with that because I think it's tempting to say, okay, I'm not going to work in the evenings. I'm not going to work on the weekends. I'm not going to work during vacations. But what happens is nature abhors the vacuum. And so the stuff comes rushing back in. You have to choose something to spend that time doing. And whether it's putting the phone away, like we did last night and sat on the porch and Gail and I had a glass of wine and talked.

48:14Or if it's the weekends, we're going to go golfing together, or we're going to spend time lingering after church and just having fellowship with the people that we're in community with, those have to be intentional practices.

48:27Michael:And they have to be slow by nature. That's right. You know what I mean? Like you could, you could go race cars on the weekends. I don't know something that was, but there's no way to do that slowly. So it's not going to help you. I mean, you, you got to do something that sort of like makes you go slow where like by virtue of just showing up and participating in the thing, it will recalibrate your, your speedometer, so to speak. One of the things I've loved about beekeeping so far, first of all, if you go fast around bees, you're going to get stung. They literally translate quick movement with threat.

48:57Michael:And so one of the ways that you can keep bees while not being all suited up necessarily, conditions may vary, you know, but not have it be a stressful thing is that you move very slowly. It's almost like Tai Chi. Isn't it the bees can, and like a lot of animals, they can smell or sense stress. They can, but it's actually just that like predators typically move fast in their case. And so they're sort of wired naturally to see anything moving quickly over them is something that might want to eat them. And so then they go like into attack mode. And so the bee mentor that I have has taught me to be very slow.

49:34Michael:Can you stop? I know. A bee mentor? Listen, it's a - Seriously? Listen, if you're a beekeeper, you know, you probably have a bee mentor. You are one. I mean, it's like, everybody does it. Wow. This is a thing. But you know, like I'll just go kind of crouch in front into the side of my beehive and I'll just watch the bees come in and out because part of how you know if they're doing well is not necessarily getting into the hive. It's actually that you just watch their behavior day after day. Same with my birds that are outside my window. And it's given me so much joy because what it does, as we've talked about with nervous system regulation and other things, it widens your field of vision.

50:11Michael:All of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm hearing the birds. Makes you more resilient too. Makes you more resilient. Anyway, so to me, the best way to become comfortable with slow is take up activities that are inherently slow. You know, I think one of the things that could be really helpful too is to esteem the virtues of slowness in our communities, whether that's our family or in our churches or places of worship in our neighborhoods, because there is this shame factor that's around it. And if we're just talking about it, like, you know, slow is the virtuous thing. You know, fast is not that cool.

50:51Slow is cool.

50:52Michael:Fast is easy. Yeah. Slow is hard. Yeah, I agree with you. It's kind of, we need to rebrand slow. That's it. We need to rebrand slow. Well, you know, two years ago, my screensaver was a single word, downshift. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. And I really tried to focus on it that year. I actually even tried to drive the speed limit. Wow. Which, you know, I may or may not have reverted to my old behavior on. Yeah. But I'm willing to give it another shot. So what other practices in your life do you think you might want to incorporate that would help you? Well, you know, it's funny because I think that part of what goes hand in hand with me and what I've been trying to practice more is presence.

51:37Because when I'm thinking of the future and I'm distracted by all those things, that's what gets me in a situation where I feel overwhelmed. You know, I'm borrowing trouble from the future. But if I think what's mine to do today and to be fully present, and if, for example, if I'm eating dinner, I don't bring my phone to the table. And I do talk to the people I'm meeting with and I'm fully present for them. If I'm in a coaching situation, same thing. I want to be 100 % present there. So I've tried to esteem presence, but I think slowness and presence go hand in hand.

52:10Michael:I know you love fishing and you like walking with mom. And I know you like golf. So I just didn't know if there was anything else you were thinking of adding to your life that was kind of a, you've also done music. I have. And you know, one of the things I just started doing was taking vocal lessons. You know, basically what my new vocal coach told me, and he's genius, is that the problems you need to fix are going to take time. You've got to retrain your brain. And it's simple exercises he's given me to retrain like tongue placement and the use of my jaw and diaphragm and all this stuff. But it's, he said, this isn't going to happen overnight.

52:49This is going to, this is going to take a lot of training. One of the gifts I think of midlife is that we kind of know this is true. Right.

52:55Michael:You don't believe this when you're in your twenties, usually when you're just naturally faster, you haven't come up against your limitations, maybe quite so much. but one of the things that I love about working with our community and our audience and coaching people in midlife is I think we've all had enough experiences of like the the liability of fast and we crave slow more so we're kind of ripe for this in a way that maybe 10 or 20 or 30 years ago we would not have been which is a helpful you think about it fixes so many issues too like we crave connection yeah but that can't happen when we're going to speed of light right You know, you got to slow it all down.

53:34Well, speaking of rushing to the next thing.

53:39Michael:Lunch. That's right. Guys, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. It's been challenging for me. I know it has for you too, Megan. Yeah. And we look forward to next week. In the meantime, I'd love for you to share this episode with a friend who maybe needs to go slower or maybe somebody that could be a companion with you on your slow journey. That's a great idea. Yeah. See you next time.

54:06You