Something You Should Know - The Power of Making Things Simple & How Pockets Changed Everything - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: November 15, 2025

Here is the GoFundMe link for Pearl that I mention in this episode: https://gofund.me/2aa4d537e Most people don’t get enough sleep — and even a small deficit can take a big toll. Just 15 extra minutes a night can boost your health, focus, and mood more than you’d expect. This episode begins with a surprising look at how too little sleep quietly undermines your life — and how a little more can make all the difference. https://www.sleep.com/sleep-health/15-minutes-extra-sleep Simple beats complicated — in business, communication, and life. Yet most of us instinctively make things harder than they need to be. Marketing entrepreneur and educator Ben Guttmann, who’s helped clients from the NFL to Nobel Laureates, reveals why simplicity is the ultimate superpower and how to harness it in your ideas, writing, and daily decisions. He’s the author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win—and How to Design Them (https://amzn.to/3udtVwz). You probably have pockets in nearly everything you wear — and yet, they’re only about 500 years old. Where did they come from? Why are women’s pockets so small? And what do they say about how people have lived through history? Hannah Carlson, a historian of clothing and author of POCKETS: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (https://amzn.to/3SUzmef), reveals the surprisingly political, personal, and practical story of the humble pocket. Finally, anger isn’t always destructive — used wisely, it can be one of your greatest motivators. Research shows that channeling anger toward a meaningful goal can actually help you focus and achieve more. I’ll explain how to tap into the power of anger — without letting it take over. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/feeling-angry-may-help-people-achieve-goals-study-finds-rcna123611 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! AG1: Head to ⁠⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/SYSK ⁠⁠⁠ to get a FREE Welcome Kit with an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3 plus K2, when you first subscribe!  AURA FRAMES: For a limited time, visit https://AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames -named #1 by Wirecutter -by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince.  Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! DELL: It’s time for Black Friday at Dell Technologies. Save big on PCs like the Dell 16 Plus featuring Intel® Core™ Ultra processors. Shop now at: ⁠ https://Dell.com/deals ⁠ NOTION: ⁠⁠Notion brings all your notes, docs, and projects into one connected space that just works . It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and actually fun to use! Try Notion, now with Notion Agent, at: ⁠https://notion.com/something⁠ PLANET VISIONARIES: In partnership with Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, this… is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We'd love to talk, business. Today on something you should know, how a tiny bit more sleep each night can make a world of difference. Then, simplicity. When you make things simple for people, you make things better. If you've ever worked in marketing, if you've ever worked in sales, the first thing that you're going to learn is that people don't buy features, they buy benefits. People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. People don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-ins-all. They don't want the thing. They want the thing does for them.

Also, how anger can be an incredible motivator and the fascinating story of pockets and why there are more pockets for men than women. Another interesting piece about pockets is that in menswear, it's part of doing business. In women's where, it's often sort of thrown out because it takes too much time. First thing to go are pockets. All this today on something you should know. With Amex Platinum, $400 in annual credits for travel and dining means you not only satisfy your travel bug, but your taste buds too.

That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. 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. Before we jump into today's topics, and hi, I'm Micah Rothers, and this is something you should know, I want to quickly tell you something personal and meaningful to me. There's a family that I know, and they struggle financially.

They have a 14-year-old daughter, Pearl, and she has a chance to go to Hawaii with her school choir in March. It's a big honor, and it's something that she may never get the chance to do again. but the cost is more than her family can afford, so I helped them set up a GoFundMe page, and I even narrated a short video for them. And then I thought, well, you know, I talk to a big audience here every day. Maybe someone listening would like to help.

And as I record this, they're about halfway to their goal, and I would love to blow this up and get her even more money so she has some spending money when she's in Hawaii. Now, there's no pressure, but if you're the kind of person who likes helping someone, reach a dream that they could never reach on their own? This is one of those moments where even a small contribution could make a real difference. So I put the GoFundMe link right at the top of the show notes, and even a few dollars helps.

And I appreciate you considering that. And so now on with today's episode, and we're going to start by talking about sleep. And of course you know that getting enough sleep is important, but it may be more important than you realize. There was a study done on over 7,000 high school students that showed that A students averaged over 15 minutes per night of sleep more than B students. B students average 15 more minutes a night than C students and so forth right down the line. Amazingly, just 15 minutes more sleep can make a huge difference. Americans average less than 7 hours of sleep per night,

and most people need more than that to function at their best. Why are we getting less sleep? Well, the answer is exactly what you would expect. Television, internet, cell phones, and a lot of other things keep us up at night, so we sleep less. But we should sleep more, and that is something you should know. Given the choice between complicated and simple, I think most of us would take simple, every time. Who doesn't like simple? It's a lot easier to pay attention to simple things. Still, we often

complicate things up. We make things harder for people to understand even though they, just like you, would prefer simple. Here to reveal how and why anything is better when it's simpler is Ben Gutman. He's a marketing entrepreneur and educator who has helped hundreds of clients from the NFL to Nobel laureates. And he is author of a book called Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. Hey, Ben, welcome to something you should know.

Thanks for having me, Mike. Great to be here. So I love this message because that's one I've always believed in, that Simple is better. And I think people know that Simple is better when you're trying to communicate. But why is it better? I mean, how do we know it's better?

Well, the essence of why simple is better is what a word that we all know, which is called fluency. And we know this in our daily life, right? We can be fluent in English or Spanish, but that word means something else to a cognitive scientist. If you ask them, fluency basically describes how easy it is to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it. And it turns out that it's something that's easier, that takes less effort, that takes less sweat, well, we're more likely to trust it, more likely to like it, more likely to buy it. And the opposite is also true. If it takes a lot of work, if it's hard for us to understand, if it's hard for us to remember, well, that's we don't like it, we don't trust it, we don't buy it. And most of the time, that's not what we want.

And that's all of our experience that we like things to be simple. But I guess, you know, how many times have you been in that position where you understand that, you get that, but you think, but what I have to say is going to take a lot of explanation that, but I get that simple is better, but in this case, that won't work. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's the famous quote, which is misattributed to Mark Twainoff and which is, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write you a short one. It's hard. Simple can be effective. we can know it can be effective. We know that as a receiver, it's effective.

But when we're in the other role, when we're the one who has to send, who has to make an advertisement, send an email, make a presentation, well, we have a really hard time getting out of our own way. And so how do you do that? How do you take something that you're convinced isn't simple and make it simple? Because do you think that everything can be made simple or at least simpler? No, no. So there's, to borrow another quote from somebody who is often misattributed, Einstein said everything should be made simpler, as simple as possible, but no simpler.

The truth is there's lots of complex things in the world, right? International diplomacy is complex. You know, corporate mergers are complex. The human eyeball. All these things are really, you know, really intricate. They have lots of pieces. They interact in different ways. But there's a difference between complex and complicated.

So complex is a natural state of being. Complicated is when we take something that could be simple and we don't do the work to make it to make it so. It's when we pull it in the complex direction. And that is what I believe is the root of most of our communication problems. Well, I guess a lot of it too is who your audience is because, I mean, you could, yeah, the eyeball is very complicated, but you could make it a lot simpler depending on who you're talking to.

if you're if you have to explain how the eyeball works to sixth graders you're going to have to make it pretty simple oh yeah and actually one of the pieces of inspiration and some of the work i have here is a version really close to that actually so randle monroe who is a webcomic and author wrote a book called thing explainer and what he did was he took all these really complex topics stuff like the nuclear bomb and you know supreme court and distilled them using just the thousand most common words in the English language and use that to explain, you know, the electromagnetic spectrum, all these different interesting things. And, you know, there's a humorous result because even the word 1,000 for the 1,000 most common words is not in there. So you have to

use 1000. It does show as an exercise that you can really, really get there on most topics. How so? How do you do you do you get your brain in that mindset of let's make this easy? Well, so it's important to look first at understanding that simplicity is not necessarily the fewest number of letters or words or sentences or pages or slides or whatever it is you have in your message. It's the least amount of friction. And if you're a designer, so my background is in design. If you're a designer, you understand this.

If you work in user experience, you'll know that what you want to optimize for is the least amount of friction. You don't want somebody to have to go through lots of different steps that are complicated and have all these different fields and everything else that between you and the shopping cart, right? You want to be able to get them straight there. And the same logic applies for how we communicate. Because sometimes that does mean this story would be better told with two or three slides instead of one slide. This email could be a few bullets instead of one giant chunk of text. So first putting the mindset on that it's not about the length that we're talking about. It's about the friction. And then what? Don't you have to consider your audience

before you do much of anything else? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So the first piece, really, once you kind of understand the mindset of that we're optimizing for ease, not for brevity is to look at there's either that I've identified five different principles to to these simple messages the first one is beneficial which is what does it matter to the receiver and I spent 10 years running a marketing agency if you've ever worked in marketing if you ever worked in sales the first thing that you're going to learn is that people don't buy features they buy benefits we don't want the thing we want the thing does for us and if you look at also all the the the science about how we remember things and how we perceive things. It all lines up in that same

direction too. We care about lots of things. We care about the things that matter to us, really. Everything else kind of goes in and out. And so what's an example of a feature versus benefit? Well, let's look at toothpaste, for example. The toothpaste might have a mint flavor to it. Okay, that's nice, but we don't really want a tooth base. We don't really want mint flavor. what we want is well so what you ask ourselves that we say well mint flavor means that we have fresh breath okay that's great like we're getting there a little bit but it turns out that's actually not where we even uh stop this if you ask so what again saying well i have a mint flavor so what i have fresh breath so what well it means i'm going to have a better date tonight right

and if you even ask it a third time you go on another level you can get to you know the famous maslow's hierarchy of needs you have physiological needs it's love and belonging needs, all these different pieces. So you can connect the things that you can see here, touch, smell, taste, with your five senses, all the way down to what our fundamental needs are just by asking a few simple questions. And once you understand that benefit, and instead of talking about the features, you talk about what actually matters to people, you're going to start to connect to them on a much deeper level. I've been teaching up Baruch College here in New York for a number of years.

And one thing I tell my students every semester, it's a famous quote, by Theodore Levitt, who's the Harvard marketing professor from the 20th century. I tell them this and I say, if you remember nothing else from this class, from this course, from your whole degree, if you just remember this, you're gonna be head of most people in this business. It is, people don't want a quarter inch drill,

they want a quarter inch hole. People don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch all. They don't want the thing, they want the thing does for them. And it's tempting to go to the thing, because again, we see that. It's very easy to crack open our senses pick one of those things. But it's harder to do the work that would actually connect and make

that sale and get that vote, get that donation, whatever it is you're trying to move people to. We hear a lot today that because there are so many messages, people are hearing so many things from so many people that it's hard to stand out. It's hard to be heard. Oh, absolutely. So one of the things I talk about a lot also is this idea of salience. So salience, what does that mean? It is, does something rise to our attention? Does it stand out? Does it stick up? Is there contrasts with the background? Is it something that is memorable? And salience is created by doing something that other people aren't. So if you talk about going to a conference, everybody at the conference is speaking the same way. If everybody at the conference has the same

type of slide, has the same intonation, well, you're not going to stand out by doing that. You have to do something different. Zig a little bit when they're zagging. Use a curse word. You know, speak in rhyme. Do something that's going to be a little bit different. The framework to get there in terms of being salient is embracing constraints. It's by doing something that other people aren't. One of my favorite examples, you know, talk about publishing a little bit, is over the past decade or so, every book in the self-help aisle and the business aisle personal development space has had a curse word in it. Every single one of them that's on the top of the best seller list from Mark Manson to Sarah Knight to everybody else, they've

sold millions of copies doing this. And if they drop the curse word in there, well, all of a sudden when you look at that on a shelf that has things like the millionaire next door and, you know, several, seven highly effective habits of highly effective people. When you look at it in that context, well, it's something that says the subtle art of not giving an F, well, all of a sudden, that stands out. That's different. And those things get remembered, they get purchased, they get read, they get talked about. Conversely, that's starting to wear off a little bit.

If you look today at the bookstore and you go to that section, every single title has that. And so you got to find out what the next thing is a little bit. The thing about zigging and zagging is that eventually other people start to zag a little bit. And so you have to continually embrace different constraints to push you in a different direction. Yeah. Well, it seems that when somebody breaks a rule like that, like putting a swear word in the title, that becomes the new rule so we get used to it. And then it's like, yeah, it's no big deal. It's not shocking. So it loses its effect. Oh, certainly. And you can see this again if you want to look to advertising. So two years ago, Super Bowl runs, what was the most effective advertisement at the Super Bowl? It wasn't

some big spectacle with some celebrities or comedians or talking animals like it has been for years and years. It was a black screen with a simple QR code bouncing around. So that was Coinbase. It was scanned millions of time. It broke the app. It was the most successful. It was commercial in years. But then what happens the next year? As advertising works, every client goes to their agency and says, I want to do the same thing. Okay, well, you go to the Super Bowl. I think about half a dozen or so commercials were some variant of a QR code on the screen, and it was much less effective. So there's a little bit of a shelf life issue you have to deal with when you're talking about original salient ideas. We're talking about making things simple. And my guest

is Ben Gutman. He is a marketing entrepreneur and author of the book. Simply put, why clear messages win and how to design them. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. Breakthrough the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ. With real-time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence, helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Treadplus at OnePeloton.com.

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magazine. So Ben, one of the ways I see people muddy up the message and make it more complicated

is jargon. They use words, expressions that I don't know what they're talking about. Maybe in their industry it

means something but it doesn't mean anything to me and so now I've kind of lost the message. Oh, absolutely.

Right? So that's an example of not having empathy with the receiver. You have to speak in the language that your receiver understands. You have to meet them where they are in terms of both the literal language as well as their motivation, their emotion, and just where they are. And if you're throwing out a punch bowl full of acronyms and jargon, you're not doing that. There's a story I like to tell as an example of what's an empathetic message and what's not. So I've had bad luck with my dental health over the years, you know, bad genetics. I go to the dentist one day

and, you know, I'm dealing with some very painful procedure. And he goes, you know what? You only have to floss the teeth you want to keep. I said, you got me. And so as soon as he said it that way, he met me where I am instead of saying something like, you should floss to prevent plaque buildup below the gum line, which is all factually true. But it's not in the language that I need to understand i need to to receive for me to understand it for me to take action on it when it's not in that language when it's when it's when it's not in plain english when it's in dental speak i'm not going to get it and you know what i've lost every single day since that dental appointment so you would said earlier that you know being simple doesn't mean brief but it often does mean

brief because when you think of the the messages that you remember they tend to be brief they don't tend to be, you know, 84 pages of baloney. Oh, yeah. I would say that simplicity is correlated with length, with brevity, but it's not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes you do need to take that extra slide, that extra page in your website, the extra sentence in order to make sure that you get there. Clever's great, but clear beats clever every time.

Well, talk about that because there does seem to be this idea that if you can be clever, that you know you hook people better that that clever is better than just plain and simple well there's an interesting thing that happens at least in you know my neck of the woods and working in marketing is that there's a lot of folks that will give you a slogan a headline for your website a brand tagline that is just a really pretty set of words but it actually doesn't connect with what they're trying to say it's something that looks good, but it doesn't actually mean anything. An example here for this. So a number of years ago, teen smoking was a big problem. And a nonprofit group developed a campaign onto the label

Truth, which I'm sure many folks are familiar with, that had a very famous ad that was, that featured a bunch of body bags being dumped in front of the Philip Morris headquarters and an actor or an activist, rather, gets on a megaphone. and shouts, tobacco kills 1,200 people a day, ever thinking about taking a day off? And this ad, you know, it won all sorts of awards. It was super effective. And it was, you know, relatively, it was blunt. It was salient, right?

This is something different. You don't see that type of language on TV. You don't see that in a magazine, a newspaper. At the same time, there was a very brief and, you know, kind of a pun, they looked like a pretty set of words, slogan from Philip Morris. that they were court-ordered to have anti-smoking PSAs, that said, think don't smoke. Think don't smoke. They had a cool commercial with some teenagers in the diner, a whole thing.

Turns out, when researchers look back on this, this was a couple decades ago, and they look and they say, well, what was the effect of each of those ads on teenagers? Well, the shorter one, kind of the little pithier think don't smoke, turns out that actually increased the interest in smoking amongst teenagers. Meanwhile, the blunter, but longer one, tobacco kills 1,200 people a day ever think about taking a day off, that significantly decreased attitude to store smoking amongst that same

group. Well, but when you think about it, it kind of makes sense because there's a little more information in that one that frames the picture a little better than just think don't smoke. There's no context to that. There's no, it's just kind of words in the air. there's a challenge that a lot of you see this in politics a lot to be honest it sounds a lot I communicators have with too much abstraction and nothing for people to kind of grab onto people want when they're making a choice if they're buying a product if they're casting a vote they want to

have an answer when somebody says well why you buying that or why you vote for that guy Regardless of what everybody thinks of either candidate's politics, you can just look back to the 2016 election as a case study in this. If you look in the Republican field in that year, you had all these accomplished governors and senators and there were Republican strategists saying this is going to be the most formidable lineup of candidates we've ever had. But one by one, you start to see their campaigns unfold. And someone like Marco Rubio comes out as saying, a new American century. someone like Jeb Bush is just Jeb, right? It's just the exclamation point at the end of it. But then somebody like Donald Trump, who ended up cruising to victory in that primary,

he has historically loaded statement, but he says, make America great again. Well, there's something very tangible about that. It's a complete sentence. It's a full idea. When somebody was asking you, well, why'd you vote for that guy? You could say because he wants to make America great again. And that was something that was, you know, plastered on. on all these kind of big, garish red hats,

but it was something that was incredibly effective as a single piece of messaging that not only worked in the primary, but when you look in the general election, Hillary Clinton, one of the most accomplished candidates on paper, well, what was the campaign slogan? It was, I'm with her, or love Trump's hate. Neither of those things are the complete, tangible sentence

in a way that Make America Great Again was. And that's part of the reason why he has been so successful in the intellectual politics over the past few years. One of my favorite examples of, and I've used it in discussions many times, and maybe you have too, but lots of people have, is that campaign, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs, any questions. I don't know how old that is. It's really old, and it's still clear as a bell. everybody that's seen it remembers it and the point is made in six words oh yeah right and again that is a super salient ad when everything else is this colorful polished um you know high octane poppy soundtrack advertisement on children's television on MTV and whatever it was 20 or 30 years

ago and then this thing comes on and it gives you this this very visceral uh image as well as that punchy tagline, it becomes something that you remember. We remember what's different. We notice what's different. And that's one of the keys to any form of effective communication. Well, you know, it would be hard to find somebody, I think, that would disagree with the idea

that simple, clear, concise messaging is better. It's just putting it into practice and not letting things get complicated. That's the tricky part. Ben Gutman has been my guest. He is a marketing entrepreneur and educator, and he's author of a book called Simply Put, Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them.

And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on, Ben. Thanks. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Unwrap Holiday Magic at Holt Renfrew with Gifts That Say I Know You. From festive and cozy fashion to Lux Beauty and Fragrance Sets. Our special selection has something for every style and price point. Visit our Holt's holiday shop and store or online at Holt Rens. Renfrew.com.

Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first... There, the last one. Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that refreshes. There is a pretty good chance that if you're wearing clothes right now, there is a pocket or two in those clothes and also a pretty good chance that there's something in those pockets

stuff you want to keep close by we are so used to pockets and carrying stuff in them that you know if you ever get a shirt or a jacket or pants or shorts or something where there is no pocket just feels wrong so why do we love pockets so much where do they come from how have they changed and how will they change Here to discuss this is Hanna Carlson. She is an authority on the history of clothing and author of a book called Pockets,

an intimate history of how we keep things close. Hi, Hannah. Welcome to something you should know. Hi, Mike. It's great to be here. So my impression is that pockets are one of those things that everybody needs, everybody uses, nobody ever thinks about. And so why do you think about them? Why is this important?

Because it doesn't seem like it would be an interesting subject for a book, but clearly it is. So why pockets? Pockets are so, they're so familiar, but we haven't spent any attention on them. There are lots of gloriously beautiful books about bags, for example. Very few about pockets. And I think that they're one of those things that upon closer inspection have a number of things to say about how we negotiate the world. Yeah, well, imagine life without pockets. I mean, I can't imagine how would you carry stuff.

But when did people actually start using pockets? Do we know when the first pocket showed up? Well, they've only been in use for about 500 years, so not quite forever, but their origins are a mystery. Pockets are first stitched into men's breaches around like 1550 or so. And those breaches were the sort of puffy bloomers that ended at the knee. Think of Henry VIII. And I don't think we're ever going to discover who had that aha moment. No tailor explains why they began including pockets.

There seems to be really something improvised about early pockets. It's as if the tailor said, huh, I'm not going to attach this purse to your belt anymore. Why don't I see if I can stuff it inside these really big breaches? And they do look sort of improvised. They look like drawstring bags, literally. They're not like the envelope-shaped pockets that we have today. They really sort of hung from the waistband on the inside of those big breaches. I don't know.

They were made of heavy-duty material like leather or, you know, cotton duct. They might be really long, like 20 inches. And they were itemized and tailored invoices separately. So they were this newfangled device, and they looked a lot more like bags than they looked like pockets today. And what did people do before pockets? Well, everyone has always had bags. I mean, bags have been around forever for millennia.

I don't think of Oatsy, the mummy who was found in the Swiss Alps in the 90s. I think he was determined to be around, that he died around 3,000 BC, and he had a bag attached to his belt. So people have carried bags in all kinds of ways, balanced on their heads, lugged by hand, around the neck. or onto your belt, and they've been perfectly sufficient. I think pockets are different just because they seamlessly fit and are stitched into clothes, and that's why people find them so compelling. It would seem, although you may correct me, but it would seem that pockets are more important for men than women,

because women typically carry purses, and so they put their stuff in there, whereas men, we don't carry purses, so we tend to stuff everything in our pockets. Well, a man without pockets is a freak of nature, according to 19th century commentators. But I think that the pocket and purse distinction is almost as important as the skirt and trouser distinction. However, I would disagree with you. There have been a lot of women who don't want to carry purses. I mean, just think about it. You can, it requires all this sort of psychic energy to keep hold of your purse.

You can put it down while you're at lunch or, you know, you're on the bus and you have to remember to keep hold of it. It can be stolen. This satellite accessory has taken a lot of energy, actually. And there are a number of women and women's wear designers who've insisted on pockets and considered it part and parcel with a sense of modern freedom. So I think this idea that, you know, we don't have to worry about including. pockets because women have handbags has actually been a little bit lazy and maybe kind of an

excuse. Yeah, maybe. But it does seem that you see women with purses most of the time. In fact, I thought about this, like if you're in a store and you want to find somebody that works at the store, one way you can tell the people, the women who work at the store is they don't have purses, but the customers do. And that's one way to tell the difference that they, purses are so common that without one, you stand out. I think that's a wonderful observation. But I would also direct you to all the, say, teenage girls who have been using their cell phones and the cases

as sort of a kind of a purse, sticking their money and ID in that case and then sticking that whole thing in their waistband of their pants as a way to not have to carry the purse. Suffragists at the turn of the 20 century called the purse a badge of servitude. And there have certainly been some women who just don't like carrying it. And so you say pockets started 500 years ago, but when did we get pockets like we think of pockets? Because it sounds like they weren't anything like today's pockets.

Well, I think that happens around with the invention of the suit. So late 17th century, when the suit is invented, it opens up all sorts of new places to put pockets. And so they move into the coat. And you have breast and hip pockets. And that's when they really flatten out and resemble the envelope shake pockets that we have that we're used to. And are pockets hard to put into clothes? Like was there any resistance? Like, oh, God, this is going to make our job so much more difficult to make clothes this way.

Well, pockets are certainly standard in menswear, and I don't think anyone thinks that they're hard, but they are difficult to put in. I teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, and I teach apparel students, and they tell me that it takes a commitment to be able to include them, because you have to kind of engineer them, you want them to lie flat. You have to think about how the hand will fit, how you'll reach into them, and it takes effort. and a number of mess-ups before you get it to work. Claire McCartle, who was a sportswear designer in the 20th century, always took the time to include them. But her manager, who was trying to make the money, was always having arguments and saying, no, no, don't include these.

It's too expensive. So I think another interesting piece about this gendered question about pockets is that in menswear, it's part of doing business. In women's wear, it's often sort of thrown out because it takes too much time. Fast fashion especially. First thing to go are pockets. And so with the suit, the suit opens up, as you say, all kinds of places to put pockets. But now, I mean, how often I've gotten a suit or tried on a suit, and there's fake pockets.

There's slits, but they don't go anywhere. In your suit, really? Yeah. Wow. I mean, is it the case that it's a pocket that's stitched up and you just need to unstitch it? There are times when really nicely made clothes, the pockets are stitched up and they're stitched up so that they keep their shape until the wearer wants to use it. And all you have to do is unstitch them. So I'm wondering if that's what you have. Or is it a real fake pocket and there's no pocket bag attached? I can think of a sport coat I have in my closet that has a very fake pocket. It looks like a pocket from the outside, but it goes no, it's like a doorway to nowhere. It doesn't go anywhere. And isn't that doorway to nowhere so frustrating?

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's the experience of many people wearing women's wear. Like, you know, when a pocket sort of is there just to accentuate the hip or to suggest something sort of a fun decoration, and when it doesn't work, it's so disappointing. Are there milestones in the development of pockets that you can point to and say, well, you know, this is where everything changed. This was a game changer in the world of pockets. In the 20th century, women's wear begins to experiment with pockets.

Previously, pockets had been held underneath the skirt. So a tie-on pocket, we call them They were tied under the skirt, and you could reach them through a slit and, you know, get at them. But once women's wear leaves behind big skirts and corseted, you know, waists and moves into the modern era, so think, you know, by the 1910s, 1920s, pockets began to be integrated into women's dress. And it just opens up this field day of decorative pockets. pockets become playful. They take on different looking shapes. I've seen pockets shaped like tennis nets and playing cards and lips and bureau drawers.

And they become a whole new avenue for designers to express and to express in sort of fun ideas, but also just fun clothing. There is a sense I've always had, like in businesswear, sport coat suits, that kind of thing. that even though you have pockets, it's better not to fill them up because it makes you look funny. It makes it's bulgy and it throws off the, you know, the symmetry and it, that, yeah, it's great to have pockets. Just don't use them very much. Yeah, that has been a common complaint. There was this amazing exhibition in 1944 at the Museum of Modern Art.

And it was called, Are These Clothes Modern? And Bernard Rudolfsky was an architect, and he was thinking about clothes, but he was especially infuriated about all the pockets in men's suits. And he said, they are not actually practical. You can't find anything in any of your many, many pockets. We have layers and layers of pockets. I have 24 pockets when I'm walking down the street. And he drew this beautiful sort of map. of all the pockets from outerwear to underwear

that men tend to have. And he made exactly your point, which is, if I actually use them, it would be so bulky. This is silly. So yes, I take your point. The pockets aren't always so functional, especially if they're sort of too bulgy. Of course, this has also been the reason

that women's wearers thought not to have pockets because you want to have a sleek silhouette. There's a wonderful story about the American women's rights advocate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And she, in 1895, writes this letter to a New York newspaper. And in it, she recounts her experience with her dressmaker. And she really wants a pocket, Stanton does. And her dressmaker says, no, no, I can't include a pocket. A pocket would bold you out, just awful.

and Stanton thinks she's won her argument but she hasn't and a couple weeks later she receives the dress it has not a single pocket and the dressmaker wins the day beauty trumps you know function in this case one thing i think every every man at least uh has the experience of at some point you realize you can put your hands in your pockets but then you're often critic get your hands out of your pockets So we don't know whether our hands should be in our pockets or not be in our pockets, and that's not what pockets are for. And yet, you know, it's a very convenient place to put your hands. I think hands automatically seem to search out pockets.

I agree with you. You know, etiquette guides starting in the 18th and 19th centuries, tried to warn men that it was, in fact, rude. to strut about with their hands and their trouser pockets. Trauser pockets locate to lust. That's the reason that all those etiquette guides say, take your hands out of your pockets. They're placed in and around the erogenous zones

according to the poet Harold Numerov. However, it's always also been really attractive. And it starts with courtiers around the sort of the late 17th, early 18th century, and they try to break the rules, and in doing so, they looked really fashionably nonchalant. So all sorts of men wanted to look that way, too. And I think the interesting thing is that fashion delights in mocking good manners. And so holding your hands in pockets sort of reveals this conflict between fashion and good manners. It's comfortable, but it's also really sveled and cool to kind of gesture with your hands in your pockets.

Well, and it's also nice on a cold day to have a place to keep your hands warm. Well, exactly. It's nice and cozy. I mean, I think once Victorian manners really declined by the end of the 19th century, people less and less call it. out that gesture is rude? Yeah, it seems like it's not so much rude as the gesture of your hands in your pockets sends a message that it says casual. And I know a policeman once told me that they were instructed not to be seen in public with their hands in their pockets because it looks like they're just kind of, you know,

hanging out and they're not like on alert for crime and things. So it does send a message. I agree with you. That's right. And I think there's also codes in the military. The U.S. Army has rule against holding your hands in your pockets unless you're taking an object out of your pocket. And I guess we could think of the debate stage. Any politician would never be caught with their hands in their pockets. But I think it also can project confidence, kind of a casual confidence. If you're at a party and you're leaning against the wall with your hand in your pockets, you certainly don't look nervous. like you're kind of, you know, cool. Right, and I think that to me is what's so interesting about the gesture.

Most hand gestures don't involve objects. Say you take a sip of coffee with a coffee cup. You wouldn't think about how I'm holding that coffee cup all that much when you're thinking about how to decode my mood or my, you know, feeling at that moment. But I think when we remove our hands into our pockets, we're suggesting something about our unwillingness to engage with the other person. You know, someone who stands with their back against the wall and their hands crammed in their pocket is sort of suggesting they're not with you.

They're not engaged with you. And so orators and politicians and people who study gesture all have to admit that even though the hand isn't making any movement, it is also expressive in the pocket. I know men's suits have in the vest, in the vest of a three-piece suit, have a pocket or used to have a pocket for a pocket watch. And I remember it came up on a previous episode here that in Levi's jeans, the little pocket inside the big pocket on the front of Levi's jeans is also for a pocket watch. Even though no one uses it for that anymore or can't imagine who does. and Levi's has always kept it to ensure the integrity of the original design of their blue jeans. But I'm wondering, are there any other pockets that were designed for a specific use like the pocket for a watch?

There are lots of pockets with specific uses. For example, in the 19th century suit, there was a little pocket called a ticket pocket. And it was right under the breastcoat pocket, and it was small so that you always knew, where you had your ticket for the train conductor. There's a fob pocket, and that pocket is right at the belt. And it's a tiny little slit, and it was meant to hold, I think, money or a tiny little purse. And the idea is it's really hard to steal anything from the fob pocket. You hold it close to your belly, and no one can just slip their hand in and steal anything.

What do you think the future of pockets is, or do we have a sense of where that's going? Are we going to have more pockets, fewer pockets, no pockets? Where are we headed? There are lots of folks experimenting with a sort of science fiction meets fashion synergy, and it's called wearables. And this idea that you could have a smart gene jacket, folks at Levi's and Google have been experimenting with that. So the idea is, let's say you're biking to work,

and you don't want to get out your cell phone. you could actually pass your hand over your jacket in which there's been conductive thread woven into the sleeve and, you know, wirelessly transmit signals to your phone. So there are all these really far out ideas about, I don't know, moving through the world seamlessly without any kind of encumbrance. But today, you know, we really don't have a digital form of handkerchief. And I think we will still rely on pockets in the future. Well, I use my pockets every day, and now I have a better appreciation for them. I've been talking to Hannah Carlson. She is an authority on the history of clothing, and she's author of a book called Pockets,

an intimate history of how we keep things close. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming on and talking about this, Hannah. Thanks so much, Mike. Those are really fun questions. Emotions are a big factor. when it comes to achieving goals, and it's assumed, I think, by many people

that positive emotions are a good motivator to help you reach your goals. However, new research published by the American Psychological Association shows that anger can also be a powerful motivator for people to achieve challenging goals in their lives. A series of experiments conducted at Texas A&M University showed that across all of the experiments, anger improved people's ability to achieve their goals.

Now, the positive effects of anger were specific to situations where the goals were challenging. Anger did not appear to be associated with reaching goals that were considered easy. Anger isn't the only thing that pushes people towards their goals. In some cases, amusement or just sheer desire were also associated with increased goal attainment. But don't discount anger just because it's... and negative emotion. You can use it to your advantage. And that is something you should know. If someone asks you, hey, listen to any good podcast lately, I hope you will mention this one and suggest they give a listen. I'm Micah Rothers. Thanks for listening today to something you

should know. The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently. I am Robert Inns and I'm sat next to Brian Cox who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series. Primarily Eels. And what else? It was fascinating, though. The eels. But we're not just doing eels, are we? We're doing a bit. Brain computer interfaces,

timekeeping, fusion, monkey business, cloud, signs of the North Pole, and eels. Did I mention the eels? Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sir Gass O.C? Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, the Regency era.

You might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. But the Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. And on the vulgar history podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era. Vulgar history is a women's history podcast, and our Regency era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time. That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more

radical than you might have thought. We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era. Listen to vulgar history wherever you get podcasts.