The Power of Making Things Simple & How Pockets Changed Everything - SYSK Choice

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:31Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  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-inch hole. They don't want the thing, they want the thing does for them.

• 1:01Mike Carruthers?

  Also, how anger can be an incredible motivator. And the fascinating story of pockets. And why there are more pockets for men than women.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  Another interesting piece about pockets is that in menswear, it's part of doing business. In womenswear, it's often sort of thrown out because it takes too much time. First thing to go are pockets.

• 1:25Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

  Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. 1,000 people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash.

• 2:00Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing, but with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:44Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  Hi. Welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. And I want to start today by talking about sleep. And of course, you know that getting enough sleep matters, but it may matter more than you realize. There was a study of over 7,000 high school students that showed that A students average 15 more minutes of sleep per night 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 seven hours of sleep per night, and most people need more than that to function at their best.

• 3:53Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 4:12Mike Carruthers?

  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 Guttmann. 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.

• 4:56Mike Carruthers?

  Hey, Ben, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Mike. Great to be here.

• 5:00Mike Carruthers?

  So I love this message because it'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?

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Well, the essence of why simple is better is 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 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,

• 6:00Speaker 02

  well, 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.

• 6:06Mike Carruthers?

  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. But I get that simple's better, but in this case, that won't work.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I mean, there's the famous quote, which is misattributed to Mark Twain often, 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.

• 6:55Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 7:07Speaker 02

  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. Corporate mergers are complex. The human eyeball. All these things are really, 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 so. It's

• 7:46Speaker 02

  when we pull it in the complex direction. And that is what I believe is the root of most of our communication problems.

• 7:56Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I guess a lot of it, too, is who your audience is. Because, I mean, you could, yeah, the eyeball's very complicated, but you could make it a lot simpler, depending on who you're talking to. If you have to explain how the eyeball works to sixth graders, you're gonna have to make it pretty simple.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And actually, one of the pieces of inspiration in some of the work I have here is a version really close to that, actually. So Randall 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 Supreme Court. And distilled them using just the thousand most common words in the English language and use that to explain the electromagnetic spectrum, all these different interesting things. And there's a humorous result because even the word 1,000 for the thousand 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.

• 8:58Mike Carruthers?

  How so? How do you do that? How do you get your brain in that mindset of let's make this easy?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  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

• 9:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:11Mike Carruthers?

  And then what? Don't you have to consider your audience before you do much of anything else?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So the first piece, really, if you, once you kind of understand the mindset of that we're optimizing for ease, not for brevity, is to look at, I've identified five different principles 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've 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 what the thing does for us. And if you look at also all the, the science about how we remember things and how we, we perceive things, it all lines up in that same direction too.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  We care about lots of things, but 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. A toothpaste might have a mint flavor to it. Okay, that's nice, but we don't really want a toothpaste. We don't really want mint flavor. What we want is, well, so what? We 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 stop this. If you ask, so what again? Say, well, I have a mint flavor, so what? I have fresh breath, so what?

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Well, that means I'm going to have a better date tonight, right? And if you even ask it a third time, you go down another level, you can get to the famous Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They have physiological needs, love and belonging needs, all these different pieces. So you can connect the things that you, that you can see, hear, 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, 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 at Baruch College here in New York for, for a number of years. And one thing I tell my students every semester, it's a famous quote by Theodore Levitt,

• 12:28Speaker 02

  who was a 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 going to be ahead 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 hole. They don't want the thing that one of the thing does for them. And it's tempting to go to the thing, because again, we see that. It's very easy to kind of crack open our senses and pick one of those things. But it's harder to do the work that would actually connect and make that sale and make that, make, get, get that vote, get that donation, whatever it is you're trying to, to move people to.

• 13:09Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  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 contrast 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, is everybody at the conference 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, you know, and use a curse word, use, you know, speak in rhyme, do something that's going to be a little bit different. The framework

• 14:03Speaker 02

  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, in the business aisle, personal development space, has had a curse word in it, right? Every single one of them, that's on the top of the bestseller 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, Seven Highly Effective

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Habits, 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, those things get remembered, they get purchased, they get read, they get talked about.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:25Mike Carruthers?

  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, eh, it's no big deal. It's not shocking, so it loses its effect.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  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 times. It broke the app. It was the most successful 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

• 16:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:35Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 16:53Speaker 05

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• 17:17Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  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 punchbowl 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.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  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, use a 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 receive for me to understand it, for me to take action on it. When it's not in that language, 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 flossed every single day since that dental appointment.

• 18:52Mike Carruthers?

  So you had said earlier that, you know, being simple doesn't mean brief, but it often does mean brief because when you think of the messages that you remember, they tend to be brief. They don't tend to be, you know, 84 pages of baloney.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:26Mike Carruthers?

  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 clever is better than just plain and simple.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Well, there's an interesting thing that happens, at least in 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 under the label "Truth," which I'm sure many folks are familiar with, that had a very famous ad that was, that featured a bunch

• 20:24Speaker 02

  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 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, that 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."

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Think, don't smoke. They had a cool commercial of, you know, some teenagers in a diner, a whole thing.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Turns out, when researchers look back on this, this was a couple decades ago, and they look and they say, okay, 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 attitudes toward smoking amongst that same group.

• 21:45Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but it, and, and 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.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  There's a challenge that a lot of, you see this in politics a lot, to be honest. It sounds a lot like communicators have with too much abstraction and nothing for people to kind of grab on to. People want, when they're making a, 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 are you buying that? Or why do you vote for that guy? Regardless of what everybody thinks of, of either candidate's politics, you can just look back to the 2016 election as a, 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

• 22:43Speaker 02

  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 prime, in that primary, he has a 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 do 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 all these kind of big garish

• 23:27Speaker 02

  red hats, but it was something that was incredibly effective as a single piece of messaging that, 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 Trumps 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 electoral politics over the past few years.

• 24:03Mike Carruthers?

  One of my favorite examples, 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 still clears a bell, everybody that's seen it remembers it, and the point is made in six words.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, right? And again, that is a super salient ad. Everything else is this colorful, polished, you know, high-octane, you know, 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 very visceral image, as well as that punchy tagline, it becomes something that you remember, right? We remember what's different, we notice what's different. And that's one of the keys to any form of effective communication.

• 25:05Mike Carruthers?

  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 Guttmann 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.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike, it's been a pleasure.

• 26:12Mike Carruthers?

  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, it 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 Hannah 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."

• 26:57Mike Carruthers?

  Hi Hannah, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Hi Mike, it's great to be here.

• 27:01Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:40Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  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 breeches around like 1550 or so. And those breeches were this 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 gonna, I'm not gonna attach this purse to your belt anymore. Why don't I see if I can stuff it inside these really big breeches? And they do look sort of improvised.

• 28:38Speaker 03

  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 breeches. 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 in tailor's invoices separately. So they were this newfangled device and they looked a lot more like bags than they looked like pockets today.

• 29:07Mike Carruthers?

  And what did people do before pockets?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Well, everyone has always had bags. I mean, bags have been around forever, for millennia. I don't know, 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 3000 B.C. 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.

• 29:50Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  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, women's wear designers who've insisted on

• 30:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:11Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  I think that's a wonderful observation.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  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 improv, 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 20th century called the purse a badge of servitude. And there have certainly been some women who just don't like carrying it.

• 32:14Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  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-shaped pockets that we have, that we're used to.

• 32:51Mike Carruthers?

  And are pockets hard to put into clothes? Like, was there any resistance? Like, oh, God, this is gonna make our job so much more difficult to making, to make clothes this way?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  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, that 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, you know, mess-ups before you get it to work. Claire McCardle, 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,

• 33:46Speaker 03

  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 womenswear, it's often sort of thrown out because it takes too much time. Fast fashion especially. First thing to go are pockets.

• 34:11Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  In your suit, really?

• 34:29Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  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 are, 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 Mike, I'm wondering if that's what you, what you have. Or is it a real fake pocket and there's no pocket bag attached?

• 34:57Mike Carruthers?

  I can think of a sport coat I have in my closet that has a very fake pocket. It is, looks like a pocket from the outside, but it goes no, it's like a doorway to nowhere. It doesn't, it doesn't go anywhere. It just.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  And isn't that doorway to nowhere so frustrating?

• 35:14Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think, I think that's the experience of many, um, many people wearing women's wear. Like, you know, where, when, 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.

• 35:32Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  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. You could reach them through a slit. Uh, and you know, get at them. But once women's wear leaves behind big skirts and, um, 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.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  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, um, uh, and to express in sort of fun ideas, but also just fun clothing.

• 36:47Mike Carruthers?

  There is a sense I've always had, like in business wear, 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, and it, that yeah, it's great to have pockets, just don't use them very much.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  And he drew this beautiful, um, sort of, uh, 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, uh, yes, I take your point. The pockets aren't always so functional, especially if they, if they're sort of too, 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. Um, there's a wonderful story about the American women's rights advocate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  And she, in 1895, writes this letter to the, 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 bulge you out just awful. And Stanton thinks she's won her argument, but she hasn't. And a couple of 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.

• 39:04Mike Carruthers?

  One thing I think every, every man, at least, has the experience of, at some point, you realize you can put your hands in your pockets. But then you're often criticized, "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, and yet, you know, it's, it's a very convenient place to put your hands.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  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 in their trouser pockets. Trouser pockets locate to lust. You know, that's the reason that all those etiquette guides say, "Take your hands out of your pockets." Right, they're placed in and around the erogenous zones, according to the poet Harold Nemirov. However, it's always also been really attractive.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  And it starts, you know, 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 svelte and cool, just kind of gesture with your hands in your pockets.

• 40:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, and it's also nice, on a cold day, to have a place to keep your hands warm.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. Yeah, 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 out that gesture as rude.

• 41:09Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I agree with you. That's right. And I think there's also codes in the military. The US 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.

• 41:53Mike Carruthers?

  But I think it also can project confidence, kind of a casual confidence. If you're at a party and you're, you know, leaning against the wall with your hand in your pockets, you certainly don't look nervous. It looks like you're kind of, you know, cool.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  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, they're not with you. They're not engaged with you.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  And so orators and politicians and people who study gesture all have to admit that even though the hand isn't making any moment, movement, it is also expressive in the pocket.

• 43:04Mike Carruthers?

  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, like the pocket for a watch?

• 43:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:25Mike Carruthers?

  What do you think the future of pockets is? Or do we have a sense of where that's going? Are we gonna have more pockets, fewer pockets, no pockets? Where are we headed?

• 44:37Speaker 03

  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 jean 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 cellphone. 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.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  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.

• 45:28Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 45:50Speaker 03

  Thanks so much, Mike. Those are really fun questions.

• 45:55Mike Carruthers?

  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

• 46:40Mike Carruthers?

  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 a negative emotion. You can use it to your advantage. And that is something you should know. If someone asks you, hey, you listened to any good podcasts lately? I hope you will mention this one and suggest they give a listen. I'm Micah Rathers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.