C (5:42)

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

B (5:44)

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?

C (6:00)

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 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.

B (6:50)

And that's all of our experience that, that we like things to be simple. But I guess 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 is better. But in this case, that won't work.

C (7:12)

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.

B (7:39)

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?

C (7:52)

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

B (8:40)

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 have to explain how the eyeball works to sixth graders, you're going to have to make it pretty simple.

C (9:00)

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 Randall Monroe, who is a web comic 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 1000 for the thousand most common words is not in there. So you have to use ten hundred. It does show as an exercise that you can really, really get there on most topics.

B (9:42)

How so how do you do that?

A (9:44)

How do you.

B (9:45)

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

C (9:51)

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. 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.

B (10:55)

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

C (11:02)

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. 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 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 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, 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, 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 down another level. You can get to the famous Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Physiological needs, love and belonging needs, all these different pieces so you can connect the things 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 a number of years. And one thing I tell my students every semester, it's a famous quote by Theodore Levitt, who's 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 get that vote, get that donation, whatever it is you're trying to move people to.

B (13:53)

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.

C (14:03)

Oh, absolutely. So one of the things I, 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 is speaking the same way? If everybody at the conference has the same type of slide, how 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, 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 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, right? Every single one of them that's on the top of the best seller list from Mark Manson to Sarah Knight, 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, habits of highly effective people. When you look at it in that context, well as 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. 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.

B (16:09)

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.

C (16:24)

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 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.

B (17:19)

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. I've learned from experience that hiring isn't easy, even when you know exactly who you're looking for. Running a business doesn't automatically make you good at hiring people. It's a skill and it takes time, sometimes too much time. That's why I like Indeed. It makes the whole process faster and easier, and the results are better. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Instead of struggling to get your job post noticed, Indeed. Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out. Your listing jumps right to the top of the page for the people you actually want to reach, and that saves you days, maybe weeks of waiting. And the numbers back it up according to Indeed data. Sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed get 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. What I like most is there are no monthly subscriptions, no long term contracts. You only pay for results. And while I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed Worldwide. It's that fast. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com something just go to Indeed.com something right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast, indeed.com something terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. We frequently talk here about AI and how to use it. And I've just started using something that you need to know about called Notion. Now. If you've ever felt like there just aren't enough hours in the day, you've got notes here, projects there, emails everywhere. You're going to love what Notion has built. It's called the Notion Agent and it's like having another version of you that actually finishes your work. Here's how I use it. After I finish an interview or a meeting, my Notion Agent reads through the notes, pulls out the action items, and then puts them in the right pages inside Notion. It even tags teammates automatically, which means I can focus on creative work instead of chasing details. Notion brings all your notes, docs and projects into one connected space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and it's actually fun to use. With AI built right in, you spend less time switching between tools and more time creating great work. And now with Notion Agent, your AI doesn't just help with work, it finishes it. Try Notion now with notion agent@notion.com something that's all lowercase letters notion.com something to try your new AI teammate notion agent today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show notion.com something 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.

C (21:06)

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. Bad genetics. I go to the dentist one day and 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 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 not in plain English, when it's in dental speak, I'm not going to get it. And you know what? I flossed every single day since that dental appointment.

B (22:21)

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.

C (22:37)

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 is great, but clear beats clever every time.

B (22:56)

Well, talk about that, because there does seem to be this idea that if you can be clever, that you hook people better, that clever is better than just plain and simple.

C (23:09)

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 non profit 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, you know, 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, and shouts. Tobacco kills 1200 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 that looks like a pretty set of words and slogan from Philip Morris that they were court ordered to have anti smoking PSAs that, that said think, don't smoke. Think, don't smoke. They had a cool commercial with, you know, some teenagers in a diner. Whole thing 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 1200 people a day. Ever think about taking a day off? That significantly decreased attitude towards smoking amongst that same group.

B (25:15)

Well, but it, 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.

C (25:31)

There's a challenge that a lot of you see this in politics a lot, to be honest. Sounds a lot of 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 are 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, 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 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 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, in electoral politics over the past few years.

B (27:32)

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's still clear as a bell. Everybody that's seen it remembers it. And the point is made in six words.

C (28:01)

Oh, yeah, right. And again, that is a super salient ad. When 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, 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.

B (28:35)

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 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.

C (29:06)

Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

B (29:09)

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A (33:18)

Hi Mike. It's great to be here.

B (33:20)

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? 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?

A (33:41)

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.

B (33:59)

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?

A (34:12)

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 going to 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. 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 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 look like pockets today.

B (35:26)

And what did people do before pockets?

A (35:29)

Well, everyone has always had bags. I mean, bags have been around forever, for millennia. I don't know. Think of Otzi 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 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.

B (36:09)

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.

A (36:27)

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 womenswear 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.

B (37:30)

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 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 purses are so common that without one, you stand out.

A (37:56)

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

B (38:33)

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.

A (38:44)

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.

B (39:10)

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?

A (39:20)

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 mess ups before you get it to work. Claire McCardell, 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.

B (40:30)

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.

A (40:47)

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?

B (41:16)

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, it doesn't go anywhere. It just.

A (41:29)

And isn't that doorway to nowhere so frustrating?

B (41:33)

Yeah, yeah.

A (41:34)

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

B (41:52)

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.

A (42:02)

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 and get at them. But once women's wear leaves behind big skirts and corseted waists and moves into the modern era. So think by the 1910s, 1920s, pockets begin 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.

B (43:06)

There is a sense I've always had, like in businessware, 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.

A (43:28)

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 Rudolphski 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 her 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, too bulgy. Of course, this has also been the reason that women's wear is 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 the 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 weeks later, she receives the dress. It has not a single pocket, and the dressmaker wins the day. Beauty trumps function in this case.

B (45:24)

One thing I think 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 yet it's a very convenient place to put your hands, I think.

A (45:53)

Hands automatically seem to search out pockets. I agree with you. 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. 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 Nemerov, 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 svelte and cool. Just kind of gesture with your hands in your pockets.

B (47:12)

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

A (47:16)

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 out that gesture as rude.

B (47:28)

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.

A (47:54)

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.

B (48:12)

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. It looks like you're kind of cool.

C (48:29)

Right.

A (48:29)

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 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. 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. 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.

B (49:23)

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 I 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?

A (50:08)

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 breast coat 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. And no one can just slip their hand in and steal anything.

B (50:45)

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?

A (50:56)

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 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.

B (51:47)

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.

A (52:09)

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

B (52:14)

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A (53:55)

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