Brett & Kate McKay 265 posts 0 comments

Discipline is essential to every success in life. It establishes the stable, well-ordered ground that allows an individual to set and achieve goals. It prevents the ensnaring, vice-filled traps that torpedo advancement. It creates the…
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It’s graduation season, which means you may be looking for a good gift for a young man heading into a new stage of life.Books are usually a safe bet for a graduation gift, especially the kind a young man will actually find useful. Over…
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The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Kate recently wrote a great piece on Dying Breed, pulling out seven insights modern folks can get from this short story/novella published in 1909. I’d known about “The Machine Stops” for a long time,…
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I haven’t touched a barbell much since January. I’ve been in a leaning out/hypertrophy/mobility-focused season of my training (highly recommend having seasons to your training!). I’ve been working exclusively with dumbbells and my cable…
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in: Health, Health & Fitness Brett & Kate McKay • May 5, 2026 You hear a lot today about how our ample screentime is affecting our mental health. But how is it affecting our bodies, and how is that impact on our…
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How many streaming services are you paying for right now? If you had to write the number down from memory, could you get within five dollars of the actual monthly total? When was the last time you logged into that fitness app that’s been…
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If you’ve been following AoM long enough, you know I like philosophy. I’ve written about philosophy on the site and talked to lots of philosophers on the podcast. Philosophy isn’t some esoteric practice for me. It’s practical. I turn to…
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While we often think of life as linear, my guest’s own life, along with a decade of research, has taught him that it’s anything but. In his latest book, What to Make of a Life, Jim Collins unpacks the cyclical pattern life actually…
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Growing up in the 80s and 90s, if my dad wasn’t watching In the Heat of the Night on our wood-paneled television, he was sitting in his recliner with a book in his hand. But not just any book. Popular, mass-market paperbacks. Thick ones,…
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Few things have captured the passion, the sometimes obsession, of men like the motorcycle. There’s no mystery as to why this is. Motorcycles represent a peculiar combination of several manly elements: danger, speed, singular focus,…
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1984 by George Orwell. My 15-year-old son, Gus, has been digging into dystopian literature lately. He recently finished this classic novel and thoroughly enjoyed it. According to Gus, 1984 is “packed with high tension” and “really…
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in: Career & Wealth, Podcast, Wealth Brett & Kate McKay • April 21, 2026 Building substantial personal wealth can feel difficult and out of reach. But my guest says that even those with modest means can, with a few…
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The other day, as I was driving my kids to school in our Toyota 4Runner, I noticed a dashboard light indicator turn on. It was a yellow exclamation point inside a horseshoe shape: check tire pressure. I flipped my dashboard display to…
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In most modern high schools, P.E. is a complete blow-off class — something to take when you don’t play a sport, and have to fulfill a health/fitness-related elective. Participants often sit on the bleachers and talk, or half-heartedly…
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Pandora. This was my music player of choice when it launched in the late 2000s. Like a lot of people, I slowly migrated to Spotify and forgot about it. I’ve been souring on Spotify lately, for a variety of reasons. One is that the…
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in: Behavior, Character, Podcast Brett & Kate McKay • April 14, 2026 When people visit a therapist’s office for help with their depression, they often don’t find the relief they’re seeking. That’s because much of the…
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A few years ago, red light therapy started showing up everywhere I looked, and it’s still getting a lot of attention. Fitness influencers evangelize it for muscle recovery, fat loss, and metabolic health. Beauty influencers say it will…
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Ever since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to know how to give a commanding whistle with my fingers in my mouth. You know. The kind you see people give in old movies when they’re hailing a taxi or trying to get the peanut guy’s attention at the…
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The Past Life of Cardboard Millionaires. Twelve-year-old me was convinced my baseball card collection was going to make me rich. I still have the album of my most valuable cards from 1994, carefully sleeved, waiting for that big payday.…
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Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, writer, and one of the most influential spiritual voices of the 20th century — a man preoccupied with solitude, silence, and the demands of the inner life.He’s best known for his spiritual…
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