The Power of Doing Less

Today on Bring Back the Porch you can discover how slowing down can enhance your life. Brian speaks with Carl Honoré, the advocate of the slow movement, and why it matters in today's fast-paced world. Time seems to be accelerating with every tick of the clock, many people are beginning to question the frantic pace of modern life. Why are we in such a rush? From the impact of technology to personal anecdotes, learn why embracing slowness can lead to a more fulfilling existence. Discover how slowing down can enhance well-being, creativity, and family bonds.

Chapters

00:00 The Rise of the Slow Movement
03:12 Personal Journey to Slowness
08:34 The Impact of Technology on Attention
14:26 Frantic Family Rescue: A Case Study
19:07 The Importance of Family Dinners
23:06 Reimagining Aging: The Boulder Philosophy
25:10 Cultural Perspectives on Slowness
27:52 Resources for Embracing Slowness

The slow movement, which began gaining traction in the early 2000s, advocates for a more mindful approach to life. It encourages individuals to take a step back and reconsider how they engage with their time and activities. As Honoré points out, the world is moving faster than ever, leading to a collective burnout. The slow movement counters this by promoting the idea that doing things well is more important than doing them quickly.

Honoré first introduced the concept in his book published in 2004, where he examined how society's obsession with speed affects our well-being. He argues that as life accelerates, we begin to lose sight of what truly matters: spending quality time with loved ones, engaging meaningfully in our work, and enjoying the little moments in life. His insights have inspired a global movement toward embracing a slower pace.

As technology continues to evolve, so does the pace at which we live. Honoré discusses the potential of AI and other advancements, which can either free us from mundane tasks or contribute to an overwhelming sense of urgency. 

With the rise of smartphones and constant connectivity, many find themselves overwhelmed by information. Honoré refers to cell phones as "weapons of mass distraction," which not only fragment our attention but also disconnect us from the world around us.

Honoré shares a poignant personal story that led to his advocacy for the slow movement. He recalls a moment when he realized he was rushing through life, even in the simplest of tasks, like reading a bedtime story to his son. This revelation served as a wake-up call, prompting him to reconnect with the importance of slowing down and savouring life's moments.

Despite the benefits of slowing down, many individuals face societal pressure to keep up with a fast-paced lifestyle. Honoré highlights the stigma surrounding slowness, where taking time for oneself is often viewed as laziness or lack of ambition. This cultural bias can prevent people from embracing the slow movement, even when they recognize its benefits.

Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of the need for balance. Many companies, even in fast-paced industries like tech and finance, are beginning to recognize the importance of employee well-being and are encouraging practices that promote slowness. Honoré notes that organizations are increasingly exploring ways to help their staff disconnect from the hustle and bustle of work to recharge and improve productivity.

Honoré expresses hope for the future as younger generations are at the forefront of the slow movement. Initiatives like "stacking" where friends place their phones in the centre of the table during meals, demonstrate a collective desire to cherish real-life connections over virtual distractions. This shift indicates a cultural change towards valuing presence over productivity.

The slow movement is not just about taking a break; it's about rethinking our relationship with time and prioritizing what truly matters. By embracing slowness, we can improve our lives, reduce stress, and cultivate deeper connections with ourselves and others. As Carl Honoré illustrates, slowing down can lead to a richer, more fulfilling life.

Resources

Carl Honoré's Website - https://carlhonore.info
30 Days to Slow Book - https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Slowness-Challenging-Cult-Speed/dp/0060750510/
Ted Talk: How to Slow Down - https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_in_praise_of_slowness
Ted Talk: Why We should Embrace Aging- https://www.ted.com/talks/carl_honore_why_we_should_embrace_aging_as_an_adventure

Guest links

Twitter: @carlhonore
Threads: @carlhonore
Bluesky: @carlhonore
Instagram: @carlhonore
Facebook: @carlhonorepage and @carlhonore
Pinterest:@carlhonore
Linkedin: @carlhonore
TikTok: @carlhonoreofficial

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Transcript

0:01

Let's pause for a moment so we can share some exciting news. We're proud to announce that I work here at Bring Back the Porch is getting noticed from October to the end of January. Videos and reels viewed more than 1 million times. Some of those viewers could be your customers sponsoring Bring Back the Porch is a great way to get your message in front of them, too. If you'd like to support our work here at Bring Back the Bunch, we ask you to go to our website and bring back the porch. Com and follow the links. Thank you for your support. I was thinking before we got on, you know, I love the idea of a porch I grew up in in Edmonton. We didn't have a porch. I guess we had a deck at the back, but our porch at the front. But the the spirit of the porch, to me is very much the spirit of slow in a sense, because the whole point of a porch you don't rush on a porch, right? The porch is not somewhere where you, you you you worry about productivity or optimizing your experience on the porch. You know, the porch is where you stop being a human doing and become a human being, right? It's This episode of Bring Back the Porch, brought to you by Bernie Leahy, River Street Realty. Let's get you home. I had the good fortune of attending a presentation from today's guest, Carl Honoré, back in, Medicine Hat in February. It was very enlightening. The movement itself, the slow movement that you, I guess first wrote about in 2004, is slowly catching on, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's happened in the interim. You started this in 2004. That seems like a long time ago. You've written several books since then. Where are we today? I think that the slow revolution, if you want to call it that, is it has been growing slowly, but more recently it's been growing quickly. I think that as the world gets faster and every moment of the day begins to feel like a race against the clock, even for children, we're bumping up against the limits of what we can take in terms of speed. And so the counter current for slowness is growing and growing fast. You're seeing more and more movements, more and more people of all ages looking for ways to dial it down, to do things well instead of quickly. I think you recently updated that first book as well, with a sort of, I guess a second edition. Yeah. I mean, I constantly updating it with sort of new forwards and so on, but I'm actually thinking now of writing a whole new book about slow, because I just feel like everything has moved on in a quantum leap sort of fashion with AI and stuff, that it's maybe time to take another step back and and dive deep into the whole question of pace, speed, slowness. And in the 21st century. AI that is that that's a that's a dirty word right now. AI because it seems like it is moving faster and faster, and a lot of people are beginning to worry about what that is going to do to our way of life. Is it going to give us more time because we won't have to do a lot of things that, the machines are going to take over and do for us? I mean, you're asking me if I have a crystal ball? And the short answer is no. I don't think even the people who are building the I know where it's going to take us. It feels like it could be a tectonic shift. I mean, the optimistic view is that it takes off our backs a lot of menial work and then frees us up to slow down and to enjoy our lives more fully. That's maybe slightly too optimistic because it's it's threatening to take over cognitive work, thinking work, intellectual and creative work as well. And if you take that away from human beings, I'm kind of not sure what's left. I, I don't know, I think there are a lot of big seismic questions we need to wrestle with at the moment. And and I worry that we're not wrestling with them. On the contrary, the AI industry in particular is just putting its head down and going faster and faster and faster. They're not interested in pushing pause and asking big questions such as why? You know what is this AI. For the. Best version of it, right? They just simply want to get it out the door and get to whatever they imagine to be the finish line first. And that historically has ended badly. So I, I'm a natural optimist, but I'm feeling some pangs of worry here as we move, hurtling towards whatever this finish line is going to be with AI. Let's go back in time to the moment when you realized that you needed to slow down. I think you were in your son's bedroom and you were trying to give him the Reader's Digest version of a fairy tale. It was while I was so fast that my version of Snow White had three dwarves rise up the snow. My son would be like, why not? But a grumpy. And the moment I realized that, I just lost my my mind, my compass was when I caught myself flirting with buying a book I heard about called The one Minute Bedtime Story. So Snow White in 60s. And when I heard about this book, my first thought was literally, Hallelujah! Get me that book now from Amazon drone delivery. But then thankfully, a second reaction kicked in and it was it was one of those light bulb overhead moments. And I thought to myself, whoa, what am I doing here? I am racing through my life instead of living it. And that was me hitting rock bottom and realizing that I had I had to I had to relearn the lost art of slowing down. I had to reconnect with my inner tortoise, if you like. And that that thankfully turned my life around and gave me my life's work, if you like. Right. Because it it for me to becoming the global spokesman, I suppose the pioneer of this whole slow movement which which is kind of funny if you look back to who I was before, because I'm a naturally fast person, I kind of come from a road runner background. So to find myself now traveling around the world telling everyone how wonderful it is to slow down, even now, it seems kind of funny to me. Well, as journalists, we always face deadlines. We're always up against the clock, so we've got to do things quickly, get it out of the way and move on to the next thing. So we are, I guess, conditioned from the time we pick up that first pen or hover over the keyboard to get it done and get it done now. Yeah. The trouble, of course, is and it's other professions have similar pressures to hit the deadline and get it all done by a certain time. That's okay. Up to a point in the workplace where the trouble is you get stuck in deadline mode, so you put in your shift at work, you know, with that deadline ethos or mindset. Then you come home and you're eating dinner like you're on deadline. You're you're reading bedtime stories to your child. So you're on a deadline when you're not right. And that's a lot of what this slow revolution is about, is. It's about a wake up call. It's reminding us that often we have more time than we think, and often we can slow down. And not only can we, we should, because we'll end up doing things better and enjoying them more. The trouble is that we get we've wound ourselves up into this frenzy where we're convinced ourselves that every moment is a dash to the finish line, and if we slow down, we are losers. We're boring or stupid. We're lazy, we're unproductive, we're roadkill. When in fact the opposite is true that by slowing down judiciously at the right moments, finding the right pace of the moment. So sometimes fast, but also other times slow, you're going to you're going to thrive in whatever it is you're doing at work, at home, whatever it is, you will do it better and enjoy it more. I like in one of the bios I read, I think you referred to yourself as a rehabilitated speed aholic. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's kind of what I was saying before that I was I was a car carrying Road Runner and I'm no longer that, thankfully. Yeah. What was the first reaction when you started trying to convince people to slow down? This is the way to go. Where was the pushback? Where did it come from? Well, I noticed right away that there was at a personal level, there was skeptics because people thought, well, what are you you're so fast, how can you be slowing down? So I had to get over that hump first. But then when I went out into the world and started talking to people that didn't know me about slowing down, I bumped up against the same resistance. And it was this. On one hand, people would say, yes, I need to slow down. I am chasing my tail. I am living like a headless chicken. I'm not. I'm touching the surface here. I'm not really living. But. And then the big butt would come in, the butt would be I can't. There's no choice. We have. We have to go fast. I need more, more time to go faster, fast, you know? So. So I came up against that a lot. People understood in their guts, right in their bones that slowing down would be good for them, but they felt they couldn't. And part of that, I think, is the taboo against slowness in our culture that slow is a dirty word. It's a four letter word. It's a byword for stupid, lazy, all the all the bad stuff. And I think that means that even when we are yearning to put on the brakes and we can feel it right in our, in our bones, that it'll be good for us to put on the brakes. We don't do it because we feel ashamed. We feel guilt. We feel afraid. We feel inertia. We've just lost the habit of slowing down. So I felt there was that kind of resistance I encountered right from the start. But that was a long time ago now. I mean, I feel like I'm not only pushing against an open door. The door is open now. Even in the workplace, in the fastest industries on the planet, people are waking up to the folly of doing everything faster. So you go to Silicon Valley, you go to Wall Street wherever, and you'll find companies, savvy companies looking for ways to help their staff tap into the power of slowness by slowing down, by not getting overloaded, by not looking at 35 screens at the same time, by having time away from work, you know, striking a balance between working and not working, all those things that are at the core of the slow philosophy, you're seeing them now finally being embraced in some of the most hurry up corners of modern life. I mean, rested, I think of how old was your son when you were reading him that story at fast speed. I guess he was probably around three, maybe 3 or 4. 3.0. And how old is he today? He's now 27, so he can read his own stories? Yes. Is he a speed aholic? No. In fact, actually, in some ways people say, what are you most proud of? And I think it's the fact that my children are both practitioners of slow, and I've never been a get on a soapbox. Here's my lecture with nine points and telling my kids what to do. I think I've always tried to lead by example and hope that they will pick up this slow wisdom by osmosis, and they have both of them live in a way that I wish I lived in. Might had lived in my 20s because in my 20s I'm like, between the tortoise and the hare, I was. I was the hare with a capital H, like five things at once rushing, never stopping my kids are not like that, right? You know, they they're engaged with the world. They're successful by most people's metrics. They they have happy lives. They have interesting jobs and wide social circles to do fun stuff. But they are not rushed either of them. It's it's kind of it's kind of lovely, actually. In fact, I saw something the other day when my daughter was back. She's 23, 324, and I came downstairs. She's sleeping in her bedroom, came downstairs. She'd already gone to bed, and I noticed that her her cell phone was outside the bedroom door on the landing. Right. It wasn't. It wasn't in the bedroom. I thought. There you go. I don't think I remember ever saying you explicitly keep your phone out of your bedroom, but they just have absorbed it along the way. One of the expressions you use that I love about cell phones and whatnot, I think you call them weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, that is an apt way to describe because you just look out the street, you watch. People are all walking like this now with their heads down. They're disconnected from the world, connected through some artificial device, and they're not paying attention to see the green grass or see the the, the flowers, the bugs, the birds, the leaves on the trees. They've lost that connection with nature. Yeah, it is. And I'm not a Luddite, right? I mean, I have I have a cell phone, I've got a MacBook. You know, these things are useful tools. The trouble is that we have become enslaved by them and we have become addicted with a capital A, we find it impossible to look away. And that, as you say, just erodes our experience of life, of the world. We we end up with fragmented attention. We end up disappearing down electronic rabbit holes, when really what life is all about is what's happening right here, right now. It's not what's happening on TikTok a million miles away according to somebody else's algorithm. And I think that more and more of us are realizing that. And one of the things that makes me optimistic for the future of the slow movement is that these days, this is one of the things I've noticed has changed in my 20 years on this crusade to slow down the world is that at the beginning, most of the slow movements were spearheaded by people I would say 30, 40, 50, that kind of age, you know, up now it's it's teenagers and 20 somethings who are at the forefront of challenging the cult of speed and looking for ways to put on the brakes, even with their gadgets. Right. I just did a an event in Paris with a European wide network called Offline clubs, started in Amsterdam a couple of years ago. Now it's everywhere across Europe. And what it is, is it's it's clubs. They organize events where, late teens, early 20 somethings come together, in a public space or a museum or beside a monument like the Eiffel Tower or whatever it is. And they just sit together and read books, like real books, physical books for a couple of hours. They don't break. No one brings a phone. They just sit in silence and read. And then afterwards they have a conversation. They chat, they listen to birds, whatever. And I didn't event for the longest five hours without any phones, with everybody under the age of 30. And just, I mean, I in my own life live a lot of time without my phone. So it's not new to me. But seeing that generation lighting up, you know, just completely absorbed in their books and then conversation and looking into each other's eyes and being present, just my heart sang. I came away from that thinking there is hope for mankind yet. And to see the young on the cutting edge of this is just so uplifting. Just one other quick example is a new social ritual, which I'm not sure if it's arrived in Canada yet, but you see it a lot in London, England, which is where I live from Alberta originally, but I live in in London and it's called stacking, and it works like this when young people, so, you know, 20 somethings, teens, whatever, go out for a coffee together or whatever, they sit around the table, everybody piles up their phones in a stack in the middle, and whoever grabs their phone first to send a message or look at TikTok pays the bill for everybody. Right. And it's just it's just a fun way of saying, we have this moment here together now. We will never have this moment again. Why ruin it by trying to be in several moments at the same time? And the fact that stacking is the invention, not of baby boomers or my generation. I'm what am I, Gen-X? We grew up without screens. This is the digital natives who are coming up with these hacks and techniques to get off screens that that for me, fills me with hope, right? Because it shows that the pendulum is swinging back from the extreme to somewhere in the middle where we use these gadgets when they're tools to be productive at work, when they're toys, to have a bit of fun, when they're platforms to connect to socially, when it's useful and then the rest of the time turning them off. Right. And being being in the real world with other real people together, because that's ultimately what makes us happy. It's what makes us fulfilled. It's what makes us human. Yeah, those slow moments together. When you were here in, February, speaking in Medicine Hat, you talked about a program that you did in Australia. I actually went with a family for 30 days and, broke them of their device habits. Walk us through how that went with you. Yeah, well, the the program is called Frantic Family Rescue, which gives you a flavor of what it was. So I was given, very fast wired families for a month, and I had to slow them down. And it was it was it was it was daunting, right. Because these these were really, really fast family and everything was moving a hundred miles an hour, everybody looking at screens. But in every case it it worked to some extent. And the one, the one case that really stood up for me was a boy called Theo, who when I met him on day one, was a complete gaming addict. Right? He was playing 6 or 7 hours a day. His parents had just thrown in the towel. They had given up, and I sat down with Theo just while he was playing and chatting to him, and I thought, I don't know if I can bring this kid back from the brink. I hate the phrase he may be a lost cause, but I thought to myself, I didn't say it out. I thought this kid may be a lost cause. What am I signed up here for? Over the space of 30 days, Theo did 180 degree turns. What I did for each of the families was I arrived on day one with a gadget box. So every gadget in the home, game consoles, tablets, phones, everything went into the gadget box for a month. No use of gadgets. And that was a pretty traumatic day for the families. There were there were tears that day. I don't just mean the kids, right? But parents were shedding tears, never going to see their phone for a month. But at the end of the month, the same thing always happened. The families would rip open the box, pull up their gadgets and start using them again, but they would use them with a much more sensible, wise, balanced, slow spirit right choosing when to use them and then the rest of the time turning them off and even Theo, he said to me at the end he said, you know what? I do like gaming and I'm going to carry on gaming, but I'm not going to game the way I did before. I'm not going to gaming evenings on the weekdays. I'm going to game a little bit on the weekends, and the rest of time I'm going to do the things that you, as in me, gave him, because what I did during the month was I didn't just pull away the the Game Boy, for, for 30 days and leave him cold turkey. I filled up that time with slow activities, so I reintroduced him to a bicycle. He'd been given a Christmas and had never ridden. It was just lying there in the garage. I got the stuff together to start building a little fort in the back garden. They had a big, big yard. It's in Australia. Introduces some other kids in the neighborhood his age that he kind of never seen or met before, and they started playing soccer and things in the street. So he fell in love with all of that childhood stuff that defined my childhood. And I'm sure yours as well, you know, that kind of free range childhood where you went out in the morning, your mum would put you out, you'd be out. You only came back at lunch if you needed something to eat, or when it got dark and your mum would be shouting, or maybe your dad dude shouting, come home, you know, dinner and you go back and play again. You'd be playing street hockey, you know, car, you know, all that stuff, all those that you know, I see them now and I'm smiling ear to ear because that was just joy. That was what made childhood what it was for me. That's what made it worth, you know, childhood worthy of the name. A lot of children have lost that because we have professionalized parenting, and we have turned childhood into a dash to perfection, right? Where kids are just rushing around with endless extracurriculars, everything, all structured activities, lots of screen time, tutoring, homework not allowed out alone. Everybody's so afraid because, you know, there's this culture of fear among parents. You feel like you open the door and you look outside. And everywhere there's a pedophile or a drunk driver or, you know, just so. So kids are wrapped in cotton wool and bubble wrap and don't get a chance to go out there and climb trees and get a scraped knee and all that kind of stuff. So that's what frantic Family Rescue, in a way, was about, was reintroducing that vibe, that energy of childhood that's been childhood since forever, until really the last generation, maybe the 90s, when it began to Peter out, kind of bring some of that back and finding that, wow, it's love it. Yeah. And they thrive on it. And parents love it too. Once they get over the kind of anxiety about, oh, I'm doing something different or this feels old fashioned or not, like what the Joneses are doing, and did it add it up? But once you get a taste of it and you see your children's face light up when they're just playing, playing freely, you hear the that music in their laughter when they're jumping through a sprinkler rather than doing come on tutoring, you know that you just feel it in your bones as a parent. This is right. This is good. And and you talk about the porch, right? That's your. Yes, of course, the philosophy of our porch people. Yeah. Have neighborly conversations over. And I was thinking before we got on, you know, I love the idea of a porch I grew up in in Edmonton. We didn't have a porch. I guess we had a deck at the back, but our porch at the front. But the the spirit of the porch, to me is very much the spirit of slow in a sense, because the whole point of a porch you don't rush on a porch, right? The porch is not somewhere where you, you you you worry about productivity or optimizing your experience on the porch. You know, the porch is where you stop being a human doing and become a human being, right? It's a place to be, to go deep, to pause, to reflect, to connect with other people, just to to watch the world go by. Right. And I just think the porch is a wonderful it's a beautiful metaphor for a lot of things that I'm talking about when I talk about the joy and the power of slow. I think a porch is a what a wonderful place to channel. Slow is a porch. Yeah, well, that's why we thought this would be a natural fit to have a discussion with you about this. I'm curious if you ever touched back with those people in Australia to see if they had any relapses. I fell out of touch with most of because this is a few years back now, but I am in touch with I'm in touch with one of the families and they carried on doing. No, actually, no. That's 2 to 2 of the families. And both of them carried on doing a lot of these, the slow things themselves, afterwards. So, so some of it did stick. Definitely. It was one family who were, very problematic. And I'm not sure I, I fear for what happened to that kid, but I probably shouldn't go too deep into the detail. Perhaps she made disciples of them, and they're spreading the word and. One. Of the other things that I really liked when you were speaking here in medicine, that was you talked about the importance of a family dinner and pulling the devices away and having time to talk about your day. Yeah, I think when people talk about what can I do to slow down family life and to connect with those deeper rhythms and connect with myself and my children. Family dinner is it's low hanging fruit, right? It's the thing that families have done for thousands of years that's, you know, the English word companion comes from the two Latin words company meaning with bread, because it's precisely when we sit down and break bread together that we are at our most close. And it's when you take away the phones and turn off the TV, and it's just the family sitting around the table, that's when those deeper subterranean connections begin to flow. That's when you see and hear each other. That's when you feel heard is when you listen. And it's also when children learn how to, you know, make an argument, how to disagree, how to, you know, be and how all those social skills that employers everywhere are telling us are withering on the vine. You know, the sitting around the table, this is the ultimate workshop for building up social acumen as well. But that's and that's a great thing in and of itself. But I think the real benefit, the real magic of eating together is, is how it builds those deep, strong bonds. Right. That and and let's face it, not every family meal, every minute is harmonious, right? Sometimes people are ill tempered. There are arguments. Sometimes someone needs to get sent away from the table to the naughty step, right? But that's part of life, right? That life involves conflict, friction, disagreements, you know, people bumping up against each other. And what better place to rehearse all of that, to try it out and test it and poke into it and learn how to navigate it, than with the people who matter to you most, the people who love you most, who hold you most, close your family right? And it's the ultimate safe space for learning how to be a person in the world. I think it's a family dinner. When we talk about time, time waits for no man. It's been said, you have, I think your last book in 2018 is called Boulder Making the Most of Our Longer Lives. You talk a little bit about what that's all about. Yeah, well, that's about reimagining and reinventing aging, right? Because it seems to me that my earlier work is about tackling the cult of speed with Boulder. I am tackling the cult of youth, taking down what I describe as the ages industrial complex, which tells us constantly that aging is a bad thing, that it's a curse, it's a punishment, it's a disease, it's a form of failure that younger is better. That, you know, being older means being written off everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom. And the truth is that that is nonsense, right? That, of course, things change as we get older that we don't like, but many things stay the same, and a lot of things actually get better, right? This is the the kind of good news angle that I'm bringing to the table here that that every age has its pros and cons and every age could be wonderful, but only if we embrace it. Embrace the present without pining for the past or shrinking in horror from the future. Only if we embrace aging as a process of opening doors instead of closing them. Only if we embrace it as an adventure. And that's, I guess, the the thrust of that book Boulder is to say, whatever age you are, you know, own it, you know, own it, and then go out there and make the most of that moment right there and show the world and yourself what you can do. And that applies to whether you're 25, 35, 65 or 105. Right? Because every chapter can be luminous, but you've got to, you know, step up and say, yeah, I am this age, I'm proud of it. And let's let's roll the dice and see what I can do with it. As you travel around the world in your speaking engagements, do you find a culture that is more open to the slow movement thought than others? Or maybe others are more resistant? Yeah, I mean, I remember when I first began researching this idea of slow and comparing across cultures, I expected that I would end up with a a league table with, you know, the top country first, second, third, fourth. But I found that it was more complicated than that because the virus of hurry really has infected every country. So so even countries that on one hand will have a strong, slow tradition. So you think of Italy, for instance, right? Italy is a country famous for its food culture. Long meals, sitting around the table. Slow food is slow. Food movement started in Italy. On the other hand, if you've ever driven on an Italian highway, you know that the Italians can go way too fast sometimes as well, right? So I think every country is a mixed bag, and I always feel that the best approach, the best solution is to look around the world and say, okay, I see that country is that that doesn't work for me there. But this might work for me in my country or my province or whatever. Alberta, Canada or something. And, and try and learn from, from wherever. I do think because this is a time where the United States is, you know, making a lot of headlines for all kinds of reasons. Right. I do think the United States, maybe it's particularly resistant to the idea of slowness, maybe more than most places. I mean, China as well as it is just roaring along in a speed vortex. But the United States has a traditional idea of itself as a kind of frontier, restless society. They're the one country in the OECD, the club of developed nations, that doesn't have statutory vacation. Right? They have, you know, there's a real hustle, hustle ethos in the US that I think, even as a Canadian, we realize is not as acute and extreme in Canada as it is in the US. So I guess you start off asking, is there one country is more resistant? I mean, I think the United States in some ways is definitely more resistant than many Western countries. But then, of course, you know, you will find slow traditions in the United States as well, right? I mean, there's a whole tradition of yoga and it's massive and meditation and also the Americans are very religious, right? There's a lot of churchgoing and church, that whole entity that springs up around church being with other people, day of rest reflection. I mean, prayer is the ultimate act of slow. It's shutting out the sound and fury of the here and now and going deep, trying to find something bigger than yourself. Those are slow traditions, and I would say the Americans certainly do a lot more than that. The Europeans do on average. So again, mixed bag, I suppose is the answer. Carl, I want you to talk a little bit about your website. You have lots of resources there for people to discover. Sure. Well, a good place to start actually, is I have a link tree which has all of my links on it, and it's just my name. It's, Carl Honoré dot info. And on that you'll find everything from all my books. I've got a couple of, tips books. Like, one book is just all tips on how to slow down. In other words, how to slow down with structured activities over 30 days. That's called 30 days to slow. I've got digital courses. I made a course for Ted. You know, Ted talks. I've had a couple of Ted talks. So my Ted talks are up there as well. One on slow, one on aging and longevity. I made a Ted course called How to Slow Down, which is actually up now online, and it's free, so anyone could do it. So that's a fun place to start, I'm finding, for people who want to dip their toe into the slow pond a little bit. So yeah. So Carla on info way more than anyone could possibly ever want to know about me. And my work is up there. It's all there in one place. Carl, I our time is up here, unfortunately. But I have enjoyed the conversation. And, I thank you for sharing your time with us. Bring back the porch. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I'm.