4.7 • 14.5K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Note: This is a rebroadcast.
It’s a tough job to manage a household. Things need to be regularly fixed, maintained, and cleaned. How do you stay on top of these tasks in order to keep your home in tip-top shape?
My guest knows his way all around this issue and has some field-tested, insider advice to offer. Charles MacPherson spent two decades as the major-domo or chief butler of a grand household. He’s also the founder of North America’s only registered school for butlers and household managers and the author of several books drawn from his butlering experience, including The Butler Speaks: A Return to Proper Etiquette, Stylish Entertaining, and the Art of Good Housekeeping.
In the first part of our conversation, Charles charts the history of domestic service and describes why the practice of having servants like a butler and maid ebbed in the mid-20th century but has made a comeback today. We then turn to what average folks who don’t have a household staff can do to better manage their homes. Charles recommends keeping something called a “butler’s book” to stay on top of household schedules and maintenance checklists. We then discuss how to clean your home more logically and efficiently. Charles shares his golden rules of house cleaning, the cleaning task you’ve probably neglected (hint: go take a look at the side of the door on your dishwasher), his surprising choice for the best product to use to clean your shower, how often you should change your bedsheets, and much more.
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| 0:00.0 | The holidays are stressful for everyone, but if you run a business, that stress gets cranked way up. |
| 0:05.2 | I still remember the first time I sold products for the art of manliness during the holidays. |
| 0:09.3 | I was living in this tiny apartment with a newborn baby, staying up late in the kitchen, |
| 0:13.1 | trying to be as quiet as possible, packing orders, printing shipping labels, and hoping I didn't mess anything up. |
| 0:18.4 | That was before Shopify. |
| 0:20.3 | Once we switched, everything changed. |
| 0:22.1 | We've used Shopify for over a decade now |
| 0:23.8 | when every holiday season runs smoother because of it. |
| 0:26.2 | Their site templates make it easy to get a great-looking store up fast. |
| 0:29.3 | The built-in AI tools help write product descriptions when you're exhausted. |
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| 0:34.5 | when everyone else is shouting for attention. |
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| 0:41.9 | If this is your first Black Friday or Cyber Monday, make it easier on yourself. Start with Shopify. |
| 0:47.4 | Sign up for your free trial at Shopify.com slash manliness. That's Shopify.com slash manliness. Shopify.com slash manliness. So earlier this year, Kate and I started a substack. It's called Dying Breed. It's a place where we can write about things that wouldn't be a good fit for art of manliness, but we wanted to write about and share anyway. Each week, we publish two articles there. First, there's Kate's wonderful short Sunday firesides. It's a great way to start your |
| 1:11.6 | week off with some reflection. And then we have a longer form article that explores topics like |
| 1:15.7 | luck, success, media theory, the intersection between technology and life, how to use technology |
| 1:21.1 | in a meaningful way. When you subscribe, you get access to over 300 articles in the archive, |
| 1:24.8 | including all of Kate's Sunday firesides, plus articles like 20 lessons from 20 years of marriage, co-written by Kate and I, what Kickagard can tell us |
| 1:32.0 | why professional sports and life can seem so boring. We have articles on luck, what philosophers |
| 1:37.0 | think about luck, a tour of our home office, and a lot, lot more. Plus, when you subscribe, you |
| 1:42.0 | can comment and connect directly with Kate and I and other dying breed readers. It's just $5 a month or $50 a year, and your subscription is a great way to support the work we do at Art of Manliness. We'd love to see you there on Dyingbreed. Head to dyingbred.net and become a member today. That's Dyingbreed.net. Thanks so much for continue support, we really appreciate you. Hey, this is Brett. We're taking a break this week from a new episode because it is Thanksgiving here in the United States. So we're going to rebroadcast episode number 973, a Butler's Guide to Managing Your Household. Hope you enjoy it. Happy Thanksgiving. Eat lots of turkey, lots of pie. We're grateful for you for listening to the show. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode. |
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