Catherine Price: Writer, Speaker, and Creator

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Foreign.

I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is remarkable people. We're going to have fun in this episode. My guest is Katherine Price. She is the author of the Power of How to Feel Alive Again. She is a science journalist, speaker, author, and teacher. She is not an improv comedian, as you'll soon hear. She helps people create a screen life balance by setting boundaries for their devices. Kathryn graduated from Yale University and UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She's a recipient of a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Reporting. Plus, she's won several awards from organizations whose names I don't know how to pronounce and I am on deadline to deliver this file. She is the author of how to Break up with youh Phone. What a great title. 101 places not to See before youe Die, the Big Sur Bakery Cookbook, and again, the book she released this week. And I recommend the Power of How to Feel Alive Again. In other words, Katherine helps people scroll less, live more, and have fun while doing so. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the fun and funny Catherine Price. I can't believe it's so hot in here.

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say. I'm rather cold right now.

No, Catherine, this is from your book where you talk about yes and oh, see, see, see.

I'm Bad at that. Oh, my goodness. That's so funny. Yes. Okay, fair enough. You're trying to get me to say yes and as an improv comedian. But in my book, as I point out, I am not good at improv comedy. I tried to be. Yes. And. But I was like, I don't know. I don't know what he's talking about.

Okay, I'm going to give you another chance. All right, so now you know what I'm trying to do.

I literally can't think of anything else to say. No, I'm really bad at improv comedy.

So this is not going to work.

No, I think this is kind of hilarious.

Okay, you tell me. You say to me.

It sure is hot in here.

You're the one who wanted to see where Epstein is right now.

I can't do it, Guy. I can't do it. I really can't. I'm very spontaneous in conversation. I cannot do this. Okay, you're welcome to make fun of me in the podcast.

People are going to be wondering, what the hell is Guy trying to do? So maybe you can explain what I'm trying to do.

Explain what the hell Guy is trying to do. Okay. So, yes, in my book, the Power of Fun, I talk about the importance of having but what I call a fun mindset, which is a version of a growth mindset, being open to opportunities for fun. And one of my suggestions is that you adopt a similar philosophy to what is encouraged in the art of improv comedy, which is yes, and which is taking whatever is presented to you and instead of shutting it down, saying, yes, and then trying to add to the situation. So in this. In the context of improv comedy, that could be a statement such as, wow, it's hot in here. To which the other player, as they're called, an improv comedy, could say something that builds upon that scene. Now, in my book, in my defense, I point out that I am actually horrible at improv comedy. It's one of the few experiences in my life that has truly embarrassed me. And I have to include examples from Tina Fey, who is an obviously excellent improviser, to even respond in the book to the statement, it's hot in here. Because I can. I am a spontaneous and fun loving person in many contexts. Improv comedy is not something I excel at personally. So she might say something like, well, you shouldn't have said, we should crawl into this dog's mouth. That's one of her examples. But Guy has just pointed out and proven that I truly am not good at acting. Or pretending, typically.

I'm not trying to make my guests look bad. I thought you would just come back and just have, like, some brilliant.

Okay, so funny. No, also, I should say I'm very literal. So when you say it's hot in here, I'm like, okay, well, I'm actually quite chilly, you know, and then I'm thinking, yeah, I'm sitting next to a radiator, but it's not really working. So.

Yes, nothing like a good, fast start to a podcast interview. So shall we proceed?

Sure, sure, let's. Yes. And our way somewhere else. Yes, we should. And I'm happy to talk about anything else that doesn't involve attending.

How is your kitchen?

My kitchen is fantastic. And I think you may be asking me that because my kitchen played a role in me writing this book. Yes, I love design and I love old details. And I, with the help of my husband, we collaborated on designing our kitchen and incorporating all sorts of what I find to be interesting architectural elements and salvage things into our kitchen, which was a very fun process.

But arguably, at the end of that kitchen story, you tell the story of holding your baby and how you were totally distracted and you were thinking, your baby's looking at you, saying, what is mom doing? I'm looking at her.

Yes. So my new book, the power of Fun, is directly inspired by my last book, which was called how to break up with your phone. And. And that book was inspired by an experience I had that you're alluding to. I mean, it's probably a number of experiences, but one that stands out in my mind where I had recently had a baby and I was up with my daughter late one night feeding her. And I had this kind of out of body experience where I saw the scene as it would appear to an outsider. And the scene was this little baby gazing up at her mother and then her mother looking down at her phone. And I just felt devastated because that was not what I wanted to be doing with my time or the impression I wanted her to have of a relationship. And what you're alluding to is the fact that, you know, whereas many people might have been looking at a news story or a post on Instagram, what I was doing was I was looking at doorknobs and hinges on ebay because we had just been in the process of renovating our kitchen when my daughter was born. She was five and a half weeks early. And even though by that point we'd finished the kitchen renovation, all my doors had doorknobs and hinges. I was still opening eBay at random moments, just as a compulsive tick, in the same way that many people do social media and scrolling through pictures of Victorian doorknobs instead of interacting and engaging with my baby. So it's a kind of absurd example of how our attention can be hijacked onto things that are ultimately really meaningless and be taken away from things that we probably truly do want to be paying attention to.

But, Kathryn, if I may be a devil's advocate and support you, I would make the case that you clearly find looking on ebay for Victorian doorknobs to be fun. So it was okay for you to do that?

I don't think it was fun. No. I think. Well, I'm at a bit of an advantage here, guy, because I spent the past two years thinking about, like, what is fun. But I would say that it was stimulating and it was a quick fix of dopamine in the same way that you get a little bit of excitement if you find a new email or a new comment or new post or you find something new. But it wasn't ultimately satisfying. I wouldn't say that. I have fond memories of the times I've spent scrolling through ebay looking at heating grates, which I also did on, you know, on ebay. So I think it was like junk food. It was like a quick fix of pleasure. But if I actually thought about what I was doing, it was not very meaningful. It didn't nourish me. And in fact, if you do it for too long, which I did, it leaves you feeling empty and gross.

I just interviewed Julia Cameron and she has.

Oh, I love that. I love her. Yeah, the artist's way.

Yes. So she has the concept of these sort of play dates, artist dates. So if you had written that one of the ways you have fun is you go to antique stores and you look at drawer pulls and knobs and doorknobs and all that, and that's how you have fun. Everyone would be swooning, saying, oh, yeah, that is such fun to go antiquing and all that. But you were doing it digitally, so why does that make it bad?

No, I don't think it's bad per se, but I would say that. I don't think that. I think that not everyone would be swooning. Some people would be like, that sounds like a miserable way to spend an afternoon. Because not everyone finds fun in the same way. And to push back on that, I actually don't think that would be fun either, because I've become much more precise about how I use the word fun. And I think there's a distinction between things that we enjoy which are legitimate. If you're truly enjoying something, by all means do it. But I think there's a difference between just enjoyment and fun. And the definition I've come to for fun is that it's a very energizing, active and engaged state that I define as being a confluence of playfulness, connection and flow. And I can tell you more about how I came to that definition if you'd like. But it requires us to be fully present in our experience and connected with something, or most often someone else. In the vast majority of cases, another person is involved, even for introverts, and to be totally undistracted and present. And by playfulness I don't mean that you have to play a game. God forbid you have to play charades. As you can tell already I would. I'm horrible at charades and I hate it. Or you know, how to play a game, you don't have to do an improv game. Just the spirit of light heartedness and just being open to whatever happens without caring too much about the outcome. And that's what I define as fun. And so I would say that I might enjoy, and indeed, indeed I do enjoy going to stores to look at doorknobs and hinges in person. But I wouldn't say that for me, that's fun per se. It's just a hobby or something that I like to do that's an enjoyable use of my time, but it's not going to nourish me for days afterwards to think, man, that was a gorgeous doorknob.

And since you mentioned it, tell us how you did come to this three factor definition of true fun.

I started by just noticing the feeling or trying to put to a word, a word to a feeling that I started to have when I started this guitar class. So to back up a bit, when I wrote how to break up with your phone, a lot of that obviously was about reclaiming time from devices. It's not about dumping your phone, but it's about creating better boundaries with technology so that you make sure that when you are using your phone or any of its apps, it's the result of a conscious choice rather than some kind of manipulative design trick that's there to essentially make money for somebody else. Now what I came to conclude after I started taking back more time for my devices is that you end up, unsurprisingly with a lot more free time. And so the next step in the process Is to figure out what you actually want to do with your free time. And I had this sort of horrifying moment, actually, in this very room, Where I realized that I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was deliberately not spending time on my phone. In this particular afternoon, my daughter was asleep, she was napping, and my husband was out. I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do. So I freaked out, decided that meant I was waiting to die. And I thought, well, I don't want to just be waiting to die. I have to figure out what I want to spend my attention on. And I ended up signing up for this guitar class Because I always said I had asked a lot of people when I was researching how to break up with your phone, what's something you always say you want to do but supposedly don't have time for? And my personal answer to that question. And I encourage listeners to ask themselves that question, too. My answer was to learn to play the guitar, because I had one. I play piano. I just never gotten around to the guitar. And I signed up for this class, and I started to realize pretty early on that this hour and a half on Wednesday nights Was quickly becoming a highlight of my week. And it was interesting because at first I thought, well, you know, I like music. I'm learning a new skill. Maybe that's what's causing this energized feeling that really lingered for days afterwards. But then I realized it wasn't the skill acquisition, it wasn't the activity itself that was causing this feeling. There was something bigger going on. And the feeling, the best word I could come up with to describe this feeling of energy and buoyancy and lightheartedness and joy was fun. I was having fun with these other people. So I became very interested in trying to nail down what the definition of fun is. And when I looked it up in the dictionary, the words that I found and the descriptions and definitions I found didn't adequately capture what I was feeling. They would say things like lighthearted pleasure or in enjoyment. And that was true. But there was something deeper for me going on. So I realized I would have to create my own definition. So I came up with this hypothesis based on my own experiences of playful, connected flow. And then to test that out, I recruited this whole big group of people, over a thousand people, for what I called the fun squad. And I asked people to recount experiences from their own lives to me that they would describe as having been, quote, so fun. I hadn't come up with the idea of true fun And I didn't tell them my proposed definition. I wanted to see what they would say. So they shared these anecdotes. And then I asked them for their definition of what fun is. And only after they'd done that, on the next page of the survey, did I propose my definition of playful connected flow. And asked them, would this accurately describe the experiences you just recounted to me? And the vast majority of people said, yes, that actually really does capture it. And when I read through their proposed definitions, I saw a similar energy running through it where it wasn't just light hearted pleasure, there was something much more profound going on, something deeply joyful about the stories. And they stood out in people's minds as peak experiences from their lives in a way that went way beyond. Yeah, I liked looking at those doorknobs in that salvage store. So that's how I came up with the definition. And I just became obsessed with what that feeling was and then looking into what it does for us. Because I really, really love examining things that we take for granted, but that upon reflection, we realize we actually have never thought critically about. One of my previous books was about the history of vitamins. And that was the same reason my husband turned to me one day, he said, what's a vitamin? And I opened my mouth to answer him. I had been writing about food and nutrition at that point, and I was like, I actually have no idea. And so I spent three years writing a book about vitamins. And the same thing with phones. I became curious, what are the effects of these devices that all of us carry with us at all times? What effects are they having on us? And then subsequently, what is fun? We use that word all the time. We talk about fun casually in all sorts of contexts, but what does it really mean? And then how can we use a more precise definition of fun to make much better choices about how we spend our time?

I think many people listening may be wondering, she's mentioned it two or three times. How about just giving us the short course on how to break up with your phone, which, by the way, is one of the world's greatest titles, I have to say.

Oh, thank you. I like that title too. It's really hard to sell that book because at that point no one was really interested in it. It was only one place I was interested in buying the book. And it's been so cool to see it really resonate with people around the world. I would say the first step would be to ask yourself what you actually want to spend your time on. Most people will start at this place of restriction and hacks, like, they'll say, oh, I just spent too much time on my phone. I need to spend less time on my phone. And then they'll turn their screen to black and white for a day, and then that fails. They give up and they feel like they are horrible people, which is not what your goal is. So I encourage you instead to start by asking yourself, what is important to you? What do you want to spend time on? And you can use fun to help you answer that question, which we can talk about more, but what are your priorities? Because once you recognize what your actual priorities are, it becomes easier to contrast that with how you're actually spending your time. You know, you'll say, I want to spend time on this hobby or this passion or this person. In reality, I'm spending two hours a day scrolling through Instagram. And once you see that contrast laid out for you, it becomes a lot easier to change your habits not from a place of restriction, but out of true desire. You just won't want to spend as much time on your phone because you've got other things you'd rather do instead. And if you can reach a point of feeling disgusted by the techniques being used against you by many of the apps that suck the most time from us, that's a very motivating emotion to get you to just not want to spend time on them because you got better things to do. So I would say the philosophical approach is very important to start with. And then once that's in place, you can start making changes to your phone itself and to your habits surrounding your phone use and to your physical environment to create better boundaries with your phone so that you can keep the parts that are useful or truly enjoyable for you and minimize or eliminate the things that are not. So it becomes a matter of setting your goals and then using those goals to help you set better boundaries.

It's time for true confession. So usually I sleep with an iPhone within arm's reach.

Is it under your pillow?

Not under, it's charging.

All right, that's better than some.

I don't want to get some brain tumor or something from that. But last night, in preparation for this, I said, okay, I am going to put that phone in another room and I'm not going to touch it. And I did it until 4am and at 4am I woke up and with every ounce of self discipline, I picked it up, I went to another room and I put it down and I went back to sleep. So I have been phone free, or I had been phone free for 12 hours, which is probably the longest I've been phone free. So you've, you've already improved my life. I just want you to know that's pretty cool.

I mean, that's really interesting, right? Because I think that once you start noticing that, then it becomes, you just start noticing how crazy we've all gotten, right? The idea that, like you, it's hard to spend your time asleep with your phone. Like you're sleeping. Why does your phone get to be a part of that? That should be, one might think, easy. But you're certainly not the only person. I mean, most people. Well, first of all, most people use their phones as their alarm clocks. And it's one of those things where if you stop and think about it, how do you get an alarm? How do you get an alarm to stop? You touch the alarm. So if your phone's your alarm clock, you are guaranteeing your phone is the first thing you interact with in the morning. And if you think about what's going to be waiting for you on your phone, unless you've done a really good job already of cleaning up notifications in minutes, but even if you have, honestly, you're going to be met with other notifications that are there to pull your attention away or you're going to be compelled just out of habit to follow up the checking of your, or the silencing of your alarm with a quick check of your email, a quick check of the news. All of a sudden you're mourning and therefore your whole day has gotten derailed. And guess who you are benefiting? The people who are making and the companies that are making the apps. You're not doing anything that benefits you. So I think that setting better boundaries around sleep and protecting the moments before sleep and right after you wake up, that's where I would actually start. Because you're going to get huge benefits if you're able to create better boundaries to protect those spaces. Your day is going to be started on a different foot. That actually is the way you want to start it. And you're also going to be able to relax, unwind and sleep and get the rest that you need, which, I mean, our phones are having hugely negative impacts on our sleep.

Julia Cameron would say that if you first check your phone in the morning, that just kind of throws off the whole morning pages theory, right? I mean, it kind of shatters that.

You know, that's funny. I have somewhere right near my, I have a journal in which I try to do her three days. I'm sorry, three pages in the morning thing. And. Yeah, when you've got a special kind of energy in the morning and your brain that's waking up refreshed, who knows what it was doing while you were sleeping? I love the. You know, I play a lot of music, and I'm just fascinated by what my brain is up to while I'm sleeping because I'll. I started playing the drums as a result of this book, and if anyone out there has played the drums, I'm sure can relate. It kind of explodes your brain in a really exciting way. There'll be something I just can't do because I can't get all my limbs to work independently. And it's just, I'm stuck, Go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden I can do it. And it's like, brain, what were you up to? Thank you. But I don't want to waste whatever my brain has achieved in the night by then turning to the news or writing a stupid email. Like, I'd much rather put it to something creative, such as. Especially since I am a writer, right. I'm supposed to be writing. Like, writing three pages in the morning and just seeing what happens. That's such a better use of your time. Each of us has a different thing that we might want to do in the morning for someone else. It might be going for a walk or exercising or meditating or reading, whatever. But I can guarantee you that nearly no one, if you ask them, is going to say, you know what I really want to do? Like, first thing when I wake up is spend a half an hour on Twitter. Yeah.

Better to look for doorknobs.

Yeah. Oh, my God, yeah. Then at least you can open your doors. Like, at least you get. And every time you open your door, you get delighted. Like, when has Twitter delighted you?

Anyway, at my house, my office is in a barn, and that barn is down the hill. And so what works for me is the amount of effort to get to a soda or French fries or candy or a phone has to exceed the pleasure I receive from drinking that soda or eating that candy bar or picking up the phone. So I think I'll just leave my phone down in the barn every night because that will make it. It's not like I can reach over and grab it anymore.

I really. I would.

It would take a lot of effort to get to that phone. So that's my new theory.

Yeah. I think it's also worth keeping in mind just that anytime you experiment with something like that, people tend to think that, oh, you need to then permanently do it. Like, from now on, you're going to always keep your phone in the barn. And then they think, well, I might not be able to do that. What if there's an emergency that all these thoughts will bubble up? So I would say if anyone's having that reaction, try it for just one night. Do all these things as an experiment and then notice the difference it makes. And you'll be able to pick out which things you want to try more consistently. And it's going to take a while because we each have a different relationship that and different set of boundaries that's going to work for us. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing. And if you try something once, it doesn't mean that you're committing yourself to a life of it, but try it. Just try it and see what a difference it makes. Because right now we're stuck in these habits that US of 15 years ago would just be. You'd be like, what? You have this. Like, you're calling it a phone. But wait, do you make phone calls on it? Wait, no, you're just like a news or an email device. Like, that's not a phone. And wait, you're sleeping with it. Like, wait, what? I thought. Didn't you used to read books? I thought you liked books. Or like, I thought you had real friendships. But it's absurd if you have to think about it.

You are just defining my life. But we won't go there. So can you tell me, do you think true fun is more about the removal of bad things or the addition of good things?

Well, I think true fun is really the confluence of those three states, the playful, connected flow. But in terms of how do you achieve it? How do you create more opportunities for it? I think it's a combination. I think that one of the biggest impediments to fun right now is distraction. Because as I was saying, so to clarify, flow, so playful, connected flow talked about playfulness. Connection flow is the psychological state of being so engrossed in your present experience that in many cases you lose track of time. The most traditional example of that is an athlete in the midst of a game. But you can have it in the middle of a conversation. You know, I would argue that I'm in flow right now talking to you because I'm totally focused and engaged and present. There's multiple opportunities we encounter each day for flow. Anything that distracts us is going to kick us out of flow, because distraction is antithetical to flow. I argue that flow is intrinsic to fun. You can't have fun if you're not in flow. And if you put those pieces together, it means that anything that distracts you is going to kick you out of flow, and then you're not going to be able to have fun. So distractions and fun do not mix. So given that we are so distracted these days, and in many cases those distractions are coming from our devices, I would say that one of the most important things we can do to set the stage for fun is to try to reduce or eliminate distractions whenever possible. Because if you're not present, you're not going to have fun. So in that sense, it's removing a negative, right? It's removing these constant distractions that are vying for our attention and stealing our lives from us, essentially. But then, as we commented on before, you're going to end up with empty space, and you need to figure out how you want to fill that space. And so I think that's when you start to investigate for yourself what typically generates playfulness or connection or flow for you personally. So I would argue that the definition of true fun is universal. Playful, connected flow really does seem to resonate with people as a universal definition of fun. But each of us finds it in different ways. And I think of that, I call them fun magnets. And my definition of that is, what are the activities and the people and even the settings that are the most likely to generate fun for you? Are they going to be guaranteed to generate fun for you? No, because fun is an emotional experience. It does not like to be tried, to be pinned down. It's like romance. If you force it, it's going to not happen. It's going to run away. But for example, I can tell you that I know that playing music with a particular group of friends is a fun magnet for me. I very often have true fun when I'm doing that. And I can use that knowledge to actually put more opportunities for fun on my schedule in a way that makes it possible to plan for opportunities for fun. Which I know sounds counterintuitive because how do you plan for fun? But if I know I'm likely to have fun doing this thing, I can make a point of prioritizing it. It might not be like the most mind blowing experience of fun I've ever had in my life, but it's going to be way more fun than, for example, spending the same amount of time scrolling through doorknobs on ebay, even though I love those doorknobs. So I think, yeah, I think it's a combination of making space by removing the negative and then filling that space with a positive and identifying really having a good sense of your personal sources of funds so that you can prioritize those and incorporate them into your daily life as much as possible. Up next on Remarkable People. Things may be more fun now than you ever thought they could be, or less fun. And that goes for both activities in terms of their potential to generate fun for you. And also people you may notice if you start paying attention to how you feel when you're around certain people. You don't have fun together, you actually don't even enjoy it and they're draining you instead of nourishing you.

I'm part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and I want to explain some of the benefits of being a HubSpot customer. First of all, to truly understand HubSpot, you have to be customer centric. So what does that mean? It means building and growing sustainable customer relationships, fulfilling unique customer needs, and personalizing the customer experience. So how does the HubSpot CRM platform help you build a customer centric business? Well, the HubSpot CRM platform provides game changing tools, for example native payment links, recurring payments directly embedded in HubSpot, quoting tools, and emails for easy delivery and collection. This helps you build a seamless payment experience with your customers. A CRM powered cms, lots of acronyms there, means both you and your marketeers can personalize the customer experience and ensure all engagements are timely and relevant. Learn more about how a HubSpot CRM platform can help you build, maintain and grow your customer relationships. @HubSpot.com.

You'Re listening to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.

Can you be in a state of flow when you're doing something you're not good at?

Yeah. Give me an example of what you're thinking of.

When you started playing guitar or drums or When I started surfing, I was not good at it. Can you achieve a state of flow surfing when you're not a surfer yet?

I think that's a great question that so the person who coined the term flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, actually writes about that or wrote about that. Unfortunately, he recently passed away. In his book Flow, he talks about how there is often a certain level of skill that's necessary to get into a state of flow and that when you are building up to that point, it actually so flow itself is intrinsically motivating and you'll want to do it just for the sake of the enjoyment of doing it, because flow feels good, but you can't get into flow if you suck at something, if you don't know how to do it. So how do you.

I notice, right?

Like, how do you actually get yourself the motivation so that you can reach the state of competence at which flow becomes possible? And one thing he says in his book is to actually provide yourself with extrinsic motivation and external rewards to keep your motivation up till you get to the point. So I think that's interesting to just play around with as a concept, if you know, you want to learn a foreign language, but you haven't, you know, not at the point where it feels at all flowy. It feels horrible. What can you do to make it more enjoyable? Also, what attitude can you bring to it? Can you bring a more playful attitude toward it so that you're not. One of the things. The most damaging things to do is to criticize yourself. While you're not good at something, of course you're not good at it yet because you're a beginner. So changing your mindset to become more excited about the idea of being a beginner and more accepting of the fact that you're not a master. And that's actually part of the process. But it's something I kept in mind personally, especially as I was writing the book. I was ready. I signed the book deal in April 2020, so right when lockdowns were really starting, and then spent the subsequent months very isolated, writing this book about fun. And in some ways, that was a little depressing, but it also made me really committed to the idea of building up more skills and knowledge so that I'd have more opportunities for flow, and then I could use those as opportunities and springboards for fun when it became possible to see people in person more. And one of my motivations for that was actually from the book Flow, in which Csikszentmihalyi uses this example I love, which is, he says that a chessboard, to someone who doesn't play chess, is just a board with carved figurines on it. Right. I mean, honestly, it's that to me. But if, you know, if you've put in the work and the effort to learn how to play chess, then the same chessboard becomes this portal into flow for you, and I would argue, into potential playfulness and connection and true fun if you're a chess player and that's a. A magnet for fun for you. So all that is to say, yeah, I think it's hard. It can be hard in the beginning to. You can't get into flow if you are just stumbling over yourself in that early beginner stages. But I think we can make adjustments to our mindset and we can use fun and the concept of fun to make those adjustments so that we're kinder to ourselves in that beginning phase. And we can maintain an excitement about our stumbles instead of just criticizing ourselves. And then we will eventually get to the point where we can get into flow. And. And once that happens, it is a self reinforcing cycle where we will want to continue because we have experienced flow, it feels good and we want to have more of it.

This is like Katherine Price and Carol Dweck walk into a bar.

I would love to walk into a bar with Carol Dweck and they come.

Out with the fun mindset. Can we have the opposite problem? What happens if you're so good at something that it's no longer challenging or exciting? Can you overshoot flow for flow?

In particular, there is an element of being right at the level of your abilities. If you read Csikszentmihalyi's work, I can't speak for him, but I would think that he probably would say, yeah, if you're like, if you've totally mastered something to the point that it gets boring, then you're probably not gonna be in flow because you're gonna be bored. I think that's something that can be a trick if you're in with a kid sometimes or if you're with like, for example, if I have such a good time playing music with my friends, but if one of them were a concert level or professional musician, they'd be bored playing with me. It takes a special kind of mindset to be like, I'm really enjoying this. So I think that, yeah, you can get to a point where you're. You either are bored because you just have mastered it and there's nowhere else to go, or you're doing this activity with people who are at a different skill level. So either the people are better than you and you feel bad about yourself, or you are so much better than the other people that honestly, it's hard for you to get into flow because you need to, to be on the same page. But I don't. I think that that can actually just be a useful thing to keep in mind when you're picking what kind of activities to pursue. I keep using music because it's something I'm really into. Other people may have a totally different way that. So feel free to use your own analogy. But for me, it's like, I'll never master music. You can always get better at music. So I'm not worried about ever getting to a point where I'm like, maybe there'll be a piece. There'll be a particular piece where I'm like, okay, I can play this without thinking. I no longer really enjoy it because I'm sick of it. There's an infinite number of other pieces and it's interesting. I never had thought about this. But just as a personal example of getting to the point where you can experience flow, I've played piano since I was a kid, but I never improvised because I was really shy. And I just. My teacher is such a good improviser that I just wasn't able to let go in that way. And it's something I'm really working on. I'm now in my 40s. I'm really trying to be better at improvising and let myself go. And we do it in my guitar class. Do we do blues on blues jams? And some of the other people in my class clearly get into a flow state when they do that. They're just playing and they're enjoying themselves. They're lost in the moment and I am not there yet. And I can tell you I really don't like those moments of classes. I feel kind of dumb and just awkward. But I'm trying to get through that because I can see the reward on the other side. I can see what joy. And I feel their joy, too. They are experiencing from this musical flow. And I know that if I continue to put in the effort of practicing the scales and just putting on backing tracks and doing it, eventually I will get to that point and I know it's going to be worth it. So I. I think, like keeping in mind the eventual reward, even when it feels really challenging and frustrating. And being, again, kind to yourself is crucial. I can report back in, like, seven years to tell you if I've actually reached the point where improvisation allows me to get into flow. But I'm trying.

Does true fun change as you get older?

I think that the fundamental feeling of true fun doesn't change as you get older, but I think that the sources of it could change. And I think that that's actually really useful to keep in mind because I think that often we get locked into either our definition of who we are and what we do, or. Or what we think of as fun. And then we don't either try new things or we don't abandon things that may have been Truly fun for us in the past, but aren't anymore. I used to really love water skiing when I was a teenager. I mean, I didn't do it that much, it was just at the summer camp. But I just found that to be so exhilarating going into the weeds. I don't know if I would say that was fun, per se. It was exhilarating. But I did love it. It was something I would seek out actively. And I had the opportunity this summer because I went to a family camp at that same camp to water ski. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna live the. Live the glory of Catherine when she was 16. And I gotta say, I really didn't enjoy that much. I felt pressured. Like, I felt like I was supposed to be able to do what I was able to do when I was 16 or 17, despite not having done that for 20, whatever years. And I found myself just worrying about injury, what would happen if I fell. And I had bought. You bought tickets to go water skiing during this camp. And I realized I'm actually just gonna, like, get reimbursed for the rest of them. Cause I actually don't enjoy this anymore. Like, I don't. And so I think it's important to recognize that things may be more fun now than you ever thought that they could be, or less fun. And that goes for both activities in terms of their potential to generate fun for you. And also, people you may notice if you start paying attention to how you feel when you're around certain people, that you may be maintaining some relationships, some voluntary relationships. Right? Like, obviously, there's some people you can't avoid having to interact with. Like certain family members or colleagues or whatever you might be spending time with. People where, if you actually reflect on it, you don't have fun together. You actually don't even enjoy it. And they're draining you instead of nourishing you. And I think that that's useful to recognize because maybe they played a different role in your life or they were different, or you were different earlier, but now where are you? And I think that's very useful to recognize because our time is limited. And we need to be much more aware of how our various activities and the people we spend time with make us feel. So that we can just make better decisions about how to spend our time in a kind way. But I think that's important to be aware of.

So Catherine Price and Abraham Maslow walk into a bar. And Catherine says, I think you should add true fun to your hierarchy of needs.

I think What I would say, so what you're referring to is the hierarchy of needs that he created. I think it was 1943, so, I mean, it'd be hard to walk into a bar with him. But if we were able to transcend time and space, the things that people need in order to reach their full potential. And the bott layers of his pyramid are basic needs like food and water and shelter and security, then if you look at the top three levels of this pyramid, it's things like strong social connections or emotional security or a feeling of self actualization. And one of the most frequent pieces of pushback I get when I talk about fun is the idea that it's not. Yeah, it's nice, but it's frivolous. It's unnecessary. Or the assumption that we already need to be flourishing, we already need to be at the top of that pyramid before we can experience fun. And what I would love to talk to my good friend Abraham about would be the idea that actually. Well, sure, achieving. If you do have strong social connections and you are full, you're actualized or whatever, yeah, sure, that's conducive to fun. But I would argue that the reverse also holds true. That fun doesn't just result from flourishing. It's actually a cause of human flourishing. And that therefore, the more we prioritize, once our basic needs have been met, if we then prioritize the pursuit of true fun, true fun, not that like the full sense of fun that we're talking about, we actually may reach our human. It can help us reach our full human potential. And I just love that idea because I think we just. We don't think. Ironically, though it sounds, we don't think seriously enough about fun. But if we do, we'll start to recognize it's kind of like a loophole in the world where it both feels really good and it is really good for us. I mean, how often do you have that? The more you. I mean, my book, I compare it to a. It being like a diet where the only rule is to eat more of the foods you love. Like, that doesn't exist. You know what? It's funny. I thought that existed once. I remember I was in college and I was eating all these cookies and baguettes and all this food. And this is a sick representation of the American female psyche. But I was like, ooh, I'm losing weight and I'm eating all these cookies. Did I find a loophole? What's happening? No, I had type 1 diabetes, and it was undiagnosed. And I was eating all that stuff because I was literally starving, because I was excreting all my energy, like through blood sugar. And I would have died 100 years prior. I would have died because I had a terminal disease that now is treated with insulin. Anyway, you know, it was like, I thought I discovered this loophole. But no, it was actually a chronic incurable disease. But with fun, that isn't a loophole. Like, it's true. The more fun you have, the happier you'll be. The more resilient you'll be, the healthier you'll be, the better you'll able to connect with the other people in your life. You'll be more productive. The list goes on. It's. It's truly astonishing to think about the benefits of fun when you define it as the confluence of playfulness and connection and flow.

I want to discuss the nuance that generally, or at least this is how I interpret it. You say that true fun can kick in after some of the basic needs are met. Food, shelter, rest and safety. But how do you define adequate or taken care of? Because poor people can have fun, right? And people who are not American middle class can have fun. So what's the baseline here? And I could also make the case, the flip side is true that there are many wealthy people who have food, shelter, rest and safety, and they're not having fun.

Yeah, I completely agree. I feel this need, given the tone of conversations right now, to really explicitly be like, I understand that you're not going to be able to prioritize fun if you don't have food to feed your family, you don't have electricity, or like someone in your life is sick with or has just died of COVID Like, that's what I want to be sensitive to, to say. I'm not saying if you're at that level of struggling for survival. I don't want to feel anyone to feel like we're adding someone else to your plate. But I think what you're is really true and is not acknowledged enough that. That plenty of people who are at the absolute top in terms of privilege are not having any fun at all. And many people whom you'd think would have life circum. Whose life, whose life circumstances you might think would prevent them from having any fun are having way more fun. And I don't think that anyone should be assuming. I think it's kind of condescending and patronizing to say, like, oh, you're poorer than I am. You can't be having any fun at all. You poor thing. I mean, they may be like, screw you. I actually have a lively social life, and I'm really close to my family, and I have a really good sense of what I. I don't think we can make those assumptions about each other. I'm just trying to be sensitive to the fact that, you know, there's certain circumstances, if you're in a true crisis moment, then you gotta just survive. So what's the adequate level? I think that it depends for each person. But if you are truly at a point where you can't. You are battling for survival, then you're gonna know that maybe you're not gonna be able to put as much thought into it. With that said, there is a real benefit for all of us to try as much as we can to notice some moments of everyday playfulness, connection and flow and opportunities for those things that exist without us having to work for them. Just noticing. One of my favorite practices actually was inspired by this poet, Ross Gay, whom I'd also love to go to a bar with. And he wrote a book called the Book of Delights. Adequately or accurate title, because it's a book for which he wrote an essay every day about something that delighted him. And he's not just. He's not a Pollyanna. He's not just saying, ooh, everything's wonderful. He writes about really sad and difficult subjects. But he also just makes a point of noticing things every day that delight him. And when he does so, he puts a finger up in the air and he says out loud, delight. One of the things that delights him is anything purple. He just loves that with all the horrible things in the world, there's also all this purple that just delights him. And I adopted this practice for myself. And then I started to encourage other people to share their own delights. One use of my phone that I actually really love is that I have got a delight text chain going on with some friends whom I don't get to see often because they live across the country. Every once in a while, someone just texts a picture or a comment or something with the caption delight. And I always feel a little more connected to those people and delighted. And it's actually gotten to the point I have a bracelet on my wrist, which obviously the listeners can't see, but I had these bracelets made, and it says delight on it. And it's a reminder to me to notice delights. One says, pay attention and the other one says delight. Yeah. Anyway, so I think that that speaks to the fact that anyone can notice delights. And I think it's important also as a, as a source of resilience. Fun and prioritizing fun and thinking about fun really, really helped me during the most isolating points in the pandemic. And just coping with life. All of us have different challenges. Maybe you've got plenty of food on the table, but just examples from my own life. Type 1 diabetes is really hard. It's not really acknowledged as such. It's really, really hard to live with and to manage. And it's very scary. And just last night I had a low blood sugar and serious low blood sugar and I mean, it can kill you any day. So that's hard. Like my dad has dementia. Like there's a lot of hard things going on. So I in no way mean to be a Pollyanna. But I think that the more we can focus on the delights, the more we can orient ourselves towards opportunities to connect with other human beings, to experience the feeling of shared humanity that fun can help facilitate. The more resilient we'll be and the better able will be to cope with whatever life throws our way and to help other people do the same.

How do people determine if they are fun compatible with other people?

So the idea for fun compatibility, it goes to the what I was speaking about earlier, where I think that playful connected flow defines fun universally. But each of us have particular fun magnets that help us achieve the state of playful connected flow. And I just think it's interesting as a conversation starter and as something to reflect on, to talk with the people in your life, your spouse, your friends, your kids, whatever, about what their fun magnets are and how they overlap or don't overlap with yours. And then the benefit of that, I think, is that the better you understand the similarities and the differences, the better you'll be able to make better decisions about the things you do together and then support each other in the more individual pursuits. So as an example, one of my fun magnets with my husband is going on adventures with our daughter. So we prioritize that or we love hosting dinners with friends, obviously hard during pandemic times, but when that's possible, it's something we want to prioritize because it brings us both joy and fun. But an example of a fun magnet he doesn't share is, for example, a couple Fridays ago, I sat in a parking lot for three hours with my friends from music class. It was freezing out and we played music till my feet were so numb it took an hour for me to fall asleep. When I got home, it probably was a hugely bad idea, but it was really fun. Not my husband's thing. He loves going on overnight backpacking trips in remote locations that involve, like, carrying 50 pounds of stuff on your back. I don't find that so fun. That's not a fun magnet for me. So we realized that perhaps that's something he should do with her daughter on his own as a special father daughter thing. Or I could take on the responsibility of childcare for a weekend so that he could go do that with one of his friends who does find that fun. And I think that's a really useful tool for relationships, too, is to identify where you might differ and then support each other instead of shutting down their source of fun because you don't share it. What if you supported it? Because one thing my husband and I have found is the more fun we're each having, like, the more pleasant we are to be around. I was actually feeling totally overwhelmed just this past Monday, and my book's coming out, and I just felt like I had so much to do and I'm just falling behind. And he said something really astute. I had a guitar class that night, and he said, I know one thing for sure, and it's that when you come back from that class, you're going to feel a lot better. And so he was encouraging me to go out and do that. And I think it's really true. So anyway, that's the idea of. I think it just can be fun to talk about as a subject is what brings you fun and how does it compare to what generates fun for me, but also can be a really practical tool for improving your relationships with all the people in your life.

Let's suppose that you're an executive or a founder, and I guess the term might be cfo, which is Chief Fun Officer.

So there should be more of those.

Yeah. What should a company do to promote a fun environment? I don't want to frame you. Should a company, first of all, promote a more fun environment? And if the answer is yes, then how.

Yes, I think they definitely should. And they should do it both as global citizens who to make people enjoy their lives more, and then also because from a business perspective, the more fun your employees are having, the more productive they're probably going to be and certainly the more creative they're going to be. And since most businesses do to benefit from productivity and creativity, if you want to have a successful business, it would make sense to encourage the prioritization of fun. But how do you do that? I don't think that's about like just putting a ping pong table in the.

I was just going to ask like always.

Ping pong, by the way, not a fun magnet for me. I suck at ping pong because I hit the ball too hard. Like air hockey. Much better. But I don't have an office because I am freelancer. So how do you do that? I think one of the biggest issues for corporate environments is actually the lack of what I call screen life balance. In between writing how to break up with your phone and then writing the power of fun. I founded this platform I call screen life balance screenlifebalance.com with the idea of trying to help people create better boundaries. And I've noticed that one of the biggest issues for corporations is email. Not the first person to say this, but so much time is sucked up by email and it becomes busy work and then it follows you home and suddenly you've got your phone at the dinner table and you're checking, checking your work email inbox surreptitiously under the table while you're supposedly spending time with your kids. It's just such a waste of time and it's such a poor. It's just a bad use of technology. So I think that that change needs to come from the top down. It's really hard for employees to try to make systemic changes in terms of how communication is handled. But I think that's one of the most important things that companies can do to boost people's ability to have fun and their productivity and reduce their burnout, which everyone is feeling so much right now. So one thing I would suggest that people think about, and I really am harping on email because it is one of the biggest negative impacts in my own life. Email was not meant to serve all the purposes we're using it for right now. It's not meant as a scheduling tool. It was essentially meant to replace written correspondence. But now we use it as a scheduling tool or we use it as a project management tool, or we use it to share stuff or to edit, to collaborate on things. It's not meant for those things. There are much better platforms for that stuff, whether it's Trello or Slack or whatever. Like I have a whole suite of of programs that I use with my part time assistant so that we don't have to use email. And it is so much better. It's so freeing. I also think that just having better communication systems in place. So for example, when I talk to people about screen life balance and trying to take breaks from technology or create better boundaries. One of their biggest pushbacks is what if I miss an emergency? What if I miss something important? I have to check my email on the weekend because what if, what if, what if that's legit. It's kind of a work version of fomo, the fear of missing out. But there's a way around that which is to have a clear sense of what is an emergency and then how it will be communicated. So I think if companies and heads of companies and people with leadership positions think and define that for their employees and then create a kind of chain of communication that can be enormously helpful in freeing up the emotional and the time space for people to have more fun. So I would strongly encourage people to not use email as a tool to communicate in emergency. Decide ahead of time that you will call people. That means that people cannot check their email over the weekend and not worry about a fire or something. Right? Because they'll know they'll be contacted. And also take advantage of things like scheduling emails in advance and encourage your employees and your colleagues to do the same. Don't send an email at 10pm Even if you say you don't have to respond to this. It's on their plate, it's in their mind. You can send your emails into purgatory by saving them as a draft or using a schedule send option. So that's out of your mind, but it's not like, think about your recipient and think about how it's going to impact them. In that moment. There's an anecdote I found very powerful from Tristan Harris, who is the founder of the center for Humane Technology and a former Google product philosopher. He was in the room with engineers who were designing Gmail and they were deciding whether or not to have push notifications happen automatically. And he points out that in that moment they were making a decision about whether billions of dinner conversations around the world were going to get interrupted. And that wasn't something that enough thought was put into. And they did decide to do the automatic notifications. And as a result, billions of dinner conversations have been interrupted as the result of a dinging Gmail message. So in other words, think about your recipient and what impact you're going to have on them before you hit send. I think that's a cultural thing that can be emphasized more on a company wide basis to help set the stage for more better, better balance and more fun. Long answer, I'm sorry.

But in a sense the pandemic has taken that and made it even worse because there's one thing with an email you send at 10pm but now you're expected to be on a Zoom call at 10pm because somebody else is in Singapore and it's 8am for them. What do you do about that? Good news, bad news? We're. We're a company that the sun never sets on. That's the good news. The bad news is we're a company that the sun never sets on. What do you do now?

Let's. Did it really work out for the British Empire? Like, maybe you look at sunset occasionally. I mean, honestly, like, okay, you're in a tough position if you're based half on the east coast and half in Singapore. That's an extreme. Obviously as extreme as you can get, but I'd say yeah. Keep in mind that you're interrupting people's lives. Also, do you really need to have all those meetings? Do they all really need to be on Zoom? This goes back to thinking more critically about how we communicate and what. For what purpose. I think there's certain circumstances where Zoom is a good option because it is helpful to see people and it does feel different. But there's also circumstances where it's exhausting, whether by virtue of just having to be camera ready at all times, which clearly listeners can't see. But I am not. But like, that's, that's a certain kind of pressure on its own. But I think we need to think more. Yeah, just think more about how we communicate, what is necessary and then what's the best form for that communication?

Okay, two more questions. And the second one is going to be harder, so get ready for this. But the first one, don't tell me.

It'S hot in here again.

Okay, no, it's along those lines. So it's going to put pressure on you. So the first question is, what do you think is the appropriate age for a kid to get a phone and what boundaries should be established for that phone?

That's a whole conversation. I don't think there's one right age. My first comment would be to push back and ask, what are we calling a phone? Because many parents will say, oh, I feel like I need to get my kid a phone call because I need to be able to communicate with them. Maybe they've started to walk home from school on their own or something like that. And I'd say, okay, well, I get that it's too bad we need to be so worried about where our kids are at all times, but I'm a parent. I get that. But you're talking about a phone in that case, that can text and that can call. You're not talking about the Internet in the kid's pocket, which is what a smartphone is. So at first say, what's your actual goal as the parent in getting your kid the phone? The trickier question is what to do when all your kid's classmates get phones and your kid feels left out. And I don't have such a great answer to that because I think it's really challenging. What I'm doing myself is to try to infiltrate my daughter's school and give presentations to the students about how they're being exploited by social media companies. Because again, I think that the trick is to get people disgusted with these products, which they really should be. They should be angered and disgusted by how they're impacting our lives. But I also think parents should put their foot down to a certain degree. Like very few 10 year olds are going to have a thousand dollars just at their disposal to pay for a new iPhone, let alone the data plan. So I think that talking to other parents and having conversations, like almost getting a group of like minded parents who will all agree that no, we're actually not going to just get you a fully functional smartphone when you're 9 or 10 years old, or even 12. I think waiting for as long as possible is important, but I also think like educating kids about the techniques that are being used against them and who's actually profiting is a really effective technique to try to get them to buy in. The idea that maybe you don't want to be doing this with your time, that maybe it's making you a boring person and that maybe the adults in your life who maybe you wanted a phone because it seems so grown up, but actually grownups are lame because we're just wasting our lives on these stupid apps. That's another technique for me. I'm going to try to wait for as long as possible. Honestly, I don't know what that will be. And I just also think that it's okay to be unpopular as someone's parent. It's okay. That's just part of our job, I think. So your kid might hate you, but if they were begging you for cigarettes because everyone else was smoking, would you give them to them? And then if you do get a phone, I think you need to have a family conversation. First of all, you're going to lose your kid to a certain degree because that's just what's going to happen with the phone. I mean in general, but with the phones. But conversation about how everyone's relationship with their device should look like what it should look like, because adults are just as bad as kids. And if we're telling them not to spend too much time, but then we're on our phones all the time, that's not going to work. And then I think that having an etiquette for your family is really important, where, for example, you all charge your phones in the same place at night where you don't have technology in the bedroom. There's been so much coverage recently about the predatory stuff going on in social media and all the truly sick stuff that kids get exposed to. And I do think it's our responsibility to protect our kids from that to a certain degree. And one way to do that is not have a computer. Like, use computers in public places. So. Sounds bad, but so that you have a sense of what people are doing. Try to model that yourself, too. And. And also your kids sleep is enormously important. Everyone's sleep is. But kids in particular. And kids in particular are be. They're staying up way too late in the middle of the night. I. I don't know. I could talk about this at length. I've talked to a lot of school psychologists about the impact of technology. I've talked to even, like, tech directors at schools. They have all said they can tell when kids get phones. They can tell the impact on their behavior, their creativity, their health, their sleep, et cetera. And that there's a whole increase in psychological issues when kids get phones. So I think as adults, we really need to look much more into the consequences of this. This act before we just blindly give our kids phones because, quote, everybody else is getting a phone.

Are you ready for my last question?

Yeah. What's the hard question you were gonna ask me? Are.

Are you at home?

You're like. You're like, solve humanity. And then what's the next one?

Are you at home?

I don't know. What's your question? No, I am at home.

Okay. So will you play your guitar or drums for us?

For. If you give me a second to get the guitar. But let me preface this by saying. Let me preface this mic of this podcast. I will do this, but this is not fun for me, because performing for an audience when I'm doing it alone, not fun for me. So I'm doing this because I'm. Yes. And I have a fun mindset. I like doing stuff collaboratively with people. And if you want me to send you any recordings of me doing that, I also be happy to. But I will do that because I'm going to say yes, so hold on.

No, I. Wait, wait, wait. I take back my request because I do not want you to do something that's not fun. That would be the antithesis of this interview.

You. I'm of two minds. And this is why. Because sometimes when someone says something and your first instinct is, no way, I'm not going to do that. Yeah, you actually should say yes. Okay, so I'm not going to sing, but I can try to play something. But I can also share with you afterwards a recording of me truly having fun doing so that you're welcome to use, because I've been playing stuff with my drum teacher, which is ridiculous. And it's, like, not like I just giggle because every time I do something really loud, it just makes me laugh.

I leave it completely and utterly up to you. You can say no to this request and not play something spontaneously. Right now.

I'll try to play something for you. I'll just play the intro to a song. Hold on. I gotta go get it, though.

Please note that I did let her off the hook. I tried to tell her she could say no. It's not easy being a podcaster. Not easy being a guest either, though. I want you to know that Pink's drummer was on my podcast, and he played the drums at the end of his episode. So you. Yeah, you and Pink's drummer.

That is delightfully absurd. Can you still hear me? Yes. My husband is walking past the hallway, giving me looks like. Who the hell are you talking to? You. It's part of my job, Peter, you know, Go away. Okay.

Tell them I don't like to camp either.

Okay. Oh, really? It's very controversial. So the first song, when I first got this guitar, which I got in college, and then I didn't play it for 20 years because my grandmother gave me money for the. To buy a guitar. And then I didn't get around to it, but I asked my friend to teach me the. The Indigo Girls song Closer to fine, because that was a big thing at that. So I. I subsequently learned it, but I don't know if I'm not. I. I freeze up when I perform. So. Wait. Oh, my.

Go.

There you go.

Yay. Yay. Yay. Thank you.

That was fun. That was ridiculous. There you go.

See, no other podcaster in your book tour is going to ask you to do that.

I kind of hope not, but I enjoyed that.

And now if somebody else on your book tour asks you or starts off the interview with, it's so hot in here, you're just gonna nail them.

No, I won't, I won't. I honestly will not because I still don't know what I was. I think it's an interesting point that there's just certain things that, that each of us has a block against. And for me, anything that involves pretending or acting, I shut down. I completely shut down. It makes me clench up and I can't think, I can't do it. I remember telling my sister in law that I sucked at charades. And she's like, oh, you can't be that bad, let's play. And then I tried. And she's like, wow, you really are bad. And I told you that's not. I can't do it. I can't do that. So no, if someone asked me if they said it's hot in here, I would probably still have the whole mental dialogue with myself about, huh, he's hot. I wonder why he's bringing that up. Doesn't really make any sense. What does that have to do with Flint? Why am I so cold? He's in a barn. It's hot.

Yeah, but what you should be thinking is, oh my God, this guy really prepared for this interview. He really read the book.

Well, after I realized what you were doing, there was a lot going on in my head. I did. I actually was gonna thank you for putting so much work into preparing for this and reading the book and for the. These questions were really fun to engage with and really unusual and I appreciate it.

Your answers are so deep and so eloquent and so sophisticated. You remind me of the former executive director of Wikipedia. Her name is Catherine Marr and she had a mind just. Or she still does. She has a mind just like yours. And it's really remarkable.

I'm gonna be laughing about that hot thing, using that itself as an example.

Going forward, maybe someday you can be on the moth, right?

No, no, you mean the storytelling thing?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, no, just tangentially. But right after college I. I tutored to pay the bills and they were the mom of one of these kids I tutored told me about. It was when it was just starting in New York and I went to a couple of them and I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. But I didn't really put together like how much people had prepared for those stories. And at some point I went to I don't get embarrassed easily. And you've touched on the two. Two memories I have of really being embarrassed were the improv comedy class. And then I put my name in the hat at a moth to tell some story about my students. I was teaching middle school math at the time, in addition to tutoring, and my name got pulled out and I went up to try to tell some spontaneous story that I really hadn't thought out. And they, they like flapped their moths to get it's like they're getting a hook, you know, pulled off the stage. I got mothed off the stage and I remember I was so humiliated. I left halfway through and there were these people standing outside smoking and one of them turned to me and was like, I didn't think it was that.

So there you have it. Catherine Price, how to have fun. I love it. And I'll tell you, it's been three days since I did the interview and I have not slept with my iPhone three times in a row, which is actually quite an accomplishment for me. Also, I have figured out how to use Gmail and Spark to send my email at 8am Pacific on the weekdays and Monday, 8am Pacific over the weekend. So no more email from me on the weekends and no more email from me after 5pm Pacific. Which is making many people's lives much better. I think so. Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. My thanks, but not my email to Jeff C. Peg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Alexis Nishimura, Luis Magana, and Madison the Drop in Queen Nismer. All of their lives are better for me having listened to Katherine Price. And now you can make that change change in your life too. Have fun. And you're hearing this on December 22nd at the earliest. So as we say in California, Mele Kaliki Maka this is remarkable people.