Cas Holman (on being playful)

Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to our expert experts on expert. I'm Dan Rather, and I'm joined by Barbara Walter. Ooh. Spend a minute.

Today we have a very interesting guest, Cass Holman. She is a play designer and RISD was a RISD professor. Ooh, very fancy. What's up with bears?

I didn't know about RISD until we started doing this show. Remember we had a guest. So it was a really, you were like, this is shameful that you don't know what RISD is. But now I do.

I do. She has a book out now called Playful, Playful Ding Ding Ding, Playful, how play shifts are thinking, inspires connection, and sparks creativity. You know, the second I saw Playful, I was like, let's get Cass in here. I know.

It's very us. Yeah. Please enjoy Cass Holman. This episode of Armchair Expert is presented by Apple Pay.

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This means you can spend the last time at checkout and more time finding the perfect gifts. Pay the Apple Way, terms apply. He's an on-chair. Max, Max, Max, Max.

Nice to meet you. Welcome. Thank you for the hug. Of course.

I brought you a here-of-kids. So, I think you're a big choice. Toi-boffers, a choice for everybody, and then for you for the kids. Thank you so much.

Not only do I have kids, but they're very up your alley kids. Do they play? They play like motherfuckers. They are playing machines.

We have adult toys. I said I think we should unbox on air. Okay, great, great. Yes, that's hilarious.

Yeah. G-mo. G-mo. G-mo.

G-mo. I'm going to open it. It's a genetic, my favorite. Everything about these.

Yeah. Now, that was the inspiration. Also, she thought about color-coding the magnets so that you would always know which one to stick together and then she thought why not let the kids discover this? Okay, thank you very much.

Wow. In life, sometimes you are confronted by things that you don't know what to do with. Yeah. And you kind of can flow with it.

So why not. Unexpected. They're mildly perverse which I like. Yes.

Would you agree, Mone? Is there something just a little bit like ooh. Yeah. I love it in a wonderful way.

External organ style. Yeah. Exactly. I feel like I'm going to break the number one I want to even notice, but I'm going to ask how do you win this?

Whoa! I wonder if that has anything to do with your adulthoodness. I wonder. You know what else these are?

They're very Sucyon. Yeah, they are. It was just reading last night, all the places you'll go to my 10-year-old. Oh, nice.

And I was looking at the drawings. They're so imaginative and creative. They don't resemble anything you're used to seeing, nor did they even necessarily make sense structurally. There's so much liberty taken by him.

It's so fun. In his drawings, you can see that he's playing. You can tell when he might start a line and not know where it's going. And so I think that for him, drawing was probably kind of free play.

I don't know this. I haven't done a deep dive into the process. Yeah. I have the same conclusion.

I sat down to go, I'm going to make an elephant with like one. I think he just started drawing and then there was a flag. And then there's the bugle. You can tell when someone loves what they do or when it's play for them.

The line looks different and the drawing looks different. This is fun. Now, here's where we'll bump up against. So we'll have our own isms money with this book, Playful.

Oh, great. Yeah, we'll bring to the table our own isms. And one would be for me, it's not OCD. It's OCD-P.

We learned. Oh, interesting. You know what OCD-P is? I know that there's different branches of internal outward-facing.

I was using it wrong and it was kind of offensive, which is I would describe my preference for things being right angled as my OCD. But that's not OCD. That's just good craft. That's just being meticulous.

Tidy-gae. The distinction is, is it in keeping with your morals? If it is, it's not OCD. OCD is, I'm afraid I'm going to molest a kid.

I'm afraid I'm going to kill someone. I'm afraid I'm going to drive myself into a concrete barrier. These compulsive thoughts that are actually in great discord with your moral values. But like, people are just neat freaks and they go, oh, OCD.

But they also agree that you should be neat. And probably not disrupting their lives. Exactly. No, other than maybe they have to clean more than.

So I do have a good degree of like, so right now, like even things. One's inherently left out. I know, I know. I know.

I know that's fair. So GMO likes to live in its environment. The errant one may go and find something to hang out with. Right?

So like, ears grab your microphone. Yeah, I should let him stay. Right? I get that.

I pulled it off. That extra limb gets to find a place and then glist there and become part of it. This is fun. This is dangerous.

I know I'm afraid I can't concentrate on it at all. When I first designed it, there were a few other systems. It was part of it called the modular ecosystem. So it wasn't about each of them living independently.

It was like they were all codependent. You know, maybe it's parasitical. Maybe it's symbiotic. Symbiotic.

Yeah, we don't like codependents here. It's a different episode. They need each other. Do you know what needs to be part of its environment?

It seeks to live in balance. I love it. I love it. You're from Northern California.

We're roughly the same age. It sounds like we grew up similarly in that I was completely unsupervised until 630pm when my mom got home from work. Yeah. Also not a great student.

I did well because I was smart, but then I went to college and that's where I realized I was a terrible student. I only did well in high school because high school was kind of easy. Okay. Where did you go to college?

UC Santa Cruz. I mean, I could guess that. I mean, I'm anem myself. I didn't guess that.

I really I'm weak of it. What's bananas lux mean? Hey, pass by. There were no grades at the time, but I still did terribly.

I was like, wait, study on command. I didn't know how to do that. I was not going to hold still and read a whole book in school. I learned how to do school.

And then I had a kind of lack of foundational understanding of how to do rigor. And what did you major in at UC Santa Cruz? I started in sciences. I dropped out after two years because I lost all my scholarships and I went and lived in the Galapagos Islands for a year and a half.

I was chasing iguanas and learning about biodiversity. Okay, great. Yeah. This is where Darwin took the BHMS Beagle.

Did you do mushrooms in the redwoods up in Santa Cruz? Absolutely. I didn't do great in the red. Yeah.

Very village. Did you spend time in Santa Cruz? I went up there and bought a half pound of mushrooms and we spent a few days there and then my best friend and I did a couple different walks through the redwoods on lots of mushrooms and I was just talking about mushroom journeys with somebody and said, I think my all-time favorite of all time was the redwoods in Santa Cruz. It was very fun.

Yeah. That's a really good fairies there who really want to help you have a wonderful time on mushrooms. No interest in you going to class. No, no, no.

And those trees are very much involved as well. The redwoods and the campus is in the redwoods. Between classes, you walk through the redwood forest. It's incredible.

Which could be really grounding or also really distracting if you would rather go hang out in the moss. So after Galapagos, where do we go? We ultimately must get a degree because we become a professor at some point. Yeah.

I've kind of adventured my way into figuring out a way to be who I am and also became play played. So from Galapagos, I went back to school and was like, I'm going to finish this. I want to figure out what my own thing is. Also because being surrounded by scientists who were so passionate about the research they were doing and about the work, I wanted that for myself.

I was pretty bad at science for the same reason I was about a lot of school. Doing something the same way twice was just not interesting. Yeah. I was a student at UC San Cruz and eventually finished in fine art sculpture and feminist theory.

Okay. And you leave there and then you do graduate school? No. I was a chef.

Okay. I worked in a diner, like literally the diner in the bus station. Whoa. Lip and eggs.

I was a shorter cook. But then worked my way up, moved to San Francisco, was in a great kitchen, this place called Hawthorne Lane. And my three month review came and they said we want to promote you. And I was like, I quit.

Oh my god. Wow. It's really hard to pin down. I know you guys are already.

I'm like, I give up. I don't know. Just like your parents. I know.

I'm a big mom though for this journey. The scenes from the dog. She's nervous. She's been nervous from the start.

She rolls with it and tries. But yeah, she's always worried in a very protective way. Yes. In ways that are supportive of me as a human, but also not supportive of the fact that I was weird and queer and the artist thing is hard for four families.

Yes, of course. Like for a family. You're smart. We want you to succeed.

We want you to do better than we are. Yes. It was all concern. I just want you to have an easier life.

This was so many conversations we had really, really hard conversations with my mom about. She just wanted to be easier. Even me being queer, she was like, I don't want that for you because your life is going to be hard. I'm so much harder for me to live as somebody I'm not.

Pretend. Yes. Her biggest struggle for so many years raising two kids alone was money. So she was like, both of you are smart and you're going to go on and have jobs and not worry about money.

Eventually, to answer your question five steps ago, I thought I have a degree. At that point, I kind of graduated from UC Santa Cruz. I may have had like two credits missing, which was very disappointing. She's got a lot of credits missing.

It's not very much. I still walked. My mom did notice that in the booklet of the graduates of 1992 or whatever it was, 94 numbers. There were the graduates and then she was like, we're as cast.

And then there's the people who will graduate in the winter. It was seniors also participating. Oh, wow. Good to see you.

Oh my God. It's rare that you can say someone did a ceremony. Oh, true. It was a pageant.

You weren't really graduating, but you weren't participating in the ceremony. I was participating. I had a recurring dream all the time that somehow I don't know what happened. Everyone graduated, but I forgot to get some credits.

I was supposed to. It's a recurring dream. I have the same one. I'm finding out, oh yeah, they let you walk, but you were supposed to make up two credits.

Did you both officially graduate? There's no foundation for this period. So weird. I wonder what it means.

There's the performance of it and it often doesn't matter. What does it mean to go to school? What does it mean to graduate being there is such a big part of it? So you can feel like I'm just finished with this experience, but that doesn't mean that on the books, the bureaucratic end is finished.

Right. Right. So maybe this is like a dream. I'm going to go ahead and just take a stab at some dream analysis.

Yeah. Absolutely outside of my expertise. I guess that's play. Yeah.

Absolutely. And say that there's a disconnect between the experience and the bureaucracy. So you're like, is there some part of what I'm doing well and how I'm succeeding, right? Because you're a graduated in the dream that's not in line with a bureaucratic ideal that when you set your sights on something and it was challenging and you spent years working towards it, I think it's natural that you accumulate some anxiety around that topic.

I have dreams where I show up on a set and I'm quickly realizing, Oh, you're directing this. Oh, I haven't read the script. Wait, is that a dream? That's a dream.

I have a friend, but I have no anxiety as a director in real life. Yeah. None. I love being on a set.

I'm quite confident. But in these dreams, I somehow have been directing something I haven't read the script of the book. Yeah. And I'm Hannah.

I tell my kids when they have nightmares, your dreams and your nightmares are this beautiful way of your brain telling you what you care about. Because if you didn't care about it, you wouldn't be fearful. It's going to go away. So if you look at it, just like, Oh, it's a reminder of what I cherish is kind of sweet.

Yeah, I feel like it's kind of more like, I forgot something important. Oh my God. How this happened? This was really important and I didn't do it.

Yeah, it's anxiety for sure. Yeah. I'm just curious. Do you start work as a designer before you start teaching?

When I stopped cooking, I wanted an office job. I'd never worked in an office. And I think I was 25 or 24 or something at that point. So I went to a temp agency.

And at that point, I had a college degree theoretically, but I never worked in office. I had to take typing in high school, but I intentionally did really poorly because I didn't want to be a secretary. That was the job in 1990. Computers were not part of my life.

Right. Or I never imagined typing would be about anything other than administration. So they were like, you don't have any experience with anything relates to this kind of useless to any employers. But I have a degree.

So office job, right? So I was able to get a couple of different placements through the temp agency. One was with AIDS Walk and nonprofit and there were a couple of nonprofits where the work itself wasn't difficult, but the emotional attachment to what the work was about. Sure.

I was like, I am too sensitive for this. I don't mean to cry after a day's work in an office about the bigger picture of the work we're doing. So I was learning a lot about what kind of work I could do. And I wound up with this company called CRI.

They were a high-infurniture company. Long story short, I realized what design was. And I was like, oh, I want to be a designer. And also it kind of was started to make sense with what I was doing in my art in the meantime because I'd been performing a lot.

You were doing dry. Can you already been on Morrie-Povitch? That's coming. Yeah.

I was a man or woman. I was a man or woman. And then people would come out, be men or women or people in drag and then the audience, they voted who voted? I screamed.

It's a man. It's a woman. It was a nightmare. Did you sign up for this?

Because I was like, free trip to New York. Yes. And your hobby at that time was drag, right? You were performing in San Francisco.

Yeah. But all of the people around me that were performing at this club, they also did it the other way. So some of the drag queens would go and they wanted drag kings to an audience screaming at a man as a woman. Okay.

And what was the verdict? I passed. Meaning. They thought it was a man.

Yeah. Because they had a bunch of kind of misfits, switches and male presenting trans people. And then I was like kind of drag king, but also gender schmender. And then they had these, they could best describe them as really sweet gay boys who were drag performers, but their drag was as women.

So they would kind of make them look like women and then put a mustache on them in order to try to trick the audience. Oh my God. The whole thing was just like. They were ratcheting up the stage.

Did you leave and were like, what? I mean, while we were there, we were like, what is happening? It was one of their higher grossing shows or bigger audience shows. So we spent three days giving costumes and they took a shopping to put us in gay.

And we were supposed to be exposed to what we really were. Yeah. It is. It is so nice.

Oh my God. That was a ball experience. Did you watch the Jerry Springer documentary that was on Netflix? No.

It's fascinating. It's so fun to watch because I'm regularly having these moments where there's such a disconnect. From when I lived through it and seemed completely normal. And now in this vantage point, I was like, what was going on?

So I'm watching and I'm remembering that I watched it. It was like, it was over the top, but also it wasn't insanity. But now when I'm watching, I'm like, oh, it's just straight and sandy. It was like, what an urban sanity on TV.

Right. And maybe led up to reality TV in a way, right? They're kind of instigating fights. Yeah.

I'm like, oh, this is the dad. Well, I wonder how that'll go. I'm trying to get too man out there. It's being potentially emasculated on television.

I wonder what'll happen. I wonder if they'll fight each other. It's like free internet knowing that outrage sells. They stumbled upon.

I bet I would watch the Moripovitch thing and be like, what is going on? But I know when I was in the 90s watching and I was like, oh, fun. I wonder. It was fun.

Yeah. Originally, they didn't want me to break dance because they're like, that's too weird. So it'll be too obvious. Yes, it's a great break answer.

Cool. I did the worm. I had this really dramatic entrance. I didn't know what music.

I was like, they couldn't get my music cleared. So they're like, we'll just play some music. I was like, what? Okay.

Sorry. That was just a very fun story I learned about you. So you're at CRI. Yeah.

They were very supportive of me going on Moripovitch. They shut the office down to watch. I had never felt so seen. I was like, you want to go?

How's this going to go? Because I also felt like I was having to pass as an office person. As a business person. I was a corporate America person.

Yeah. And my friend, Lady Sergio and I, who was my drag girlfriend, we both worked there. So they loved us for who we were. But we were still kind of like, what kind of code switching do we have to do?

Of course. Yeah. And that was proof in fact that I could be. Exactly.

It was really, really nice. And so when I went back to school, that was for design. So I went to Cranbrook, also no grades, very open ended. Where's Cranbrook?

Outside of Detroit. It's in Bloomfield. My sister went to the high school. Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow. Bloomfield Hills, the campus is gorgeous. Yeah. And there's just a grad program there.

That's really small, but very craft based. Like everybody has a studio, no classes, no grades. You're just making art and having critique. Wow.

And like reading groups and things like that. Are you learning the history of industrial design and all these different things? Is there any history being taught or a technique? Yeah.

And the technique, it was all peer to peers. For example, I had a project that I needed a welded part. So I went to a friend that I met at Lounds, where everybody once a week would hang out. And I approached my friend, and was like, hey, will you help me weld these chair legs?

And I'll teach you how to make a mold for that weird silicone thing you're trying to do. She was like, yes. And so it was all very collaborative. Wow.

Yeah. It was great. So you got out of there and some what you find yourself employed at a design place. And they're using you as like, what's what Cassin and getting off the wall take on this?

Yeah. Similar to in the other office job. And this was a rockable group with very high end, really successful architect in New York with all kinds of projects. And so I was working on a playground and they do hotels and lots of restaurants, all kinds of projects all over the world.

So that was really fun and tons of people inspiring people. I'm sure you were working on that. Yeah. Really inspired.

There were like 250 people up until 2008. So it was also kind of how I got to learn how design works as an industry, not as much industrial design. But like workflow of it, right? From idea production to installation.

And from my studio leader kind of learning how to pitch an idea and tell a story and work with clients and things. So that was all really fun. And the playground that ultimately I got to work on was kind of it. It's in the south seaport area kind of down your battery park city.

Oh, okay. So I'm sure there are places in LA that have them. A lot of children's museums have them. So you know your standard blocks that would in blocks with the triangle and the square.

They were just very exaggerated size. What we wanted was that the kids could design the playground. Yeah. Because you could move on and stuff.

Yeah. And I was kind of like kids are going to love a playground because A, it's for them. Yeah. There's other kids there and mostly they can run and slide into all things.

So we were thinking about why do they all kind of look alike? Like these pipe and platform. I think they look like scaffoldings and also sometimes a little bit like jails. And so we were trying to think about how it can look different.

And then I realized who cares if it looks different? What's the play experience of the kid? And also why are we designing it? What if the kids could design it?

And so not just as a process for this one playground. I was like, what if the playground itself is a thing that kids are designing by playing there? Yeah, altering it moving at shaping up. Yeah.

Really inspired by adventure playgrounds which are junk playgrounds. Yeah. Big in the UK. Yeah.

And so part of what we were trying to balance is this was a neighborhood that we had a certain aesthetic expectation. So giving them a junk playground is not an option. However, we wanted to figure out what's less visually messy and also kind of easier to maintain version of a playground. So these big blue blocks are like a high density foam.

They feel like a yoga block or something. So theoretically, there's hundreds of them. And every day that the kids show up with a playground that's a different playground, they do what they need to do. So they have so much more agency in their play.

They feel really powerful because they're like, I mean, this giant thing that's bigger than me. Those were kind of ideals that also were part of GMO, not the scale. But so I was starting to kind of figure out, oh, here are all of these different ways to instill some of these ideals where there's room in the object for children to invent what it is and imagine what it is. Because increasingly toys are being licensed characters.

There's these beloved characters and you can figure out what Spider-Man is going to do today, but it's still Spider-Manned. Right. So developing your own identity, what if you could be like exploring identity through the toys you're playing with and not have it already have one based on the story that you're given, which again, adults wrote. Well, I think this would be a good time to explain.

This is in my mind where you're starting to form a more cohesive theory on play in general, which is you start thinking, I'm not designing a toy. I'm trying to design something that will facilitate play. Yeah, it's not really about the toys necessarily. Just as a designer, I think I like to be kind of formally agnostic.

If the goal, and this is also kind of named by function. So there's this candle right here. And I could say, let's design a new candle and like, well, right, what's the goal of the candle? Is it to light a room?

Is it to make it not smell bad? Is it decor? So we know that you're really fancy and cool because it's a black candle and it probably smells something like cedar. Right, right, right.

Maybe some musk in there. You know, right? So is it a status symbol? So you can think of like, what's the actual function of that candle right now?

And so starting from that, instead of starting with the archetypical way that we do that, which would be candle, right? So if we were to redesign a way to light the room, that might be like, let's put a hole in the ceiling or let's get a bunch of fireflies in here. Yeah, you give a great example. You'll say to kids that I wrote down that I like, which is you tell kids build a car and we know what they're going to build versus build a way to get to school, which is really fun.

Yeah, imagine a way to get to school, then you're going to have dragons and unicorn systems, blinds and river. Yeah. I want to take a lazy river to school. Oh my God.

If you could get in here too. You know, they get these design communities and they're mostly kind of omeletist, the concept maybe just because no one's done one right. But if the entire way you got through this community was a web of interconnecting lazy rivers and you traveled solely by lazy river, I would buy a home in that design community. Yeah, I understand that everything would change if we wanted to get coffee on the way.

Yeah. I'm so fun. I'm such a boring adult because I'm like, oh, STDs. Well, from a river.

Yeah, it happens. They get transported through these lazy rivers and colleges. I think men tell, I think men tell their wives they got an STD from the lazy river, but I don't think I tell them. Yeah, that's a thing.

I love that as you're like, yeah, but STDs like every time. We're supposed to be going vacation. Well, you know, who doesn't have STDs. Yeah, that's a very good sign.

Zero incident rate of STDs. You think like that very adult eat, but what about the risk and whatever? Yeah. And maybe it's like the hierarchy of risk.

There's a risk every time you leave the house. Of course, there's risk if you don't leave the house. Yes. Are you risking physical harm versus mental harm, right?

If you don't leave, you're safe, but are you safe, then you're going to be maybe kind of sad and that's not safe. Exactly. Yes. Okay.

So here's where we get to our first little area where I do want to challenge a little bit. Okay. So what I totally love about your approach and what I think is so consistent with all of us as humans is in the best case scenario, we adopt theories and we adopt work strategies to kind of address the needs that were not met for us as kids or issues we had personally. And I think our work ends up reflecting a bit of just who we are.

So what you scream and what I like is I'm not a right angle and your work is very much like don't give kids instructions on how to build this Lego set. And I think that's very valid. And what I would want is for there to be that as an option, but also there are future engineers, there are autistic kids, there are other kids, they're like, no, they're fucking right angles. So the only thing I worry about is like when anyone shows up with any and this goes into parenting strategies, classroom strategies, all of it, I fear attempts to unify us and we're unumifiable and we're so different.

So then the challenge to me becomes in a classroom on a playground. Monica loves following directions and she loves, she said, how do I win this thing? Right? It was like a joke and it wasn't a joke.

And that's what satiates her and that's what really makes her feel safe. And then I'm more like you. I'm like, fuck that boring way. Someone already did that.

That was why I want to do that. So do you have an appreciation for the other versions or just a completeness taste for them all? No, absolutely. And thank you.

That's kind of the point that I get into in the book is that there's a misconception that free play means no rules at all. Part of what happens when we are encouraged or allowed to free play as children means that we are in touch with what do I need right now? What do I want to do right now? And then we're skilled in going to find it.

And one of the things that I do this a lot as a design professor is help people find their own constraints. I love constraints. Again, the idea with open-endedness is like, no constraints. It's like, well, you start with no constraints and then you find your own based on what you need.

Or if anything's an option, then everything's an option, which is totally overwhelming. Yes. Absolutely paralyzing. Yes.

So the thing about unstructured play for kids and open-ended play for kids is they learn how to find and make their own structure. And also with Rigma Jig, I talk about it as being open-ended and unstructured, but it's not really the wood, the materials, nuts and bolts. Those are constraints. Right.

Those create structure. You don't need instructions. I mean, it could be the constraints. The materiality of it as an object has constraints and structure built in.

And especially when there's a system, Rigma Jig is a building system. So in figuring out what the system is, you kind of start building something and then before you know it, you have the beginning of the card or a monster or a whirly gig. Rigma Jig, can you see that in your mind? Have you ever seen Rigma Jig?

No, should we open it? No, it's huge. Rigma Jig. Oh, I have a small one.

I'm taking a jig junior. I'll open this back. So unlike conventional erector sets or these other things, there's no obvious thing that these should be assembled. It's not a puzzle.

It seems like a very random grouping of shapes and sizes. But there's infinite ways to assemble these. This is what's in the High Line in New York. Stay tuned for more armor expert food.

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Fall festivities have never been more fun or easy. Hey, the Apple way terms apply. When we initially launched it, it was a big pop up playground. This was such a nerdery and it made the project so much harder in a way that I'm like, well, that probably wasn't necessary.

But we used beams. We recycled industrial pieces from some of the industry that was near the high line in order to make these toys. So they had they call them industrial scars. You could see the remnants of where a bolt was.

Which again is like the imagination. Industrial art. Yeah. Those are very successful during classrooms and stuff.

And then we rig them a jig jr. is kind of the home version of that. And the thing again similar to with the big blue blocks, it's too big for one child to use alone. So they need each other anyway.

I like that. It becomes so when we learn to need each other in play, it's a positive association with help and collaboration and cooperation. And sharing credit, learning to share. We made this as opposed to all I made.

Yeah. There's two pulleys. So if you're not using that pulley, can I use the pulley? I got to go ask.

We got to share resources. Yeah. Okay. I want to get in the book, but I just want to take a personal antidote you didn't ask for.

So I work on cars a lot. I build a lot of things with wood. And for sure, my favorite part of any project is I get to a point where I do not have the part I need. And then I start going like, what do I have in my garage?

And I start going through drawers and I'm like, oh, they put that ball through there. That to me is the euphoria of building. So I'm doing two things. Right.

It's like one is a carburet has to go together in a certain way. And a gasket goes there, but could a cracker jacksbox be a gasket? It's just cardboard. And that's when I just love it to no end is when I have to improvise and solve it, even within the framework of the thing has to be structurally sound.

So it's very much relate to your agenda. My experience of that moment exactly is easy as boring. I could just go and get that gasket, but I'm drawn to compelled by and intuitively I want to make this other thing work. Yeah.

I want to see how many rubber bands I can wrap around it instead of go and get the right gasket for this. Well, there's like a steam building in that for me, which is like, oh, I can't be stopped. Even if I don't have the right thing and flow, right? When you're in the flow of something to leave to go get that part takes you out of the flow of that you're in it and you've lost track of time.

That's also part of what play is when you lose track of time. You're so immersed in the thing. You're doing it because you love it. It's pleasurable.

Okay. So I'm grateful how play shifts are thinking inspires connection and sparks creativity. So when this came through, we get an email of the different experts that are potentially guests. And the thing we say most on here is playful.

Really attracted to play. Nice. I say it all time. Like I'm here on this planet to play.

I'll have to do some stuff I don't want to, but my primary mission is to play. Amazing. So you define right out of the gates 12 types of play and we don't have to go through all 12. But I'm wondering if you could tell us about a few of them and then I will tell you the ones I like so much.

Yeah. The ones I define early in the book are play types that I've used and I think are not universally. There's different versions of them, but that are used to understand and observe children's play, but they aren't called children's play types or just kind of play types because play most often is associated with children and the people who work with play are usually working with children. And so I had been using these play types.

So things like rough and tumble play, locomotor play, creative play, which is kind of building things pretend play, which is kind of performing or going into other worlds. We like communication play. And yeah, obviously you all take part in children's play types. That was probably like social play.

Right. One that's listed that I was grateful for is deep play. Deep play is one that I think really challenges the definition and the idea of play for a lot of people. Right.

So I look like big gestures of joy and celebration because in order to play, we kind of have to trust either our environment, ourselves or the world around us and people we're with, we become really vulnerable. And so children, if they're in deep play, are touching on things that are something they have to work out. Maybe it's something difficult in their household that's going on and they're trying to through play understand it or maybe even heal from it. Or even we walk around with all this fear.

So it's like, I might climb that rock. I'm afraid of that rock. I'm afraid of falling. I'm going to somehow play my way into interacting with this fear.

Yeah. And then you understand or get through your fears if you don't confront them and it's safest and fun and enjoyable to confront them in play. Yeah. And play in general, we could just broadly agree with like it's something that has zero purpose.

You're in one of the episodes of abstract on Netflix. You reference crows finding the lid of a yogurt container and then putting it on top of a snowy roof and then sliding down, snowboarding down and then flying back up. And it's like crows play. There's no point to that.

Crows can fly. Yeah, exactly. So that's just a novel experience for them. There's been so much science around this often, unfortunately, that used rats.

Some of the science makes me a little bit sad when I think about half of the rats were kind of tortured by being denied anything to play with or having to be alone while in the other cages, rats had an enriched environment, which was things to play with. They had each other. They have friends. They're fulfilled.

The rats that are alone and don't have toys. They love drugs. They love drugs. They don't have a drive to survive.

They don't solve problems. Well, eventually they stop caring. They just don't eat. They don't want to solve the puzzle in order to get the cracker because they don't care.

They have no drive to thrive. There's a lot of rat studies around this. And then there have been studies that use college students instead of rats. Right.

That's extreme. I'm not studying the neocortex development in these cases, thankfully. But similarly, college students, there was one study by Alice Eisen who put students in a room for five minutes with nothing. You're just going to sit in the desk for five minutes.