Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Backstage Integrity

0:00Growing up as an adult, I think I began to notice, especially when I started using social media. I was like, these stories are not the same in fundamental nature as the ones that I grew up hearing from people around me. They've lost something. And, you know, I just started noticing that and that's really where I started thinking about this book. You're now listening to a new episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times. Gratitude instills humility. Gratitude removes ego. Gratitude helps empower the best in others around you. Our goal is to guide individuals and companies to practice gratitude. So you can live a longer, happier, and more successful life. Get ahead of life with connection and purpose. This is Gratitude Through Hard Times with Chris Shembra. Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

1:00And welcome back to another episode and very important episode of Gratitude Through Hard Times. It's your host, Chris Shembra. And today it's a wonderful Friday, New York City. I'm excited for the weekend. It's good to have you, your old friend. Some of you have been with us for the last decade and have supported us through good times and bad. This podcast is a result of your unwavering commitment to having a positive impact on our world. So keep up the work you're doing and it's good to see you. Some of my favorite moments are throughout the week or when you email in, your thoughts, questions, comments, and concerns of today's episode, gas. So keep those words flowing. If you're new to this podcast, welcome. It's nice to meet you new friend. I don't know how you stumbled upon our humble little corner of the internet, but it's good to have you. You've stumbled upon a podcast series of our commitment to bringing on great leaders,

2:04great thinkers, great academics to share the stories of how they've built the impact they've built to give you a peek onto the hood. If a friend of yours sent you this podcast, it's because they believe in you. Let this podcast be an a note in your cap of knowing you're on the right path. Keep going. We're going to invite you to click that subscribe button by the end of this podcast. And join us along this journey is we make a commitment to sharing amazing stories with our world. If you think that you've come here for a new go-to-market strategy or how to hire your thousandth employer or some go-to-market thing, you haven't you stumbled upon a real human story driven conversational series here gratitude through hard times. Today's episode I think you're going to have a lot of fun with today's guest has had a very big impact on our life.

3:07Today we have Catherine Jesermorton who by the way is a tremendous tremendous writer. She writes a wonderful column at the cut her authorship her words on domestic life and digital culture have been featured in the New York Times, the nation, the Guardian and so many amazing publications. She's got her PhD in sociology from Concordia University and she lives with her family just down the road from Geno's La Zanya and Nagroni shop in Montréal. But Catherine Jesermorton wrote a piece for the cut in January of 2026 about a new term called friction maxing. And Catherine I'll let her explain friction maxing for just a brief moment in a sec. But friction maxing is what her prediction was for the word of the year in 2026 were friction maxing,

4:08which is in a world that worships frictionless efficiency and optimization. Maybe we can reintroduce a little bit of positive friction to make our lives and relationships matter. And when we read that that single word friction maxing helps sum up an entire decade of our life's work and she unlocked something new in us. So if you know what we care about for a decade, my golly, you're going to love Catherine's entire body of work. Today we're here to talk about her exciting new book that I read and loved the story of your life, how social media shapes the way we experience everything. It's one of the greatest chronicles of the norms of our American domestic life platforms over the last two decades, like Instagram and Facebook and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share information about our lives.

5:11And Catherine has gone on a long journey to examine how these algorithm driven platforms change how we shape our experiences, how we show up, what stories we choose to tell and how those choices reflect and shape our actual identities. So we're going to be talking about this book and the different chapters and concepts and research in our book today for this podcast. So grab that cup of coffee and let's welcome Catherine Jeser more into the podcast. Glad to have you. Thank you so much for having me on Chris. It's going to be exciting. Now we're going to talk about your book and a sec, but we do have to make a detour for gratitude because it's what we do now Catherine and to all our new listeners out there. We always like to start our podcast with a very simple question. It's a question that I asked to a room full of people who gathered around my dinner table on July 15, 2015 at 7.47 pm.

6:14So yeah, I just invented a bowl of pasta sauce. I decided to feed it to people. So I hosted a dinner party with my friends who didn't know each other. And we paused halfway through the meal and asked this very simple question. Catherine, if you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don't give enough credit or thanks to, whether you've never thought to think. The story you've never shared on social. Who would that be? It's such a great question. I feel like my mother in my mother-in-law, my husband's mom Louise has been really, really important to me. I've known her since I was a kid. I go way back with this family that I married into. And as I've become an adult, she's watched me grow from, you know, childhood adult. Really, I haven't been married since childhood, but she has known me for a long time. She's given me a lot of like really unjudgmental listening in a way that because it's not my own mom,

7:16it's not my own family, somehow it's easier to be really open. Sometimes with people who are just one degree removed. And she just always made herself so available like she was just ready to sit down and stay forever for as long as I wanted to talk. And it's made a huge difference in my life. It's really, I think it's made me more confident as a storyteller. So I think my mother-in-law, Louise, who is not usually one of the people that I think publicly for stuff. Cheers, Louise. Catherine, I love the way that you talked about how her unjudgmental listening from a person one degree separated has made you a better storyteller, more confident in your storytelling. And that's it. There's a researcher named Mark Granavetter that we had on the podcast who did a study. I know him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Famous guy. Famous guy, yes. If you're in sociology, that guy's important. Sorry, I didn't drop you can go ahead and tell people what he did. Where did you first? So for all our listeners, you've heard me quote through the years, Mark's study, The Strength of Weekties,

8:21how vital and he found in 1973 at Stanford that vital information best passes around a social network through a series of weekties, which means that if you've got strong ties, like family and close friends, and you've got weekties, like loose acquaintances or maybe a mother-in-law or something like that, it's actually easier to ask for things you need or share is crazy, creative, innovative ideas with people who are one degree removed from you, because there's less pressure on the relationship. And so creativity, innovation, job promotion, career growth actually happened through these weekties. Where did you first come across Mark's work? And oh, by the way, how does that link into the book? Because you didn't write about it in the book, but I can tell it would have been something that might have had something in one of those chapters in the book. Yeah, so I mean, grand of edders, he's a canon sociology. That's a reading that everyone does, like it's 101.

9:23The Strength of Weekties is very, very influential and you, I feel like I learned at some point in graduate school and you know, and it's one of those things too that it's strictly because it's a really clear description of social kind of the way that we organize ourselves socially, and it's the kind of thing that's easy to remember, and it makes a lot of sense. And then you start to see it in the world all the time. So it's just a great, it's a great concept. And as far as the book, yeah, I didn't include it. I mean, I do think that what it speaks to is that our networks on social media are not at all trivial. And I mean, I believe that strongly, the book really is approaching social media as a very untrivial space, as an untrivial pastime. We tend to kind of, you know, we dismiss it as a waste of time, you know, it's, it's performative, it's stupid. But in fact, I think that a lot of super important social information passes through that. And most, like you said, of that information is going between weekties.

10:23Because we don't learn about our closest friends and like our siblings on social media. It's usually where we learn about people that we don't know as well. So I think it's a very much, an example of that very concept. It's funny. I had not thought of that until just this moment. So in a world, oh my gosh, this is the last non book related question that I want to ask. But I do find it just a fascinating question. Gosh, golly, this is going to sound crazy. Is there a world where we've hero worshiped weekties too much, where the average human has 553 Facebook friends, but zero people call it 3 a.m.? Definitely. Yeah, yeah, that we're there now. Interesting. Yeah. And no, this is a seminal, this is a seminal study that we worshiped for five decades. Go meet new people entire trillion dollar empires were built on that premise. Of let me help you connect. So folks that are watching this quite literally there's studies that have shown that like 90 something percent of all.

11:30People that were hired. Last year or whatever the year this study was done by LinkedIn was through a second degree connection. A week tie. Right? So we've built platforms that hero worship this and in directly we have architected the themes in Catherine's book, the stories we tell on social media in order to maybe a piece week ties. Yeah, that's really interesting. So we're right. So where does I'm so glad that this is being validated because you're the first person I'm actually publicly sharing this with in a world of week ties. How important does strong ties, Dumbars number, Dumbars principle, which says we cannot have more than like five friends, like maybe 150 people in her head at once. How does that strong ties be maybe more valuable tomorrow than ever before?

12:38And how did you growing up in Vermont on a commune give you a great sense of being able to share stories within a close community in a healthy way. Yeah. So I think that as far as the importance of a small group of people who you're intimately, you know, they know you well. These are your strong ties. I do think that there's kind of an opportunity there and we have the capacity between us to like accommodate really complex and nuanced stories about each other from each other. You know, a close friend, you know that this is a person who maybe has a public persona. You know, they, for example, they might be really successful professionally. And then you also know that, you know, on the backstage, they have certain things that they are always insecure about and unsure of themselves. You know that because they've confided in you. And so you see this kind of like nuanced multi-dimensional person and you're like, that's my guy. That's the guy that I love and I trust, right.

13:39We don't get to have that picture of people that we only see representing themselves on social media, right. We see the self that they choose to show us. So I do think that the more of these strong ties that you maintain, the more you even kind of maintain your own capacity through your knowledge of these people to understand that humanity itself is never going to be simple. It's never going to be linear. There's never going to be one version of success of whatever because you see your friends and you're like, oh well, you know, I remember five years ago, you know, he went through that thing that was really bad and we weren't sure what was going to happen and look, he's okay now, right. You have kind of anecdotes based on this past intimacy with your strong ties. So I think it's essential as far as just maintaining a sense of what people can do. Because I mean, this is the thing about stories. They teach us what it is to be a person. That's how we learn. We learn that from our from our families growing up, maybe from our faith communities, like there's many ways in which we acquire information about how people function socially, what people are expected to do, right. We acquire this throughout our lives.

14:52But as we get older and we kind of get settled into a professional or a family environment, we need continuous, I think, help getting through stuff and other people's examples of, okay, so I feel I feel shitty about something that just happened to me and like one of the ways that I'm going to get through it is the knowledge that this kind of thing has happens and has happened and will happen and I incorporate that into my worldview. You see what I mean, these are stories, that's all they, but they have to be stories that you believe, right, they have to be stories that have a real kind of basis in what you perceive to be true and like personally, and I know I'm not alone in this, like I'm a bit of a skeptic. And like if I read something in like a self-help book that's like, you know, you can do it. You're awesome. Don't worry. Believe in yourself. I'm going to be like, yeah, thanks. That's, that's great. I'm going to go ahead and just pretend that I never heard that. Like what I need is for someone who I can really perceive as a whole person.

15:54Look at me be like, I know you. I know that you can get through this, for example, right. So this is all just storytelling. This is knowing people letting yourself be known. To go, I don't want to, I don't want to barrel forward. Can I, can I, you go, you go. Okay. So the commune, I grew up on this commune in Vermont. I write about it in the book. It was founded in the 60s. They know they were hippies. By the time I came along, it was the 80s and they were like still hippies, but like not in the same with the same intensity. You might say people like had real jobs and like, you know, there was a little bit more kind of. You could say, I don't want to say convention. That's not the right word, but like people were being respectable. Members of their community in like a more kind of traditional way. Anyway, the people that I grew up around. They were storytellers and the commune any kind of intentional community, whether it's like a faith-based one or, you know, people who are occult, I mean anything.

16:57It's based on stories. Stories are like what holds it together because people have to believe that it's worthwhile to be there. They have to believe that there's something special about it. And I mean, that's the whole game. There's nothing else, right? You're not there for the money. You're not there for the prestige. And you're not there for the amenities. Like it's dirty, it's broke. It's no one knows about it. So you're there for the vibes for the stories. And this place was just so rich in that. And I really grew up hearing about all kinds of like bizarre tragedies and like a beautiful, you know, romances and breakups and just the whole drama. It was like a movie. And I think I came to understand that part of what makes life rich and beautiful is the ability to share that with people and to have people around who like want to hear you talk about your day and make them laugh. And then like they'll make you laugh with something. And like it's just that's all it was was just storytelling nonstop. And for me, I mean, that was it was fun. I really I really enjoyed that as a kid. I can tell you, but growing up as an adult, I think I began to notice, especially when I started using social media.

18:02I was like, these stories are not the same in in fundamental nature as the ones that I grew up hearing from people around me. They've lost something. And you know, I just started noticing that and that's really where I started thinking about this book. You say that there was like a little bit of a golden heyday when social media was just like a hobby, maybe from 2007 to 2012. And you used it just for like as a tool for often authentically, you know, and you saw other people using it as a tool with with a wacky filters and you know, all those kind of good things. And then it kind of like took on a new a new dimension in a Tom Peters wrote the book about personal branding. It became a vehicle for capitalism and and brand sponsorship and promotions and everybody's got something to sell in some way, which will get into some of those topics in a little bit.

19:03But like you started off researching a very specific portion of people who used social media. What was your initial introduction in the social media world with mom influencers? Yeah, so when I was writing my doctoral dissertation, I decided to choose mom influencers as my subject because I was just interested in like I had little kids. I was a mom and I was seeing this stuff on social and I was like this stuff is crazy, man. Like I want to talk to these women. I want to hear it from them about what they're doing and about the struggles that they have in this, you know, what I really wanted to know was, what can't you say? Like as a mom influencer, what are you not allowed to talk about? I was like really fascinated by that question. And I'm generally fascinated in like what is unsayable within a group like and these are all unwritten rules that kind of social groups establish and maintain together. So as I was doing that research on mom influencers who are like, you know, influencers who are they have brand deals, they they have certain brand guidelines that they have to maintain in their content per the agreements.

20:07I began to notice that like ordinary people that I knew who were not influencers at all were basically communicating in a very similar way. Like they almost seemed as though they were trying to be influencers themselves. And so I noticed that I thought like this is really interesting. This the influence of influencers in terms of not selling the products, but like presenting yourself as a certain kind of person and using certain scripts to communicate is becoming widespread. That's that's where the real influence for me was being seen. And I wanted to understand what ordinary people how they were making sense of that and how it was now part of their own meaning making to almost present yourself as a little brand. Yeah. So that was that was sort of the next that's that's where I started going with my research for anybody is listening to this. I want to take a pause. I mean literally in Catherine's book she talks about, you know, kind of Tom or the 1997 cover story and fast company magazine called the brand called you.

21:10That was written by Tom Peters to talk about every worker from the boiler room to the board room would consider themselves an autonomous entity no longer defined by their profession. I think you're I mean, that was written 20 years ago 30 years. My gosh, Gali 30 years ago. Yeah. And now it's ironic that I think more than ever before founder led storytelling or the ability or the importance for you to have your employees sign up for some social selling workshop for LinkedIn posts and promotion. You all are all like now starting to do that. I've seen a lot of you sign your teams up for those things. And so the conversations that we're going to be having about, you know, the stories that we share online impact you as business owners because story telling. What you share online is really the last competitive advantage in a world where information is cheap and your competitors have the same access to information is everybody else does, which means your stories in your relationships are really the only thing we have left.

22:16And so this is very important not just for the retail, you know, just for like the individual user of social media that's watching this, but for the business owner who needs their people to think about some of these things. So just take that consideration when you're listening to some of these stories. Does that make sense Catherine to put it through that lens for them? Absolutely. And I talk a lot in the book about like capacity, like human capacity for understanding the nuances of your own experience, like living your own life and being able to metabolize your experiences. That's something that there's varying degrees of capacity that a person has. I think that, for example, your teams, you're trying to, you know, help your teams to like become more effective storytellers. You have to think about their capacity to even perceive the nuance of a given story. There's just I do think that we're overly we're really used to hearing this kind of brand based storytelling that we've been doing instinctively for the last 30 years.

23:17This kind of like this consistent. It's like, you know, if you're a brand, you have to remain consistent. You don't want to like kind of deviate from like the basic guidelines. You don't want to demonstrate too much. Obviously like risk exposure. However you want to put it. You want to see him as though you're like really tight sorted out. And that type of storytelling is not just to me because I grew up on a commune and was raised by hippies. I think objectively that type of storytelling is boring as hell. It's super boring. And I think that consumers feel that because we've been exposed to it nonstop for 30 years. And I think that we know there's way better stories. And this is why like every so often a brand will break through and of course I cannot think of an example. But like a marketing team will come up with some brilliant idea that will kind of almost seem to like redefine the whole space where they're like using honesty in a whole new way. And everyone's like, oh my god, that was such that was so effective. And it's because you know the marketplace is like we all we want is something that feels real to us. That's like we want that so badly.

24:19Anyway, that's a digression. You write about in your book that where people used to share the ups and downs of their life. Now they just share this like slow consistent like it's just getting better and better and better and better and better. And people's just like even if it's not the truth of how their lives going, that's what they're sharing online. We're going to get to trauma dumping in a sec as a topic. I want to start off with a question about one of your first chapters, which by the way this book Catherine really outlines that there's a couple different topics or a couple different buckets that she writes about in this book, how social media and the stories that we tell affect the narratives of our life, the vacations we take, the celebrations that we do. The way we share our reproduction news, politics, struggle, home, lies, grievances, residents, all the stories that we tell. And so this whole book is written in a couple different kind of buckets. Before we go into a bucket, I want to ask you about integrity. Now in the first play I ever produced in New York City, which opened on Tuesday, October 23, 2012.

25:30It was a one man show about Ferella, LaGuardia, former mayor of New York City, LaGuardia Airport. And in it, we have LaGuardia looking at the audience. And he's holding up a picture of his two kids, Eric and Jean. And he says two lines, two different lines and two different parts of the play. But I know your turn. I know you I know you turn your lights off when you leave your home. Do it when you leave a hotel room. You are who you are when known as watching. That's in your book. And the second thing we say is don't worry about people knowing you make yourself worth knowing. So in a in a in a world where a lot of us have been born to post, which is chapter one in your book, chapter two in your book. What does integrity behind the scenes look like when no one is watching? And what does it mean to stop worrying about people knowing you online and making yourself worth knowing offline the backstage moments?

26:31Yeah, so I think that the kind of culture of posting social sharing has made the sort of front stage that the being seen part kind of almost like overgrown, overdeveloped in the backstage kind of underdeveloped for a lot of us. Or we don't really think as much about who we are when no one's watching and to your point, that's where a lot of integrity comes from. And I think that it's also where we learn how to enjoy our lives like we learn how to take pleasure in our experiences by, you know, not feeling as though people are watching us when we're having them. And developing our own personal relationships with our own experiences that have nothing to do with what other people can see or think. And I mean, that's it sounds when I say it like that I'm hearing myself and I'm like it sounds really obvious. It's not that obvious. I think for a lot of people, the value of an experience is so tightly tied to the perception and you know how it's going to, you know, burnish their reputation.

27:35That it all if they lose sight of just their own ability to enjoy something for its own sake. I mean, that's like a tragedy like that's a human humanity level tragedy. In Susan Sontag's book on photography, she says to take a photograph of something is to appropriate the thing being photographed. And separately, good hearts, law states that when a metric becomes a measure, it ceases to become a good measure. This idea and then what we talk about in our upcoming book is the idea that we can't just have an experience anymore. Every experience has to have a duel. You have to experience it twice. You experience it when you live it and then the experience when you create meaning out of it to post online. For sure. And even I'll take that a step further like even, you know, there I'm thinking about like kind of a Gen Z thing, which I'm seeing a little bit, which is, okay, we're going to have a dinner party.

28:35We're going to have a we're going to have a get together and it's going to be phones free. We're not going to take any pictures. This is like an exclusive IRL experience. Okay, which is cool. Like I like that idea. But even that frame is within the frame of the capture of the experience. And so it's like, you feel extra special about it because you're thinking about how no one's taking our picture. Like the camera might as well be there. You know what I mean? It's just another kind of way of thinking about the experience through this kind of like this mediated framework. It just happens to be like an assence of a phone. So I don't think that's that much better. I think we really have to take a step back. And you're experiencing and feeling and relating to your life through just your own frame of your own personal history and your own perspective. You know, it's in first of all, I love the person who posts on Instagram stories, a photo of the cabana where they just said, I spent three hours without my phone.

29:39Oh my god, virtue signaling. Anyways, I want to talk about struggle. So I want to dive right into one of the chapters. So I'm starting by asking you about this because I think it's most directly tied to the entrepreneur's listening or the whoever's listening. It's a leading a team or or founded a company or the CEO in 1947 Kurt Vonnegut had his master's thesis rejected at the University of Chicago on the idea that all stories have shapes that could be plotted on a graph. I know that that's a cool anecdote. The Cinderella story, the boy meets girl, the rags to riches, but the most famous one he found was something simple called a man in the hole, which is the idea that the protagonist walks down the street falls into a hole, learn some things, meet some people, climbs out and the new normal is better than where he began. Right. And it's this idea that if you can knock down the protagonist in the first part of the story, then you can build him up in the last part of the story and the audience will root for him.

30:40And so this idea of like a founder watching this being like, you know, when I started my company, I had credit card debt. It was so hard. But now look at me. And this is what I can do. Like we share about our struggles online as a very well crafted story. And some take it to the extreme where they either make vulnerability or they trauma dump. Tell me about the law of telling a story that's based on struggle online. Well, I mean, okay, so the allure is that it does give you the opportunity to then be a comeback in right. So you're the chips were down and you made it out. I think that that's like you said, I think it's been the come a little bit of a commodified way of telling stories where you're using the struggle as a selling point, which is ironic as struggle sucks and we don't want to have it. It's like, or sure, like making lemonade of lemons, whatever you want to call it and listen, like in business, this is like basic stuff. Like you have to make the best out of we have to overcome.

31:45But I think that it is it does follow its formulaic and there are a lot of rules around the telling of a sort of a redemption story, a story of it sucked, but now it's good. And I think those rules are actually really limiting and I just I don't think that those stories are ultimately as interesting or as true or as like valuable in terms of just like accounts of humanity that as they could be. This idea of there being this like grand bottom and now there's this grand bottom and here's what I learned about it. So buy from me is this very vertically oriented up and down type of story. I went up, I went down, I learned this along the way, come with me on the journey. Here we go. That's like a dopamine based story. Yes, precisely. What you write about in your book is that there might be a perpendicular to that like a horizontally oriented serotonin based flat story.

32:53Yeah, I mean, listen, stories are supposed to be fun and interesting or you know they're supposed to elicit some kind of reaction and a flat story as I call it is a story that is just more of a like a babbling brook like it was okay and then it wasn't and you know this and that happened in life is long and you know through the ins and outs. And here we are, you know, we're still here. We may not have necessarily become better versions of ourselves, but we're still here and we have the wisdom to talk about it. Like to me, that's a flat story and it's not the purpose of a flat story is not necessarily to like grab attention within the attention economy and like squeeze people's attention for everything is worth. And without giving a honest accounting of what real life is like and real life is usually for most people a flat story and there may be some ups and then there are some downs and what I see now is people who have had success and who have had like you know great periods where they've been talking about how it was hard and now it's great and yes, like and that was a story that was very easy to tell and the audience was like so there for that.

34:04And then things kind of fell off a little bit and now maybe they're just kind of a plateau and they're like I don't understand how I can tell this story. It feels like this is death like if I'm not growing if I'm not killing it. Well, fool and what am I and to me like that's what most of life is like if you talk to people other parts of the world other you know social classes like. And then you know, I think that's the kind of thing in a very kind of nuanced and day to day relationship to success that is fascinating to hear about and it's just the kind of thing that is there's a void on social media in that type of storytelling does not exist. I would imagine that a lot of the people watching this you are very comfortable in the uncomfortable. And you can craft a good story to tell about it, but what Catherine's talking about is what we write about in our upcoming book is become comfortable in the comfortable. And tell that story tell the boring story like you're literally in your book you're saying like you know tell the story of working the job that you don't get fired from.

35:10Or like you know the boring version of the story that just kind of like is I think again we live in a world where pendulum swing back and forth every time I think the world hero worship these like vertically oriented dopamine based like crash and failure type of things. And I think the world is craving more stories around this like flat lined kind of like I was like you know kind of a boring like not all life has to be like meaningful and epic that you learn from like just like keep going I don't know put one front of the other. I'm going to like slightly disagree with the boring characterization I think we have come to see these kinds of stories as boring because we're so used to this like crazy up and down. Yes, I think there's an enormous world of unboring this in this little nuance kind of babbling broke. But it's true that if you're used to if you're used to the peaks and valleys you are like this. So I want to give an example of what you write about that you researched in the book this is going to be a cousin of all of you that are using AI to create AI slop that all looks the same right I know you felt it I know you see it on LinkedIn it all looks like shit it's all the same whatever.

36:25This is a cousin of that. Catherine writes in one of the chapters which is just completely under the topic of like vacations house stories that we tell online show up in the vacations that we take. She quotes Kyle Shikas book filter world who notes that the design homogeneity of what's called air space which is a frictionless easily shared aesthetic develop for digital platforms has become a universally adopted by spaces seeking to attract young people disposable income in every corner of the world. This is the aesthetic that you see on vacations in Airbnb's that start off with like the industrial you know the West Elm industrial version 10 years ago and then it became Scandinavian mid century modern chic and now it's just completely devoid of any color and it's completely soulless.

37:29It looks great on Instagram because it's predictable but it's creating a very very very boring burgeoning boredom expected aesthetic existence so now all these people who want to tell their stories online are seeking the novelty of a vacation so that they can post so that makes it look like they have an interesting life. But the places that they're renting now just look like boring. The aesthetic shit tell me about that. I mean yeah you know Kyle's book filter world is an amazing book that describes that phenomenon. I think that you know when we're thinking in terms of making content during our vacations we want to we want to show. So that our audience is like oh yeah Positano like I know what that looks like I know that what that yeah I've seen that before I look they're there and I think the whole point for a lot of people is just saying like I check I checked the box like I succeeded in getting to a place in this beautiful iconic spot where there weren't too many people behind me so it didn't look full of ugly tourists and you know here I'm and it's like I I achieved the objective of vacation.

38:48But like vacation is supposed to be you know an experience like if you think about before you know let's say the 90s the 80s and 70s when people took vacations that older people might remember. You know I traveled in the 2000s before social media and college and my whole goal of traveling I was in Europe I was a go by myself you know I hitchhiked was like I just want to like blend in here I want to like pretend like I live in the south of France I want to spend a day wandering around and no one would even notice me. Because I'm like a native member of this community which of course is a delusion and like most of the time everyone can totally tell your tourists and like don't fool yourself but it doesn't matter that was like the head space I was in and it was so fun like I had a frickin blast and you know that's a way of approaching vacation I want to I want to change I want to switch places with someone else I want to imagine what it's like to be from another place. Cut to today for a lot of people the purpose of the vacation is to be like I just I want to make it look like I did it right like I I you know I made I booked in advance all the right spots my wife you know wants to go here here here takes you know a year to get these spots I got them more here we look great here's us bodies you know perfect.

40:0710 on point and that's the whole point you're basically just like accomplishing a set of very challenging objectives and to me I mean it's not just to me that's not fun or like how is that fun and how is that something that like you're inner world is like you know on a journey with it I don't think so well talking about the idea of blending in and learning the culture of another through travel in Roman chrysanarex but I'm not sure if you're going to be able to do that. So empathy why it matters and how to get it. Travel is one of the six steps of highly empathetic people like go step into the feelings and perspectives another understand their feelings and you know step into their shoes understand their feelings and perspectives and then come back and use that knowledge to guide your action right taking that action. So if you go and you only hang out in the places that were curated for American tourists and you only meet American tourists in the place where you're taking the photograph for the person before you took the photograph.

41:14You're actually meeting the locals are eating their food are doing the thing it's crazy but you know what I think you said which is so important because it's one of the main one of the big chapters in your book one of the chapters on lies L I E S lies. You write we all know people who take vacations they can't afford and then post about them with a carefree self assurance that seems like an attempt to casting a spell against the interest payments that will await them in a month's time maybe these posts seem to say if we convince ourselves that we belong here will somehow be able to afford it. My question to link what we were just talking about was like people go on vacations just for the photo just opposed it just to project to others that like we might belong on the flip side what does going on a vacation and telling a story online due to our motivation or hope that we can somehow actually become that person.

42:17Is it positively impact is it negatively impact is it like statistically saying like the more you post about it the more likely it is that then you're going to be rich one day like what's the thing. Yeah I mean I do not think that we can create we can establish any causal connection in the world of manifestation right sorry sorry of course that's that's caused that's a causal relationship you manifest that it's going to happen listen. I think that travel is one of those things that is like everyone should do it it's like it's like taking your vitamins like it's good for you it gives you things that you might not even really be able to perceive so I do think that if a person wants to wish cast a reality that they're richer or that they're more worldly or whatever it might be. And they want to create content that is part of that project it's not like that's the worst thing in the world I think in general travels good and you should just do it. You know I don't want to nitpick but at the same time I do think that especially for younger people who maybe are just kind of getting old enough to do the sort of thing.

43:27There's just a little bit of a kind of a posity of imagination or like you know a lack of imagination in the way we think about travel in the age of posting where I just don't think that we see it as the site of opportunity for like the unexpected and the unknown. It's more about creating predictable evidence that we did it and to me that's just a huge missed opportunity like it's all about I mean talk about friction maxing it's about inviting the unknown into your life and then having to you know react to it and that's if we're trying to like extract value from our vacations like to me that is a huge value. By the way it's not lost on me that Anthony Bourdain's new movie called Tony just came out which Anthony Bourdain was the ultimate even though he had a camera crew and maybe there was some kind of posturing of you know how many novel experiences can I get on into on camera to post maybe there's a little bit of that and he probably wrestled with that but like this is a guy who wanted to eat where the locals ate wanted to experience the local culture.

44:35You know those kind of things I mean yeah it's but the interesting thing about linking back to flat stories is that I think you can take the same empathetic adventure same empathetic journey to a new place a new destination without necessarily needing to go very far. For sure I think I think what's cool what's cool now is like live your same life just see it from like a different perspective sit in a different chair take a different route home do that kind of thing it may look less sexy it may get you less likes then just like the Taj Mahal but like it'll probably actually have a bigger impact on you in the stories you're actually able to tell. For sure I agree completely and also like these are this stuff that is maybe closer to home this is where like you develop depth of relationship with people around you like I'm thinking about like my kids like just this last little while I've been going on trips for this book and.

45:40We've taken one kid with us and then the other one was home and then we've like spent one on one time with our kids which we never do ever and it's just like we're not even going far we're not traveling the world it's just like little trips. And it's like we're getting to know each other in ways that we really hadn't and it's like in some ways when I look back on this in 10 years it's not going to be like it was so awesome I was like promoting my book i'm going to be like it was cool we like went for dinner with you know my 16 year old and like he ordered something that I was like whoa you want to eat that and he was like yeah you know like. I was like getting to know each other as a family it's awesome. I want to by the way you skipped ahead to residents without even being prompted because you've already you've already realized so well about what you know what this is all going to mean for you in the future but I want to start rounding the corner and you know honoring your time you didn't write this book as a how to book right for all for all of you.

46:40You know watchers when you go read the story of your life which the link is in the comments below or in the show notes below it's not going to give you a simple you know five part framework on how to then tell better stories or whatever. You know Catherine's a researcher she tells her stories and she addresses a lot of the research that dictates the stories that we tell what do you hope either you walk away with or the reader walk away with. So all these different topics are said and done. But me like best case scenario if someone reads this book they have acquired a little bit of a skeleton key for understanding why people are behaving the way they behave on social media and I think that when you have a better understanding or when you feel a little bit like in possession of some critical thinking that you didn't have before it's going to make it easier for you to just like cope with this storytelling technology. Maybe use it more effectively yourself have a better relationship with it and also maybe like have more empathy for the people out there creating posts that so often we dismiss or you know we are judgmental of people on social media all the time and I think it might help you understand.

47:58A little bit about like what's going on there why they're doing that so you know. I think that like a little critical thinking critical awareness, especially as it pertains to media technologies is so essential right now like in the way that we're living so i'm hoping to give a little bit of that. Well you you gave it and so much more in this book very well researched you blend your personal stories with the amazing evidence of what social media is doing to. How we take vacations and how we live our lives and the lives we share and the politics we believe in and all these kind of different amazing amazing amazing big topics in our lives and I think you packaged it up. In a wonderful way if your mother in law Louise was on the call right now with us what gratitude would you give her. Oh I mean thank you so much for just letting me tell all the versions of my stories and not expecting them to take a single type of form being open to whatever I was trying to say.

49:02Thanks for that Louise cheers to you captain any last words and closing. Oh guys thank you so thank you Chris for having me appreciate this audience hope people enjoy it thanks a lot. Folks that are watching this thank you for tuning in I think the book that Catherine wrote is not anti social media nor am I social media is a tool of how we have met each other some of you we've gone on wonderful adventures having a positive impact on our world. Catherine does a very good job pointing out kind of some of the hidden things that we haven't thought about yet that are impacting the stories that we tell so grab the book take a fearless and searching moral inventory the stories that you tell and why you're even telling them in the first place. And I don't know let's let's go on and you know just make the world a little bit more human and tell better stories and connect deeper with others and yeah just have some positive impact so thanks for tuning in.

50:06All the low listeners will see in the DMs to all the new listeners it's nice to meet you next time your New York City you got a you got to see it at my table waiting for you just reach out click that subscribe button join us along for this journey. Hope you all have a phenomenal day on earth remember folks it's your world go explore we'll see you next episode.