Katherine: [00:00:00] to spend time with someone and nobody’s on their phone feels like one of the most generous gifts you can give someone nowadays, because it’s so rare to give someone your full and complete undivided attention and I think that we need to remember that in our own relationships and in our friendships, I know that when I have those interactions with a friend who has never shown their phone at any point over the course of our walk or our coffee date or whatever it may be, it makes me feel so honored as a person.

It makes me feel like they truly wanted to be here with me. They wanted to spend this time with me and connect with me. I can only hope to try to give that same feeling back to others.

Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badsen. I’ve been writing about friendship for over a decade. And in that time, I have definitely see some trends in social media and discussion about phone use come and go. I would say lately, the momentum has really picked up for discussions about not just kids and [00:01:00] their use of screen time, because that’s been around a while, but

adults and how much time we’re spending on social media or just staring at a screen in general, it might even be watching TV, Netflix, and listen, if you know me personally, or if you know me as a listener or a reader you know, I’ve watched a lot of TV shows.

I am certainly a user of social media. For many years, I had articles and different websites. I’ve had a newsletter for a long time, and I’ve had a podcast since July of 2021.

I’m in a very online world. I don’t have a big machine of marketing that does it for me. It’s me. And the truth is, I don’t need a trend or a new discussion point that’s happening, I guess is better than a trend, about lessening our time on screens to know that I’m on it too much. This is a podcast about friendship and this episode will be about friendship as it pertains to screens.

It’s a deep issue I think to say it’s not a problem is to be in [00:02:00] denial. Uh, you really only have to look around any restaurant groups or friends getting together of any age. Any age from teens, younger adults, all the way through, older age adults. And that phone is out.

we tell ourselves a story and, I’m part of we, that we need to be in touch that our kids might need us, that, our aging parent might need us. There’s a lot of reasons. Most of them are valid. I’m not saying that they’re not valid reasons, but to deny that something is taken away , it’s throwing your head in the sand.

It is not the same to spend time with people when the phone is getting picked up every two minutes. I think about how some schools are taking away phones, maybe that would free up the adults a little bit. It’s not like I don’t want to hear from my kids, but also it makes me personally feel like I can’t ever not be available. So it’s something I grapple with myself. I’m curious, have you out there noticed this bigger momentum to stay off the phone, to get off social media?

Have you yourself taken the apps off your phone, deleted your [00:03:00] accounts? Now I’m not saying I’m deleting my social media accounts. but I need more balance around it. Today’s guest is a perfect person to have this conversation with Katherine Martinko is a writer, editor and speaker and the author of childhood unplugged . She’s the creator of a fast growing sub stack newsletter called the analog. Family. Analog. You know what analog is, right? Things that are not technology based. Things that are off a screen.

Her approach is not anti tech. That’s a huge thing I love about her work because it’s not so black and white all the time. . Katherine is a speaker on behalf of Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation campaign. She lives in Ontario and does a lot of work in Canadian media as well, but also, international publications.

She has a real calm about her that I think you will appreciate on these topics. She’s not hysterical. It’s just really a matter of fact how to build your life offline and friendship is a huge piece of it. Let’s welcome Katherine. hi, Katherine. [00:04:00] Welcome to dear Nina.

Katherine: Hi, Nina. Thanks so much for having me.

Nina: It’s really fun for me to be a fan of a writer’s work and then have the opportunity to reach out to that writer. That is one of the positive things about the internet, right? Is how else would I have done that so quickly?

I guess back in the day I would have written a letter or something and maybe you would have written back, but then I wouldn’t have even had this podcast. That’s a huge part of what I like about your work is you do not have a black and white attitude about being online or the internet or the phone, it’s a little more nuanced.

Katherine: Yeah, no, I would agree with you. I think that I like to say upfront to a lot of people that my approach is not anti tech. It’s very much about putting technology in its rightful place as a powerful tool that’s worthy of our respect. But we shouldn’t let it become a toy. You know, it shouldn’t be the primary form of our entertainment as well at the same time.

So for sure, these tools are incredible for connecting us, for enabling us. to have this conversation, getting the word out about your work, about my work. but the problem always arises when that sort of just becomes a predominant uh, means by [00:05:00] which people are interacting.

Nina: I feel like you were on kind of the early end of, I mean, not the earliest, earliest, not the first person to be like, Hey, we’re on our phones a lot. Our kids are on the phones a lot. They don’t have a normal childhood, but right now in this moment, it feels like I am being bombarded with those messages and maybe it’s because it’s a message I need personally need to hear but do you feel like it’s increased?

Katherine: Absolutely. I agree with you completely. In fact, I feel like the timing for my book could not have been better. It almost seemed, eerily prescent, perhaps just I started writing about this thing that some people were asking me about how it was that I was raising my kids without phones and iPads.

And it seemed like a really quirky kind of outlier thing, Some people scoffed at the idea that I was even writing a book about it because obviously I started the book. I don’t know, we’re talking more than three years ago now, because it takes a long time for a book to come out.

But by the time the book was published, and then in the, in the, the year following publication, it seemed that this topic just sort of exploded. And it was the thing that was on everyone’s mind. It was driven, of course by Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, which [00:06:00] obviously is a very high profile book, has stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for the past year that it’s been out.

So I think that that has really done wonders for my work as well because it’s just, it’s become this high profile issue. And I think too that we are reaching a time of, I guess you could say almost like smartphone fatigue. Perhaps we’ve had these devices in our lives long enough that we are now starting to see some of the negative effects of it on our relationships, on our families, on our friendships as well.

And we’re starting to just feel a little bit uncomfortable that maybe this really great experiment that seemed really exciting initially and like, understandably so maybe is turning a bit sour and sort of has this dark underside to it that we hadn’t considered before.

Nina: And then a lot of your work focuses on the negative effects for kids. But what I want to move to because my podcast really focuses on adult friendships is how much the phones are getting out in the way of those relationships and I just want to read something quick from your Substack post , this is the one that made me reach out . It was called Fix Your Analog [00:07:00] Life First. I’m going to read one paragraph of your own words and then I’ll let you talk. It says, we talk so much about the necessity of reducing screen time and getting off one’s phone, but we don’t talk enough about what is supposed to replace it. With adults spending on average 2. 5 hours per day on social media alone, not counting other forms of phone based entertainment, that is a significant amount of time that suddenly needs to be reallocated towards something else.

It makes sense that many of the popular phone life balance hacks don’t last. They are temporary solutions to a bigger problem. Okay, I’d love for you to say more about that.

Katherine: Yeah, well, I think that we are distracted by our devices. We know that these are rabbit holes that just exist at our fingertips in our pockets. And so it’s become really hard to focus on doing anything else and to develop other interests and to invest in other relationships because there’s just this You know, it’s, it’s been designed, of course, to be highly addictive to draw us in. We do struggle with that self control aspect, which I think we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over, but we [00:08:00] do need to acknowledge it.

there’s some really great work by Cal Newport. He talks a lot about this. He actually was the one who gave me that phrase, fix your analog life first. And he says how, unless we start constructing real things in our real offline lives that can fill the void that’s left when we start to pull back from our devices, we don’t stand a chance and resisting that like siren call of the device.

So really, if you want to curb your screen time, and I hope you do, I mean, the, the average numbers are pretty shocking then you do need to take very conscious, deliberate effort to build things that you can do in real time, in a real physical world that add value to your life that bring you into face to face contact with other people, and then it will be easier to get off the device.

You mentioned that statistic, the two and a half hours a day looking at social media. It’s, uh, adults pick up their phones on average 144 times a day, which is really shocking. The total screen time is usually around four hours. So that’s in addition, so that’s including the two and a half hours of social media, but still that’s a, that’s a big chunk out of your day that you could be allocating to something that might [00:09:00] be more productive, but it’s not just about productivity. It’s also about pleasure. It’s about reward. It’s about satisfaction and fulfillment. And I think that a lot of the things we’re doing on our devices are not really feeding our souls in the way that we deserve.

Nina: When you add those numbers up , over the course of a month, of a year, I mean, it’s really Staggering. by the way, listeners, I am right there with you as guilty as anyone. I’m out there promoting the podcast. I’m, also using it as a user.

So not just as somebody who’s posting my own stuff, but also as a form of relaxation, I guess. And I do so many other things and people are like, you’re so busy. I am. And yet that phone is. In my hand so I think I am doing the other things. I do have the analog life and I’m just even thinking of being with friends.

It’s like we will be doing something else and yet the phone is still right there. We’ll be playing Mahjong, which is great. You know that we are doing something, I’m in several different Mahjong groups, but yet every single one of us has that phone at the ready. this is where I’m finding it to really get in the way [00:10:00] of relationships because you could be in the conversation with somebody They pick up that phone and it might just be to, quickly check a text from their kid and they’re gone. goodbye. It’s like you can watch them float away. Bye bye. I guess we’ll see you in 10 minutes, you know, maybe, but then they missed the whole conversation.

Katherine: yeah. No, I, I think that that’s a huge problem. The presence of a phone, we know that even just the mere presence, it could be face down, it could be silent. It is a distraction and you are less present for the people that you’re sitting with physically just because you know that that device is there.

And the other person is also aware of that device’s presence. And it’s true. As soon as you check that text, which might sort of feel urgent in the moment, you’re also sending another message to the person that you’re with that they matter less then whatever it is you’re looking at on your phone. what I’ve been trying to do in social settings is not to take my phone out at all.

I try to keep it in a bag, in a backpack, on the floor. Sometimes I even leave it in my car, which is really crazy. Less so, but if it’s in a bag, for instance, I will often even set an alarm for the time when I have to go, or if there’s something that I have to do, so that I’m not even tempted to pick up the [00:11:00] device to check what time it is, because Few of us even wear watches anymore for the purpose of telling time exclusively.

I think that you can also encourage friend groups to do the same. You know, it’s a little bit of a contagious effect. If one person does not have their phone out and nobody else sees it, I think that they become a little bit more self conscious about having their own phone out on the table as well.

And so it can sort of become positive feedback loop, I think, where you sort of set a new tone for an interaction in order to just discourage people from, from being on their devices. Something I’ve noticed too, and I’ve is that more people seem to be vocalizing their phone checks, which I think can be helpful.

In a group, if you’re sitting at a table or something, someone might say, I have to do a quick phone check because such and such a thing is happening. And it’s sort of, you sort of give permission as a group for that person to do what they need to do. And that person realizes that they’re on display and that everyone’s aware of what’s happening.

And then they’re a bit more quick, I think about doing it. But we do need to resist that temptation. 1 interesting statistic I read recently was from, I believe, Sherry Turkle’s book alone together, which came out quite a few years ago, but she [00:12:00] said that the magic number seven minutes that that is the point at which a conversation between friends can sort of become awkward because you have you’ve gone over all of the, basic, the easy stuff, you know, the general catching up and that’s the moment at which a conversation can either go deep.

Or it has to stay superficial. And so that’s often the point at which people will reach for their phones.

Nina: That’s so interesting and I think true.

Katherine: yeah, yeah. Well, ever since I read it, I’ve started paying attention and I’ve realized people are good for the first seven minutes. You do not feel that temptation at all to reach for the device. What I do now is I feel that discomfort and I lean into it because what else are you going to do?

Either you break that connection and the potential for something to become really good or you, you, you go for it. And it’s obviously far more rewarding to go for it than to avoid it.

Nina: I think that’s what’s happening all day Like I’m thinking about even my own work of editing the podcast. Editing it is actually very hard work and you have to really listen closely. You’re using a lot of senses and even your hand my hand. We’re on YouTube also So I’m like showing my hand [00:13:00] It’s very like delicate work on the mouse. And so having to delete things that are not just little words here and there, but okay, if I deleted this, I had to go back forward and delete something else. It’s harder work.

That is when I pick up my phone. I know it. it’s like, I need to escape the work for a moment, but I do it throughout the process. It’s not good. It makes something that is very time consuming as it is, twice as long..

The phone extends everything we do. But what you’re saying about the keeping the conversation surface and we pick it up when it’s hard, yes, we do do that in all through the day.

Katherine: Yeah, it erodes our focus. And obviously in my work with kids, you know, it’s a huge problem when it comes to doing homework and kids being in school, I do think that we need to remove those devices physically from the kid’s reach during the time that they have to get a task done, because otherwise, how are they going to learn to just, , sit with the discomfort of needing to accomplish a task and go deep into it and as a result, create higher quality work.

Same with our relationships. We get higher quality relationships when we’re not, fragmenting our attention and our thoughts all [00:14:00] the time.

Nina: I want to go back to something you said about changing the feel among your own friends like if you don’t have your phone with you and What you said about the person saying out loud and I agree with you that it’s something I do I will definitely if I’m gonna pick up my phone.

It is awkward to be the person who’s the phone awareness person. I think I am that person, even though I’m on social media more than my friends because of the podcast, but I am have been writing about trying to be off my phone.

I I’ve written a whole thing against Apple watches.

Like, so I sound like I’m new to the idea and it’s hard, but I hate to be known. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I don’t like to be the person everyone’s anxious about being on their phone around I don’t how do you avoid that and you must really feel that

Katherine: Well, I think you could reframe it a bit differently, instead of the fact that you’re like taking something away from people, you’re kind of giving them an opportunity to enjoy a phone free space. And I, I think that we very much need to normalize the idea of phone free spaces. And I think people are desperate for them.

Not just kids. I think adults are too. And I think [00:15:00] that there’s something almost liberating when someone comes in and says, look, let’s not be on our phones in this space. Let’s take time to just be present and to fully engage with and enjoy this experience. there’s some ways to sort of make that a little bit easier and a less and less awkward.

I think smaller gatherings for sure can help a lot. if I want to really connect with a friend, I have found that honestly, getting out of the group chat and doing the one on one chat and inviting someone to do something can be really helpful because it’s a lot more awkward to look at your phone when you’re sitting across from one person at a small table than if you’re in a whole group of, five or six. In my case, you might go out for brunch or get coffee together or drinks or whatever. I think group chats are actually really they’re kind of a good idea in theory, but in practice, I think that it it leads to a lot more sense of disconnection from people than you might think. It’s easy to not make real plans and just have this ongoing, infinite conversation that never really has a conclusion, that doesn’t have a purpose to it.

sorry, going back to technology, we talked about, the lack of focus and direction. And I think that [00:16:00] With texting, these tools are really good for, communicating and making plans with someone. But if, if the plans never leave the device and actually turn into something concrete, it’s not really improving your relationship with that person in the long run.

So, I think if you can make plans to meet 1 on 1, that can be really good and it can be easier to get off devices. I think 2, planning things to do together. I, I try to do active things with a lot of my friends. So we go on a lot of walks. I find that that’s, you know, it’s harder to look at a phone, of course, if you’re out in the forest on a trail or walking along a beach or something.

It’s sort of conducive to just bringing you together as friends. And the devices tend to stay in pockets for that amount of time.

Nina: I agree with that. Let’s move on for a moment to raising kids which is a big part of your well, it is the thesis of your book and trying to Have that analog life be more important than the screen life. When you are a family that is trying to be very low screen or even no screen, how does this work when you are sending them to other people’s houses?

And when other people’s kids, well, how old is your [00:17:00] oldest?

Katherine: So my oldest is 15. He’s in 10th grade. Yeah.

Nina: so then you have it on this end too. kids come to your house with their phone attached to them like it’s a limb. So both, both of those, sending your kids out and then other kids coming to you.

Katherine: Well, you have just voiced one of the most popular questions that comes up at the talks that I give. There’s always a Q& A that happens after. And I kept getting asked this question so often that I’ve now incorporated it into the presentation itself, because people want to know, how do you handle kids with phones in your house?

And how do you handle your kids going to other people’s houses with phones? the way I see it is my house, my rules. So I have the right to tell kids, please get off your phone. If they’re in my home. For the most part, they’re very, very amenable to that. They actually, I think a lot of kids are very excited to have an opportunity to put their phones away and to engage with other kids who aren’t on their phones.

So kids won’t do that themselves. You know, it’s, they, they still want to fit in. they don’t want to call someone out. They’re sucked in by it. They love the technology because it is highly addictive and compelling. So when a parent sort [00:18:00] of draws that boundary for them, it frees them up to then do other things.

one conscious effort I’ve made is to try to turn my house into a social hub for, particularly teenage boys, because I have two teenage boys in my house right now. And I have a younger child as well, three boys, so it’s a bit of a rowdy household. But you know, we have all kinds of stuff for the kids to do.

And so the neighborhood sort of flocks to our space. We’ve got a garage gym, we’ve got a slackline, we’ve got a trampoline, we’ve got a basketball net in the driveway. Like these things that I’ve sort of acquired over the years, sometimes secondhand for not that much money. Just sort of built up this collection of things that kids they want to do and boys, that’s what I’m experienced with.

But you know, all kids are, they’re embodied creatures. They want to play still. They need to play. They have that drive and all too often it’s sort of quelled by the phones. And I think they sort of suppress it and think that they’re doing what they want to be doing. But as soon as those are taken away, they suddenly are free to explore these very physical, active interests.

which, which I love. So I have not had pushback from kids about removing the phones. Usually they just put them away. I don’t actually confiscate them. Some [00:19:00] people I know, Erin Lochner, who’s the author of the opt out family, she keeps a basket right at the front entrance of the house and asks visitors to deposit their phones when they come in the house.

I haven’t had to do that. I would if I, if it turned out to be a problem. so that’s, that’s one side of it. And then the other question is, of course, what do I do with my own kids when they go to other people’s houses? So my kids don’t have phones. Even my 15 year old does not have a phone. He doesn’t even have a talk and text phone at this point.

We’ll be getting one for him at some point soon. So when they go out into the world, they are on their own. I trust them to be able to handle themselves. I know vaguely where they’re going. So it seems presumptuous of me to impose my parenting philosophy on other parents who are graciously hosting my child in their home. They might be feeding them, they’re taking care of them, supervising, whatever it is. I don’t say anything. I know that my kids go to these other Homes and they often do play video games.

They’ll sometimes play video games for hours on end And they will watch movies and they’ll do all kinds of things and then they come home and they tell me about it Or sometimes they hide it a little bit I think they downplay perhaps the amount of time that they [00:20:00] spent doing these things. But there’s a sort of sense I get that they’re grateful that we do things differently here you know, it’s one thing to sort of dabble with it and see it and experience it but I don’t really think it’s the life that they want and they know that we do things differently here in our own home.

And so they don’t push back against that as much as you might expect. It’s good to see how other families live too. They will sometimes come back and you know, I’ll flip the script on them occasionally and they’ll be complaining about not having a phone or something. And I ask, well, how, how are your friends doing?

Like, tell me about some of the experiences that your friends are having with their devices. And inevitably there are a lot of horror stories, the kids are not thriving by spending, upwards of eight or nine hours a day on these devices. They’re really struggling in a lot of ways. So my kids kind of see that.

So they’re getting a balance of, gaining some perspective on how it can be as well as what potential there is when you pull back from that and pursue an alternative.

Nina: It is like a numbing. It does not surprise me to hear that your kids when they come back home, they feel like they’re kind of like back on. the brightness is back. Doesn’t mean it’s not fun to play video games. Of course it’s fun. That’s why people [00:21:00] do it for hours and hours and hours.

It’s why we scroll. There is enjoyment to it, but there’s a numbing effect. I feel it myself it’s like where did the time go all of a sudden you come back alive when it’s Gone. I think you said something extremely important that it reminds me of the paragraph of yours that I read about Building that life offline.

So you had all of those things in your house. You have to have stuff for the kids to do and for you as an adult. If you are going to try to spend less time on your phone, what are you gonna replace it with? And I loved your point to build that stuff up, build the environment up, maybe even before you try to be too severe with putting that phone away or the video games or all of that. People need to ask themselves, what are you going to do? Really? Everybody with the hours and hours and hours that you’re going to get back neither Katherine or I are saying. all or nothing, Gretchen Rubin talks about this a lot, some people are able to moderate their behavior, whatever it’s about phones and sugar or whatever the topic, alcohol, but some people really can’t, right?

Like for some people, it really is a little more black [00:22:00] and white,

Katherine: Yeah, and I’ve,

Nina: not have it.

Katherine: I’ve talked to the parents who point out too, that not all children are created equal. Like there are some kids who can maybe handle having an iPad in their house and their sibling absolutely cannot, they just go completely nuts and have zero self control. I think that you don’t really know, in that case, if you have kids with mixed levels of addictive.

behaviors is probably better to err on the side of the kid who really can’t handle it and, you know, have the kid who can handle it just go without. yeah, for sure, it’s, it’s a real challenge. Everyone’s made differently.

Nina: I’m going to give a little tip for parents that I haven’t really seen anyone write about or talk about because it’s usually the kids don’t get a phone, which I get and respect a lot. We don’t give our kids unlimited data. So this is something we do that’s different.

Everybody has unlimited data. We give them very limited data. So even once they get a little older and they have more access to social media and stuff, they don’t have unlimited data. And social media takes up a lot of data. I don’t know if every phone company does this. We have Verizon. My husband has and my husband, by the way, is excellent about [00:23:00] not being on his phone.

So he’s actually a good model. He’s much better than any of us. but he has through the Verizon app, you can give the adults a certain amount of data, and then you can give the kids each person, you can control instead of the whole family having, you can decide how much they get If they run out on their own phones, they’ll get a text that says you’re almost from Verizon.

It’s not like from us person. We’re not monitoring it day to day. Verizon’s monitoring it and it will tell them that they’re almost out. And if our kids want more, we make them pay for it. So that they have awareness it’s only ten days into the month and I’ve already used all of my data

Katherine: Yeah.

Nina: yeah, I don’t know.

Katherine: Well, I think that’s a good example of creating friction. You know, we need to do that sort of as adults and as kids to just make it a little less convenient. To reach for these devices all the time and to do things. So for sure, I think that that’s a great little roadblock to put in place. I’ve heard of some other interesting hacks, like for instance, parents who do want their kids to have social media for whatever reason, don’t want to deactivate or delete accounts.

They might suggest that the [00:24:00] child only access it on a desktop computer. Instead of having the app on their phone so that they could still be part of that social environment. But they are not accessing it constantly. You know, it’s just a little, it’s that friction. It just makes it a little bit harder to have to go sit down at a computer.

In fact, that is how my boys participate in group chats and texting their friends. So we have a desktop computer in a common area of our home and the boys can message their friends using iMessage. they still get their fair share of silly memes and photos and all the things that the teenage boys like to exchange, but they’re not carrying it with them in their pocket.

So they have to log out and walk away and go out into the world and then, wait to check their messages for when they come back at a later point. that works for us too.

Nina: This has been so great I mean the world is gonna have to deal with this stuff and I know people are starting to people like you and other writers Are and thought leaders are really starting to grapple with this but I think it’s gonna be more and more and more as a lot of people are starting to I have no numbers to it, but I definitely feel the energy of people [00:25:00] getting off social media.

It is happening. People are deleting their accounts or they’re taking them off their phones and there’s more talk about this, but I don’t think there’s enough talk about the part you’re talking about, which I also try to talk about cause I talk about friendship a lot offline. you need to be doing stuff offline, but what are you doing?

My last thing, and I’m going to give you a chance to say any last thing you want to say. Probably in every two episodes, I bring up my love for tennis that I only rediscovered about three, four years ago. And it comes up a lot for so many reasons. Trying new things in it as an adult have older friends from it, younger friends from it, get you out of your regular friend groups. Trying something new as an adult is so good for you. Okay. There’s so many good friendship reasons to do it. One of the things I love about it most is we are not on our phones.

Katherine: I can relate. I go to the gym. I discovered weightlifting of all things like 10 years ago, which was so random because I’d never had an athletic background as a kid. And I just love it. I go to the gym like four or five times a week and there’s this hour long session. That’s just, you know, weightlifting.

There’s some conditioning as well at the end of it, but it’s just, a time where it’s such a [00:26:00] physical activity. It’s demanding so much of your body that you’re not even thinking about what’s going on in the online world, which isn’t even the real world, you’re very, very present in your own body. And in the moment, you also can’t not be focused because there’s sort of risk associated with losing that focus and everybody else is there too.

And I think this is an example of what Cal New Newport has described as super charged socializing. So these are certain social environments where you can go and you are going to engage in a sort of elevated fashion with people. You’re not just bantering and saying, hello, you’re sort of on a team that’s, you know I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but you’re joined in this like mutual process of delving deep into something that you all are both love and it brings you together.

You know, it’s a really great feeling. And I think that to speak to what you just said, that to spend time with someone and nobody’s on their phone feels like. One of the most generous gifts you can give someone nowadays, because it’s so rare to give someone your full and complete undivided attention that isn’t broken by any other demands.

And I think that we need to remember that as people, like, in our own relationships and in our [00:27:00] friendships, even with our own kids, to be fully present is now so rare that to do it is just It’s almost mind blowing. And I know that when I have those interactions with a friend who has never shown their phone at any point over the course of our walk or our coffee date or whatever it may be, it makes me feel so honored as a person.

It makes me feel like they truly wanted to be here with me. They wanted to spend this time with me and connect with me. I can only hope to, to try to give that same feeling back to others.

Nina: That is a beautiful place to end. Thank you for giving me just the best soundbite ever. I appreciate it. It’s so good. Katherine, thank you so much. I will be seeing you on your sub stack as the analog family. I it’s just so fantastic. I highly recommend it to everybody. It will be in the show notes. I wish you a wonderful rest of a mostly phone free day.

Katherine: Thank you so much, Nina. It was a pleasure talking to you.

Nina: All right, listeners, you know what I’m going to say next, which is when our friendships are going well. We are happier all around. I’ll see you next week. Bye. [00:28:00]