Hi there. I'm Jason Gots, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

When was the last time you were bored? I mean really well and truly staring at the patterns in the wallpaper, bored.

Statistics suggest that you're probably listening to this show on a smartphone, which means you own a smartphone,

which means it's probably always close at hand full of apps and podcasts to distract you the instant

that uncomfortable feeling of boredom creeps in, which means your brain almost never gets the

chance to sit with that restlessness and come up with creative alternatives, from daydreaming

to doing something brilliant or at least less boring,

in real life. If that's not you, awesome, but it's a lot of us these days. My guest today,

Manus Samaroti, is the host of Note to Self, a popular radio show and podcast on how we live

with technology. An experiment she did on the show, with the eager help of 20,000 fans, became the subject of her new book, Bored and Brilliant. How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self. Welcome, Manish. Thank you, Jason. I'm psyched to be here. Yeah, I'm so psych to have you here. So. Yeah, where do you want to start? You just made me laugh with that intro. It was funny.

Oh, good.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

I mean, well, and I was actually, when I, when I wrote it, I wrote it on an app on my smartphone and I was going to be reading it off of that app. And then I thought, okay, no, let me actually. Be meta. Yeah. somehow not have not have every moment of my life engaged in my phone.

But it's hard.

It is hard.

So what is there to talk about here?

There's a lot to talk about.

But I mean, at the same time, right, there is this conversation that we feel like we hear over and over again, which is like, oh, no, our devices, our life is being totally inundated.

And yet, what can you do about it being totally inundated, and yet,

what can you do about it kind of thing? Like, what, what happened? It's far more interesting than that, I think. And it's a shame that I think, you know, that's been my goal not to be finger-waggy, like, you should get off your phone. Like, oh, my God, you're on your phone again like Like, no, no, no. It's really interesting.

Okay, so I'll just start from my own perspective, which was that.

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