What’s Poppin’ with Haeny and Nathan?!

Nathan Holbert:
Welcome to Pop and Play, the podcast all about play and pop culture and how it shapes our lives. I'm Nathan Holbert.

Haeny Yoon:
And I'm Haeny Yoon. And today we're bringing you another pop-off.

Nathan Holbert:
Pop-off.

Haeny Yoon:
Woo. A short episode where we talk about play as it's happening out in the world or our world.

Nathan Holbert:
Whatever world is...

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, we live there.

Nathan Holbert:
We're in all the worlds, world travelers. But before we get into the pop-off today, I know you're champing at the bit to really get at-

Haeny Yoon:
It champing or chomping?

Nathan Holbert:
It's champing. That's why I actually thought for a moment before I said it because I'm like, "I'm going to get this wrong," but it's champing.

Haeny Yoon:
It's champing at the bit?

Nathan Holbert:
It's champing, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
What? Did I just learn something?

Nathan Holbert:
I'm positive. Champing at the bit.

Haeny Yoon:
I thought it was chomping at the bit.

Nathan Holbert:
It is champing.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my gosh. Wow.

Nathan Holbert:
It is champing, I was right. Okay, phew. On Pop and Play, you learn something new every episode.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, thank you. Thank you for that insight.

Nathan Holbert:
And this week we're talking about idioms. No, no, no. We're not talking about idioms. We're going to do a pop-off in just a moment. But before we get into that pop-off, we just want to remind you about our upcoming play date. As you know, this season, this year, we're exploring play in all sorts of different ways. We're having play experiences that we're doing with guests. And this upcoming play date, we are going to be woodworking.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. And you know what? Woodworking is a loose term.

Nathan Holbert:
It is.

Haeny Yoon:
Because when you work with wood, you can basically do the simplest things, because our guest is going to intimidate us-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
... with what to make.

Nathan Holbert:
We're not going to be building a huge sauna, like our guest apparently is.

Haeny Yoon:
Spoiler alert.

Nathan Holbert:
Spoilers. But we are going to get a chance to play and create and meld and mold wood. It's going to be a lot of fun.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
And so be sure to play along with us. Try to find some time in the next few weeks to experiment with wood, even if it's just, I don't know-

Haeny Yoon:
Sanding it down with sandpaper.

Nathan Holbert:
... sanding some wood. Yeah. My wife is currently kind of cleaning up an old dresser, so maybe you want to do that.

Haeny Yoon:
Varnishing things.

Nathan Holbert:
Maybe you want to do some whittling with a stick.

Haeny Yoon:
Whittling with stick?

Nathan Holbert:
Mess with wood is what we're trying to tell you to do.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Whittle with the stick on your porch in the backyard, in the forest.

Nathan Holbert:
With some iced tea preferably.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, exactly.

Nathan Holbert:
But join us for that play date, that'll be coming up soon. But this week we're doing something a little different. What's the plan this week, Haeny?

Haeny Yoon:
So this week we have a little treat for ourselves, so every time in our-

Nathan Holbert:
Little treat, for us?

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, for us.

Nathan Holbert:
Nice.

Haeny Yoon:
Because every time in our episode and we asked our guest what's poppin', I'm dying to say what's poppin' for myself.

Nathan Holbert:
I know, me too. There's always something that I'm just like, "I need to tell somebody about this," and I'm jealous that-

Haeny Yoon:
They get to do it.

Nathan Holbert:
... Cassie gets to do it, who was on our episode recently, and I don't get to talk about it.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, exactly.

Nathan Holbert:
And listen, Cassie had great things to suggest, but they were wrong. Kidding, Cassie. Just kidding.

Haeny Yoon:
Just kidding, really. Because I'm probably going to think what you say is wrong.

Nathan Holbert:
100%, and same for me. So this week I am thrilled to be able to ask you, Haney, what's poppin'? And maybe we can do this in two different chunks. Right?

Haeny Yoon:
Okay.

Nathan Holbert:
So maybe we could start by let's think, as we often do in Pop and Play, we think about play as it happens in our lives, and we also think about play as it happens in work and education and things. So maybe let's chunk it into two pieces where we first talk about what's poppin' for you in work.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, wow. In work. I mean, obviously the podcast is what's poppin'. Okay. What's poppin' for me at work, I've been actually thinking a lot about what this podcast has taught me over the last six seasons and how I do my work. And I think the part that's really interesting for me is that I've seen possibilities of work could be and not what I think it should be.

Nathan Holbert:
Ah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
You have a picture in your mind of what work could be, and then you're like, "I need to do these steps." And now I've been sort of introduced to the idea that you can actually portray scholarship, mobilize different kinds of academic discourse into a public facing artifact, I guess.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
And so not to be cheesy, but I do think this podcast and doing this podcast has really helped me to think about play in my work. And then I've just been thinking about play in publishing too. So that is kind of a secret, and I'm going to... Hopefully something will come out soon that shows that. What about you?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, I'm excited about this secret. I'm wondering if I know this secret. This is great. Well, before we talk about me, I think that's a really important point that you make about just reflecting on the nature of our work and what we expect it to look like and what we imagine it's supposed to entail. And just not to get too in the weeds of our particular job, but there is an aspect to being an academic that is... It transforms when you're a pre-tenured academic-

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, for sure.

Nathan Holbert:
... and when you're a tenured academic. And one thing that I think we both have acknowledged and talked a lot about in our own careers is when we were able to make that transition. But another thing to point out, our frequent guest and friend, Lalitha Vasudevan, once told me whenever I was an assistant professor pre-tenured was like, "Look, there are things you want to do that you feel like you don't have time for because there's all these expectations, but screw that. Do them anyway and figure out how to make them fit the expectations." And that was such an important realization for me.

Haeny Yoon:
I wish someone was giving me that thanks pre-tenure.

Nathan Holbert:
Wish she had told you that pre-tenure? It was such an important realization for me to recognize that I could find ways to meld those two things together.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've actually... what you said just gave me a thought about so much of our job is about writing, but writing in a very particular way, which I don't really consider writing. It's like technical stuff, right?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
We're writing technical things that we know fit into a certain kind of template.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
And within that template, there's some flexibility to it, but not as much.

Nathan Holbert:
There's a lot of structure. I mean, we got to get the intra and then we hit our lit review and our theoretical framework and then we got our methods.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, journals have a structure. That's the nature of our job. And I guess it's not like we didn't go into it with eyes wide open, right?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. And we're both good at that.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. But what I've actually rediscovered about myself the last couple of years is that I actually really enjoy writing and not writing in this way, but just writing in general. I feel like growing up, being in school, my teachers were always like, "Oh, you're writing it so good..." And then I just realized that I like it. I like the idea of writing. I just don't like the idea of writing in the way that I've been writing for the last decade or something. And I feel like that has kind of turned me off to the idea where I'm like, "I hate writing." I just think about writing and it's like a practice I dislike.

Nathan Holbert:
Ugh.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
Yes.

Haeny Yoon:
But lately I've been just reclaiming that practice a little bit and writing for me versus writing for other people and just to see what kind of writing actually comes out of me. And that's been really energizing for me, when I'm reading a lot of essay collections, a lot of different kinds of books, a lot of memoirs, a lot of poems, things that people write out there and I've been thinking about how to incorporate that into my life.

Nathan Holbert:
Nice.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And I really believe that that will make my writing, technical writing, better.

Nathan Holbert:
I think that seems likely to be true. Right?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
You're honing in the craft of words and communicating with them.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Holbert:
Which I just did excellently by the way. That's reminding me though, you have a long career of being a brilliant writer. If I recall, one of your earliest works of art was a book about instruments that had a life or something, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, yeah. Yes. Okay. Yes. When I was like... What did I say?

Nathan Holbert:
We talked about this at a previous episode.

Haeny Yoon:
I think 6th Grade or something, I was writing about two Korean instruments, because they had to be Korean because it's cultural.

Nathan Holbert:
It had to be cultural, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. And then they were talking and it got laminated. So, yes, I mean... Yeah, if they were giving some kind of Newbery award to young children, I would've won it right away.

Nathan Holbert:
What I'm trying to say is your writing prowess has been refined over decades.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, yes. Yes. Very much so.

Nathan Holbert:
Awesome. Awesome.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. How about you? What's poppin', Nathan? Sorry, I did not catch the cue.

Nathan Holbert:
That was the cue. Because it feels good to have you ask, "What's poppin'?"

Haeny Yoon:
Nathan, what's poppin'?

Nathan Holbert:
You know what? This might be, unfortunately, a tad repetitive because I was going to also suggest that writing has been poppin' for me in my work lately.

Haeny Yoon:
I think you should tell us more.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. I've been, like you, feeling a little constrained by writing journal articles. I still enjoy doing that sometimes. As you said, it's a very particular kind of writing, and it's one that I do still find enjoyment in doing. But-

Haeny Yoon:
That makes one of us. Just kidding. Halfway kidding.

Nathan Holbert:
I'll write for the both of us, I guess. But a colleague and I, actually a former guest on the pod, Matthew Berlin. He and I do a lot of writing together, and we were both talking about how we wanted to think about ways to communicate more broadly to people about learning and about design and about the kinds of work that we do. And so on something of a whim, we decided to put together a proposal for a popular press book.

Haeny Yoon:
That's amazing.

Nathan Holbert:
And, yeah, it turns out we've been fortunate and we're going to do it. We had a publisher pick it up.

Haeny Yoon:
So it's not coming out on Teacher's College Press?

Nathan Holbert:
No shade to Teacher's College Press, I've got some work with them as well. But, yeah, I got a publisher behind it. I can't announce all the details yet, but hopefully we'll be able to do it on the pod sometime soon. But, yeah, a new book coming out called... I think the title will stick. So I think I can say a new book called How to Learn Anything.

Haeny Yoon:
That's awesome.

Nathan Holbert:
Which is a bold promise.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, that's awesome.

Nathan Holbert:
But it's been a lot of fun to write for just people to read with pleasure, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
And to tell stories with our writing, and to kind of explore interesting data and explore interesting experiments, but to do it in a way that's very easy to understand and easy to play with. And it just feels like a totally different kind of writing. I'm literally right now writing this book. I'm also writing another academic book, and that feels like extremely different exercises.

Haeny Yoon:
Very different? Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. So it's a lot of fun.

Haeny Yoon:
Do you find a space where you can integrate the two, or do you feel like it's impossible?

Nathan Holbert:
What do you mean by a space I can integrate the two?

Haeny Yoon:
Do you find some of your popular press writing being integrated into your academic writing and vice versa?

Nathan Holbert:
It's kind of the opposite. I find that it is, and I have to stop it.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, yeah?

Nathan Holbert:
Because it-

Haeny Yoon:
You have to disentangle them?

Nathan Holbert:
I have to disentangle them because the... I don't know. My academic writing I think has always been a little more... It's a little less formal than maybe some academics write, but there is certain... We just talked about, there's certain expectations about the form and about how you need to back up claims and all those kinds of things, and that's good. But in the popular press writing, it's a lot more freewheeling. And so sometimes I see it bleeding together. I'm like, "Okay, I'm being too formal over here," for example, or, "I'm being way too loose over here," and kind of trying to pull that apart.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Well, it's almost like one informs the other.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, you just have to learn to shift the gear while you're driving.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm going to say something really nerdy right now.

Nathan Holbert:
Let's go.

Haeny Yoon:
But in literacy, we talk about that as transmediation, where if you take one form and you translate it into a different form that it mediates a different kind of experience too, and it almost shapes, reshapes and gives you a different perspective into an idea. Right?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
So there's something really cool about that.

Nathan Holbert:
Well, transmediation right here, this podcast has been a big part in how it's helped me think about writing for a more popular audience, right?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
A lay audience. And so I do think even though maybe certain academic writing and this other type of writing feels a little distinct, the ways in which we've been practicing taking academic ideas and communicating them into a more public forum through this podcast has absolutely been a part of it.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I think it has implications for when we think about children and their literacy moves, right?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Is that we always want them to get to a point where they're able to take an idea and put it into lots of different forms and see different ways that they can communicate and represent that.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
Lessons and ideas that connect to kids, who would've thought?

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my God, that's why we do this podcast.

Nathan Holbert:
Okay, well, what about what's poppin' for you in just kind of play in the non-work life?

Haeny Yoon:
Yes. Okay. So everybody that knows me in the last few months knows that I'm very obsessed with Orange Theory. Okay?

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
That's true. Shout out to Orange Theory, everybody should go there.

Nathan Holbert:
You should tell the people what it is. I mean because-

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, so Orange Theory is like this... I don't know, it's like a HIIT workout kind of thing where there is cardio, but then there's weight training, and I'm really bad at that. So I think that's the whole point why I even signed up for it. But then there's these coaches that I've learned some amazing pedagogical strategies from them. Because I feel like there's certain coaches that I keep going to over and over again, and I think I like their vibe, energy, and their style. And so I feel like I go to Orange Theory, obviously because I think it's fun. There's a lot of playful-

Nathan Holbert:
Working out is fun?

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, they have made it fun for me, okay? But then I also step back and think, "Wow, I've really learned a lot about how to be a good teacher and a good coach from these people that are good coaches."

Nathan Holbert:
Nice.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
And so in your classes, you're always having students fling kettlebells and stuff now, right?

Haeny Yoon:
No. No. Okay? Obviously not, but I'm not doing that, FYI.

Nathan Holbert:
Still feel free to take your classes. You don't have to be able to lift 50 pounds?

Haeny Yoon:
Exactly. Yeah. So yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
So Orange Theory's poppin'.

Haeny Yoon:
Orange Theory's poppin'. I've continued to be very obsessed with Libby. I'm on the waiting list all the time for multiple books?

Nathan Holbert:
Just books? Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes, audiobooks though.

Nathan Holbert:
Oh, okay.

Haeny Yoon:
Because someone asked me, "Do you read?" And I said, "Yes. I read audiobooks."

Nathan Holbert:
I mean, listen, we have talked about this, but I think you can expect a pop -off sometime in the not too distant future-

Haeny Yoon:
About what reading is.

Nathan Holbert:
About reading audiobooks, maybe comic books. We'll pull it all together, because that is an interesting debate and topic.

Haeny Yoon:
Topic. Yes, very much so. I read audiobooks, so that's a spoiler alert to what I think.

Nathan Holbert:
Spoiler.

Haeny Yoon:
And most of it is about murder and mayhem.

Nathan Holbert:
Naturally.

Haeny Yoon:
So very much enjoy this. But I will say that other people also think that's poppin' because that's the ones that I always have to wait for 12 weeks.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, long wait for those.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
Love some murder and mayhem.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. How about you? Nathan, what's poppin'?

Nathan Holbert:
Oh my God, I'm so glad you asked. I should do it, yes, too like, "I've been waiting for you to ask." Listen, at various times of my life, I find joy and play in different forms, but lately it has been very video game focused.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes.

Nathan Holbert:
I mean, I'm not watching a lot of TV right now.

Haeny Yoon:
That tracks. Video games, like we haven't heard that multiple times.

Nathan Holbert:
It might be the first time I've said it on this podcast, but also this year has just had some really fantastic games. There's been some bangers. I've been playing recently, this maybe dates us a little bit, but I've been playing the game Silksong, I played Hades II. But I want to speak very briefly about a game called UFO 50. And the reason I want to mention this is it's actually over a year old now, it is such an incredible artifact, piece of art, fun, playful experience. UFO 50 is actually a package of 50 games-

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my God.

Nathan Holbert:
... that these seven game developers spent six or seven years putting together. And whenever you play a lot of games, sometimes you'll come across a game package like, "Oh, there's 20 games in here." And they're all these little tiny, short five-minute games. These are full-

Haeny Yoon:
50 long games?

Nathan Holbert:
Full on games.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh my God.

Nathan Holbert:
Some of these are real big boys. Some of these are still five or six hours, others are like 30 hours. They're like long games.

Haeny Yoon:
Oh wow.

Nathan Holbert:
And they're all fully fleshed out, fully thought out games. But let me step back because what I want to tell you why this is interesting is not because it's a lot of games, it's because there's a whole meta to it. So the premise is that these guys found an old video game system and the games that were released on this system from the mid-eighties to the early nineties, and what they're doing is releasing these video games now for everyone else to play.

Haeny Yoon:
Like re-releasing them?

Nathan Holbert:
So it's not real, but there's a meta that these games are made in the eighties and early nineties-

Haeny Yoon:
Oh, I see.

Nathan Holbert:
... and that they have this kind of history of a company around them.

Haeny Yoon:
Okay.

Nathan Holbert:
And so as you're playing, you're also getting these little snippets of this culture in which these games are emerging from. And then on top of that, there's all these Easter eggs, and it turns out that there's this secret game inside of the 50 games. And so anyway, it's really crazy. It's an astonishing work of art. And if anyone's interested in games and game design specifically, this is just like a master class in how to make games and what games can be and how games can be art. And the last thing I'll say about it, because otherwise people are going to turn off our episode.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, I know. Some of us are falling asleep.

Nathan Holbert:
You're already asleep? I'm so energized. And you're like, "Oh God."

Haeny Yoon:
When is this over? I'm just kidding.

Nathan Holbert:
The last thing I'll say is I want to recommend another podcast. There's a podcast called Eggplant. And they took an entire year, and every week they talked about one of the individual games. It did a book club format, but of this 50 games. And it's so fun. It's such an enjoyable thing to play along with them, to listen, to think about... And they're all game developers, so they're really digging into the nuances of what's happening here. UFO 50, it's poppin'.

Haeny Yoon:
How many of them have you played?

Nathan Holbert:
I played all of them.

Haeny Yoon:
Whoa, okay.

Nathan Holbert:
And I've beat a chunk of them. This has been a thing I've been going through for the year.

Haeny Yoon:
Wow. I hate to tell you this, but everything that you said is very Taylor Swift-like. Because you said some key phrases like Easter Eggs, secrets within secrets, you have to discover, uncover new things. There's hidden messages. Okay, I'm sorry.

Nathan Holbert:
What did we say-

Haeny Yoon:
Parallel universes.

Nathan Holbert:
That's fine, this is parallel. It's not Taylor Swift does that. Taylor Swift was-

Haeny Yoon:
Parallel universes, okay?

Nathan Holbert:
These are things in media, and I'm very happy that Taylor and Taylor community is also engaging with them. That's fantastic.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
They didn't come from Taylor Swift, though.

Haeny Yoon:
She invented Easter eggs, okay? I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.

Nathan Holbert:
Jesus did.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, Jesus. This is not a religious podcast.

Nathan Holbert:
Different episode.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes.

Nathan Holbert:
Okay, so we need to wrap this up, but one last thought is how should we think about play? How should we think about what's popping as it relates to kind of work and life as well?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. So I've been thinking about this season and this season. We've been sort of teetering on the edge of people who talk about a craft as playful, something that they started to enjoy and really got into. And then all of a sudden we talk to them and realize that their play has become really intense, where it teeters on the edge of being a hobby and to something a lot more serious.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Haeny Yoon:
Right? And so I think every now and then I've been thinking about how something actually interests me. And then I'm like, "I think I'm done with that."

Nathan Holbert:
That was fun.

Haeny Yoon:
And so it just becomes a playful, fun thing. It had a lot of affective impact in my life, it didn't necessarily have a long-term impact in my life.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
And then I think about things like this podcast, and that's why we started off with the idea of work and play intersecting, because there's some things that start off playful activities that have more momentum and a seriousness to it that is maybe more beyond a hobby. We could call ourselves the in-between. We talked about that before.

Nathan Holbert:
Mm-hmm.

Haeny Yoon:
The in-between space where there's playful, serious, and something that happens in between it.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
And so this season we're talking about the intersection and where it kind of teeters on the edge of being a more serious practice. And that's what we'll be talking about for six seasons. Play is fun, it's joyful, it's frivolous, but it's also serious, intellectual and productive and maybe has some implications for how we live our lives in work and play.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah. I mean, the number of guests that we've talked to that have been like, "I started this because it seemed fun and now it's my job." We've had a guest who said, "No, I could do this as a job, but I'm intentionally not doing it as a job because I want to find joy in it."

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. Because then you no longer-

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah, yeah.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, exactly.

Nathan Holbert:
It is interesting, that edge. I like this notion of riding the edge of that in-between space that we're doing.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. And isn't that the goal sometimes? We want to make our work fun and we want to make our play closer to our work too.

Nathan Holbert:
Well, we at least want to play.

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I mean, there are things that are-

Nathan Holbert:
We want to get good with our play. Is that what you mean by making your play work?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Holbert:
We want to improve and... Yeah. Yeah. I buy that. I buy that.

Haeny Yoon:
All right.

Nathan Holbert:
That's poppin' this week.

Haeny Yoon:
Awesome.

Nathan Holbert:
Orange Theory, UFO 50.

Haeny Yoon:
Murder and mayhem.

Nathan Holbert:
Murder, mayhem, writing.

Haeny Yoon:
Fiction, murder and mayhem.

Nathan Holbert:
Important to note the fiction.

Haeny Yoon:
Yes.

Nathan Holbert:
All right. Well, thanks so much for being here, everybody. Please, if you get a chance, leave us a comment about the episode. We'd love to hear how you're feeling. Leave it to us on an email or leave it to us on the podcast app that you enjoy, and rate the show that helps us get a little more visibility. Share Pop and Play with your friends. Follow us on Instagram or Blue Sky and we'd love to hear from you. All right. Thanks, everybody.

Haeny Yoon:
Thanks. Bye.

Nathan Holbert:
Bye.