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Tell Me More: Kathryn Nicolai
00:32:49
Introducing Tell Me More, a bonus podcast that brings all kinds of stories and storytelling together under one big tent. First up, an interview with the popular host of the podcast, Nothing Much Happens, Kathryn Nicolai.
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- [00:00]
Meg Wolitzer
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- [00:53]
Meg Wolitzer
Five year guarantee on eligible plans Exclusion supplies. See website for details. Not available Fab Metro with T Mobile in the past six months Tax supplies hi, this is Meg Walitzer, the host of Selected Shorts, and welcome to the first episode of our spin off podcast, Tell Me More. If you know Selected Shorts, our radio show and flagship podcast, you know that we're obsessed with stories. This new show, Tell Me More, will give us the chance to talk about a lot of different kinds of stories, not just fiction. In the future, we'll be talking to actors and journalists and, who knows, scientists, visual artists, even chefs. I mean, creative people all tell stories of some kind, and this is our chance to look behind the scenes and find out how those stories get made. Today I'm talking to podcaster Catherine Nicolai of Nothing Much Happens. The title of her podcast tells you a lot of what you need to know. Her show is entirely fiction, written and performed for occasional insomniacs like myself who need something calming in their ear at night to help them fall asleep. The show is incredibly popular, and I know why I like it. As a fiction writer and reader, I gravitate not only to story, but also to the feeling that a story can give you. And when I started listening to Catherine Nicolai's podcast, I realized that it gave me a really specific feeling. I haven't studied the range of sleep podcasts out there, so I can't compare this one to others, but her stories take place in an imaginary village, and even though the characters aren't given a lot of description and the action is on a really low boil. I was not only never bored, I think I was also comforted and engaged in equal measure. As I said, it was a very specific feeling. And every time I listened, I felt the exact same way. As Catherine says to listeners at the top of her show, you feel good and then you fall asleep. That is true for me. So I was eager to talk with Catherine Nicolai and find out how she came up with her entrancing read aloud sleep potion. In our conversation, we get into the power of sleep and the power of stories, and we unpack a curious condition in which people literally cannot picture things in their minds. So let's get into it. So, Katherine, welcome. I'm so glad to have a chance to talk to you today. I've heard your voice a lot and at night when I'm trying to sleep, but we've never met. You are the creator and host of the podcast Nothing Much Happens, which is one of the most listened to podcasts anywhere. I think it's been streamed more than 180 million times, and its sole purpose is to put people to sleep. Did I get all of that right?
- [03:36]
Catherine Nicolai
You got it right. Meg, thank you so much for having me. I really am excited to meet you and to talk about this.
- [03:42]
Meg Wolitzer
Oh, thank you. Your writing is wonderful and literally hypnotic. What's your background? Involving stories or fiction?
- [03:51]
Catherine Nicolai
You know, I have always told myself stories to fall asleep. It is one of my earliest memories. Maybe when I was 3 or 4 years old and I was just a kid with a big imagination and I would close my eyes at night and snuggle into bed. And the idea that you could take your mind anywhere and think of anything, dream up anything, just kind of blew me away. And I was also growing up in Flint, Michigan, in the 80s, and it was probably a little bit of an adaptive measure to make myself feel safe because, you know, it was a little bit of a scary time and place. And so I think I learned to build this little cozy nest through storytelling. And I've always kept it my whole life. And because of it, I can sleep, which is like a modern superpower.
- [04:39]
Meg Wolitzer
It is, I think. You know, when I get together with my friends, we talk about sleep so much. It's something that it's the holy grail. But back to your stories, just for a second before we leave them. Your early stories, do you remember any of them? The kinds of stories you told yourself?
- [04:53]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah, they were super gothic. In the sense of.
- [04:57]
Meg Wolitzer
Which is not what your podcast is like.
- [04:59]
Catherine Nicolai
No, in the sense of sort of everything goes wrong. Before it goes right. And then that feeling of relief when everything goes right. And I remember sort of telling myself a story about being so cold and being so hungry, and I would actually push my blankets down until I was so cold that I couldn't stand it anymore. And then I would pull the blanket up and finish the story that we were safe and we had everything we needed, and I would just zonk right out. So I think even then, I was thinking about that feeling of relief, of feeling safe and guarded and how. How solidly that would put you to sleep.
- [05:37]
Meg Wolitzer
I just read some incredible thing the other day that Patti Smith had said about a story. Do you know about this? About putting herself to sleep? And it's the story about I'm gonna get it wrong, so I should really not be going on about it. But it's a story about a boy who falls into the water, and a sailor on a ship, a lowly sailor rescues him. And the captain says, what do you want more than anything? You've saved my son. And he wants to sleep that night alone in a bed. So the captain gives him his bed and leaves. And he's not slept in a real bed, like, in many, many years or ever, perhaps, and he falls into the deepest sleep. And the idea being that that was how she could fall asleep. Thinking about sleep, it's got a meta quality to does for sure, and it.
- [06:27]
Catherine Nicolai
Speaks to sort of this very, like, relatable hunger that we have for solid, good sleep and how it can be painful to go without it, how desperately we need it.
- [06:39]
Meg Wolitzer
But I find that when I was looking for sort of solutions to my own sleep problems, some of the podcasts or ways to do it were, you know, about boring yourself to sleep, which is apparently very legitimate and can work. But that's not what your podcast does. What is the. I mean, I've been listening to them, and I wrote down a few of the names so that our listeners can hear them because there's some quality, some gestalt to them that, you know, unites them. The Waves at night. Winter Getaway, which is in three parts and is perhaps my favorite. Strawberry Moon Snowfall at the Bakery. Now, that, to me, Snowfall plus Bakery is like, how can you not be very happy to be there? And then the last one I wrote down is the innkeeper's blanket. These seem created to induce something before sleep, a feeling. And tell me about that creation.
- [07:39]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah, I think you're right. They're sort of indulgently layered with coziness and good feeling and an expectation of softness. When I'm writing, I'm always thinking of a couple things. I want the experience itself of the story to be. Be inherently comforting, cozy and relaxing. And then I want there to be an element of nostalgia. Even if it's not something you've experienced, it's something so relatable that you kind of have a longing to return to it, even if you've never been there. And then a lot of sensory information, because when we're bathed in sensory information of how things look and smell and feel, it makes us naturally present. And when we're present, we're calm and we're ready for sleep. So I do dip into those things like that feel when I think about something like the innkeeper's blanket, right. There's already something so romantic about the feeling of the inn and then being guarded over by the innkeeper. She's a keeper. She keeps you. And then layer, let me get one more layer on there. She's going to tuck you in with this lovely blanket. And when I think about sort of the style of podcasting or storytelling that is coming from the bore you to sleep place, I just think you deserve better. I just think you deserve more. And one aim I always take at sort of as you know, my history of being a yoga teacher and meditation teacher is that if your self care practices do not involve pleasure and fun and enjoyment, you're missing a big chunk. And so I always want to see if, can I just put a little more enjoyment, can I just put a little bit more fun or sweetness into this? And if I can, then I'm going to do it.
- [09:22]
Meg Wolitzer
Well, it certainly shows you can really feel that. And it actually speaks to a larger question for me, which is about what is the point of fiction? I mean, what is the purpose and the use of fiction? Because a lot of people in this very nonfiction world don't necessarily think that they want fiction, but for me, fiction is about not how things are, but how they might be. And we understand the world and other people through that. And there is a great element of pleasure for me in reading, like the excitement. I just finished a book and all I wanted to do was race home to it. It was waiting for me like that innkeeper's blanket. I mean, it was waiting for me in a way that books can do and stories can do. Now you talk on the show about an interesting concept that I'd never heard of before, about putting your brain into task mode. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of neuroscience here?
- [10:18]
Catherine Nicolai
Sure, absolutely. So if you've ever had this experience where you're in bed and you're reading and maybe you're even in a really uncomfortable position, but you cannot stay awake. Your book kept falling on your face, you're fighting with one eyelid to stay awake, and finally you give up and you close your book and you turn off the light and you get as comfortable as you have ever been, and now you can't sleep. Like, what changed in that moment? And basically we switched brain modes from task positive mode, where basically all that means is your brain had a job to do, which was pushing your eyes forward along the page. You probably weren't even absorbing what you were reading, but your eyes were moving across the page. And then when you took away the job, you slipped into the default mode network. And in default mode, it's just the background static of your brain. It feels chaotic and spinning. And it's often what you experience when you wake up at like 2 or 3 o' clock in the morning, that sort of tornado of thoughts where you can't find a steady place to rest your brain in order for it to settle. And so it turns out that just by giving your brain a really simple job to do, which kind of goes to like the old adage of counting sheep, you were just giving your brain a simple job to do, it slips back into task positive mode and that's where you can fall asleep. So, you know, listening to a story, counting, there's lots of ways to get there. But as long as we can achieve it, we turn off the static and sleep becomes accessible.
- [11:48]
Meg Wolitzer
That's fascinating. But there are only certain kinds of stories, I think, that work with it, because our show, if you fall asleep to our show, that's not at least our intention. I mean, if that helps you, I'm delighted. But I think that most of our listeners do want to listen to the end of the story. And I think with your show, I mean, for myself, there's this quality of what did happen on that I don't know. I don't really know what finally happened with the Snowfall in the bakery, I really couldn't tell you. And if I go back to listen again the next night, I still won't be able to tell you. And I love that. But with the shows that we do with selected shorts, sometimes the endings are very big and dramatic, sometimes the story builds intention, and it's a very, very different kind of quality. Are you a reader of fiction like that too? Or do you, in your own fiction want that calm?
- [12:42]
Catherine Nicolai
I usually do want a layer of calm. But, I mean, I love a cozy mystery. I still love a long, twisty gothic story. I love multi layered stories, multi generational epics. As long as there's nuance and interesting characterizations, I'm there. I get burnt out. I feel like there was this vogue a couple years ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago. I used to call it despair porn, where it was like the most upsetting combination of circumstances plus the least redeemable characters you've ever read. And I felt like every book I picked up for like a year and a half just hit me over the head with this, you know, heartbreaking despair. And I've heard other readers say, you know, there's some catharsis in that for me. That works for me. And if it does, groovy. It just wasn't my cup of tea. And so I definitely love to sink my teeth into, like a big twisty story. I just need to see nuance and layer in character that there's not just good and bad, but there's, you know, all these shades of humans and shades of experiences. I just was reading a book like 15 minutes ago, Meg, that I had to stop reading. Even though I'm very excited to be talking to you. I was like, okay, I'll come back.
- [13:54]
Meg Wolitzer
Right, you will.
- [13:55]
Catherine Nicolai
So that's the kind of reader I am.
- [13:56]
Meg Wolitzer
And it will be waiting for you. But actually, it's funny that you mention character because that's something that's very elliptical in your stories. Gender oftentimes or any physical description is sort of missing. And is that to allow the reader to fill it in, or is that because too much is sort of too exciting? When we start to create a whole world, we need to live in it.
- [14:20]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah, it's mostly so that the listener can imagine themselves as the narrator of the story. I want you to sort of step into it and wrap it around your shoulders like a blanket and be like, ah, this is me. This is my story. I can relate to it. So I don't usually use gender markers if there's a relationship or none of my characters have names. The dogs and cats do, but none of the human characters do. And that's, I think, also so that you, on the other side of the coin, don't overly identify with it so that it doesn't become something that becomes too sticky for your brain and you can just sort of let it wash through you. It was a stormy day at the cottage, and I didn't mind it. The week had been hot and humid and I'd been soaking up as much sun as I could, wanting to store it away in my cells to tide me over in winter. But I'd also been a little worn out by it. My eyes were tired of squinting at the sun. I was tired of sweating through my T shirts and wanted a day to spend inside without feeling like I was missing out.
- [15:47]
Meg Wolitzer
Did you start differently and you figured out things along the way, like, oh, they shouldn't have names, or they. Or it should be more like this. Was it a recipe? In a sense, a lot of it.
- [15:57]
Catherine Nicolai
Was intuitive, that I just had this intuitive understanding. Things like reading the story twice. I had this immediate intuitive knowing that if I told you right at the beginning, hey, this is gonna come back around, I'm gonna give you permission right now to let go and not have to keep track of anything. Repetition in itself is so soothing. But also.
- [16:20]
Meg Wolitzer
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just wanna tell our listeners that you read it once and then you read it more slowly a second time.
- [16:27]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah. And I think about, you know, the comfort of that and the soothing and just also, as somebody who feels like, even though I was already told nothing's gonna happen, it's the name of the podcast. I need a little more reassurance to go, okay, I really don't have to keep track here. But most of it was intuitive, knowing sort of the way that the characters had to be at the same time. I've been at it for seven years now, so I feel like I've learned so much more about even how to use my voice and how to write it in a way that really feels soft to the listener.
- [17:01]
Meg Wolitzer
Were you shocked by its incredible success?
- [17:04]
Catherine Nicolai
I absolutely was. I thought I was doing something so niche. I told my brother, I was like, 10 people are gonna find this. Like, there's, like, so few people that will connect to this really niche thing I'm doing. And, no, it's actually really universal. Almost everybody at some point in their life will struggle with insomnia, and a lot of people use it for anxiety and other things too. But I think it's such a lovely feeling of extended community that all these people are responding with this feeling of not just, hey, I needed to sleep and I slept. Thank you. But also, I really relate to the village that you're building and the themes that you connect to. Like, that feels like home to me. And that feels wonderful as a writer.
- [18:06]
Meg Wolitzer
Going up.
- [18:07]
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- [18:28]
Meg Wolitzer
At Metro five year guarantee on eligible plans. Exclusion supplies. See website for details. Not available. Fab Metro with T Mobile in the past six months tax supplies. If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think Golder. Because new sweet and smoky special edition Gold sauce is here made for your chicken favorites at participate in McDonald's for a limited time. I read in an interview that you have a condition. Am I pronouncing it correctly? Aphantasia. Can you tell us about that and how it affects your work?
- [19:04]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah. Aphantasia means that I can't visualize anything, so I have no images inside my head. I can't create any images, but I have full aphantasia. So all of my senses are blind in my mind. So I can't hear anything in my head. I have no internal monologue. Some people can recreate sense in their head. I don't have that either. And it's always. Sometimes people will ask me, well, how do you write things that feel so visual and textured? And all I can say is, since this is the only way I've ever known my brain to be, I must not need that to create this because I don't have it and I do create it. And also I think that it sort of makes me the person for this because I'm very naturally present. I'm sort of constantly agog at the world because I don't have this previous reference point that I could pull up in my mind every time I step outside and smell the breeze or see the way the leaves scintillate in the sun, I'm amazed. I'm like so blown up and made alive by it that I feel like I'm the person to like, preach on the joy of wonder at the natural world, because that's my experience of it. It also interferes with my memory a little bit, but in a way that I feel like, again, makes me like really present. So I wouldn't have it any other way.
- [20:28]
Meg Wolitzer
That's really fascinating. So when you listen to a short story, say, you know, one of the stories on our show kind of stories, what are you doing? You're not seeing it? Are you feeling it?
- [20:41]
Catherine Nicolai
No. You know, we don't use the word. Even though I used the word imagination earlier, I don't have the same concept of it because it implies image. So I always say, like, I can't imagine, but I can conceptualize. I am just sort of with the thoughts of the things that are being spoken about. You know, before I knew about Aphantasia and I just thought everyone's brain was like this. When someone would say, picture it in your mind's eye. I never thought y' all were being literal. I didn't think you meant, like you were actually seeing it. So I think it. For me, it's just like concepts that my brain touches. Like you might press a piano key and sometimes you play chords. But for my brain, it's all in the dark and completely quiet.
- [21:27]
Meg Wolitzer
It sounds to me like that might really help facilitate sleep in a person. Because I'm sort of. I don't think I'm the opposite of that. But I know that when I lie in bed, there's like a whole show that goes on like this puppet show, and can be an evil puppet show, definitely. It can have sort of evil characters and embarrassing things from the past. And, you know, and who needs that? Like, who wants that? I didn't ask for that. And now I'm picturing that third grade teacher, you know, who was so mean or whatever it is. I'm picturing it now. And I didn't ask to do that. But to be able to sort of quiet that when you don't want it is, you know, something that I would imagine be useful.
- [22:06]
Catherine Nicolai
I think it's kind of a gift. Yeah. And I think it's probably the things that drew me to these lines of work. Right. To be a yoga and meditation teacher. Somebody who teaches other people how to be present and be with the experience of the moment. You know, moment to moment awareness and then to tell these kind of stories. I feel like it slotted me right into that. Often when I hear people say things like, I'll never unsee that. I think I just did.
- [22:33]
Meg Wolitzer
That's so perfect. That's so perfect. I'm really interested in these ideas around how stories can be an agent of sort of stimulation or one of its opposite. And how writers sort of have an intuitive sense of that, I think, as they're writing, where the reader will linger. I teach writing a lot, and one of the things that I'll say to students when they're blocked is find a passage in a story or a book where, you know, the writer got really excited when they wrote it. I used to say, did the Snoopy dance? And now nobody's like, what?
- [23:11]
Catherine Nicolai
What?
- [23:11]
Meg Wolitzer
Snoopy? Who? What Old lady who what?
- [23:15]
Catherine Nicolai
You know.
- [23:17]
Meg Wolitzer
But find a passage where you know that the writer was really excited. And how do I know that? Like, how do I know that the writer was like. I know I'm right when I find it. Because there's some kind of, like, weird way that writers and readers communicate with each other. I think that there's a sense that even though when you write, you're all alone and you know. And that's true for you as well, when you write, there is a world out there that will read it and will understand to some degree maybe the experience of writing it. And I think that must be true to some extent with your readers. Even though it's really different. Like, you know, as you said, the coziness factor, but also almost like the snow globe container factor. There's like a contained world, like Truman show, but not cynical and evil quality to this, that we are stepping out of our own life, which I think is something that links what you do and what we do, which is that when you're reading to stay awake and when you're reading to sleep, you're sort of stepping out of your own life to do that, maybe.
- [24:22]
Catherine Nicolai
Yes. And there's that feeling that is such an amazing feeling when you write and you realize that you got it right in a second. And it's a feeling of communion with the reader who isn't even there yet, that you know that you're gonna share an experience when you both sit in the same line of dialogue or whatever. And I feel like what I'm trying to wiggle into in my stories is this feeling of recognition and like the soft smile you share with a stranger when you just shared an experience that you don't need to explain to each other. Like the feeling of finding $5 in your coat pocket. Or, you know, when strangers sing Happy Birthday to you in the restaurant and they just join along. There's these little glimmering moments where you go, oh, that's good. I like that. That makes me feel good.
- [25:17]
Meg Wolitzer
That's right.
- [25:18]
Catherine Nicolai
And I think those are the moments that I'm trying to highlight in my stories.
- [25:22]
Meg Wolitzer
Well, of course it's successful, hence those numbers that I mentioned. But even on a personal, unscientific level, I've shared the show with several friends, and they've all responded to it very much. And we talk about, you know, your greatest hits, like, the ones that we like. And what do I mean by like? Like, I'm fascinated by it, because they're not. Again, there's no characters that I'm gonna. Oh, remember that scene where Jane said to Tim and then he betrayed her? No, no, that's not here. You know, that may be, you know, in a very different story, but that's not here. And yet we feel it and we understand it because there's this unspoken language of what now I and your other listeners want from a story by you.
- [26:04]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah.
- [26:05]
Meg Wolitzer
And it's just this sort of thing that, I mean, you're putting it beautifully into words, better than I think I could. But I know that for me a good night's sleep involves listening to some of your stories and also playing a game with myself, which I don't know why I go back to again and again. But I'm very word and letter based and I'm a big Scrabble player and I'm a big crossword person and used to create crosswords. But I will try to go through the Alphabet and find herbs for every letter, although I am still stuck on some ones that you might imagine. But sort of this, your stories plus the Alphabet makes for a good night's sleep.
- [26:43]
Catherine Nicolai
I think that makes so much sense. That's actually called cognitive shuffling or cognitive reshuffling when you do just what you described. And I used to do one where I would walk through the rooms of a house and sort of close the door behind me and. And it would be maybe my grandparents house or something like that, but just going through room to room and that would just drop me right into it as, you know, as fast as could be.
- [27:08]
Meg Wolitzer
That's amazing. I actually have a different association to that kind of game because I had read that book about the memory palace, that idea around. You can walk through the rooms and you can think of an object in every room as you walk through a house, you know really well. So there would be different things in each room and keep going into the next logical room in this house. And then later if you try to name all the objects in order, you can do it if you're seeing them in this house, but you couldn't memorize them in order if you didn't have a context for them. And I used this memory exercise as a way to help students understand that when things are mentioned in fiction without being given some kind of context, some kind of understanding and feeling, almost like what I consider a change in room temperature, they won't be as memorable to the reader. But when they're attached to other things, they might have a feeling and the reader will then, you know, they will take on meaning for the reader really. So I love how that can have such a different use, what you just described. Yes.
- [28:19]
Catherine Nicolai
And, you know, it's interesting. As somebody who can't visualize, I've always been stumped by the idea of memory palace because I can't sort of hold onto things in my head. I always say, like, my brain doesn't have any drawers. It's just like one flat workspace. And as soon as something falls off the workspace, it's gone for me. But, you know, the idea of, like, holding onto an image and then trying to add something else, even just as the thought of the image, I always say, like, I can't play chess. That's. I can't strategize. I can't get to the next step. So a lot of my. Even my writing, it's just pure intuition because I can't plan ahead. And then I had a writing teacher say, well, your subconscious will plan things ahead, and then you'll find them. And there are moments where that's happened for me where I think, oh, well, thank you, brain. I couldn't have seen that. I would get to the end of this hallway, open this door, and that would be behind it. Amazing. But it's such a lovely feeling.
- [29:14]
Meg Wolitzer
Well, intuition plays such a large part, I think, in the creation of stories. I'll find for myself. I'll put a detail in a book, and I don't really know why I put it in there. And much later it's repurposed in a new way. And, you know, it's like when you drop something, pick it up. Like, I find, oh, that's why I put it there. Or I didn't know that's why I was going to put it there. But I had a sense that it would hold something. I didn't know what yet. But you have to trust that intuition. Did the show just take off right away?
- [29:44]
Catherine Nicolai
Kind of. It did, yeah. I remember within like a month or two, we had gotten some recognition on Apple podcasts that pushed us in front of more people. And then it just started growing and growing. And like you said, we're almost to 200 million downloads. The book that I wrote about it sold in 35 countries. So it is absolutely my. I always say, like, I have to dream wilder. Cause my wildest dreams have come true several times.
- [30:09]
Meg Wolitzer
So do you, like, in the other big podcasters, like, have, like, a secret club? You like hanging out with these people? But do you know other. Is that like a world that you're now in?
- [30:21]
Catherine Nicolai
It kind of is. I do know a lot of the Other sleep podcasters, and we're all sort of buddies behind the scenes, which is really fun. But also, you know, my favorite murder, the podcast, my favorite murder. Georgia Hardstark is a listener, and she used to talk about me on the show. And so now we can be buddies. And, you know, sometimes somebody on TikTok or Instagram will mention and you'll reach out and they'll say, oh, my gosh, I listen to you every single night. Or it's just a really interesting world that. Because, like you said, I do it by myself. I record it by myself. Sometimes when I'm writing it, I tell myself, everyone's asleep, so I don't have to keep thinking about if that was the right word. I just say, sister, they're all asleep. Just write for yourself. So I'm always sort of shocked when people are like, no, I've heard it.
- [31:05]
Meg Wolitzer
That's so funny. I like actually writing when I think everybody's asleep. I live in New York City, and I look out the window and when in fact, it looks like it's really quiet outside and very few of the apartment windows are, you know, are lit up, that's a moment, if I can sleep late the next day, that I love the sort of secret feeling of writing in those moments.
- [31:28]
Catherine Nicolai
Yeah, I totally relate to that, too. There's like, magical hours where it feels very prime for the creation.
- [31:37]
Meg Wolitzer
I have one last thing to ask you as a yoga teacher and a meditation teacher. Do you get bored? I mean, because for me, the fear of boredom is something that sort of exists when I try to be calm and relaxed, whether it's to go to sleep or meditate, which I do. But I'm curious about the relationship between, you know, of boredom in your life, if there is one.
- [31:59]
Catherine Nicolai
I don't get bored, and I think this has to do. Also, I'm a highly sensitive person, sort of in the biological sense that all my senses are turned up real high. And so even to be sitting in my body, I'm sort of captivated by the sensations I feel. Even when I'm still whether I'm meditating or if I'm in triangle pose and I can feel my hamstring and my chest open, I'm sort of astonished by them. And I have been practicing for 20 some years. So I always tell people, practice for 20 years first, then see how you feel. But for me, I don't get bored. And I have to say, that's not an experience. My brain has a lot, and I think possibly I just have, like, this real I always say like sloth energy, like real steady, non grasping kind of energy where I'm just like very contented and calm and steady with my experience. My wife has like hummingbird energy and we are such polar opposites. But I see her brain like constantly trying to solve a problem and reach for the next thing and I wonder at it. And she's very successful at the things that she does. But that's not how my brain works. My brain can just sit down.
- [33:10]
Meg Wolitzer
I envy you so much. But I am really glad to reap the benefits of your brain as I do when I try to sleep and when I see the name of like a new episode that pops in, I already am kind of imagining what you'll do with it and what it means. And then I find out, but then I don't remember the next day. So that's the beauty of it all. That's the beauty of it all. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today. It's so interesting to learn really about stories that put you to sleep so beautifully.
- [33:43]
Catherine Nicolai
Thank you so much, Meg. I've been a huge fan of yours for years, so it's just really exciting to talk to you. Thanks for having me.
- [33:48]
Meg Wolitzer
A pleasure.
- [33:49]
Catherine Nicolai
Thank you.
- [33:56]
Meg Wolitzer
That was my conversation with Katherine Nikolai of the podcast Nothing. Nothing much happens. But as you heard, an awful lot of care and attention goes into ensuring that nothing much happens. If you're already a fan of Catherine's show, but you don't know selected shorts, you might also enjoy our weekly podcast. It's got short fiction from authors such as George Saunders and Zadie Smith, read by professional actors including Anika Noni Rose and Jason Alexander. It's not designed to help you fall asleep, but if that's your thing, we will not stop you. Until next time, I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for listening.
- [34:36]
Metro Wireless Advertiser
Prices keep going up. These days it feels like being on an elevator that only goes up.
- [34:41]
Meg Wolitzer
Going up.
- [34:44]
Metro Wireless Advertiser
But not at Metro. We're pushing the down button. Going down, we've lowered prices. Get one line of 5G data for $40, period. That's 20% lower. And you get a free Samsung 5G phone when you bring your number. Only at Metro.
- [34:57]
Meg Wolitzer
Five year guarantee on eligible plans exclusion supply. See website for details. Not available. Fab Metro with T Mobile in the past six months. Tax supplies. If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think Golder because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here made for your chicken favorites. And participate in McDonald's for a limited time.