Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Cas Holman (on being playful)

October 29, 2025

Key Takeaways Copied to clipboard!

  • Play, as explored in the *Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard* episode featuring Cas Holman, is fundamentally about self-directed exploration and finding one's own structure, rather than following external rules or instructions. 
  • The experience of play, even in seemingly frivolous activities like a crow snowboarding on a yogurt lid, is vital for cognitive function, as studies show that engaging in play before problem-solving significantly improves performance. 
  • Adult play, including sexual role play and even substance use like alcohol, often serves as a necessary, albeit sometimes maladaptive, shortcut to bypass learned inhibitions and access the vulnerability required for genuine play. 
  • Continuing to play is a powerful form of resistance against forces that seek to suppress human nature, as play itself is threatening to bullies and oppressive systems. 
  • Adult play requires embracing possibility, releasing judgment tied to extrinsic motivation and productivity, and reframing success beyond singular, predefined outcomes. 
  • Play, especially for those who have experienced hardship, serves as a core antidote to subjugation and defeat, allowing for resilience and the ability to carry on. 

Segments

Guest Introduction and Book Reveal
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(00:00:14)
  • Key Takeaway: Cas Holman’s book, Playful, focuses on how play alters thinking, connection, and creativity.
  • Summary: Cas Holman, a play designer and former RISD professor, joins the podcast to discuss her book, Playful: How Play Shifts Our Thinking, Inspires Connection, and Sparks Creativity. The hosts immediately connect with the theme, finding the topic highly relevant to the show’s interests.
Unboxing Gemo Toys
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(00:04:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Gemo toys are designed as a modular ecosystem where pieces are intentionally not color-coded to encourage discovery over instruction.
  • Summary: The hosts unbox Cas Holman’s Gemo toys, noting their slightly perverse aesthetic inspiration drawn from bone marrow colors. Holman explains that the design intentionally omits color-coding for magnets to force children to discover connections themselves, promoting open-ended play.
Academic Background and Early Life
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(00:08:24)
  • Key Takeaway: Holman attended UC Santa Cruz, where the lack of grades and immersion in the redwood forest environment fostered an unstructured approach to learning.
  • Summary: Dax and Cas share similar backgrounds of being unsupervised as children and struggling with structured academic rigor. Holman dropped out of UC Santa Cruz after two years to study biodiversity in the Galapagos Islands before returning to finish her degree in fine arts sculpture and feminist theory.
Career Pivot and Maury Povich
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(00:11:13)
  • Key Takeaway: Holman transitioned from being a short-order cook to working in design after realizing she needed a career that allowed for constant novelty.
  • Summary: After quitting a promotion as a chef, Holman worked temp jobs, eventually finding design at CRI, which made sense with her performance art, including drag. She appeared on Maury Povich in a segment titled ‘Is it a man or a woman?’ while working in the corporate design world.
Design Education and Rockwell Group
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(00:21:11)
  • Key Takeaway: Holman’s graduate design education at Cranbrook emphasized craft, peer-to-peer technique sharing, and critique over formal classes or grades.
  • Summary: Holman attended Cranbrook for design, where learning was collaborative, involving trading skills like welding for mold-making. Later, at Rockwell Group, she helped invent the Big Blue Blocks for a South Seaport playground, aiming to give children agency by allowing them to design the playground through play.
Play Philosophy: Function Over Form
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(00:25:31)
  • Key Takeaway: Effective design, especially for play, requires starting by defining the function (e.g., ‘way to get to school’) rather than the archetypal form (e.g., ‘car’).
  • Summary: Holman advocates for being formally agnostic in design, focusing on the actual goal rather than the conventional object. Asking children to design a ‘way to get to school’ yields imaginative results like lazy rivers, contrasting sharply with the predictable outcome of asking them to ‘build a car’.
Play as Antidote to Boredom and Risk
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(00:28:01)
  • Key Takeaway: Play is essential for mental health and problem-solving, serving as the necessary antidote to boredom and a safe mechanism for confronting fears.
  • Summary: Studies show that environments lacking play lead to apathy and drug-seeking behavior in rats, while college students perform significantly better on tests after engaging with toys. Play allows individuals to safely interact with fears, such as climbing a difficult rock, which is crucial for personal growth.
Adult Play Types and Alcohol
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(00:38:33)
  • Key Takeaway: Adult play often involves ‘misbehavior play’ or using substances like alcohol as a shortcut to bypass inhibitions learned through socialization and schooling.
  • Summary: Holman developed play types for adults, noting that adult play is often inherently misbehavior because it rejects the seriousness of adulthood. Alcohol frequently becomes the primary replacement for play by chemically cutting inhibitions, leading to a desire to find ways to access play without it.
Conditions for Adult Play
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(00:52:00)
  • Key Takeaway: Adults maintain playfulness by practicing attention play—being curious and present—and actively releasing the judgment instilled by extrinsic motivation systems like school.
  • Summary: To stay playful, adults must embrace possibility and release judgment, which often manifests as habitual phone scrolling to avoid boredom. Dax shares his successful experiment of avoiding social media, which immediately reconnected him to creativity and allowed him to observe people on the subway, a safe space for emotional release.
Adult Play and Judgment Release
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(00:51:57)
  • Key Takeaway: Adult play requires embracing possibility by releasing judgment, which stems from an extrinsic educational system that attached self-value to efficiency and success.
  • Summary: Staying playful as an adult involves being open to what you might find and releasing judgment, as schooling conditioned people to be extrinsically motivated and obsessed with efficiency. This obsession with productivity often leads to solving problems that may not truly be problems, creating rigid systems. Approaching things as play allows for agility and shifting expectations when outcomes differ from the singular definition of success.
Play as Innovation Catalyst
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(00:53:56)
  • Key Takeaway: Great innovation, as demonstrated by JPL, directly results from hiring and valuing engineers who were playful tinkerers in their past and present.
  • Summary: Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found that engineers lacking tinkering experience struggled with problem-solving, leading them to filter candidates based on playful history. Tinkering involves using one’s hands, like taking apart model airplanes or lawnmowers, which fosters the playful mindset necessary for innovation. This focus on playfulness significantly improved JPL’s innovative success and problem-solving capabilities.
Reframing Success in Play
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(00:55:36)
  • Key Takeaway: Playful engagement requires reframing success away from a fixed destination or outcome toward valuing the shared experience and social connection.
  • Summary: When engaging in activities like hiking, one should release judgment and reframe success; for instance, success can be defined as the shared time spent together rather than reaching the top. This mindset shift prevents frustration when minor setbacks occur, allowing participants to enjoy the process. Children on the playground naturally value play skills over conventional success metrics, unlike adults conditioned by years of schooling defining success externally.
Play as Resistance and Survival
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(00:57:02)
  • Key Takeaway: Play, including comedy and satire, is a fundamental human expression that becomes a powerful act of resistance when suppressed by bullies or oppressive forces.
  • Summary: The shutting down of play, such as comedy, demonstrates its inherent power because it is so threatening to those who seek control. Play is not merely a tool for building resilience; it is the resistance itself, pushing back against anything that demands non-human behavior. Marginalized communities often understand this well, using play as a core antidote to oppression and subjugation.
Play as Coping Mechanism
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(00:58:14)
  • Key Takeaway: For those with difficult childhoods, a strong drive to play becomes an essential mechanism for survival and processing trauma in adulthood.
  • Summary: The guest attributes their strong drive to play to a childhood where play was the primary activity due to a lack of adult supervision. This consistent engagement in play served as a necessary coping mechanism to navigate tricky childhood circumstances. This drive continues into adulthood, allowing for intense appreciation of moments of joy relative to ongoing difficulties.
Workplace Play and Value Undervaluation
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(01:08:49)
  • Key Takeaway: The workplace often undervalues the productivity and team cohesion generated by playful employees, sometimes viewing fun as a loss of managerial control.
  • Summary: There is a cultural assumption in many workplaces that having fun while being productive is inappropriate, which frustrates highly productive, playful individuals. Managers can feel threatened by visible play, prioritizing rigid efficiency over the joy and cohesion that playful environments foster. Recognizing social skills and playfulness as valuable, compensated skills is necessary to properly value their contribution to the overall workplace environment.
The Value of Playful Exploration
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(01:06:44)
  • Key Takeaway: True curiosity involves experimenting without instruction, viewing activities as safe areas to fail and challenge personal limitations rather than strictly adhering to external guides.
  • Summary: The guest contrasts their preference for spontaneous creation (like with Legos) against following explicit instructions, which can feel restrictive or induce feelings of incompetence. Play should be a safe zone to experiment and potentially fail, which can be cathartic for high achievers who struggle with imperfection. Learning about another person’s play style, such as following instructions versus free-form creation, deepens mutual understanding.
Dax’s Daughter’s Natural Athleticism
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(01:24:35)
  • Key Takeaway: Dax Shepard’s daughter exhibited exceptional, seemingly innate skill in her first volleyball game by prioritizing fun and social connection over performance anxiety.
  • Summary: Despite only practicing for two days, Dax’s daughter served the ball over the net perfectly in her first game and scored points in subsequent turns. This success occurred because she approached the game with a mindset focused on having fun with new friends, contrasting with the pressure to achieve that Dax might have felt. The girls’ team demonstrated high levels of mutual support and kindness, contrasting sharply with typical competitive male youth sports dynamics.