Episode 233: In a World Filled with Distractions, How Can You Live with an Expansive Mind? Nate Klemp Answers

 
 
 

Nate Klemp, PhD, is a writer, philosopher, and entrepreneur. Most recently, Nate is the author of the new book OPEN: Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World. The book explores how screen addiction and political polarization have closed the modern mind. Using new science, age-old practices, and life experiments, Open investigates tools we can use to cultivate a more open mind. 

 

In today’s episode, Nate joins Erin to discuss what it means to open ourselves up to the other side, to really try to experience for ourselves the opposing belief system, and what that can create. 

 

Nate explains why he never experienced politics the same way after writing Open, what he means by “behavioral architecture” and “dopamine dessert,” and why overindulgence might be the answer sometimes. 

 

If you’re looking for a mindset shift on what it means to be curious in a world that banks on certainty and distraction addiction – this is the episode for you. 

 

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Erin Diehl is the founder and Chief “Yes, And” officer of improve it! and host of the improve it! Podcast. She’s a performer, facilitator and professional risk-taker who lives by the mantra, “get comfortable with the uncomfortable.” Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin has created improve it!, a unique professional development company that pushes others to laugh, learn and grow. Her work with clients such as United Airlines, PepsiCo, Groupon, Deloitte, Motorola, Walgreens, and The Obama Foundation earned her the 2014 Chicago RedEye Big Idea Award and has nominated her for the 2015-2019 Chicago Innovations Award. 

This graduate from Clemson University is a former experiential marketing and recruiting professional as well as a veteran improviser from the top improvisational training programs in Chicago, including The Second City, i.O. Theater, and The Annoyance Theatre. 

When she is not playing pretend or facilitating, she enjoys running and beach dates with her husband and son, and their eight-pound toy poodle, BIGG Diehl. 

You can follow the failed it! podcast on Instagram @learntoimproveit and facebook, and you can follow Erin personally on Instagram @keepinitrealdiehl here. You can also check out improve it! and how we can help your organization at www.learntoimproveit.com. We can’t wait to connect with you online! 

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Episode 233 Transcription

Erin Diehl (00:01.671)

Nate, Dr. Nate, I'm gonna give you your formal introduction. Then I'm gonna go Nate, welcome to the Improve It podcast.

Nate Klemp (00:10.998)

Thanks so much for having me, Aaron. It's a joy to be here.

Erin Diehl (00:14.283)

Oh my God. Well, you were a joy and a prep for, I'm not gonna lie to you. I was so interested in this concept and you inspired this monthly theme of openness here on the show. I love to start every episode by setting a one word intention for the show. So what is one word that you wanna give yourself and our audience today?

Nate Klemp (00:32.366)

Hmm.

Nate Klemp (00:40.042)

Well, let's go with the word open. That's the title of my new book, but it's also a concept that's so rich. So it's got this long scientific history. So most people don't know this, but in psychology they have what's called the big five traits of personality. The first is introversion versus extroversion. We all know about that, right? We talk about that ad nauseum, but the final...

Erin Diehl (00:42.583)

Yes.

Erin Diehl (00:59.419)

Mm.

Nate Klemp (01:08.01)

of the big five personality traits is guess what? Openness versus closeness to experience. So this is not just like some out there crazy spiritual thing, but this is actually a centerpiece of human psychology. It's a personality trait. It's a practice, I think. So I know we'll get into all the different dimensions of it, but for this month, I love the idea of exploring what is it like to open instead of close to life, to our own mind.

to other people who disagree with us, what does that full experience feel like?

Erin Diehl (01:43.263)

I am so down for this conversation and it could not come at a more pinnacle time. I feel like this I needed this today. Nate, okay, like selfishly sometimes I do shows for my for my peeps. Today I need this. So when you think of this word openness, what does it mean to you specifically? I know you've got the science behind it. But for Nate inside, what does openness mean to you?

Nate Klemp (02:10.187)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (02:13.878)

Well, in some ways we can get there by also talking about closed, because I think there are two important words here. One is closed, one is open. And these are two experiences we're all familiar with. And the reason I thought this was such an interesting distinction or project to investigate is that I found myself in spite of having gotten a PhD in philosophy and having meditated and done yoga for 15 years, I found myself just

closing. And what I mean by that, there's sort of two dimensions to it. One is this experience of closure we're having in the form of screen addiction, the craving we have for our screen. So we feel a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit anxious, whip out our screen, right? Self-medicate through some novelty through our screen. So that's one dimension. The other dimension is a form of closing, not so much to our own mind, but to other people.

Erin Diehl (02:54.862)

Uh...

Erin Diehl (03:01.339)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (03:12.514)

And that I like to describe as political polarization, which is something we're all also familiar with, right? Like, you know, four or five years ago, somebody disagreed with you and they had a different perspective. Now they're like the enemy, you know, and there's something wrong with them. They're just a misguided moron or whatever. So the invitation here with opening is to see if we can begin to unwind the momentum of closure.

And that's why I think it's important to talk about closure. These two forces of closure have tremendous momentum in our modern age. A lot of that's because of technology, a lot of that's because of the movement of politics. But the project that I think is really interesting is interrupting the momentum of closure, step one. Step two, finding practices and tools we can use to sort of have a more expansive view of life, be more open to other people who might disagree with us.

Erin Diehl (04:09.763)

love this so much. Never before in my adult life had we ever felt more of a divisive culture than I think 2020 was the 2016 through 2020 politically I think was a extremely tumultuous time. On top of that the isolation of the pandemic. Um let me ask. I know right.

Nate Klemp (04:20.447)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (04:32.626)

Yep.

Well, and here comes 2024.

Erin Diehl (04:39.051)

I know. So, and I want to get into the experiment that you did. We're going to talk about that because I think it's so fascinating. But I love that we're having to look at closure in order to really understand open and openness. And I like that when you're saying openness, you're not necessarily saying one side is better than the other. It's let me look at both sides. Is that where you're going?

Nate Klemp (05:05.422)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I also think it's totally legitimate and important to have strong views and opinions, to have beliefs about politics that are important to you. So what I'm saying is not, you should have no strong political opinion, you should be neutral or something like that, or that you should adopt the views of the other side that you think are so horrendous. It's more, we're so basically stuck in this

strategic frame of politics where it's all about winning for our side, making sure the other side loses, that I think we've lost this skill of actually listening to somebody who might disagree with us. And the statistics here I think are worth mentioning because they're kind of eye-popping. So in 1980 Gallup ran a survey. They found 47 percent of Americans felt warm and favorable toward the other political party. 2020 that number drops in half to 25 percent.

And then there's this other study that's even crazier. Some political scientists wrote a paper called Mass, Lethal Mass Partisanship. And they found that about 20% of Democrats and Republicans believe that the other side lacks the basic traits to be human, that they behave like animals, and that we would be better off if large percentages of the other side simply died. Right, so that's 20%. That is a lot.

Erin Diehl (06:33.511)

That's a lot.

Nate Klemp (06:33.63)

And those are the conditions we live in. So I guess the idea here is, again, not that you have to stop believing what you believe, but that maybe it's useful every once in a while for all of us to consider actually engaging and listening to people who might not share our political views.

Erin Diehl (06:52.2)

interesting. Do you have a specific experience in your own life that you can think of where you really had to lean into this idea of openness?

Nate Klemp (07:05.866)

Absolutely. Well, in the political realm for this book project, just full disclosure here, I live in Boulder, Colorado, kind of left leaning town. I am generally a proponent of things like gun control. So I thought it would be really interesting and helpful for me to just get a full on experience of immersing myself in the other side because there's not a whole lot of diversity politically here in Boulder.

Everybody kind of thinks the same. So I ended up signing up for a National Rifle Association training to get my concealed carry permit. And I ended up spending quite a bit of time with people who had very different beliefs. And I learned a few pretty interesting things. So one thing I learned is that the National Rifle Association was way more moderate in the way they were teaching us to use guns than I had thought.

Erin Diehl (07:36.847)

Sure.

Nate Klemp (08:05.07)

The basic message of the course was like, don't use your firearm, do everything you can to avoid using your firearm. So that was interesting. The second thing I learned is that I started to see the essence of the difference between our views. And it wasn't really about guns. It was more about human nature. So everybody else in the class had this view that like, we're kind of living in this like dystopian hellscape.

where you're always just one Walmart trip away from being abducted and shot in a dark alley, and nobody else is gonna protect you, so you should do it for yourself. And I kinda had this view of human nature that like, yeah, the world's kind of crazy, like crime happens, but for the most part, everything's pretty good, and I don't really need to worry about protecting myself. And so that was the essence of our disagreement.

Finally, this is just the last point I want to make about that experience. I had in the end, this experience of getting to really know some of these folks, having lunch with them, talking about our marriage, in addition to, you know, like Trump and various other conspiracy theories and things like that. And I just realized on a deep level that we are all the same. We are all human beings doing our best in a very crazy world and that there is no enemy.

And for me, that was just like mind blowing. I could never see politics the same way after that experience.

Erin Diehl (09:38.431)

Okay, you're hitting a woo nerve for me here and I love it so much because I truly believe that. I believe that obviously political views are meant to divide, they're meant to increase fear, we're talking about the other component, our opponent, we're

There's no love and there's only two emotions really that make up the human being experience, fear and love. And you can choose to be in the stream of wellbeing and flow with the stream of love, or you can choose fear. And I think what you kind of got to with this experiment was that we are all human beings. We all want to feel connected and loved, but having that openness to go through that.

And I come from a similar space. I come from Chicago, okay, very liberal town, city. And then I moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 2020. So it was a very interesting experience as well. I find that when you lead with love and you lead with a genuine curiosity of the human being, we are all wanting the same things, this desire to feel connection.

And so through that experiment, did you have, just out of curiosity for you, when you went back to Boulder and you shared your experience with other people, what was that like?

Nate Klemp (11:08.322)

Well, most people had the reaction of, wow, I should do that. Why am I not doing something like that? And then, you know, there are a small percentage of people who had the reaction of, how can you even talk to these people? How could you give money to the National Rifle Association, right? This kind of like instinctual outrage reaction. So it was mixed, but that was how people reacted.

Erin Diehl (11:22.457)

I'm sorry.

Erin Diehl (11:33.227)

very cool that you did that. I want to talk about too, because when we talk about this idea of closed versus opened, you also, obviously a big part of the book is overcoming distractions in such a distracted world. So with today, like when you even talked about earlier technology at our fingertips, you made me think of, I live in a neighborhood filled with kids.

and I'll run in the morning, and they'll all be at the bus stop. None of them are talking. All of them, middle school and up, are on their phones. Literally not looking at each other, not talking. What are some strategies that we can use to filter through this noise and focus on human beings and connecting?

Nate Klemp (12:29.694)

Yeah, well, I want to answer that question. But first, I also want to just sketch out a little bit of context here to show why this is such a profound problem for all of us these days. So the first thing is the statistics here are really fascinating. So Nielsen estimates the average American spends 11 hours a day on screens. They've also found that about 50 percent of teenagers describe themselves.

Erin Diehl (12:53.876)

Oh, I believe it.

Nate Klemp (12:58.89)

as having a significant addiction to their screen. And then there have been these studies where they pose these kind of like, would you rather dilemmas to people? So would you rather spend a month without your smartphone or your pet? 40% of people choose their phone over their pet. Would you rather spend a month without your significant other or your pet? 44% of people choose their phone over their significant other. Would you rather have a month without sex or your smartphone? 56% choose their phone over sex.

Erin Diehl (13:01.946)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (13:15.988)

Um.

Nate Klemp (13:28.81)

And in one study, they found 10% of people would rather amputate a finger of their own choosing, like cut off their own finger than go without their phone. All right, so all of that is to say, sometimes people try to minimize this, like, ah, we've always had technology, it's not that big of a deal, whatever. I think it's a big deal. I think it's a really, really big deal. And it's not just that we're distracted, to your point, it's that we crave distraction.

And I think the difference there is crucial that for many of us, we're experiencing a behavioral addiction to our screens. So I just like to lead with that as the context, because I think that helps answer the question of like, well, why should we think about strategies? Well, we should think about strategies because we may be losing our basic freedom as human beings. So so it's worth checking this out. So in terms of strategies, the big idea here.

Erin Diehl (13:57.76)

Yes.

Nate Klemp (14:25.746)

is thinking about ways we can redesign our environment. This is sometimes called behavioral architecture, to make it easier to focus on the things that matter and create a little bit of friction in between us and our screens. So one way we can look at this is in our physical space, like thinking about how could our physical space be more conducive to focus and things like that. So one tip that I always recommend is kick your phones out of your bedroom.

That's like step one. You can have an alarm clock, that'll help you wake up, but like kick those out of the bedroom. Have a place in your house where you can like leave your phone so you're not carrying it around the whole time. The other thing is to think about like how you design your time. So one of the tools I've used that I think can be really useful here is actually setting aside time each day for distraction. So like in the middle of the day when I'm eating lunch, that's my distraction.

zone. I allow myself to just completely gorge on quick hits of Instagram and news and all that stuff. But as a result, like in the morning when I have those urges, I know, you know, my dopamine dessert is coming. I don't need to do that now. And then finally, I think there are ways we can redesign our devices themselves, right? So you can silence all non-essential notifications. There's no need to get a notification every time you're emailed or something like that.

move all the distracting apps off your home screen. You can use focus mode. You can use do not disturb. You can go gray scale if you really want and turn your phone into black and white or go with a flip phone, right? There's some more radical things you can do. But the basic idea there is just like really thinking about the environment that you're in, that you've created for yourself and how to create friction between you and your phone.

Erin Diehl (16:05.179)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (16:18.679)

Okay, I love that you use the words dopamine dessert. That is incredible. I'm never forgetting that, dopamine dessert. I will give you the credit, okay? That is hilarious, number one, and it's so true. And then, okay, I have so many thoughts on this. Like I could spend the entire episode dissecting this, so I'm just gonna go super high level. First and foremost, I am so, I'm addicted to my phone. I am that person. I probably would, I don't know if I, I wouldn't lose a limb.

Nate Klemp (16:22.411)

dopamine dessert, yeah!

Nate Klemp (16:29.617)

Alright.

Nate Klemp (16:43.434)

Yeah, I am too. I am with you.

Erin Diehl (16:48.491)

Okay, that's as far as I would go. I wouldn't lose a limb. Right, ask me on a bad day, maybe I'd give my partner away. I don't know, I love my husband, just kidding. No, but I love you, John. But like, I truly feel addicted, personally. I know so many people listening to this. Hopefully, hopefully you don't feel addicted. But I know many people who are working parents specifically.

Nate Klemp (16:49.646)

So you're not gonna cut your finger off. That's good.

Ha ha!

Nate Klemp (17:05.314)

Yes.

Erin Diehl (17:16.783)

We're tied to our phones because sometimes we have to leave work because we need to take care of our families. And so work is on our phones, so we can't be with our kids and not have our phone. And then when we are with our kids, we're looking at our work. And when we're at work, we're wondering, is school going to call today? Is he coming home sick again? It's so hard to just not have that. And I think back, I was born an early 80s baby. We had a landline.

Nate Klemp (17:23.67)

Yep.

Nate Klemp (17:34.484)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (17:44.479)

Okay? And like that was it. There was no, there was cable television and we survived. So this addiction is so real and I found myself putting up boundaries. Like you've mentioned, I will put my phone in my office from 5 30 to eight every, I've started doing this, have not been doing it as a habit. It's hopefully a habit because that's my time for my family. When I make dinner, we go for a bike ride. That, that

Nate Klemp (17:45.111)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (18:09.727)

Yep.

Erin Diehl (18:12.211)

two and a half hours of no screens feels amazing. But you know what I do at 8 15 when my son is tucked in? Boop! Scroll, editing videos, you know, doing all the things. It is such an addiction and those are some really great things that we have to put in practice. I think it comes with the dopamine dessert, another day would be discipline, like making... Yes! Help me!

Nate Klemp (18:24.849)

Totally.

Nate Klemp (18:33.08)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (18:38.09)

Well, can I give you another crazier strategy? I'm gonna give you one that's like kind of bonkers. Are you open to that? Okay, so in the context of this book, I write about this in the first few chapters, I thought it would be interesting to go the other way. So all the screen addiction tactics I just gave you, they're all about restraint, they're all about like fasting from your devices, all that. And that's really good, I think we need that.

Erin Diehl (18:42.453)

Nate, help!

Yeah, give me the bonkers. I'm here for, yes.

Nate Klemp (19:08.406)

But there's also like this energy that's created when you really try to restrain yourself from something, you know, like with dieting and stuff like that, where you're like, I don't wanna eat the cake, I don't wanna eat the cake, and now you really wanna eat the cake. Like there's a way in which restraint can intensify desire. So, exactly. So what I thought would be really interesting is there's this old technique, you know, like old school parenting, they would say,

Erin Diehl (19:24.995)

Yeah, then you stick your face in the cake and you're like, I'm here for this cake. Okay, keep going. Yep.

Nate Klemp (19:37.718)

You catch your kid smoking a pack of cigarettes, have him finish the whole pack or smoke two packs and he'll never smoke again, right? Terrible parenting vice, not endorsing that, but it turns out this technique has a long history in the tradition of tantric Buddhism, where they thought instead of restraining, wouldn't it be interesting if we kind of consciously indulge? So they would do this with things like sex and drinking and decadent eating.

Erin Diehl (19:43.588)

Right.

Nate Klemp (20:06.838)

But I thought like, wouldn't that be interesting to do this with screens? And the idea is if you kind of overindulge, can you burn out the root of the desire? So what I did is I spent three days all day, every day, just binging on screens and political outrage. And a couple of really interesting things happened. One, I realized that the connection between our screens and sleep is no joke. Cause when I really overindulged.

Erin Diehl (20:16.036)

Mmm.

Nate Klemp (20:34.534)

I basically couldn't sleep. I was up every night at 2 40 and there was like no going back to sleep. So that was really interesting. But the bigger lesson I learned is that the thing that keeps us coming back to our screen is novelty. And in a way it's very similar to like a gambling addiction in the sense that you see somebody at the slot machine, they keep pulling the lever, putting in the coin, pulling the lever, putting in the coin. What are they addicted to?

Erin Diehl (20:52.919)

Mmm.

Nate Klemp (21:02.114)

They're addicted to that moment where they see something new, where the wheels stop and they're like, oh, I won or oh, I didn't win. And our phones are the same. We pick up the phone and it's like, there's something new in the text message app. There's something new in our email app. Go to Instagram, there's a fresh social media feed, right? We're addicted to this experience of novelty. And so by overindulging and going all the way with my phone, I found that in a way I destroyed its superpower.

because at a certain point there was nothing new for me to see. I had seen it all. And after the experiment, I had a morning where I woke up and I had this thought like, oh, this is where I usually grab my phone and go to the bathroom. And the desire for the first time in a decade just completely fell flat. So all that is to say that there's another way you can go. It's pretty radical, but it's like instead of pulling away, you can experiment with going in even more than what you usually do. And then

There's a kind of revulsion that can happen that can be useful.

Erin Diehl (22:05.315)

You know what, that's first of all, I read that about you and I was fascinated to know this journey. So thank you for those gonna ask you that. Okay, so many thoughts here because it reminds me of when the pandemic hit in 2020. I don't know about you, but literally people were coming out of the woodwork for me. Like high school friends were like, let's have a Zoom happy hour. Like it was.

Nate Klemp (22:08.758)

Hahaha. Yes.

Nate Klemp (22:16.429)

Okay.

Nate Klemp (22:31.562)

Yeah, Zoom happy hour.

Erin Diehl (22:34.155)

The craze, right? Because we couldn't leave our houses. We were glued to our phones. On top of the fact, it was a political year. Things that we had a social pandemic, we had a health pandemic, we had all of these pandemics happening. And the only thing we could do to connect ourselves was our phone and was Zoom and apps like Riverside, which we're recording on now. I remember also our company created something called Laugh Breaks during that time, which was.

Nate Klemp (22:44.15)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (22:59.842)

Hmm

Erin Diehl (23:01.231)

We basically zoomed bombed your team meetings with laughter. Okay, like we were, it was all short form improv. When I tell you that in 2020, we sold hundreds of these, I mean, we sold hundreds and they were nominally priced because people were glued to their screens. And it reminds me of that time, because I'll tell you what, no one wants a laugh break in 2024 anymore. No, no.

Nate Klemp (23:15.266)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (23:27.734)

No one wants to do Zoom happy hour. It's like, are you kidding me?

Erin Diehl (23:30.683)

No one wants a Zoom happy hour. Yeah, absolutely not. I feel like we went through a mini version of that, like as a society in 2020. And I will tell you, like, there will be some vacations that I say, I'm putting my phone down. I will check texts and that is it. When I get back from those vacations, I feel completely restored.

Nate Klemp (23:37.366)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (23:48.886)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (23:58.643)

when I was in the 2020 state, like thinking back actually gives me hives because I was so sick of screens at that time. I didn't even want to look at my phone, but it was all I had to connect with the outside world. So your experiment, I feel like would be interesting to do today. And I'm pretty sure everyone would have that same finding because we all had a mini crash course in 2020 when we were just

Nate Klemp (24:17.421)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (24:28.54)

stuck. We could not do anything but look at the screen.

Nate Klemp (24:28.926)

Yeah. I love the connection between that experiment and what we experienced in 2020. I think that's totally true. And I think the bigger practice here or the bigger insight is just that anything you can do to disrupt your ordinary habits, whether that is through the fasting side, by like, I'm gonna lock my phone up and I'm not gonna touch it, or through the indulgence side, I'm gonna overindulge.

Erin Diehl (24:54.341)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (24:57.494)

Both of those are outside of your normal habits. And so you could put them together, you could do one or the other, but the basic idea is to do something that just kind of disrupts the ordinary flow of habit so that you have a little bit more perspective on like, wow, this is not the way I want to live. And what can I do to shift that?

Erin Diehl (25:15.925)

Totally.

Erin Diehl (25:19.547)

I love this. Like this is gonna hit with so many people. Your book is coming out at the perfect time, by the way. I'm so excited. It will have launched by the time this episode airs, launches February 13th, which is Galentine's Day, by the way. So if you wanna Galentine's Day. I wanna talk about this.

Nate Klemp (25:24.482)

Hmm

Nate Klemp (25:29.559)

Yep.

Galentine's Day, all right.

Erin Diehl (25:40.287)

Rise of a distraction culture, this dopamine dessert that we all crave, right? And I wanna talk about something that I think will hit with a lot of our listeners. We call ourselves the improvement peeps. Comparisonitis. As leaders, look, I can be crushing it. Let me talk for myself, okay? I'll speak for everyone, but on a day that I am crushing it, I'm having the best day. We...

Nate Klemp (25:50.03)

Okay. Hmm.

Nate Klemp (25:59.02)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (26:07.343)

You know, things have come in from clients. We've gotten great client feedback. We're booking stuff. We're feeling good. I can turn on my social media. I can literally go on Instagram and I can see my colleague Susan, same space, doing something better. And now guess who's day has a little dopamine downer. This girl, who's got two thumbs in a dopamine downer? Me. And...

Nate Klemp (26:20.93)

Hmm

Nate Klemp (26:26.177)

Yep.

Nate Klemp (26:35.167)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (26:36.787)

It is, I know I'm not alone. I know I've heard from so many people, we're all in different life stages. So depending on what life stage that you're in, it could be, oh my gosh, she's engaged and I'm not. Oh my gosh, she's pregnant and I'm not. It could be, oh, she's gotten that promotion or she's launching that thing. I'm not. Like there's so many different types of comparison, but what are some tips? Like I need some solid tips about...

Nate Klemp (26:48.602)

Mmm.

Nate Klemp (27:02.039)

Mmm.

Erin Diehl (27:05.515)

embracing openness and not falling into that constant comparison trap.

Nate Klemp (27:11.626)

Yeah, well, amen to everything you said. As a writer, I am constantly caught in that same game. This person, they sold way more books than me. They have so many more followers than me. They have all these awards that I don't, et cetera, et cetera. And you're right that we've always had that problem, but now we have technologies designed to amplify that problem, right? So...

Erin Diehl (27:20.676)

me too.

Nate Klemp (27:40.494)

To your point, you go on Instagram, you see these people who are living seemingly amazing lives, knowing in the back of your mind that it's all kind of like BS, that behind that picture, there's really like a lot of relationship conflict or whatever, but you don't get to see that, unfortunately. And so yeah, to your point, this is, it's a problem that I think is, we've always had.

Erin Diehl (27:52.356)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (27:59.591)

Totally.

Nate Klemp (28:08.062)

It's innate in the human mind, but we've like turned the volume way up on it. So how do we mitigate that problem? Well, I think one thing is. I call virtual space screen land. I just, that's like my cute name for it. And part of the reason I do that is as a reminder to myself, like, okay, I'm going to screen land right now. I'm not going to reality. I'm going, it's like when I go to Disney world, you know, I don't think Mickey mouse is like hopping around at Disney world.

Erin Diehl (28:30.705)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (28:38.014)

It's a dude in a costume, right? So when we go to screen land, I think let's just be clear on where we're going. We're not going to reality. We're going to like this weird, it's like Disneyland, but designed to make us feel bad about ourselves or something, like that's how I would describe it. So let's get that awareness first. Like this is screen land, this is not reality. But then I think in our actual life, having some practices we can rely on.

Erin Diehl (28:41.043)

Totally.

Erin Diehl (28:45.883)

Yes.

Erin Diehl (28:53.507)

Yes! Yes.

Nate Klemp (29:07.49)

that kind of ground us and get us out of that trap. And I think there are a lot of different ways to do this. Getting out in nature for me is such a powerful practice. Meditation for me has been a very powerful practice. Anything I can do to just like come back to the present moment, hanging out with my daughter, my wife, such a powerful practice. So I think it's like, to a certain extent,

we're torturing ourselves a little bit with respect to comparison. If we're spending so much time on screens and we're not creating these other rituals in our life that feel a little bit more real, that ground us, you know, that remind us like, hey, we're okay. I don't need a million followers to be a good person or a good writer. I can be okay just as I am.

Erin Diehl (29:56.167)

That's right.

Erin Diehl (30:00.351)

I love that. It's a great reminder for me today. Again, I'm sorry, Improve It, Peeps. I needed this one. I know you needed it too. I look to my microphone when I talk to the audience. Like, you're right there, Peeps. I feel you. It's such, you know, it's almost like you're in high school and sometimes you see the cool kids and you're like, I want to be a part of the cool kid club. But you are a cool kid.

Nate Klemp (30:10.29)

Nice. They're over there. Yeah, totally.

Nate Klemp (30:23.316)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (30:28.239)

Like you're out there crushing it, right? And I'm just saying like for you, for example, as an author, and there's so many things that when we get back to reality that ground us and give us that peace. So I also love that idea of saying screen land. I'm gonna say that, because that's like, that's what that idea.

Nate Klemp (30:43.958)

Well, the other thing is, like, I've had that thought a lot, that it's a lot like high school. But then I started to realize, no, it's not exactly like high school, because if you go on Instagram, the first thing you see is like a number that tells you how cool this person is, right? So you see they have like 4,000 likes and 400 comments, and you go to their profile, you see they have 500,000 followers.

Erin Diehl (30:50.725)

Yes.

Nate Klemp (31:13.858)

To me, it's more like if you were in high school and you went to the cafeteria and everybody had like a score on their shirt, like big score with like, I'm a 9.5 in terms of popularity and you had like a 7.2 or a five, like that's what it's actually like, which is even more intense than high school where you kind of knew, cause like whatever people were wearing a certain brand of clothes or they're hanging out with certain other people, but it was still like a little bit.

Erin Diehl (31:25.284)

Yes.

Nate Klemp (31:42.45)

mysterious, you know, it wasn't just like spelled out in numbers that way.

Erin Diehl (31:48.039)

Okay, this is not where I wanted to take this, but it feels like I need to ask you this because I have a four-year-old son. How old's your daughter? She's 12. Does she have a phone? Does she use social media?

Nate Klemp (31:55.086)

She's 12. Yeah.

So my daughter has an Apple watch because we realized that it's really tricky with kids, especially once you get around 10 and over. There are two dangers as far as I can tell. Danger one is you let them just have a smartphone, lie about their age and get on Instagram because the age minimum technically is 13, but all the kids lie now or TikTok or whatever.

Erin Diehl (32:16.804)

Yes.

Nate Klemp (32:28.866)

So that path I think is super dangerous. I would not want to subject my child to that. But there's another path that feels kind of dangerous, which is to say, no, you can't have a phone, you can't have texts, you can't have any way of communicating with your friends. You're gonna be this kind of like loner who's adrift, you know, and doesn't really have a way of being a part of a social group. So like you're choosing between like ostracism and just like becoming a complete screen addict.

So I think knowing that those are the two extremes, the goal we've tried to aspire toward is like this kind of middle way. So she has an Apple phone, she can text, she doesn't have any social media. So that's about all she has. Once she gets to eighth grade, we'll probably do the smartphone thing, but I will try my best to keep her off social media. So that's just my perspective on it, but it's tricky.

Erin Diehl (33:07.055)

Mm-hmm.

Erin Diehl (33:25.639)

I love that. I'm curious, because I obviously I'm not there yet. And I wonder people, you know, our listeners listening what they're doing for their own kids, because it is like for me, Facebook didn't exist until I graduated college. Like, thank God I was going on AOL. You know, I was in 17 magazine chat rooms with the dial-up internet when I was in high school, you know, like it was still the, rae rae, and I'm so.

Nate Klemp (33:28.343)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (33:52.511)

glad because it's just like, it's just so hard for a parent to watch that and to know we really, in such a distracted world, we as adults can understand, but I feel like as a mind that's still developing, that's a whole other subject. And I hope you write a book about that. I hope that's your next book. You got a marriage book. We need an open book and then we need help the parents of this generation with...

Nate Klemp (33:53.558)

Yeah.

Nate Klemp (34:11.922)

Yeah. Ugh.

Nate Klemp (34:19.842)

Totally.

Erin Diehl (34:21.711)

distractions because it's so hard. It's hard for me as a 41, almost 41 year old woman, you know, like, so I love that you've given us all these tips and tricks. Is there, I have one final question for you. Have you ever done improv? And this is a fun thing I wanna do cause you're launching your book and I love to do this with authors. This is a little improv home. You have not done improvisation as an actor.

Nate Klemp (34:27.596)

Yeah.

Erin Diehl (34:49.903)

but you've done improv as a jazz musician. So this will be very easy because it's about you. This is a little ditty I call five facts. I'm gonna do a little ditty. After I do the five facts, little ditty, I want you to give me five facts about the book that we can't find anywhere online. And it may be like five facts about you writing it, five facts about the process. It doesn't have to be anything in the book. So five interesting facts about your new book open. Okay, here's how this goes, Nate.

Nate Klemp (34:53.879)

Okay.

Nate Klemp (34:57.582)

Okay.

Nate Klemp (35:05.162)

Mmmm

Nate Klemp (35:12.706)

Gotcha.

Erin Diehl (35:18.383)

Five facts, five facts, five facts, five facts, five facts, fact one.

Nate Klemp (35:23.666)

Oh, and now I go with the facts? OK. I thought you were going to model the whole thing first. OK, perfect. Fact one is the idea for this book came to me at a comfort inn in Rawlins, Wyoming.

Erin Diehl (35:25.763)

Yeah, there you go. Ha ha

Erin Diehl (35:40.663)

Okay, two.

Nate Klemp (35:44.03)

I was not originally going to explore psychedelic assisted therapy as a possible modality of opening, but somewhere along the way, it became obvious that I had to.

Erin Diehl (35:59.727)

God, I wish I knew that. Three.

Nate Klemp (36:03.346)

This book is my fourth book.

Erin Diehl (36:10.767)

Love it, four.

Nate Klemp (36:13.886)

While writing this book, once I finished, I realized I had to keep writing. So I started a new book with my wife, which will be another relationship book that I've been writing concurrently.

Erin Diehl (36:28.079)

Love it. And number five.

Nate Klemp (36:29.842)

Number five is...

Nate Klemp (36:35.129)

I...

Nate Klemp (36:39.186)

I'm hopeful that this book creates a different conversation, that we stop talking so much about how much we hate each other and start talking to each other. And that's like the whole, the big goal.

Erin Diehl (36:53.199)

Bye.

Erin Diehl (36:58.627)

going to give some yes to that. Let's keep that conversation alive. I'm so glad you wrote it. I should have done this at the beginning of the show because now I want to know about the psychedelic journey. I have so many more questions but we'll have to read the book in order to find out right. So okay where can everyone find you? Where can they get the book? I know they're going to have questions. I know they're going to want to know more. See the other four or the other three books that you have. So where can they find you?

Nate Klemp (37:12.751)

Totally.

Nate Klemp (37:27.79)

Yeah, the best place to find me is nateclemp.com. That's my website. So you'll see links to the book. The book should be available everywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et cetera, local bookstores. And we also, my wife and I do a newsletter once every week or two that's totally free that you can sign up for there. That's just really like tips, tools, strategies for relationships, for living a better life. So that's the best way to kind of

get into my orbit of what I'm up to.

Erin Diehl (38:02.231)

I love it. We'll put all the links obviously in the show notes for you. Buy this book open, buy it. Let's have this conversation of love. Let's be open, which was your intention when we started today. And I really can't wait to read about the psychedelics. So make sure you get this book wherever you get books. Nate, I'm so glad John Miles, who's also been on the show.

introduced us to you. So thank you, John Miles, for this intro. And I really cannot wait to see where you take this conversation.

Nate Klemp (38:38.838)

Well, thank you, Erin. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Erin DiehlComment