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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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I think if you reduce down the cost of distraction to its absolute essence, it really is freedom that s at stake here.
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Because when we are tethered to our device, when we re checking our phone constantly, for example, around family members, or we go for
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a play day with our kid and we re on our email or whatever it is.
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What s happening there is we re prioritizing the distraction over what I think we all would say matters more in that moment.
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So there s a way in which we re not free to live according to our highest priorities, to focus our time and our energy on what really matters most to us.
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Instead, we re just sort of sucked into this loop of craving
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 416 of Passion Struck, the number one alternative health podcast.
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A heartfelt thank you to each and every one of you who return to the show every week, eager to listen, learn and discover new ways to live better, be better and make a meaningful impact in the world.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member.
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We sure appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we ve organized into convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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I also wanted to tell you about the PassionStruck quiz.
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You can find it on the homepage of the PassionStruck website.
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It consists of 20 questions, takes about 10 minutes, and you can find out where you sit on the PassionStruck continuum.
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And in case you missed it, my interview from earlier in the week featured Morgan Housel,
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a mastermind in the world of finance, behavior economics, and psychology, and also the author of the international bestseller, The Psychology of Money, which has resonated with over 4 million readers globally.
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I engage Morgan in a thought-provoking conversation, diving deep into his latest work, Same as Ever, a guide to what never changes.
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And if you liked that previous episode or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five-star rating and review.
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It goes such a long way in strengthening the passions in our community, where we can help more people to create an intentional life.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today, we re diving into a crucial conversation with my friend Nate Clem, exploring how to thrive in a world overflowing with information and distractions.
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In an era where our natural response is to shut down,
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from our own emotions to others and to the wider world.
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Due to the constant bombardment of stimuli, Nate s groundbreaking book, Open, offers a beacon of hope and a roadmap to a more expansive, creative, and wonder-filled way of life.
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In this episode, we ll delve into the heart of why we tend to close off when confronted with stressors or threats, and discover how we can instead train ourselves to embrace the fullness of life s experiences, even in the face of fear, outrage, or heartache.
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Nate s unique blend of new scientific insights, age-old practices,
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deeply personal narratives, sheds light on the modern challenges that make it all too easy to shut down.
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Join us as we journey through captivating experiential stories, psychedelic-assisted therapy, engaging with political adversaries, and the power of meditation to a host of other tools aimed at opening our minds.
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Nate also introduces the three shifts of opening, breaking free from the habit of mind-wandering, choosing engagement over withdrawal, and expanding our perspectives.
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So if you re ready to unlock a new level of freedom and experience life in its fullest, expansive form, this episode with Nate Klemp is not to be missed.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so honored and thrilled to have my friend Nate Klemp on PassionStruck.
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Welcome, Nate.
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Thank you for having me, John.
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It s a real pleasure to be here.
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I m going to start this out by congratulating you on this book that I m holding in my hands.
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People can also see it over your right hand shoulder, but congratulations on bringing your latest masterpiece into the world.
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Well, thank you very much.
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And can I reciprocate just by saying congrats for your latest masterpiece, Passionstruck.
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We re launch buddies.
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Our books launch a week apart from each other.
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Yes.
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I am just glad they didn t launch on the same day.
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Exactly.
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Yeah.
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I always like to give the audience a chance to get to know the person I m bringing on the show.
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And I understand that during your time at Stanford, you developed a passion for two different things, jazz and philosophy.
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And you made what you described as a pragmatic decision to pursue a career in philosophy rather than jazz music with the goal of learning how to live the good life, which is what we all want to learn here on PassionStruck.
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But I wanted to ask you this in a little bit different way.
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Did you ever think about what your life would have been like had you chosen the other path and pursued jazz?
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That s a really good question.
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And I think about that sometimes.
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I think that I would have a good life.
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I love jazz.
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I was a piano player and it was really one of my passions at the time.
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So yeah, I think it would be a really good life.
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I think I d probably be teaching piano, playing gigs every now and then.
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But at the end of the day, I m really glad I chose what I thought of at the time was the pragmatic route, which I think is kind of funny because nobody in their right mind goes into philosophy thinking it s like the backup plan, except me, I guess.
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But yeah, it s a really interesting question.
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I think I would still have an interesting, good life, and I m glad I made the decision that I did.
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Yeah, I asked this because we started our kids both around the age of three or four learning how to play piano because
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I have always thought understanding music, understanding how to read, write, et cetera, is such an expansive skill for you to have that carries through everything you do in life.
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And it s interesting, my son is 25 and he s now in the business world, but he s spending more and more time on music production, playing music, those aspects, trying to see if he can somehow do both.
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make some money in the business world, but also find ways that he can expand his passion project.
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I love that story.
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And I do think you re right that music is something you can do for your whole life.
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But it also is something that taught me a lot of lessons that carried over into being a philosopher into being a writer.
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I mean, the whole idea of jazz is that it s improvisational.
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So, you know, even what we re doing right now is is a form of jazz in some ways, right?
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I don t know what you re going to ask me.
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I don t know what we re going to talk about, but I have confidence that we re going to go in a kind of cool direction and play around with different ideas.
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And so I think it s all kind of connected in a way.
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It certainly is.
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And speaking of connected, I want to talk about your sophomore to junior year transition in college, because I have a daughter who s a sophomore right now at UF.
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I remember when I was a sophomore in college, you get done that year and it s kind of this midway point and people pursue different things.
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You ended up spending extended time in Cuba during your junior year.
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How did that experience evolve?
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How did it help you to see the world differently?
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I was my sophomore year in college and the year was 1999.
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So that was, I don t know if you remember the Elion Gonzalez saga that happened between Cuba and Miami.
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That was happening while I was down there.
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And the way that all unfolded is I just basically had no idea what I wanted to do.
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I was completely lost.
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And I loved jazz.
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I wanted to learn another language.
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So I started to think like, where are the countries where I could learn another language, where they have amazing music?
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And immediately Cuba popped up as the obvious possibility.
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The only problem was, how do you go to Cuba?
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In 1999, it was even more restricted than it is now.
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So I ended up getting my own license from the US Treasury Department.
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And basically going down there by myself, I was supposed to have a study abroad program, but that fell apart.
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They couldn t get approval.
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So I m 20 years old, just going to Cuba by myself.
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I knew one person there who helped me find a host family.
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It was kind of a crazy experience.
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I m actually surprised my parents let me do it, to be honest.
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But it ended up being such a transformative experience for me because Cuba gave me this break from
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the kind of chaos and the stress of my college life.
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And that s actually where I started to realize that philosophy was something I was really interested in.
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These questions about how to live the good life, reading some of the great works of history.
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For whatever reason, being in a country like that with a totally different political system
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helped me come back to my life in America and see it with totally different eyes and really start to wonder, you know, what are the basic ideas and principles underneath all of this?
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So that was the real gift of that experience.
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Yeah.
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Just prior to you living there earlier on in the nineties, I happened to be working at the joint interagency task force
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that did counter-narcotic work all throughout the Mediterranean.
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But we had an incident where a US aircraft was shot down, and I got to be in the epicenter of that because our command, which had a two-star that was overseeing it, became the command and control center for that whole incident.
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So it s so interesting how close we came to taking action, and then wiser minds prevailed and decided not to.
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do anything about it.
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But yes, you went there during a much more turbulent time than what we re facing right now.
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Yeah.
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Wow.
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That s amazing.
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You have that experience.
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So Nate, after a decade of intense philosophical training, so you graduated from Stanford, you then got a PhD from Princeton.
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You, like so many people today, myself included, experienced profound burnout instead of achieving this goal of human flourishing that you had put your path towards.
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Can you share how this experience influenced your perspectives on well-being and success?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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For me, as I said, philosophy was going to be this path that was going to help me ask the big questions, learn how to live a really good life, a life of human flourishing.
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Eudaimonia is the word that Aristotle uses for it.
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And I went as far as one can go.
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I got my PhD.
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I was in the final year of getting my PhD, just a mixture of different things happened that led me to that state of burnout.
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One was I was in the very early years of my marriage, which at the time wasn t going very well.
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Two, probably more important, at the end of my time in graduate school, I had a bike accident where I fell headfirst over my handlebars and had a pretty serious concussion.
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I understand.
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I think that s another commonality between the two of us that we ve recovered from something like that, which is its own wild life journey.
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And for me, that was the first time in my life where I felt like I had been just completely punched in the face by life.
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in the sense that I had months, if not years of anxiety and depression that went along with that.
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And I started to realize that these philosophical ideas and tools, while super interesting, they weren t really the path to giving me what I really needed in that moment, which was the ability to essentially understand and manage my own mind.
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That, you know, just reading a lot of Plato and Aristotle and Emerson, while really fascinating, wasn t going to get me there.
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So that was a pivotal turning point for me where I realized if I m actually going to experience something like happiness as an embodied quality, I m going to need to train those skills the way we might train physical fitness.
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And so I got really interested in things like meditation, mindfulness, yoga,
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things that I would consider almost like inner technologies of the mind, tools that help you not just have interesting ideas about happiness, but cultivate it as a moment-to-moment experience of being.
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Yeah, and it s something that I experienced as well a little bit later in life than you did.
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But I was originally introduced to doing yoga when I spent a tour of duty with the Navy SEALs, which a lot of people think is kind of ironic because they don t think of them doing things like that.
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But actually mindfulness was an extremely important aspect of the training, at least for the teams that I was part of.
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And that then kind of led me
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over the years to start getting deeper and deeper into the practice of yoga and then just overall mindfulness.
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I know from that experience, you ended up making a decision to leave your tenure-backed or your tenure-tracked position in academia
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And this led you to coauthoring Start Here, Master the Lifelong Skill of Wellbeing with Eric Langsher, which ended up becoming a New York Times bestseller.
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What were the key messages that you both wanted to impart about achieving well-being?
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That book came out in 2016.
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And at the time we were writing it, which was more like 2012, 2013,
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I don t know if you remember this, but P90X was really popular and like CrossFit was just starting.
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And there s this whole idea of, you know, to achieve physical fitness, we can cross train by using different practices, all of which give you this combined effect of greater fitness.
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And we were taking all of this in, but also our interest was more on what you might think of as internal practices, practices like meditation and gratitude.
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So we started to think, well, wouldn t it be kind of interesting to create a program which was kind of like P90X for the soul, you know, or like CrossFit for the soul.
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The basic idea being that we, Eric and I, my coauthor, we were really, you know, transformed, I guess you could say, by practices like meditation.
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But we realized meditation wasn t the only tool out there, that there were all these really interesting tools.
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And so we wanted to create this kind of cross-training program and really dig deep into the science of all these different practices.
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So instead of just writing a meditation book, we talk about meditation, obviously, but then practices like movement and inquiry and gratitude, compassion, contribution, full engagement.
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The idea was essentially create this menu of practices validated by science that could then serve as a starting point for people.
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Not that you would do all nine of these practices, but maybe there are one or two that really resonate and you can start building a habit of those two practices and then adding or changing it up as you go along.
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That was the basic idea, CrossFit P90X for the soul.
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I love it because during that time I was doing the 90 X and on the other days I was on Stevenson s program.
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And after you went through both, I just found that you needed to alternate.
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And at the time I had just moved.
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to Austin when I was really into this and I was put up into a temporary apartment until we found our house.
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And I was on the second floor.
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And I remember my neighbor would get so pissed because I m an early morning workout person.
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And I guess doing those at six o clock, six 30 in the morning, isn t conducive to sleeping when your upstairs neighbor is jumping all around their house.
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I can imagine being your neighbor would be quite challenging under those circumstances.
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Yes, I m sure they were very happy when I moved out.
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Well, you brought up your wife, Kaylee, a little bit earlier, who I understand you first met when you were in high school, if I have it correct.
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The two of you end up penning a book together called the 80-80 Marriage, which offers a new model for modern relationships.
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And the New York Times actually selected it as an editor s choice.
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What do you think made your book stand out and what impacted you to
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hope it would have on modern marriages?
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Well, we wanted to write a different kind of marriage book, not to disparage the books that are out there.
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They re great.
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There s a lot of amazing marriage books, but they re mostly about ways that we can communicate with one another, you know, various tools that are almost like psychology-based tools.
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And we were thinking that the thing nobody was talking about
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is this phenomenon that we see in our own marriage and all the marriages of our friends, which is we are really the first generation in all of human history trying to make egalitarian, equal marriage work.
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Our parents didn t really do it.
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Our grandparents didn t really do it.
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So in other words, we re really the first people to be asking, how can we be equals and in love?
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That s a new question.
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And so in the midst of all that, we found that we ended up interviewing about 100 couples for this.
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We found most couples default to this unconscious strategy where they say, OK, if we want to be equals and in love, we re
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We re just going to try to make everything perfectly 50-50 fair.
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And not only that, we re going to keep this elaborate scorecard where I compare all the wonderful things that I did against all the things that you didn t do.
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And the idea is that somehow once everything comes into balance and we achieve this 50-50 fairness,
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We somehow like ascend to the heavens of marital bliss and everything is awesome all the time.
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So that we see as just this kind of fundamental trap of marriage and relationships in the modern age.
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So the whole idea of 8080 was to say, well, what if we thought about it differently?
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What if we thought instead of trying to contribute my 50%,
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I try to contribute 80% knowing that that s a mathematical impossibility, knowing that it s probably not even possible to do, you know, just in terms of the balance of contribution.
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But what ends up happening is there s this shift in mindset from a mindset of fairness to what we think of as radical generosity.
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And that shift in mindset can be so powerful for relationships.
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not only relationships.
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Adam Grant did some great work about the power of gratification in the workplace and showed that places that have more gratitude are actually 55% more productive than those that are not.
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So definitely a life skill that we can use in multiple areas of our life.
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So I want to review this.
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So you did a bootcamp
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for well-being would start here.
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You then kind of did a boot camp for how to redo marriages in the 80-80 marriage.
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And now you ve decided to tackle what is becoming an increasing issue in society, and that is distraction in your new book, Open.
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And I wanted to open this up, given we re talking about open, by talking about the anatomy of attention.
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Why is it that we often find ourselves in control of our lives in the physical world, but not in the digital world?
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There is something really unique about the digital world.
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And I think this is another one of those new predicaments that our grandparents didn t experience, their grandparents certainly didn t experience.
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And that is that
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We live in a time where we re surrounded by technologies of distraction.
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And that s somewhat problematic, but I don t think that s the real problem.
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If you go one level deeper, the real problem isn t just that we re distracted.
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It s that we crave distraction.
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We re addicted to distraction, many of us.
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We have a compulsion to distract ourselves.
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Part of the reason I thought this would be an interesting project for me, because I don t know if you have the same thing, but for me, the way I select book projects is I get to a point in my life where there s some really deep existential fundamental problem that I feel like I don t know the answer to.
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And I look at the existing books and I feel like they re not giving me the answer either.
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So the way I stumbled upon this project is that I was having that experience with my screens in the sense that I ve been doing all these practices, yoga, meditation for years, gratitude, all sorts of different wellbeing practices.
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And yet here I was still feeling like my mind was very much out of my control.
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and that I would spend an inordinate amount of time each day on digital cravings to the news or Instagram or my Broncos blog.
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I m a football fan, right?
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So I get sucked into that sort of thing.
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And so this became just an area of interest for me to figure out, first of all, how can we interrupt this urge, this craving, this addiction to closing down our own minds to distraction?
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But then second, how can we actually open the mind?
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So it s kind of like a two-part thing.
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How do we close less?
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But then also there s something about a more open mind that I think is really interesting and powerful and a mindset shift worth exploring.
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So how do we do that was another part of the question.
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It s such an interesting topic.
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And recently I interviewed BJ Fogg, who many of the listeners probably know, author of Tiny Habits and a professor at Stanford where you graduated.
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Was he teaching when you were there?
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He might ve been, but I didn t hear about him until maybe 2010 or so.
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I know he was running the persuasive technology lab there.
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He was, and that led him into behavior science.
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But when he was still doing the persuasive technology lab, he ended up doing a project with his students that was all about the distracted nature of technology.
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And it s something that he had been talking to Congress and other figures about.
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But interestingly enough, he had two pupils in his class, Mike Krieger and Tristan Harris.
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And it s interesting because coming out of this class on distraction, one of them ends up going to found Instagram and the other comes at this on the exact polar opposite side.
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After working at Facebook at understanding how do we try to tackle what these things are doing to us?
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But I can t even imagine what that class must ve been like.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Yeah, no, I ve heard that same thing.
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And it is interesting that both one of the leading critics and one of the leading platforms of social media came out of that.
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Wild.
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Very wild.
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And I wanted to ask you, since we re talking about science, in your research, what does science reveal about what causes us to become distracted?
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And what is the consequence of this constant interruption and the closed-mindedness that it brings?
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Yeah, well, starting with what causes it, there are a number of different factors, but I think there s one in particular that s worth looking at.
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And this is really well documented in Nir Eyal s book, who I believe was also in that BJ Fogg persuasive technology class.
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So he went on to write a book called Hooked about how to build these persuasive technologies.
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And one of the things that s highlighted in a lot of this research is that there is something fundamentally different about the way we interact with the analog world and the digital world.
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So for example, when I open up my refrigerator, the light turns on, there s food in there, but it s the same food that was there earlier in the day.
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When I open up my phone, I open up my email program, and it s always different.
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There are like new messages.
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I opened up Instagram, and the feed is totally different.
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I open up my favorite news app, whether that s Fox or the New York Times or whatever it is, and there s new stories, right?
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So what we re getting is this experience of novelty, which is also called a variable reward.
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So you can imagine in the analog world, this might look like you open up your refrigerator,
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And all of a sudden, there s a new treat there every single time you open up the door.
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And imagine how captivating that would become.
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Well, that s how our screens are designed.
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They re designed around novelty.
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And we know from the brain science that every time we have this experience of novelty, the brain takes careful notice of that.
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Because from an evolutionary perspective, there s something new happening here.
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We need to pay attention to that.
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And one of the things that happens as a consequence is we get this like burst of dopamine, the pleasure associated neurotransmitter in the brain.
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And so there s this whole cascade of hormones, neurotransmitters that happens around novelty.
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And that I think goes a long way to explaining the underlying craving, why we re not just distracted, but we re sort of seeking out these distractions.
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And then of course there are things like, you know, the endless feeds that happen, or you re watching a video on Netflix and it just automatically queues up the next video.
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There s social reward strategies, all the likes and the comments and things like that.
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There s streaks, right?
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So there are all sorts of these,
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persuasive technologies built into the devices that we use every day.
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But I think when it comes to the foundations of our craving, that novelty bias of the brain that gets activated is really the key thing that s keeping us coming back and back again.
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It s so interesting.
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Last year, I interviewed Professor Scott Galloway, who I m sure you re familiar with, and he had a great book called Adrift.
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I really liked it because of the pictures and the way he explained what was happening.
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It reminded me as I was reading your book,
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You write, most of us don t want to live like this, heathered to distraction and division, but we keep coming back to this world of virtual negativity and it gives us permission to those things around us that shift our awareness in very negative manners because we re just consumed by this influence that s hitting us that
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people are tailoring us to act in certain ways.
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Why is this all making us such a slave to our environment?
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Well, I think the key word that you touched upon there is freedom.
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And I think if you reduce down the cost of distraction to its absolute essence, it really is freedom that s at stake here.
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Because when we are tethered to our device, when we re checking our phone constantly, for example, around family members, or we go for a play date with our kid,
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and they re on the play structure and we re on our email or whatever it is.
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What s happening there is we re prioritizing the distraction over what I think we all would say matters more in that moment.
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So there s a way in which we re not able, we re not free to live according to our highest priorities, to focus our time and our energy on what really matters most to us.
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Instead, we re just sort of sucked into this loop of craving that takes our attention elsewhere.
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And I think we all have our own unique forms of distraction.
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So if you re listening to this, I think one thing that s interesting to do just as an exercise is to take a step back and reflect on what are my key digital cravings?
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What are my top three?
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So things like news for some people, social media for some people, shopping for other people, right?
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Everybody has their own idiosyncratic list.
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But once you get clear on what that list looks like for you, it becomes just easier to see that arising in real time.
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And I think that awareness is ultimately how we start to have a little bit more freedom.
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And I m not sure if you ve gotten to this part of my book yet, but I think it s chapter 13.
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I have a whole chapter that I wrote about becoming a conscious engager.
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And in this chapter, I really explore this concept of
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the fact that so many of us are living a pinball life, which is really what you re describing in the beginning of the book.
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And I liken it to we become the pinball in the game of pinball.
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And that s how so many of us are living our lives.
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We are constantly being distracted by everything around us, being influenced.
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So we re unintentional, just like that ball is, just bouncing from one thing
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to the next.
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Most importantly, which is what I tried to do in the book, we start living this inauthentic life where we get further and further away from our aspirations.
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I just had Hal Elrod on the show, and we were talking about how Cornell published this study in 2018.
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That, to me, is just mind-blowing.
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Out of thousands of people that they interviewed that were getting close to their deathbed, 76% of them said their biggest regret in life was that they didn t live the life that they aspired to live.
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And when you think about the distractions that are happening all around us,
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What it s causing us to do, and it s why you explained you wrote the book, is you start feeling this subtle urge to this close that s growing inside of all of us.
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The way that I likened it was you and I have both experienced burnout, and for me,
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It started out like you described, this closeness starts out almost imperceptible until it grew into this raging fire.
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Can you walk us through kind of that metaphor that I just made and that analogy of how this closeness is kind of similar to that?
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Yeah, sure.
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Well, and I also just really want to highlight the pinball metaphor that you talk about in the book.
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I think that s so important.
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And that might just be the fundamental principle underlying all of self-improvement and self-development.
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Because what I love about your metaphor there is pinballs basically move by total accident.
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You shoot the thing and it bounces around and the pinball at no point decides, I m going to go right instead of left, right?
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It just goes where the underlying flow of habit is telling it to go.
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And I think that for all of us, that is the way in which we experience life by default.
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I like to call it life by accident, or you could see this in relationships too.
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Most relationships are structured by accident.
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And what your invitation there is to do, which I think is like the fundamental move in all of self-improvement, is to shift from living by accident, being in your relationship by accident, using your screens by accident and just kind of winging it, to bringing intentionality to it, to doing it by design.
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And so I just wanted to highlight that because I feel like if there s one principle that I try to think about in terms of why we do this work, that s it.
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Like we re just trying to bring a little bit more intentionality to our habits, our relationships, how we use screens, you know, and there s all sorts of dimensions that we can bring that intentionality to.
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So yes to that.
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And then you were asking about the imperceptible movement towards something like burnout.
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I think you re absolutely right that it, I think for all of us who have experienced it, it s definitely not an overnight thing.
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It s a consequence of, I think that pinball-like experience
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of having these habits that may have served us in some previous era of our life, but no longer serve us, that are more or less unconscious habits that are running the show.
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And I think the gift of burnout, and I d love to hear your perspective on this as well.
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But to me, the gift of burnout is, for me anyway, once I hit that moment of burnout, I could no longer sort of push away these unconscious habits.
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I could no longer live in a state of denial.
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I had no choice but to face something is not working in my life.
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And to me, I see that as like the gift of those moments is that there can be this kind of new perspective that emerges, new opportunity that emerges to create new and more optimal habits.
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But I m curious if for you, cause I know you had a similar experience, like did burnout have that kind of paradoxical gift to it?
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Yeah, I ll touch on that.
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I do think it did have that gift, although it was a painful gift.
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It was a gift.
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Not a gift I would ever want to give anyone.
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Yes, it s a gift I would hope no listener of this show ever has to deal with because, man, I found myself just completely numb to the world.
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And when you start feeling burnout in one area of your life, man, does it eventually cascade into every other area of your life?
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And the analogy that I was trying to bring up was that similar to burnout, I think this rage of distraction driven by distraction has the same phenomenon.
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Because similar to burnout, when you start checking your phone, it s almost imperceptible how often you re doing it.
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And then over time, this pattern keeps increasing.
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I wrote about in that same chapter, Tim Cook and his own phone use, which is one of the reasons he s such a big advocate that people look at their time use on the Apple phone and that they had that on there to help them log it.
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But he found himself that he was abusing this far more than he ever thought he would.
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And I do Toastmasters and a couple of weeks ago, there was this brave girl who got up there to deliver her speech on this whole topic of distraction.
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And she self-professed, I think she was probably late 20s, early 30s, that when she started doing her own audit, that she was spending somewhere between six to seven and a half hours on her phone a day.
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People in the room just kind of all nodded.
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And what ends up happening, similar to burnout, is that we don t even know how much it s starting to occupy our lives.
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But just like the numbness that I felt.
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I think distraction does the same thing because it takes us away from our relationships.
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It takes us away from our career.
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It takes us away from being creative.
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It takes us away from free thinking.
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And I m going to go to exactly what you were talking about with intentionality, given that this podcast is all about creating an intentional life.
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I think focus and intentionality go hand in hand.
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So if you follow that, I believe that these underlying forces of distraction are taking us further away from living intentionally.
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And that whole pinball metaphor, so many people talk about people are living on autopilot.
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Well, when you re on autopilot, you still have a direction.
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In some ways you still are being intentional.
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It might be intentional in the wrong direction.
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When you re a pinball, you re not autopilot.
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You re completely unintentional.
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You were just
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living your life every single day, bouncing off whatever may come be without the passion and perseverance to create this life of aspiration that we all long for.
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I think that this distraction is one of the largest things that s causing this impact of
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unhappiness, of a lack of significance that so many people are feeling.
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I really think it s this feeling of unmattering that now is leading to the epidemics of loneliness and hopelessness.
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I m going to just turn this on you, given the company you own and the whole evolution you re doing around mindfulness.
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Do you see any commonalities in what I m saying?
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I absolutely do.
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And I think the thing that really stands out is the link between burnout and distraction.
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So one of the things I ve been fortunate to do in my work with corporate clients is I ve worked with a number of large consulting firms and been able to get a kind of inside view of what s happening.
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And one of the things I ve observed is that the combination of really intense stress at work and constant distraction creates the following experience.
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Most people go to work
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They re never fully on when they re at work because every time they try to really focus on something, there s an email that comes in or there s somebody who comes into their office or there s some sort of interruption or distraction or they go to Facebook or whatever.
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So they re never fully on at work.
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Then they go home to rest and relax and distraction arises there as well, right?
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So they re now at home and they re binging Netflix or doing whatever.
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So they re never fully on at work
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They re never fully off when they re at home.
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So there s a way in which we ve kind of created this experience of just constant stimulation such that we re never fully engaged, but then we re never actually relaxed either.
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And so that s one of the ways in which I think these two forces coexist.
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is that the human body was really designed for something more like a sprint and recovery mode, where it s really intense effort, really push the boundaries of what you re capable of when it comes to a task at work or a challenging project that you re doing, but then
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in order to counterbalance that, to have these deeper periods of rest and relaxation where our mind isn t constantly stimulated and we re not looking at bright colors at all hours and keeping ourselves up at night.
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So I think that s one way in which these two states are almost like mutually reinforcing, that distraction creates burnout, burnout creates distraction, and it becomes a kind of negative feedback loop.
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Yeah, it becomes a loop.
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All right.
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A loop to more and more people not living anywhere close to the lives they want to live because let s face it.
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We end up trying to emulate everything that we see, what we re told, et cetera, instead of doing the mindful work of getting to know ourselves, which then leads us to understanding what our passions are, which then leads us to making shifts in our life, which then leads us to expanding where we want to go and, and what we want to accomplish.
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And it s something I wanted to explore because the book is all about what does it mean to live with an open mind?
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And I think for me, it s important that people understand the concept that you start your section in the book open on, which is creating an expansive mind.
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Can you talk about that?
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Yeah, I think if you look at those moments of closure, how they re different from when we feel more open to our life, a lot of it has to do with the size of the mind.
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So just as an example, the other day, I had a long day at work.
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I didn t get the stuff done that I was hoping to get done.
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My mind was spinning.
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I just looked at the news.
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The news always gets me riled up.
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I had a moment of closure where I could feel all this happening and I just didn t want to experience it in the present moment.
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So I turned on Monday Night Football, which is one of my favorite ways to just kind of like take a little break, check out, I guess you could say, to close.
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So what s going on there?
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Well, one thing that I would point to is there s a particular mind state there, which I would call unconscious mind wandering, where the mind is not in the present moment.
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It s kind of just time traveling through these stories about the past and the future.
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And there s a great study at Harvard showing most of us spend 47% of the day in that state of just mind wandering.
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Second,
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When we close down like that, there s a tendency to kind of pull away from our life, pull away from the present moment, pull away from our family members.
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Maybe it s just subtle rather than moving toward approaching.
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But then the final thing is what you were touching on, which is
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in those moments of closure, whether that s we re feeling overwhelmed, we re feeling uncomfortable emotions, maybe there s some sort of scary thought that s rising in the mind.
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There s this mental experience of the mind being like small, almost like the mind tunneling in on this one little negative thought or this one sensation or this one emotion.
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So that size is really one of the key characteristics of what s happening when we feel closed.
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There s not a whole lot of space in the mind.
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And when we open, it s the opposite.
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So a more open mind, I think at its core is really about
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experiencing life with a little bit more space, having more headspace.
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It s not that the brain gets bigger, right?
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Your brain is the same size.
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But there s something that does get bigger, which is the feeling of space or the size of your awareness.
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I think we ve all had this experience.
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You know, you re looking at a sunset, you re at an amazing concert, whatever it might be, you re eating an amazing meal.
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Those moments where the mind just kind of relaxes and there s this feeling of expansive space.
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And while that may not sound like a big deal, within that space is possibility, is a little bit more perspective.
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Maybe the hard stuff, the emotions, the thoughts, they re still there, but we see them differently with space.
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And so I think that s really the essence of the concept and the project is to say, wouldn t it be interesting to try to experience more of life with a bigger, more spacious mind and spend less time just closed down, tethered to distraction and division?
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It s interesting because you then took that concept and you tried to explore different ways you could do it.
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And when I was thinking about it, I interviewed Dacher Keltner, a professor at Berkeley, wrote this great book on awe.
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And when I think it happened in this open mind, sometimes I liken it to being in the state of awe.
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And what was really intriguing to me is that from all the research he did,
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We all think like we have to go to the mountains in Colorado by close to where you live to experience it, or maybe the Grand Canyon, or people say they experience it with the birth of their kids.
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But he said the most common way we can experience it and a way you can experience it on an everyday basis is by either performing or seeing acts of service to others.
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And he said, when we see that kindness, it creates experiences.
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But you bring up that one of the ways that you did this was by opening yourself up to the enemy, and I thought this was a really interesting chapter of how you went about doing this.
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Can you talk about your experiences with guns and how they evolved?
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Absolutely.
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So I think of closure as happening both internally, we can be closed to our mind, to our emotions, but it can also have a more external form.
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I think all of us are experiencing this on some level that there s this closing down to people who believe something different from us, who vote for the opposite candidate, who support the opposite political party.
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And it doesn t matter whether you re on the right or the left, I think we re all having this experience, no matter what your political perspective is, an experience that seems to be getting more and more intense, sort of amplified by social media, siloed media, etc.
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So in the book, I was trying to figure out, well,
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How can I set up an experience for myself of just radically immersing myself in the other side?
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I live in Boulder, Colorado, which is a pretty left-wing town.
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I m sort of center-left.
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I historically have been an advocate of gun control.
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Guns scare me.
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I ve never owned a gun, never really even shot a gun.
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So I decided to go take an NRA course where I would earn my concealed carry permit in the state of Colorado.
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and essentially immerse myself in the other side, knowing that these are people who I would probably never come across in my ordinary life.
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So I did that.
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And one story that I think was just kind of illustrates like the paradoxes that I experienced.
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I got to this training in rural Colorado and I wore my Denver Bronco hat thinking, you know, we re all in Colorado.
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This is going to be my way of finding common ground.
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One of my classmates came in with a Kansas City Chiefs jersey.
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They re our division rivals.
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So I made a little joke, you know, like.
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Like, I don t know if we can be friends because I m a Bronco fan, you re a Chief fan.
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And her husband comes up to me and says, oh, you don t have to worry about that at all.
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We haven t watched the NFL in five years after the kneeling.
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So the kneeling for Black Lives Matter.
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And then our instructor was like, yeah, I haven t watched the NFL in five years.
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And so I m standing there thinking, wow, we can t even agree on a shared passion for a modern gladiator sport.
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But then something wild happened, which is the same guy who told me that, you know, we haven t watched the NFL.
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He was talking with the instructor about politics and he turns around and he says, well, you know, we shouldn t assume anything here.
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What side are you on?
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And he points at me.
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And I said, you know, I m on the side of staying open to all points of view.
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And it was the craziest moment because everybody s face just brightened up.
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And even though we didn t agree on anything politically, everybody was saying like, yeah, we need more of that.
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Why are we talking to each other?
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This is crazy.
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So what I learned through that moment and the whole rest of the experience is that there s a craving on all sides to connect.
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And when we do, it starts to become clear, like there is no enemy here.
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We re all trying our best.
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We re all human beings doing the best we can.
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Maybe we watch different news channels, but other than that, there s a lot of common humanity here.
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So that was just a really mind-blowing experience.
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And I encourage everybody to do it.
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If you re on the right, immerse yourself in the left.
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If you re on the left, immerse yourself in the right.
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And it s a way of just experiencing our differences in a totally alternative way to the experience we usually get through watching the news or surfing Facebook or whatever.
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Yeah, going back all the way to Cuba and politics, people probably don t realize this, but when Kennedy became president and was going against Richard Nixon, their debates were so difficult for both men because they were both moderates on both sides.
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of the aisle and actually what their campaigns were wanting overlapped in about 90% of areas.
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So it was actually very difficult for each one of them to stand out.
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It s so interesting how different that is to where we stand today in politics.
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Another area I just wanted to touch on real quickly is about a year and a half ago, I did this 4x4x48 David Goggins challenge to support a number of veteran related nonprofits.
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And I was surrounded by almost all people who were in the special operator community.
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people like myself who had experienced a bunch of combat-related trauma.
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And two of the charities that were there were vets and heroic hearts, which were both on the very leading edges of psychedelic treatment.
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And it was amazing as I talked to these vets, many who ve
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would have never in a million years taken any type of drug, speaking of different camps that people are on who open themselves to doing ayahuasca or ketamine or different forms of this and found that it had just a completely profound impact positively on their lives and overcoming their trauma.
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What role for you did psychedelics play on this journey to creating openness?
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I m so glad you asked this question.
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I originally had no intent to write about or experience psychedelics at all.
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Halfway through this project, I started getting a lot of questions.
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What are you going to say about psychedelics?
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What s your perspective on psychedelics?
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And I approached them with a lot of fear because I felt like these are compounds that are very out of control.
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I had a lot of stories of family members who had taken them, friends who had taken them and had really bad experiences, sometimes lifelong implications from those.
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But then I started to look deeper and I started to see there was this really important distinction between psychedelics, the compounds themselves,
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and psychedelic-assisted therapy, which is the pairing of these compounds with an intentional structure of support and integration.
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And once I started to understand that and I started to read the research, it became clear to me that there s something that s possible with the kind of structured guidance and support that s not with psychedelics alone, which is to really integrate these compounds into a process of therapy itself.
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So one of the most amazing things that happened for me is I ve had a fear of flying for, I don t know, 20 years, really since 9-11.
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I just would have these experiences being on airplanes where I couldn t really explain where it was coming from or why I was feeling it, but it was just fear, anxiety.
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And so I had a pedamine assisted therapy session with Sarah Lewis, who was my therapist and my guide.
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And I put on the headphones and I put on the eye mask.
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And all of a sudden I was like on this plane, not a real plane, but a plane in my mind, felt like a real plane.
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And it was one of the craziest experiences because unlike anything I had ever experienced in the last 20 years, I was in love with airplanes.
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It felt so good to be, I felt like I was at home on the airplane.
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And then I had the experience of watching this commercial airliner crash to the ground, watching myself be incinerated by the plane.
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And my first thought was like,
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God is a plane crash.
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This is one of the most beautiful things I ve ever seen.
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So I just need to caveat that by saying like, I do not believe plane crashes are good.
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But what was happening in that moment is the therapy coupled with the compound gave me the ability to approach or move toward this extremely traumatic mind state that in ordinary consciousness, I just couldn t go there.
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Like my mind would just recoil.
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I d automatically feel fear.
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I d automatically feel some sort of trauma.
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And I think that s the real possibility here is opening up spaces where we can re-experience some of our most traumatic memories or thoughts or experiences in such a way that we re able to see them differently, that there s a new narrative around them, that we re able to become more adaptive to them.
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So I m with you in that, like, I don t recommend people should go out and take psychedelic compounds, but I do think for veterans or anyone who has PTSD, significant depression, anxiety, things like that, they can be interesting, you know, if used in a very careful, structured way.
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And I have two great episodes that if people want to learn more about this, they can tune into.
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One was with Professor David Yaden, who got his PhD at a University of Pennsylvania and is now teaching and working at the Consciousness Center at Johns Hopkins University, which is probably the most preeminent body that s looking at psychedelic research.
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And then I just did a fascinating discussion with my friend, Matthew Weintraub, who goes through the psychedelic origins of religion.
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and how psychedelics have actually been a part of our customs for centuries.
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Mostly they were natural use ones when you think of the Native Americans or the tribes down in Central and South America who were using natural compounds to do mind expansive things.
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So both are two very good episodes on this.
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I just want to say, I want to appreciate you for your openness, having been a vet yourself to having these conversations on your show.
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I think that s a really big deal just for us to have a more public conversation about this.
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So thank you for that.
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Yeah, you re welcome.
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It s just amazing to me as I ve talked to psychologists and psychiatrists who were completely against the use of psychedelics, who are now advocating for its use because typical pock therapy and even some of the mind-altering prescription drugs that we use are only having a 25 to 30% efficacy.
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And the phase two and the phase three trials are showing that psychedelics are having 67% to 80%
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efficacy with long-term life altering changes.
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So it is something that people need to be paying attention to, but to do it in a way that s supervised as you suggested.
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So Nate, I don t want to go through all the things in your toolkit.
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I was hoping you might be able to just open up a dialogue to encourage people to buy the book so they can understand some, maybe you can give them a teaser of what s offered in the book.
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Yeah, well, I would say lots of different tools.
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You know, some of these tools are about how do we interrupt that momentum toward closing that we were talking about?
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So screen addiction tactics, political polarization tactics for unwinding our own outrage toward the other side or our own cravings for screens.
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But then, as I said before, most of the book is really about tools we can use to experience a little bit more openness in our mind.
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So we talked about psychedelics,
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opening to the enemy or the other side.
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But there are numerous other tools that I think can be quite useful.
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So I talked quite a bit about meditation.
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One of my favorites is actually street opening.
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It s this idea of
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bringing meditation into the world.
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So I have a chapter, for example, about spending a day at Costco, turning my local Costco into a meditation retreat center and seeing my local Costco from that place of awe that we were describing earlier and how we can essentially turn these throwaway moments of everyday life and airplanes and Ubers waiting in line into opportunities to open more.
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And then also various practices we can use for sort of slowing down the nervous system, unwinding tension in the body, and just creating more space for this experience of openness to happen more in our life.
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So yeah, lots of different tools.
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And it s one of those books where
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I just really believe that we would live in a better world if we all paid a little bit more attention to trying to be a little bit more open, both to our own internal experience and to other people who we might disagree with.
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Yeah, I couldn t agree more.
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And I wanted to close out, Nate, on you were doing a ton of stuff with Mindful, and I was hoping you could talk about some of your future aspirations and how you envision its role shaping the global conversation on mindfulness and well-being.
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Yeah, well, I think that part of my work throughout my whole career has just been about how can we bring a little bit more intention, as we were talking about earlier, into our lives.
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And the reason I think mindful, what we re up to as a magazine, but also mindfulness just as a tool that we use, the reason I think that s so essential is that shift toward more intentionality requires a moment of mindfulness.
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You know, we were talking about being the pinball and the lack of choice in being a pinball.
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Well, if we want to stop the momentum of pinballing, there has to be that moment where we see what s happening in real time, where we become aware
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that we re getting caught up in these unconscious habits and unconscious patterns.
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So I think that s why mindfulness is really at the core of everything I ve done.
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I just see it as such a fundamental skill, even in relationships.
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Let s say you want to shift from a 50-50 to an 80-80 relationship.
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Well, that s great as an intention, but if you can t see that happening in real time, see when you re getting stuck, become aware of those moments,
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it s unlikely that you can make that shift.
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So I do think mindfulness is really one of those key underlying tools.
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It s almost like the master habit that allows us to start creating new and better habits.
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Well, I love that.
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And Nate, for the listener who wants to get more information on you and where they can not only buy the book, but get other assets that might help them on their journey, where s the best place for them to do that?
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Absolutely.
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So probably the best place is my website, nateclemp.com.
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My last name is K-L-E-M-P.
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We put out a newsletter every couple weeks with tools for relationships and mindfulness, things like that, that could be of interest to folks.
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And then also on Instagram at Nate underscore Clemp, I do a bunch of different posts and challenges there.
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And then the new book comes out February 13, Open Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World.
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And you can find that everywhere.
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I m doing the audio for the first time ever, so that ll be fun.
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You ll hear me narrating the book.
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And, uh, mostly though, John, I just want to really thank you for having me on the show.
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This has been such an interesting.
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And an opening conversation, I would say.
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Oh, you re welcome.
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Honor was mine, Nate, and congratulations on the book.
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And thanks for reading mine as well.
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You re one of the, of course I love it.
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Yeah.
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And I hope this book people should read this book because it s really important.
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So many interesting ideas, helpful tools.
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Well, thank you again and congratulations on everything.
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Thank you.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that great interview with knee clamp, and I wanted to thank Nate and sounds true for having the privilege of interviewing him today on passion struck links to all things.
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Nate will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links.
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If you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show videos are on YouTube at both our main channel, John or miles on our clips channel, passion struck clips.
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Please check them out and subscribe advertiser deals and discount codes are one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash.
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deals.
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You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles.
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You can go to LinkedIn and sign up for our newsletter, Work Intentionally, or you can sign up for our personal development newsletter at PassionStruck.com titled Live Intentionally.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with Jamie Kern Lima, who s an American entrepreneur, billion-dollar business success story, champion of women, philanthropist,
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culture shifter, and highly sought after keynote speaker.
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Jamie is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Believe It, How to Go from Underestimated to Unstoppable.
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And in our interview, we discuss both it and her new book, Worthy, How to Believe You Are Enough and Transform Your Life.
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I wrote a chapter in Worthy called, You re Not Crazy, You re Just First.
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And I want to share that with everyone because it is for anyone who feels like who they are is not enough or is odd or quirky or doesn t belong.
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It s one of my favorite breakthroughs I ve had personally, because I used to think I didn t belong or I didn t have what it takes or great things happen to other people, but not people like me.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others, so share this show with those that you love and care about.
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And if you found something useful in my interview with Nate, then definitely share it with someone who can use the advice that we gave here today.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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And until next time, go out there yourself and become PassionStruck.