[MUSIC]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[MUSIC]
Our guest today is Nate Klem, co-author of the New York Times Best Selling Book Start Here.
He joins me to discuss a topic I've broached often on this show.
Namely, how to take one's distance from a hyperconnected world and
find one's way back to that inner place of reflective silence within the self.
[MUSIC]
He addresses this topic in his brand new book called Open Living with an expansive mind in a distracted world.
But before I welcome Nate Klem to entitled opinions,
let's hear from one of this radio programs, venerable trustees.
I mean Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote a poem called Alone,
which opens with the following verses.
From childhood's hour I have not been, as others were,
I have not seen as others saw.
I could not bring my passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken my sorrow.
I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone and all I loved, I loved alone.
From this uncommon spring deep within the self, everything essential.
Everything personal, as well as interpersonal, comes forth into the world we share in common.
Without the uncommon differences that separate one person from another,
the world that comes between men, as Hannah Arand called it,
would not have plurality as one of its basic constituents.
If the world is defined by plurality, it's because each one of us, and each one of the citizens,
in our polities, has an idiosyncratic first person singular.
I say idiosyncratic because a subterranean place of ecstatic interiority hides in every one of us,
whether we're aware of it or not.
That place remains the self's native homeland,
even though most of us abandon or flee from it,
for reasons that remain mysterious.
DH Lawrence puts it memorably in a passage from his work Phoenix, like quote.
In the very darkest continent of the body, there is a God.
And from him, issue the first dark rays of our feeling,
wordless and utterly previous to words.
The innermost rays, the first messengers,
the primeval honorable beasts of our being,
whose voice echoes wordless and forever wordless down the darkest avenues of the soul,
but full of potent speech, our own inner meaning.
The God who haunts this dark continent is not one of the traditional divinities,
like Yahweh, Zeus, or Jesus.
Give us God's before these Lawrence declares.
The before God, see, as in mind, are utterly previous to words.
There are the first messengers, whose messages reach you,
only when the self is alone enough to bring its full attention to bear
on that almost inaudible voice, which Lawrence says,
is wordless but full of potent speech.
In his poem, thought Lawrence evokes the kind of thinking that allows those innermost rays to shine.
I've quoted these verses before on entitled opinions.
Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness.
Thought is a man in his wholeness, holy attending.
My guest and I share the opinion that our digital age has declared all out war
on the dark continent of inwardness and attention,
on the self in his wholeness, holy attending.
The devices that so enthrall us and that have compressed the world into a miniature screen
are hostile to what Plato called the silent dialogue I have with myself inside my own head.
That silent dialogue is what thought is all about.
Let's find out if my guest today agrees with that Nate Clamp, welcome to the program.
Robert, thank you so much for having me.
I have to say that was probably the most beautiful warm up to a podcast.
I've heard instead of starting with an ad for
Target or Costco, starting with that girl and Poe on our rent,
I think we need more of that.
So thank you.
I feel like I just dropped into a totally different
plane of thought and discourse.
Well, that's what entitled opinions aims to be.
First thing, we don't have any sponsors, so we're not beholden to anyone.
We don't make any money. We don't ask for any money.
We're down in what I often call the catacombs of Pazy DSU,
where we practice this persecuted religion of thinking.
There you go.
Nate, I mentioned your new book.
It's titled open living with an expansive mind in a distracted world.
And that book has two parts.
In the first part, you describe what a closed mind is
and how a closed mind is entangled with,
I'll call it self-exile, screen addiction, and political polarization.
In the second part, you discuss how to move from a closed to an open or expansive mind.
And here you touch on various kinds of openings, different kinds of openings.
The psychedelic opening, for example, is you call it opening to the enemy,
open meditation and street opening to mention a few rubrics of part two.
So let's start with the closed mind.
Bear with me here a moment. By your own admission, you were once a screen addict yourself
before you made a concerted effort to overcome that addiction.
You mentioned that at one point, you imagined your late grandmother, Hilda,
who grew up on a rural farm in North Carolina,
shadowing you throughout the day.
And you write, I quote you, she would be so confused, she would surely wonder,
why aren't you going outside?
Why aren't you talking to other people?
Why do you keep staring into that screen?
Hilda, of course, would be right. We're dealing here, which, well,
I think it's a major pathology of the 21st century.
You cite some statistics that come from global newswire that I'd like to share with our audience
from the beginning of your book, which I found rather alarming.
I'm going to read here about screen addiction.
11 hours, that's the amount of time Nielsen found that the average American adult spends on
electronic devices each day.
150 daily phone pickups. That was the 2013 figure reported by venture firm,
Kleiner Perkins. That is, until a more recent study of smartphone usage found that the average
users taps, types, swipes or clicks their device 2,600 times a day.
96%. That's the percentage of people who check their device within an hour of waking,
according to a study conducted by Deloitte Consulting.
They found that 61% of people check their device within five minutes of waking.
"Half of all teenagers, this is how many adolescents openly describe themselves as having a
significant addiction to their phone when finally 10%. That's the percentage of American adults who
admit to having used their smartphone while showering or having sex. This is truly insane."
So, question. Why are so many of us addicted to our screens and how difficult is it from your
experience to recover from this fixation?
Well, I love that you cited all those statistics because I think it presents a context here
where sometimes we can argue, "Well, this isn't such a big deal. Everybody looks at their phone.
What's wrong with that?" But I think those statistics are helpful in telling us,
"No, there's something going on here that we need to pay attention to."
And you mentioned my own screen addiction. In a way, it was surprising for me because
I felt like on some level I had been training my mind for the last 25 or so years
to have focus, to not fall into these sorts of cravings. And that training in some way started
at Stanford in the late 90s when I got into philosophy and then became a philosophy professor
and then really interested in practices like meditation and yoga where the whole purpose
is to cultivate the skill of focused attention and learn how to use one's own mind more
skillfully. So, here I was waking up every day, meditating, and yet still captured by these cravings.
In some ways, what led me to take this question really seriously around,
this might just be the problem of our time. And I think it's the problem of our time,
both because it's ubiquitous and because it's so invisible. It's happening beneath the radar of
awareness in such a way where we can't even see that it's going on for the most part.
So, in terms of my own screen addiction, there's all these hacks out there. I've used many of those,
right? Like redesign your environment, kick your phones out of your bedroom. There's even
self-binding techniques where you can lock your phone in a safe that doesn't open until it's
like two hours or three hours, whatever you specify. But one of the more interesting tactics I use,
that was actually quite interesting and helped me understand the root of the addiction.
It came from the tradition of tantric Buddhism where they have what's often called feast practice.
And it's a practice where instead of practicing restraint or aestheticism, you're practicing
indulgence, conscious indulgence. So, you know, in the traditions, it's often used with sex and
decadent eating and drinking. But I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to use this with screens?
And so, I spent three days all day, every day just gorging on digital outrage and Instagram and news,
and just all the things that I normally see as like my favorite mind snacks. And what was really
interesting about that is in a way, it actually worked because after those three days,
I remember I woke up and I had the thought, this is when I would usually grab my phone,
and the desire just totally fell flat. And what I realized in that moment is that
at least for most of us, I think the root of this addiction is an addiction to novelty,
that we pick up our device because it offers what technologists call a variable reward, that there's
something new that we're going to see in our texts or our email or a new news feed or a new
social media feed and by going all the way with my phone for such a long period of time,
in a way I had annihilated its superpower, its superpower of novelty.
Well, that is only part of the journey that you undertook, right?
That's true. Yes. It wasn't enough just to gorg and feel a sense of satiation.
It was necessary then to take the next step, which is disconnection and finding yourself
essentially alone in a room where instead of staring at a screen,
one is staring at a void if you want to put it away. Here, I was quite interested in the
experiment that you referred to. I don't remember who it is. Timothy Wilson from University of
Virginia. Yeah. Can you say a word about that experiment? Because I found that extremely enlightening
revelatory or insightful is the right word, I guess. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up because
I think of screens as creating a behavioral addiction. So it's different from other forms of
addiction, substance abuse addiction, things like that, but similar to something like gambling or
shopping addiction. It's happening at the level of behavior. And one of the best ways to understand
the reason for a behavioral addiction like that is that often that behavior is coming out of a
desire to escape from some sort of unresolved emotional experience, difficult emotions, scary
thoughts, traumas that we might have experienced. And so there's this subtle aversion that I think
many of us have to our own mind to just sitting there in silence with our own mind. And that's
what Timothy Wilson's team did in an experiment is they essentially revealed the ways in which
for many of us, we live with this constant aversion to our own thinking. And so what they did is
they put people in a room for 15 minutes, and they called it the 15 minute thinking period,
people had to put away all their belongings, including their phone, so they didn't have their
phone with them. And at first, they just had them go into this room and 50% of people said, wow,
that was really unpleasant. You know, even though in our busy chaotic lives, like 15 minutes,
just to sit there and not have to do anything, that sounds fantastic. Like who wouldn't want that?
But then they shifted the experiment. And here's where I think it gets really interesting.
They had people go in for 15 minutes again with nothing. Just do your 15 minute thinking period.
But this time they gave them a choice. You can either sit there with your thoughts, or they attached
two electrodes to their ankle and train them on how to self administer a high voltage shock to
themselves. So another question became, would people just sort of sit there, relax with their thoughts,
or would that be so aversive that they'd rather torture themselves using a high voltage shock?
And it turned out 27% of women shocked themselves, 67% of men shocked themselves. And there was one
guy, apparently, who shocked himself 190 times in 15 minutes. And the conclusion of this,
which I think is really fascinating, is that there is something about idle time that,
especially now that we're so conditioned with these phones and all the distractions we're
surrounded by constantly, that's so aversive to us. We'd rather torture ourselves
than just be there with our own minds. And the way that you talked about with Plato,
right, like sitting in the silence of our own mind and allowing that deeper form of thought to
arise. That is in a way, an aversion of the modern mind.
Well, you've studied philosophy and it becomes a philosophical question, which is, what are the
deeper sources of this aversion? And I couldn't help thinking of the 17th century French philosopher,
we want to call blaze Pascal, a philosopher, but Pascal famous for his ponces or his thoughts,
has very interesting things to say about the human need for diversion. Here, now we're talking
about something more universal than our own distracted age in our present moment in history,
because according to Pascal, I'll quote a few of his ponces, starting with this one, for example,
nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest without passions, without business,
without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency,
his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his
heart, weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, fixation, despair. And it's always like,
you would rather have a shock, no, even a hundred times, yeah. And then it goes on to
say I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they
cannot stay quietly in their own room. A man who has enough to live on if he knew how to stay with
pleasure at home would not leave to go to sea or beseech a town, a commission in the army would
not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town, and men
only seek conversation to enter in games because they cannot remain at peace at home.
So there is here a more existential suggestion that when we are left without any diversion,
we start thinking of the emptiness of our own condition and inevitably towards our mortality
and death, and that therefore this is what existentialists would call the flight from this sort of
genuine or authentic awareness of one's own abandonment by being. Anyway, I don't want to get too
heavy on the existentialist thing, but it seems to me that social media and other forms of screen
addiction would not have nearly the amount of crushing success that it has in our time,
if it were not actually feeding off of or profiting from this dread or what Kiphegard called
the anxiety that attends the human condition in general.
I think you're right, and I love the Pascal and the Kiphegard.
I think what you're saying is exactly true that there is this deep existential dread
that when we really sink down to the recesses of our mind, we encounter, and this is why
if you've ever done like a silent meditation retreat for a week or 10 days,
I love those and a weird masochistic way, but this is one of the main things that
one experiences is that for a couple of days it feels great to be off the grid.
It's amazing not to have emails you have to worry about and distraction.
And then all of a sudden the mind just starts to reveal all of this content that you might not
have thought of for years, traumatic memories, really hard emotions.
I think that's exactly right that it is maybe baked into human nature
that being with our own mind is counter habitual.
It's not what we're wired to do, but there's that existential dread baked into it.
And yet I also think that what's going on or what has happened over the last 15 or so years
since the advent of the smartphone in 2007 is that we now have a way of exiting from those encounters
with our own mind so quickly, so reliably, so constantly that it's almost as though we're closing
down on steroids. You know, we've always been doing it and in the book I quote, "Tokeville,"
one of my other favorite French philosophers who talks about how Americans are turning inward
and seeking pleasure and there's this closing happening which I think is very similar to what we're
experiencing today, but I guess the tools we have now are just so much more powerful and
carefully meticulously designed by the world's leading technologists and artificial intelligence
algorithms specifically so that they can exploit these weaknesses of our brain.
So that's what I think is so fascinating about our current times that we're doing with
age-old existential content, but the tools that are being used to draw us into these worlds of
Greenland are just so much more sophisticated than anything Pascal or Tokeville could even conceive.
Exactly. And your experience and maybe you could tell us a little bit about the sort of discipline
that is required in order to not just disconnect from the Borg Collective as I would call it where
we're always plugged into the Beehive Collective and you're always hearing all the
collective's voice always in your head, so you're never allowed to hear your own thoughts.
So disconnecting from the Collective is one thing, but then it takes I gather from what you write about
your own personal experience, a rather diligent discipline sort of commitment to go from the
close mind to an open expansive mind. It's not just a question of curing yourself from an
addiction, it's about cultivating some new possibilities on the other side of the addiction.
I think that's right. It reminds me of this idea that freedom often requires some form of constraint.
I remember we're so talking about this and this is back in my political philosophy,
Professor Days, but I think that's true here as well, that if we just give ourselves total freedom
to binge on our screens and addictive technologies and political outrage and all these kind of quick
dopamine hits that are available to us. In one sense we're free, but the value of that freedom feels
pretty limited. It actually feels like we're closing off a lot of possibilities that might be
available to us. So if we want to experience an alternative to that Beehive mind that you're
describing, and by the way, I think the distinction you were making in the opening was so important
and beautiful. I was interpreting it as a distinction between our deepest authentic layer of thought
or something like intuition and what's usually happening, which I would call mind wandering. That's
the technical term in psychology of just like this super fast paced random thoughts about stuff
you got to do or like something you saw on social media or whatever, that there is that
essential distinction between those two and to spend more time in that more authentic zone of intuition,
sometimes I think we do have to create some constraints. Anna Lemke, one of your colleagues at
Stanford, she wrote a book called Dopamine Nation, which I thought was really interesting where
she argues that this self binding approach is really one of the keys to overcoming any form of
addiction, including an addiction to screens. So she actually goes so far as to say,
go without whatever it is that causes your craving for a month and then reevaluate your relationship
with that thing. So I think those kinds of things are really powerful and there's a lot of ways
we can do it. Meditation is a practice we can use for that simply binding ourselves such that
we don't have access to this kind of content or devices is a powerful way to do it. But I think
you're right that it does require discipline to create that freedom. So in part two, you have these
rubrics for sections. You talk about psychedelic opening, happy land opening to the enemy, open
meditation street opening, and you actually underwent a number of behavioral changes. So I mean,
just opening to the enemy, you join, you modify your arm, you went to fire ranges, you talk to
people from the NR, did you join the NRA or? No, so yeah, yeah. So just to be clear, I did not buy a
firearm. And the context here is I live in Boulder, a very liberal enclave. I'm a proponent of gun
control. I go in this terrifying me. So I didn't buy a firearm, but what I did do is I underwent a
national rifle association training and I got my concealed carry permit in the state of Colorado.
So it was an attempt for me to really explore in a first-hand experiential way. What is it
like to really open to the other side? So I ended up going to rural Colorado and doing this
this sort of full immersion experience in gun culture and some pretty far out politics.
But in the end, it was a really valuable experience. I mean, I think my main takeaway was that
there is no enemy here. I mean, these, these people were just like me in so many ways. I could see
the humanity behind all of it. And yeah, we disagree, but there's something deeper there that connects us.
Yeah, we have so much more in common with any fellow human being than we have in terms of differences.
And the enemy is more often than not or only rarely is the devil. The devil that we make the
enemy in our own imaginations, no demonization or that. So you opened yourself in that regard. You
also had not done drugs and that you also opened your mind to psychedelic experiences, right?
Yeah, that was a really interesting thing. I wasn't planning to do that. That was not at all part of
the original project as I laid this out. But I realized that there were so many amazing breakthroughs
in the field of psychedelic science happening that it would be very difficult to write or explore
this idea of opening without encountering this for myself. And just one quick anecdote from that.
So what I experienced was what I would call psychedelic-assisted therapy. I had a therapist,
I had a very extensive psychological evaluation before doing any of this. So this was very
structured, very purposeful, very controlled. It wasn't just me in the backyard, like doing
a much of LSD or something. And what I experienced that was quite amazing is I had had this
fear of flying for about 20 years. And during one of these psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions
on the compound ketamine with my therapist right next to me, I had this experience of actually
being on a flight. And for the first time in 20 years, it was totally calm and there's nowhere
I'd rather be. And then I actually watched myself die in a commercial plane crash. It was like
the plane was going down and I saw the plane explode into a big fireball. And I watched myself
incinerated. It was like one of the more beautiful things I had ever seen.
Was that an out of body experience? Well, it was kind of just like this
total inversion of perspective, I guess is how I would describe it. And what was most amazing
about it is that it's not that my fear of flying has totally disappeared, but it has changed
in remarkable ways. I used to have dreams like this. Those dreams have gone away. When I'm on a flight
now and I feel some anxiety, I immediately see myself on this, I call it the ketamine express,
this sort of magical plane. And so what I realized is that to your point about existentialism
earlier, I think for some of us who have experienced trauma in the past, there are corners of the
mind that are almost impossible to encounter in our ordinary state of consciousness. And that
this new emerging practice of psychedelic assisted therapy, it gives us a way of opening to some of
these darkest corners of the mind and completely transforming our relationship to those places.
And so that I think is the promise of all this. And obviously there's a lot of dangers. There's a
lot of risks. There's a lot we need to learn about the science of it. But I think it's a really
powerful possibility. Yeah. Well, how about meditation? That is something that I'm curious about because
I've never been particularly seduced by the idea of anjomy to some sort of discipline meditative
practice. But many of my friends do meditate and they seem to have been enriched immeasurably
through it. And it philosophically, it seems to me the perfect sort of recipe for any kind of same
existence. But I don't know what it is in me that resists it. Maybe it's just my western,
logo-centric sort of disposition where I feel like I should always be in some kind of
dialogical relation to others, whether it's in actual conversation as we do one in title opinions
as we're doing right now where there's a kind of exchange of ideas or whether it's in
conversation with the dead in terms of reading books that come to us from the past.
But can you say something about your incorporation of meditation into this project of going from
a close to an open mind? Yeah. And it's interesting. I hear that perspective a lot about meditation.
And it's certainly not something that's for everyone. So I'm not one of those people who says,
"Oh, I've reached meditate." I think of meditation at its best as almost being like a conversation
with the present moment that what we're cultivating in our mind is the ability to
stay with something that's occurring in present time. So sometimes when you're meditating,
you'll concentrate on the sensations of breath. Breath is always happening now, right? It's
never happening yesterday. So that's one way of doing it. In the book though, and just in my own
experience, I've been exploring sort of two sides of meditation. One is what I would think of as a
more formal practice where you're sitting down for 30 minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes
or going to retreat and you're trying to block out distraction. I think that's really powerful.
That's something I do. But I also think that can be a barrier for certain people,
maybe you fall in this camp. And so there's this other practice that I've come to call
street meditation or street opening, which in some ways is like the real practice. And I think
the more exciting practice. And that's just the idea of when you're standing in line at the grocery
store or actually just earlier this week, we were driving down from the mountains, we were skiing
here in Colorado. We got caught in like a four hour traffic jam, you know, just sitting there and I
realized I could sit here in agony or I could meditate. And so the idea is like, can you bring this
practice of just really turning toward whatever it is that's happening in the present moment,
the sounds, the sights, the sensations, your breath and see if you can do that,
even in the kind of crazy, weird circumstances of modern life, you know, at Costco,
when you're at the airport standing in the long security line or whatever it is.
So I think for people who are like turned off by the formal practice, that can be a better on ramp.
And again, the goal I think is really to have that conversation with wow, what's actually happening
in present time? If I get out of this time traveling mental space and just into like,
what's happening here now?
So you would describe it not as a certain transcend of flight from reality, but actually an
altered sort of encounter with the real. It's almost yeah, an encounter with the pre-conceptual
nature of each moment, whereas a lot of thought for me is very conceptual and it's very story-based.
It's almost like what's happening below the story. And sometimes for me, that's a really
liberating place to be because the stories can be unnerving and distracting and terrifying at
times.
Yeah. That's very interesting because you obviously undertook very deliberate way this sort of
expansion and I take it from your book that not only was it worth it, but it's something that you
feel strongly enough to have written a whole book which invites your reader to
actually not just follow your example. That wouldn't be the right way of putting it, but
seriously considering a very substantial alteration of mind in our own
distracted world as you put it.
Yeah. I mean, I think of this as something that our world could really use in the sense that
it just feels like life is moving faster, politics are becoming increasingly divisive,
distractions are becoming more powerful, they have more of a hold on us, and that if we're going
to survive in this increasingly uncertain, strange time, that openness might be one of the key
virtues that enable us to survive and even thrive in these times where everything seems
so just sort of radically contingent and wild and chaotic.
Yeah. I have one more issue that I'd like to raise with you, which is the role of nature,
because what I find oppressive about screen addiction, I mean, I'm not a screen addict myself,
but I do spend a lot of time, I have to spend a lot of time on screen because I, you know,
writing is something that takes place on the screen now, communication emails and so forth.
But what I find so impoverished about this screen is the other of the screen for me is the
natural world is nature itself and nature is where I find that the most significant, deep thinking
takes place, at least for me, maybe because I have a particular sort of bond with the natural
world that I've had since I was kid or for other reasons, but do you think that nature is an
essential ingredient to the expansion of the mind? You know, as you're asking me that, I had this thought,
that might have been a miss for me. I should have, should have emphasized nature a little bit more,
because you were describing that. I was thinking about this essay, Thoreau wrote called,
"Balking," where he talks about his practice of walking for four hours a day, and he makes this
amazing point of like, when we're in nature we experience wildness, and it's that wildness that
allows us that unsettles our conventional forms of thinking. And so encountering wildness,
you're right. I mean, that's like an essential ingredient to having a more open experience and a
more open mind. And boy, if I had to do over, I might say more about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I appreciate you bringing that up. And it's funny, even in this period where this is a really
intense period in my life, because anytime there's a new book, there's a lot of energy and a lot of
stress. And I've been trying to create an intentional practice of going outside every day for an hour to,
I live by the mountains here in Colorado. And just as you're saying, for me, it is such a
grounding experience. Yeah. You know, there's everything's moving a little bit more slowly.
It's in present time versus the past or the future.
Well, Nate, there's no reason why you can't do a follow up on the, you know, having nature at the
heart of your ongoing expansion of mind. I think that would be the next place I would go.
Well, yeah, thank you so much. I mean, I just have to say it's such an honor to be here. You
have interviewed many of my philosophical heroes, Richard Rorty. We talked about that a little bit. He's
it was one of my advisors. And just to be on this show is to me a real honor. So thank you.
Well, thank you. It's having people like you, you know, thoughtful people like you that makes
the show what it is. So I'd like to thank Nate Klempe for joining us here on entitled opinions
to discuss his brand new book called Open Living with an Expensive Mind in a Distracted World.
Thanks again for coming on, Nate. I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
[Music]