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234. MUST LISTEN TO EPISODE - Living With An Expansive Mind In A Distracted World With Author Nate Klemp PhD · The Ultimate Intimacy Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You are listening to the Ultimate Intimacy Podcast, where we discuss how to find ultimate intimacy in your relationship.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: We believe that, no matter how many years you've been married, you can achieve passion, romance, happiness and ultimate intimacy at any stage of your life.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Join us as we talk to not only marriage experts, but couples just like yourself and people who are just flat out fun.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: The Ultimate Intimacy Podcast is for couples who have a good relationship but want to make it even better.
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: So hi and welcome to the Ultimate Intimacy Podcast with Nick and Amy, and we are so excited for today's guest.
• 0:48
  Speaker 3: We've had him on before.
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: You'll recognize him from the author of the 8080 Marriage.
• 0:53
  Speaker 3: Hopefully most of you have bought that book because it is an incredible book.
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: I know for Amy and I we read a ton of books on relationships and this was probably one of the, if not the top book that we've ever read.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: I mean it just awesome.
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: So pleasure to have Nate Clamp on the podcast with us again here to discuss his new book, open Living with an Expansive Mind in a Distracted World, which comes out, I think, on February 13th, if I'm not mistaken.
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: Right, that's correct.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, this is so needed, so needed.
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: You know, we often are doing polls and talking to our audience about social media and the destruction of social media as it relates to marriages and also individually and families.
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: But it's a big deal and so I'm so glad that you know you've done a book on this, because there's really not a lot of information out there regarding, you know, technology and social media yet yeah, well, first of all, nick and Amy, it's such a pleasure to be here.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having me back as a repeat guest.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: I feel honored and, yeah, I'm really excited to dig in a little bit about both relationships because, as you know, a lot of my work, especially with my wife Kaylee, is around how do we navigate relationships in the modern age, and this next book, open, is kind of about how do we navigate some of these forces of digital distraction and political outrage, both for ourselves but also for our relationships.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: So obviously there must have been something you experienced or something that happened in your life that gave you the inspiration to write this book.
• 2:39
  Speaker 3: Do you mind sharing what that was or what experience you had that you know obviously gave you that inspiration?
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: Well, this is an experience that I actually don't write about in the book, so I'm giving you kind of an inside story here.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: So I had an experience a few years ago that was really the catalyst and then I'll tell you how it led to the book and whatnot.
• 3:05
  Speaker 2: But the context here is I had a pretty serious bike accident 15 years ago and for the last 15 years I've had tinnitus, or ringing in my left ear.
• 3:15
  Speaker 2: That's basically been just constant, like it sometimes gets better, sometimes gets worse.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: And several years ago actually, right after Kaylee and I wrote the 8080 marriage and you know, got through the stress of the book launch and everything, I was in this state where the ringing kept getting worse and I was like taking all these supplements and I was trying to do meditation and yoga and I was trying all these kind of crazy esoteric protocols to get rid of it and going to different doctors.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: And I remember I was actually we were staying at the Rollins Comfort Inn in Wyoming on a road trip.
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: We were going to Jackson Hole and I remember lying on the ground because I just finished a yoga practice, thinking maybe this will get rid of the ringing in my ear, and my ear was just like ringing and I remember lying there having this thought what if, instead of trying to get rid of this thing?
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: That's just driving me crazy.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: I just open to it and I just allow this to be exactly as it is.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: And a really interesting thing happened like all of a sudden, the resistance that I had toward it loosened up a little bit and it was.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: It was somehow more palatable.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: It wasn't necessarily what I would choose to be experiencing, but it really changed the nature of that experience, and so after that moment I started to think wait a minute, not everybody has tinnitus, not everybody has ringing in their ear, but I'm willing to bet that almost everybody has various experiences in their life where they've tried to get rid of it.
• 4:58
  Speaker 2: They tried to control it and they failed.
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: And there's this pivotal choice point like do I just keep fighting against this thing or do I figure out how to open myself, my life to it, my mind to it?
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Whatever you want to, however you want to say it.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: And so that was really the catalyst that I started to sense there was this profound difference between closing our mind, trying to control things in our life, and opening our mind, creating a little bit more space in our experience so that we can have difficult emotions and experience uncomfortable sensations and not go directly to our phone as a way to sort of self medicate them away so that I love that inside scoop for Nick and Amy.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: I love that and I think that's a great experience of you know, giving you the inspiration of why write this book well how many people go self medicate turning to their phones right now, like when we take polls, that's what's happening, right, like we all have these issues, addictions, things we're dealing with and we turn to our phones to train, I don't know, distract, heal, whatever.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: That is right and yeah, and that's the thing.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: So I wanted to come up with a really simple distinction between two ideas to capture this modern experience that we're all having.
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: And what kept coming up for me is the difference between open and closed, and I think, in our modern context, what closed and beans for many of us is that we have that feeling of discomfort or that emotion we don't really want to feel, and then there's this instantaneous urge to reach out to our device and have some experience of novelty, right like go, a new text or a new email or whatever it is.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: And I think that that's such a pervasive experience, and what's going on during that experience is that there's this kind of contraction of the mind, there's a contraction of what's available to us in terms of, like, connections with other people, our connection with the present moment, and it might be helpful actually to start with a few statistics about love it just how bad the problem is just to contact it for people listening.
• 7:16
  Speaker 2: So so a few things just to point out.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Nielsen has found the average American spends 11 hours a day on screens.
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: 50% of American teenagers describe themselves as having a significant addiction to screens.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: Deloitte did a study that found 96% of us check our devices within an hour of waking.
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: So those are really interesting.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: Even more interesting to me is they've done these studies of like how we prioritize screens over things that should really matter more.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: So they ask people would you rather spend a month without your pet or your smartphone?
• 7:52
  Speaker 2: 40% of people said they'd rather spend the month without their pet.
• 7:57
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: They've asked would you rather spend a month without your significant other or your phone?
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: 44% of us say we'd rather spend a month without our significant other so we have access to our phone, that is crazy.
• 8:10
  Speaker 2: And then there's one where they ask would you rather spend a month without sex or your smartphone?
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: 56% of us would choose our phone over sex.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: My phone would be gone in two seconds.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: You're a man.
• 8:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so that is crazy, that is crazy so.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Crazy sad.
• 8:28
  Speaker 3: So we were just on vacation and we were doing some videos by the ocean and make a long story short.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: Amy's phone fell in the ocean and she does a ton of our social media and work on her phone.
• 8:38
  Speaker 3: Everything I do is on my phone.
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: So for five days she had no phone.
• 8:42
  Speaker 3: And how was it?
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: It was awesome.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: It was awesome.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: It was like I should just not bring the phone on vacations ever again.
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: I mean yeah our business struggled, but no, I'm just joking.
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: But yeah, it was.
• 8:57
  Speaker 3: She was kind of forced into that at the whole time.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: She's just like this is amazing.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: I felt.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: I felt myself the first day like where's my phone?
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: It's not my purse.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: Where's my?
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: It's not my pocket.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: And then by day two I was like okay, I can tell my mind's changing a little bit.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: And by day three I'm like this is incredible and I enjoyed a vacation without any distraction.
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: It was we're all addicted.
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: We're all addicted.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: I love that story, amy.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: I mean, what you're explaining, or what you're pointing to, is this strategy that they call self binding, which is the idea of essentially creating constraints for ourself so that we have freedom to not have to reach out for our device.
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: So one way is to lose your phone, which maybe not the most ideal, but we actually bought this thing called a case safe that we have in our kitchen.
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you've heard of this same sort of idea.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: It's basically this container.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: You put your phones and your devices in it and then you set a timer for, let's say, three hours, two hours, you can go up to 10 days, and you cannot open this container until the timer ends.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: So in order to get your device, you would literally have to take a sledgehammer to this container.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: We need that and I had the same experience where it's like I put my phone in there even for a couple hours, and there's something that happens to me where I just feel a little lighter.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh okay, I can read a book now, I can do anything I want now I don't have to respond to texts now.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so your book is awesome and you need to share with our audience the experiment you did, because I loved it and I want to, yeah, I guess, hear what your conclusion was after going through that experience.
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: I know you share a lot of that in the book, but briefly, tell our audience what you did as far as technology and your experience or your conclusion, what you've kind of noticed as a change, and things like that.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, as you mentioned, I did an experiment which is a little weird.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: The idea from this experiment comes from.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: you know the old school parenting advice that if you catch a kid smoking, haven't finished the whole pack or haven't smoked two packs or three packs and they'll never smoke again.
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: I think that's probably really bad parenting advice, so I'm not advising you to do that at home.
• 11:24
  Speaker 2: But there's something really interesting in that advice, which is this idea that we can use overindulgence as the way to essentially destroy craving.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: That's the basic idea, and so what I thought was wouldn't it be interesting to run a similar experiment with my phone?
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: Because I tried all these like restraint based practices to not use my phone.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: You know, I tried locking it in the case safe, and I tried, you know changing settings and all these things right, and they weren't really working for me.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: So I thought well, what if I go the other way and just overindulge?
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: So for three days, all day, every day, to the best of my ability, I was just on screens and I allowed myself to just consume this like endless digital buffet of distraction, and it was really an interesting experiment.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: So there are two main things that I would point to.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: The first is I realized that all this talk about screen time and sleep is like the connection is totally true.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Every night during this experiment I would wake up at 2.40 am and it was like my mind was just on fire, like I was ready to conquer the world.
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: There's no way I was going to sleep.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: That was my problem last week, yeah.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: So that was really I get it.
• 12:46
  Speaker 2: The more interesting thing was I started to see how the superpower of my smartphone is its ability to give me the experience of novelty.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: So, you know, every time I pulled out my phone and I would go through the lock screen, it was like there's always something new there.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: You know, there's always like new texts and new emails and a fresh social media feed on Instagram and fresh articles on your favorite news site, and so by going all the way with my phone and being on screens all day, every day, for that long, it was almost like I, at a certain point, saw everything there was to see and I had destroyed the superpower of my phone.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: The novelty yeah.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: Novelty.
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: So, like I woke up the day after this and I remember having the thought okay, this is where I usually grab my phone and go to the bathroom, and for the first time in a decade, that desire just totally fell flat.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: It just wasn't there.
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: So that was the screen binging experience.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: Amazing.
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: I loved it and then and then you took that experience which I loved as well, as far as like opening up to other people with different political views or things like that, and I thought your experience there was really good as well, because I think oftentimes, just like that experience where we close up to people that feel or believe differently we sometimes do that with our spouses as well- yeah, I think you're touching on something really important there, which is when I think of this idea of closing our mind, kind of getting smaller and more contracted.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: There are two levels to it.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: One is this internal level, where we're closing down to difficult emotions or mind states and usually reaching out for our phone instead.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: The other level is closing down to other people, particularly those people who disagree with us, and I think we all know on some level that this is happening, but it's happening so much more than it used to.
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: So Gallup did this really interesting study where they found in 1980, 47% of us felt warm and favorable toward the other political party.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: That number in 2020 drops basically in half to 25%, which is totally in line with what we've all been experiencing.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: So yeah, to your point.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: I thought it would be really interesting to, as an experiment in opening, go and hang out with people who believe something just radically different from me politically, and it was really cool because I got to the end of the experience and I started to see both that we weren't as far apart as I thought going in, but also I could really just feel like this is not my enemy.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: We are not enemies.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: We are all people doing our best in the world.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: We have projects that matter, we have kids, we're all sort of in this together.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: So that to me was just Mind-blowing, really, to see that you know, in spite of all the political rhetoric we hear about how we were enemies with each other and we hate each other, that really, when we're sitting across face-to-face you know, we can start to relate to each other differently.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I absolutely love that part of the book as well.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: So Any thoughts before I?
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: I'm just still stuck on his experiment, like I loved your Experiment and I got a little tiny taste of what that felt like, because here I was for five, six days without a phone right.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: And I end up loving that feeling.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: But the minute I got back I was piled with work, had to get a new phone, had to set that up, and was on my screen more the next day that I got back.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: Then I ever have been in my life my screen time was embarrassing.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I was straight playing catch-up and I literally the next day constant headaches, could not sleep at all last week, like all the health things and ramifications from a couple days of tons of shit.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: I like I can imagine three days straight.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: But I think a lot of us do turn to our phones After work, during work.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: When we first wake up one week, climb into bed.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: If we, if we're not on our phones, we're turning on the TV, right and here we are.
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: All these things are super, super bad for our health but so bad for our relationship and here this addiction that we, we all think, oh, I don't smoke, I don't, I don't do this, I don't do this, I don't do this.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: We're so addicted to our phones we have no clue until we lose our phone like I had no idea right, and while we're talking that, I want to look up a Stat.
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: So we did a poll among our audience and it was pretty staggering and I want to pull this up, make sure I get it right.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: But you know we asked the question.
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: You Know, talking about social media, let's see social media addiction.
• 17:44
  Speaker 3: So we asked our audience and I thought this was really interesting who in your marriage is more addicted?
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: And 65% said the wife Interesting.
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: And then we asked our audience.
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: We just thought you know We've heard a lot of comments that social media for women can sometimes be like as much Addictive as pornist to men, and we asked this question as well, too, and it said 80% of the people that responded to our poll among our hundreds of thousands of followers Said that social media is as addictive to women as porn is to men.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: So interesting I.
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: I feel like you know, we don't really recognize how addictive and how destructive Social media can be to our relationships.
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: I think sometimes we kind of downplay it and just brush it off.
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: But I got your mental.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but but going back to your book and the things that you experienced, when it's all said and done, how did your Other experiments and the things that you you went through change your marriage Based upon the understanding that you now have, and the things that you implemented and and things like that?
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that and I think just I also want to touch on that poll because I think that's so interesting and I want to make sure men don't feel like they're getting off the hook here, because, even though there may be more of a social media addiction for women, men have their own flavor of digital destruction in the form of, you know, the ESPN app or sports betting, has just like blown up you know, and news, whatever, right?
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: so so I want to make sure that we see this is a problem affecting all of us.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Great and and so, yeah, in terms of the question of how did this impact me and how did this impact my marriage, I think that, with the value of what Amy was describing Going without your phone or the value of going way further with your phone in terms of over indulging your phone yeah, is that?
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: What's happening in both of those is you're kind of like Uprooting your ordinary habits of screen time.
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: So maybe every day you're on your screen for two or three hours, you know, on your phone.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: If you do it for 14 hours, you're gonna have a totally different perspective on that practice.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: If you do it for zero hours, you're also gonna have a really different perspective.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: So that's actually one way people can get a little bit more freedom from their device is to Even pair these two together.
• 20:20
  Speaker 2: Spend one day over consuming and one day fasting from your device, and you will have a totally different perspective on how this technology is impacting your life.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: But I do think, in terms of my relationship.
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: There was something really powerful that happened, a shift that happened when I was able to see, like, the urge that I had for my screen and See that my life would be so much better if I were able to direct more of that time and attention, mm-hmm, toward Kaylee, my wife.
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: You know the thinking that really matters, like if you asked me what, what better is more, your wife or your phone?
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: My wife a hundred times.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: But do I live that every day, all day?
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: No, not necessarily.
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: So it was really helpful like priorities check.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: That I think, happened.
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I love it, I love hearing that fact.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: We had a religious leader that kind of Said hey, give your, give yourself, a week off social media and just see what happens.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: And a lot of people did that and it was very, you know, they shared their experiences and it was very hard for a lot of them but a lot of them said I'm never getting back on there like it was that life changing.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: And so, like you said, kind of testing that and saying, yeah, let's, let's have a fast for a day or two days or you know, kind of see, see the difference in your life with that, with that not over overtaken us.
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah well, Well, I was just gonna say one more thing to your point about the individual problem and the relationship problem.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: Here I think it's important to just point out how they're interrelated.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: You know we've been talking about yeah screen addiction is something that we're dealing with as individuals, and that's true, but of course, having this kind of addiction as an individual is gonna spill over into relationships, and when we were researching the 8080 marriage, you know, we interviewed about a hundred people trying to understand the challenges they were experiencing relationships, and One of the primary things that we kept hearing about again and again Was, to the point of your poll.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: It was this digital distraction thing and people telling us like They'll be sitting there in bed Before they go to sleep, and they're each on opposite sides of the bed One person scrolling Instagram, the other person scrolling the news and they're not Looking at each other, talking to each other, connecting to each other.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: So this is it's an individual problem that, like has very quickly has implications for the relationship.
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: I love, I love you're saying that.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: So we go on date night every week Religiously, and when we go out, one of the things we notice will just look around the restaurant and I'm not even exaggerating 80% of the couples are at the dinner table on their phones instead of talking, or they're in the waiting room on their phones, and Amy and I are just looking at this saying how in the world could you rather have your eyes face deep in your phone than be Connecting with your spouse like it's just, it's mind-blowing.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: We've all been guilty, but totally and I was just.
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: I was just gonna say, you know it's easy to judge because maybe maybe the husband's on there looking for a movie for after dinner or you know something like that.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: We've all been guilty of that.
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: But over time, as you see that it's, you know You're sitting around waiting for 10 or 15 minutes and you see that it's the same way, and 15 minutes later it.
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: It's pretty astonishing and you can understand why so many relationships and marriages are struggling now because of this, this new thing that's being introduced into our lives, this distraction.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: You said you know if you're struggling with this, you or your spouse, you know, challenge yourself, take that day to be super consumed and then that day off.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Isn't it interesting that if you do that like I kind of had to do, forced we realize when we're outside, when we're connecting, when we're talking with our spouse word for feeling better, we're getting vitamin D, we're getting word, we're just, we feel better, our health is better, our marriage is better.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: And then when we're in our house, swiping phones, disconnected, not getting outside, we get headaches, we get depression, we get all these.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: We know that this happens, yet it's so hard for us humans To not be addicted.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: But but we know that it causes these things like why do you think it's so hard for us?
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's a great book called digital minimalism by Cal Newport about this same topic, and One of the things he says, which I think is really true, is we have to think of this as a David and Goliath type struggle between us and these systems, like they are engineered to capture our attention by the world's best technologists, by the world's most sophisticated AI algorithms.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: So what we're up against is actually something that's pretty formidable.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: This is not a matter of like oh, we'll just do a couple of little hacks here and there, and it'll be fine.
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: It's by design.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's by design, and so I think for our relationships, there are some practices that I think can be really useful.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: One is what you guys described, which is when you go out for a walk or you go out for a date night if you can and sometimes you can't because a babysitter is something that can you leave the phones at home, or can you put the phones on, do not disturb.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: That is a kind of edgy practice that I think is fun to play around with as a couple.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: The other thing we've done as a family is we've come up with a screen time contract.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: So this is including our daughter, who's 12, who now has an Apple watch.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: She doesn't have a smartphone yet, but we sat down and we said what are the rules that we wanna bind ourselves to, Almost like we were creating a government for our household right Love it.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: And we came up with a set of rules like no phones at the dinner table, no phones after 9 pm, and we put them all on a piece of paper and we signed this contract, so that can be useful.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: One other tip for relationships is this is really subtle, but there is a huge difference between pulling your phone out in the middle of conversation with your partner and saying something like hey, I just got a text, is now an okay time for me to check this?
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: Like asking for permission.
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: It's really subtle, but it actually starts to change that whole dynamic.
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: Or you can imagine you're driving with your spouse and they're on their phone or about to get on their phone.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: The difference between just getting on the phone and being like, hey, I need to do this thing, is now an okay time for me to do this.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: It's just like allowing your spouse to have a little bit more control over when you're using your phone, when you're not using your phone.
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: Or just showing respect in general, kind of, but we're guilty of that all the time.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: I love that idea.
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: One of the things I really loved about the book, too, is a lot of books are written where they tell you what the problem is, but they don't really show you in detail how to solve that problem or how to get over it.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: I love in the book how you have not only back it up with statistics and share experiences that you had and really establish the reasons of why this is an issue, but then you get into here's what you can do to resolve it and you give several ways and ideas and things, just like you've done here, as to how you can get over this.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: And I think that's so important because, I mean, we get so many emails every day and it's always like how do we solve this issue?
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: How do we solve this issue?
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: How do we solve this issue?
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: And so I love that you have included and covered everything in the book, with putting together game plans and actually being able to address and solve this issue, and every couple is gonna be different, but from what I noticed, there were enough things in there that you could say, yeah, this will work for us, or this won't work for us, or what have you.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: So I really like that as well, yeah, and the big idea behind all of that is there's a principle in habit formation called either behavioral architecture or environmental design, and it's kind of a cool idea.
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: The idea is that your environment has this profound impact on either supporting your good habits or supporting your bad habits, depending on the way it's designed, and so we can leverage this to use our phones and our devices in a more skillful way.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: So the basic principle is you wanna add more friction to the thing you're trying to avoid, so you wanna add a lot of friction to picking up your phone, and you wanna take away friction from the things that really matter most to you connecting with your partner or being with your partner or intimate moments with your partner, things like that.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of ways we can do this, but one simple thing in terms of how we design our bedroom, for example, is kick the phones out of the bedroom.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: I always think like this is the starting point.
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: If I could only give you one hack, it would be do not charge your phone on your nightstand and go to sleep next to your phone and wake up and just reach over and have your phone right there.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: That if you can only do one thing, that is a really powerful hack and you know a lot of people will say well, but how will I know when to wake up?
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: You know my alarm's on my phone and it's like well for $5 a month, Buy an old school alarm.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: yeah.
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: That's exactly so, anyway, things like that, and I've got a lot of them in the book, but they're just a lot of ways in which we can design our environment.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: We can design our time, so, for example, one thing I do that's been really powerful for me is I actually set aside time for distraction each day, so I have usually it's at lunch, so, probably, after this podcast, I'm gonna go make myself some lunch, and I'm gonna spend a half hour where I allow myself to just go to Facebook and Instagram and news and just like gorge on all the distraction I want.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: What's cool about that, though, is that when I have those urges in the morning, I can think to myself nope, I have my digital dessert.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: It's coming up.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: I don't have to check it now.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: So anyway, lots of strategies you can redesign your devices themselves and have a bunch of tools in the book on how to do that.
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: but we have more control than we think we do.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: We can set we're adults right Like we can learn habits.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: We can set goals and learn how to create habits out of those goals right.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And it probably just took you waking up a certain amount of days and saying that to yourself and then all of a sudden you're like I don't even check anymore, right?
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: Well, what you said is so important and what Amy said as well, is right now, I would say, for most people, their phones control them.
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: But what you just stated is now you control your phone.
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: You didn't give up that much.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: It's not like you had to sacrifice that much, but you've dictated, when you're going to look at your phone, what you're going to allow.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: Versus the phone dictating everything, versus the phone basically saying, yeah, I'm going to dictate how much time you're going to work or how much time you're going to do this.
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: And I love that you did that because, again, if you look at that, you didn't change or take anything away.
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: Now you're solely in control of what your phone's doing, versus your phone being solely in control of what your life is, which I think is unfortunately the latter for so many of us is typically what happens.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the analogy that comes up for me is it's almost like your phone is a small child.
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: And if you were trying to parent a small child and you basically just said I'm going to let my kid decide everything, I'm going to let my kid have total control over our life when we go to bed, what we value, what we spend our time on, what we spend our attention on, like we all know, that would turn out really bad both for your kid and for you and for your whole family.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: And it's similar with our smartphones.
• 32:06
  Speaker 2: I mean, they have the power to just completely overrun us, but we have the power to set boundaries with them.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: We have the power to parent ourselves in the way we use them, and I think that's the real opportunity here for all of us is that it's just a matter of taking a step back, looking at our habits, thinking about a new structure of habits and then implementing those, which is probably the hardest part, but we can all do it.
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: It's within our power to make these shifts.
• 32:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah well.
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: I love it.
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: So I wrote down something you did or said in the book and I really like it because it's something that Amy and I kind of have a similar motto.
• 32:47
  Speaker 3: But you said you know whether it is you were talking about deleting apps off your phone and deciding what to keep or what not to keep, and you asked the question does this bring me joy?
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: And I love how simple that is, because if you look at that simple question, that's such an easy way to determine what you need or what you don't need, or what you want to take into your life or what you don't want to take in.
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: Amy and I have a similar one where we say people are always asking is this right or is this wrong for our marriage?
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: And our motto is does it bring you closer together or further apart?
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: And so I love it Jumped out at me.
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: I loved how you asked that question Does that bring me joy?
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: And if you can sincerely ask that question, that can really help you kind of filter what to get rid of, what to keep when it comes to social media.
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: That time, yeah, I mean I have to credit Marie Kondo there.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: You're probably familiar with that book, the Magical Art of Tidying Up.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: So this is her question, for how do we tidy up our physical space?
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: You know we pick up every item in our office or our bedroom.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: We ask does it bring me joy?
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: If it doesn't, you know we thank it.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: But I started to realize like that idea actually extends way beyond our physical belongings and it's made even more powerful in the digital realm Because, like I know a lot of people and for me that's this way too you get on one of these sites like Instagram, for example, and you, if you take a quick pulse of how am I feeling right now and you compare it to how you're feeling 30 minutes later or 60 minutes later when you finally get off the site, for many of us our experience is we feel worse, like we actually feel like, ah, my mood's worse than it was before.
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: And now I'm comparing myself against Sally's vacation, which looks amazing, you know all these things.
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: So I think like that's a really interesting question to ask.
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: Does it bring me joy?
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: And the one other thing that I think is useful I try to think about digital consumption, like the way we consume food, and there's the saying you are what you eat you know.
• 35:02
  Speaker 3: So if all you eat is, McDonald's and junk food, absolutely.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: that's going to change your body and your experience of life in various ways and we kind of understand those.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: But I don't think we have the same understanding of content and digital consumption.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: And I think we should, because there really is a way that you are what you consume and in what I call screen land, absolutely.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: You know, like absolutely you.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: If you spend all day listening to outrageous political commentary about the other side and how bad they are, like that will consume you.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: that will be who you are in the world, and so you really do have another choice point there where you can look at the content you're consuming and be like who do I want to be and what does that content look like?
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know and that whole question.
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: You can dive even into social media and be like are these accounts bringing me joy, Right?
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: Are they making me feel depressed?
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: Are they making me covet and be jealous and, like you said, walk away and have all those feelings like delete, delete.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: We have so much more control than we think we do.
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: So you're exactly right and I think it takes a lot of like being honest with yourself.
• 36:08
  Speaker 3: So a couple years ago, we have what's called the parade of homes in our area, where they you know, you have $5 million homes and they walk through the homes and see what the homes look like and jealous the whole time, yeah, and.
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: I I was.
• 36:22
  Speaker 3: Every time after going through those I could feel like a change in me, right, Like if I could feel like, oh, you know, why do I not have a house like that, or why not?
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: And I finally told them I'm like I don't want this in my life, Like I'm done, I don't want to go to that anymore.
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: And so a couple years ago I said I'm not going to it anymore.
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: And this may sound silly, but just that one thing cutting out that one thing has has taken those things out of my life and I don't even need to think about it anymore.
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: Right, I don't need to worry about those things.
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: And I think you're exactly right with social media, Like you said, you know what vacation is Sally on or what, what are the, what are they doing and why is my life not like that?
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: And it can be so destructive to our own lives, Just like you said, what we consume or what, what we bring in.
• 37:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a name for the world that we enter when we pop out our screens and, you know, go into social media.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: I call it Screenland.
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: I like that name Because for me it's a reminder that we're going to a different reality.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: For sure, screenland is not the same as the real world Right and so.
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: But we kind of know that on some level but we also forget that.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of like I think about going to Disneyland.
• 37:36
  Speaker 2: You know you go to Disneyland, you know this is not real.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: Like the Epcot Center is not Italy, the mouse walking around is not Mickey Mouse, it's like a guy walking around in a mouse suit.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: We all understand that.
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: But we go into Screenland and it feels real and we forget that this, this place called Screenland, operates on totally different rules, that the laws of gravity are totally different.
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: You know that you can see only the highlights of someone's life and none of the bad things, none of the adversity.
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: You can see like a quantified number that represents that person's popularity or worth.
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: You know the number of followers they have, the number of likes they have and compare it to your own and feel bad about yourself.
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: And so, just like the awareness that we're in Screenland we're not in reality.
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: For me has been really useful as a reminder that this is not real life.
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: This is some different thing that we're entering and it's cool sometimes, but like let's, let's just remember there's a difference.
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that so much.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: I feel like, when we get to a certain age where we're that our life is coming to an end, I feel like we're so many of us are going to look back and be like I wasted so much time on things that don't matter, Right.
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah, just time on our screens Like.
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: I don't want to get there and like feel guilty and sad that I spent so much time away from my kids because I was glued to my phone.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: And there's days that I do that and a lot of moms do so.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Constant reminders that we can just be better, yeah.
• 39:13
  Speaker 2: Well, and to Nick's point, it's not even that we're wasting time necessarily on screens.
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: It's that sometimes the emotional hangover of being on our screens if we do spend the whole rest of the day looking at our house, being like, oh man, I don't have a sub zero fridge and a Viking stove top like this place is a piece of crap.
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: You know, I need to have a better house Right, Like that's actually really significant that we spent all day in that energy and not in this energy of gratitude Wow, I have a house.
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: This is amazing.
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so true.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: So for all of you out there listening, you know we do podcasts where some subjects relate to some people and some don't, and things like that.
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: You can see why we had Nade on to talk about his new book.
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: This is a subject that I think every couple out there listening can benefit from.
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: I know for me, once I opened that book, I had a really hard time putting it down because of all the information on the things that I was learning and what it could do to benefit our marriage, and so I really I think there's books out there that you you can read, you should read and you must read, and I would put this in a category that this is a must read book.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: If you are a couple out there looking to strengthen your marriage and your relationship, this this, is a book that you need to get, and I can pretty much guarantee that this will transform your relationship in one way or another.
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: So which also transforms your kid's life, because when you have an amazing marriage, that's the best thing that you can give your children Right.
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so so don't hesitate to go out and get this book.
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: Also, the 8080 marriage book, like I said, is one of the best books Amy and I have ever read can really benefit your marriage as well.
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: So tell our audience where they can go get your books and when what's.
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: I guess what's the easiest way to get get this.
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can go to my personal website, nadeclampcom.
• 41:14
  Speaker 2: That's Clamp with a K and there's information about the book Kaylee and I also have a newsletter.
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: You'll see links to that that we send out with tips and actually some of those I think appear on Ultimate Interest.
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: So, exactly, so we have tips and tricks for how to make marriage work in the modern age, and you can sign up for that for free, and then the book is going to be available everywhere starting February 13.
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: So wherever you can get books Amazon, etc.
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: Audible I did the audio for this one for the first time Perfect, so you'll hear me narrating this if you do audit.
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: But I also want to say, nick and Amy, just thank you for all the work that you do, providing such amazing content.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: You know we were talking about all the content that's out there that makes people feel bad about themselves.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: I think the two of you really stand out in that you're creating content that does the exact opposite, that's really helping couples and helping them make really important shifts in their life.
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: So thank you for that.
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you so much, and we'll also put this in the show notes, as well as newsletters and things like that we have.
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: We'll make sure that you find this book and again, thank you so much for being on and sharing your time and until next time, we hope all of you find ultimate intimacy in your relationship.