#1074 - Nir Eyal - A Masterclass in Changing Your Limiting Beliefs

24:27Nir Eyal:I didn't need that. I wanted to vent. I wanted to tell her why my mom was being way too judgmental. And I wanted her to let me vent. Well, it turns out the research shows that venting does not work, that venting does nothing but cement the vision that you have of people, the beliefs that you have about people. It just makes them more vivid. So venting, we know, does not work, even though that's kind of the conventional advice that you have to blow off steam, You have to say how you really feel. Don't hold things back. Turns out it's not so great. I knew that at the time. And so I did one of these turnarounds.

24:55Nir Eyal:So I took out these four questions. And I started with, you know, what is the belief? The belief was very clearly, I wrote it down. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, now the first question, like we just did with you, is it true? Obviously, Chris, you're on my side here, right? Right, my mother, what mother doesn't thank their son for their flowers? Who says that? Clearly she was too judgmental and hard to please. Absolutely, it was true. Second question, is it absolutely true? Meaning, is there no other possible explanation other than my belief? Well, if I'm honest, maybe, okay, whatever.

25:29Nir Eyal:Maybe there's another explanation. Okay, I don't want to think about what that explanation could be, but perhaps. Then the third question, who am I when I hold this belief? Well, when I believe my mother's shoe judgmental and hard to please, I'm kind of a jerk. I'm judgmental, I'm short-tempered, I'm not myself I'm embarrassed about what I do and then the fourth question is who would I be without that belief and if I'm honest I would be much happier if there was a magic wand and I could erase that belief from my head that'd be great I wouldn't be so judgmental I'd be me and then I did this turnaround so I took that belief my mother is too judgmental and hard to please and I turned it around I asked myself could the exact opposite be true as as ridiculous as that sounds I mean to your question.

26:13Nir Eyal:How do we possibly believe something if we just don't believe something? We're confusing facts with belief. It doesn't matter if it's true. That's how we do it, to answer your question. So is there any possible truth in it? Could there possibly be a way that my mother was not being too judgmental and hard to please? Thought about it for a few minutes, and I had to admit, maybe she was just trying to save me some money. Maybe she just didn't want me to be scammed from this florist. So, okay, that could be true. There might be another explanation. Then I did another turnaround. I am too judgmental and hard to please.

26:49Nir Eyal:Could that be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please? Well, I kind of did demand in my head in the script of when I called her and said, hey, happy birthday. How are the flowers? I had already scripted out exactly the way I wanted her to respond. I wanted her to say effusive thanks. And when she didn't do that, I lost it. So who was being judgmental and hard to please? Me. And then the third turnaround, I was being, not my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I am being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That really what was happening, this actually turned out to be the most true, even though I did not want to accept it at all, was that when the flowers didn't arrive exactly the way I wanted them to, I took that as a statement on my competency, that I had done something wrong, that I messed up.

27:37Nir Eyal:So really, I was being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. Now, when you take out those four beliefs, the original belief in these three new ones, those three new ones sounded absolutely ridiculous. I did not want to accept them at first. But that first belief of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please only left me with one option to get through it. She had to change in order for me to be happy. And like with your example around life having to change, that's pretty tough, right? For her to change was not a possibility. Now at least I had other options. So what did I start doing?

28:11Nir Eyal:I started trying on those beliefs for size, you know, for a week. Okay, I'm not, I'm going to take that perspective of that I was being too judgmental and hard to please. And all of a sudden, this weight was lifted. Like I didn't have to believe that anymore. I didn't have to have these standards because I didn't even see I was holding myself to those standards. And all of a sudden I did become more patient. I did become nicer to my mom. I was a better, I was more of the person that I wanted to be. And so the way you change these beliefs is you try on a different belief as an experiment. Just try it on for size.

28:42Nir Eyal:You see what happens. And as ridiculous as it feels at first, when you start building more agency, when you start proving to yourself in small steps that, hey, that could also be true, you can choose at some later point to keep that belief or chuck it for yet a new one. why why does rumination feel productive when it's actually destructive then what is it that's happening inside of our minds that causes us to want to do that yeah it's a few things so one rumination feels like problem solving but it's rumination about the past right rumination comes from what cows do to their cut right they they ruminate they chew chew chew on a problem uh endlessly.

29:24Nir Eyal:And oftentimes that can feel productive because it feels like we're putting time and attention towards something. But when it becomes rumination, when we were talking about the same thing again and again, and we see this all the time when people think about their past, right? Rumination is always about something that has happened in the past. It moves from constructive problem solving into many times an escape from reality, that if I'm constantly thinking of a problem, I don't have to do what's currently in front of me, right? That it's something that that almost becomes a pacifier in a way. So a very practical solution, what I've started to do, which also sounds nuts at first, is I've actually started planning time to worry.

29:59Nir Eyal:So now my brain doesn't have to ruminate about the problem. It doesn't have to ruminate just as much about when will I have time to think about and solve this problem? Because now I have time in my calendar for worry. Now here's what happens nine times out of 10. You know, I'll write down, here's what I need to worry about. Very, very important thing. I keep ruminating in my head about this thing. that I definitely, definitely need to think about. Very, very important, this thing that I messed up on in the past, and I need to think about how do I fix it. And then when that worry time comes, nine times out of ten, what the heck was I worrying about?

30:28Nir Eyal:Why did I keep ruminating on it? I didn't need to. In fact, it's something that got crushed under the weight of some other priority. Yeah, the addiction to venting and rumination is, it feels so satisfying. You know, it's the same as stretching that torn or strained muscle. You just keep on checking, checking, checking. We'll go back to it. We'll go back to it. We'll go back to it. So I have to imagine that rejection and failure when it comes to belief is somewhat of a challenge, right? How do people rebuild belief after repeated failures? Yeah. Yeah. So if you are failing, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

31:21Nir Eyal:What I want to change in my life, and what I hope I can help with others, is to give them more persistence. Because we know that persistence is the defining factor. You've met lots and lots of successful people in your life. I've interviewed billionaires for this book. I've interviewed people who are broke for this book. And what I discovered was is that unsuccessful people are not those that fail more. Unsuccessful people are those who fail less. Successful people fail more. It's the billionaire who tried again and again and again and again until they hit it big. They do more of these experiments.

31:55Nir Eyal:They have more shots on goal. And so that turns out to be a defining trait, that persistence. There's a wonderful study that really blew my mind, this Kurt Richter study back in the 1950s where he took these rats and he put these rats in two cylinders of water and they were filled about halfway full. And he took these rats, he put them in the cylinder of water, and he stood there with a timer to see how long the rats would swim for. It turns out, in case you were curious, a wild rat can swim in a cylinder of water for about 15 minutes before it gives up and dies. Very nice. Then he wanted to do another study.

32:28Nir Eyal:He did a follow-up study. By the way, you can't do these kind of unethical studies anymore, but they did it so we can learn from it. Then he took a new batch of wild rats and he put them in the cylinder of water and he watched them swim, swim, swim for about 15 minutes. And right before he knew they would give up and sink under the water, he reached in, pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath for a minute and plunk back into the cylinder it went. And now he wanted to see if he did that a few times and he conditioned the wild rat to know that salvation might be possible, what would happen?

33:01Nir Eyal:Could the rat swim for longer? Now you've read the book. I know you know the answer, but when I ask people how much longer did the rat swim for, people say maybe double, maybe triple, maybe four times longer. Wouldn't that be amazing if the rat went from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, an hour? Think about that. If you're running a marathon and now you have four times the endurance, if you're working on that hard task, whatever that challenge is, you can sustain four times longer, that'd blow your mind. That'd be amazing. What kind of crazy intervention would that be? Well, the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes.

33:30Nir Eyal:They ended up swimming for 60 hours. They swam for 240 times longer. And that ability was in them the whole time because their bodies didn't change. The experiment didn't change. What changed was we think, we can't ask these rats what they believed. We think that something must have changed in their minds. The fact that they saw that hope and salvation were possible kept them persisting, persisting, persisting. And so it all of a sudden became unlocked because of a belief. They believed that salvation maybe might be possible. And so the goal here is to realize the practical application of this is not to quit at the 15-minute mark.

34:08Nir Eyal:That for the vast majority of us, myself included, when it gets uncomfortable, when it gets difficult, when it gets painful, that's our limit. But your limit is so much further than you actually think. So the most important thing is to quit when it's the right time. Quitting is not wrong. There's nothing wrong with quitting. Quitting too soon is a destruction of human capital. That's what we have to prevent, right? Quitting too soon. I've quit many things. I've quit relationships. I've quit businesses. I've quit all kinds of things. It's not that quitting is wrong. It's quitting when it's too soon.

34:39Nir Eyal:That's the problem. So, and one of those criteria for when not to quit is when it hurts, right? That pain is just a signal. Remember we talked about 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information. Those pain signals, that's just information. That's not necessarily a bad thing. So if we can disconnect the pain from the suffering, the interpretation of that pain, and only quit when it's time. So for example, one of the criteria for when is it a good time to quit is not when you're failing. That is a bad reason to quit a task. The failing is not the right reason. It's when you stop learning. That if the failures are teaching you something, keep going, right?

35:16Nir Eyal:That's not necessarily, there's two other criteria about when is the proper time to quit. But failure itself, in and of itself, is not necessarily the right criteria for when to quit. What are the other criteria? The other two criteria, number one is you have to meet a checkpoint. So most people don't set checkpoints, they set deadlines. And that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about a deadline. We're talking about a checkpoint is when I say, I will endure this suffering for a fixed period of time. Now, why do we do that? Because if we don't do that, as soon as it gets uncomfortable, we're going to interpret the pain as suffering and we're going to want to quit.

35:50Nir Eyal:Instead, when we say, I'm going to try this perspective, right? I'm going to try this crazy view of my mom, like I was describing earlier, or this crazy view of my life that life is not for ticking off tasks. Okay, doesn't sound right. I don't agree. Maybe it's not true. But I'm going to try it for one week, 30 days, whatever you make up the number. And I'm not going to stop until I hit that checkpoint. Then at that checkpoint, I can say, Okay, let me let me take a step back. Would I continue this experiment past that checkpoint if I were to start today, But don't quit until the checkpoint, right?

36:22Nir Eyal:Whatever that hard task might be, 30 days of exercise, 30 days of posting YouTube videos, 30 days of writing your book, whatever it is, make sure you have that checkpoint. That's criteria number one. Criteria number two is, are you still learning through failure? We talked about that earlier. And then the third and the most important criteria is, does persistence make a difference? Many things in life, persistence does not make a difference. If you're in a crappy work culture and it's awful and the people are sucking out your energy and you on Sunday evening, you are dreading waking up on Monday morning because you know you have to go to work.

36:57Nir Eyal:Persistence ain't going to help. Those people are not going to suddenly leave just because you stuck around longer. Right. You're going to die by the time those people leave. So persistence is not going to make a difference. However, when it comes to fitness, for example, you're a jack guy. You know this. You hit plateaus. And then if you persist, hey, you'll bust out of that plateau. You'll make progress eventually, right? So there are certain things in life where persistence really does make a difference, even if you're not seeing progress. But if you meet those three criteria, that's fine. The most important thing is that you're not quitting too soon.

37:25Nir Eyal:You're not quitting at the 15 minute mark like those rats, even when you have the 60 hours of potential. Before we continue, I am a massive fan of reducing your alcohol intake, but historically, non-alcoholic brews taste like ass. You don't need to be doing some big reset. Maybe you just want to crack a cold one without feeling like garbage the next morning, which is why I am such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Co. They've got 50 types of NAs, including IPAs, Goldens, and even limited releases like a cocktail-inspired Paloma and Moscow Mule. And here's the thing, you can drink them anytime, late nights, early mornings, watching sports, playing sports, doesn't matter.

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38:38What did you find out about luck?

38:39Nir Eyal:Yeah, that luck is not chance. That luck, in fact, can absolutely be engineered. Let's be honest here. The most lucky thing is your birth. That if you are lucky enough to be born in an industrialized democratic country, you won the genetic lottery, as Warren Buffett used to say. Other than that, after you're born, it turns out there's no such thing as like particularly lucky people. We see successful people, we say, oh, they just got lucky. And of course, lucky things happen to all kinds of people. But it turns out what's much more important is how they manufacture their luck. We know that entrepreneurs, they have this phenomenon called entrepreneurial alertness, where we know that successful entrepreneurs literally see the world differently.

39:27Nir Eyal:They metaphorically see$100 bills all over the floor. and there's actually a wonderful study that showed this. They took two groups of people. One was self-identified pessimists and one were self-identified optimists. And in this study, they asked people to look at a newspaper and this newspaper was specially designed for this experiment. And the goal of the experiment, they asked them, we want you to count for us how many photos there are in this newspaper. Okay, how many photos do you see in this newspaper? count as quickly as you can, and then tell the proctor, and you'll get a monetary prize.

40:04Nir Eyal:Now, people who are self-identified optimists took about 11 seconds to finish this experiment. People who are self-identified pessimists took two and a half minutes. Why? Why the difference? That's a huge advantage. What happened? Turns out that on page two of this newspaper was a photo that said there are 48 photos in this newspaper. That's all it said. Then halfway through the paper, it said there are 48 photos in this paper. Collect your prize, okay? Optimistic people saw that. They saw this thing staring in the face. They got up. They said there's 48 pictures in the newspaper and they collected their prize.

40:46Nir Eyal:They walked off in 11 seconds on average. The pessimistic people sat there and said, one, two, three, four. They didn't even see the opportunity staring them in the face. They were completely oblivious to it. And so this is a wonderful example of how we don't see what we believe. That's kind of what we think is common knowledge. We have to see something in order to believe it. Turns out the exact opposite is just as true. That in order to see something, we have to believe it. That's wild. That is so crazy. Tip of the iceberg. There's so many of these. What other ways does this show up in people's lives?

41:23Nir Eyal:All over the place. I mean, we know that people who are on a diet physically see food as larger. They see that people who are afraid of heights see distances as farther away, right? So back to this keyhole of attention, that when we are forced to see reality through this itsy-bitsy keyhole of reality, we can't help it, right? That coffer illusion I talked about earlier, it's crazy. I'll show it to people and they will absolutely swear there's nothing here but squares, right? Whereas you show it to other people and they'll say there's nothing there but circles. And it's completely determined, we think, we don't exactly know why this is happening.

41:58Nir Eyal:We think it's because of where you grow up. That people who grow up in urban environments see sharp edges, right? Buildings and streets, they see sharp edges. These are not natural. But people who grow up, for example, where they did this study that they showed the Khafre illusion to people in sub-Saharan Africa, and they see circles because that's what they have been conditioned to see. They see organic shapes. They don't see hard edges. And so it absolutely affects time and time again what you are able to see based on your past experience. And of course, we make up problems for many of us where they don't exist, right?

42:30Nir Eyal:That it's no coincidence that this is, people are gonna think I'm crazy. And when I say this, know that the crazier you think an alternative belief is, the more you should actually explore it, right? Because that's your brain with your belief immune system is trying to keep out foreign antibodies. is trying to keep out these beliefs you don't like. The fact is the world is getting better and it's in fact better than it's ever been, right? But the average person, if you say, is this the best time in history? The average person will say, no, it's terrible. We have wars, we have crime, we have this, we have that.

42:59Nir Eyal:Things are terrible and they're getting worse. Well, that's not true. And if you don't believe me, read this wonderful book by Hans Rosling, Factfulness, where he interviewed university professors and he gave them an exam about the state of the world, the state of all the things we care about, the state of education, the state of the environment, the state of female empowerment, the state of democracy. These professors on this exam did worse than if monkeys would have taken this test. They did worse than chance on a realistic portrayal of how the world is because of this negativity bias that we all have, because of these existing beliefs that we seek to confirm time and time again.

43:37Nir Eyal:So if you are looking for negativity, if you believe that the world is getting worse, you're going to see all the ways the world is getting worse. You're going to tune it into the media that does nothing but reinforce that fact because you know if it bleeds it leads you're going to see all the crime stories the hatred the the animosity the wars because that's what you're turning into that's what you're paying attention to um i'll give you one more quick study that i love is these the dartmouth scar study where they took women and they uh they they said we're going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements we want to see how people are treated differently how they are discriminated against so we're going to put this fake scar on your face.

44:13Nir Eyal:And we're going to put you in a room with somebody else, the person we're doing the study on. And we want you to report how you're treated with this facial scar. And they made this very realistic, you know, like one of the ones that you would see in a horror film, this huge gash on their face. And they said, okay, now you're going to walk into this room, and we want you to take careful notes on how people treated you when you had a conversation. Except, wait, wait, wait, come back here for a quick second. Before you go into the room, let me just do a quick touch up. And what these women didn't know in the study is that they completely removed the scar.

44:42Nir Eyal:Now, the women didn't know that. They saw the scar in the mirror. But then when they did the touch-up and removed the scar, they didn't know that the scar didn't exist. It wasn't there. And yet, these women in the study reported that they were stared at, that they were discriminated against, that the people they were talking to seemed disgusted and averted their eyes many times, and they felt very uncomfortable, all for a scar that didn't even exist. It wasn't even there because they expected a response and when you expect something to occur you will see it it's like living in a simulation it's like we create a simulation of the world and kind of disregard what the actual world is showing to us that's right now we don't have to right so that through this consistent practice of making ourselves see the world uh differently we hopefully can see truth.

45:31Nir Eyal:I mean, how, isn't it crazy how, at least in many cultures, not all cultures, disagreement is seen as rude, right? That like when someone disagrees with you, they're kind of, you don't like that person, right? When someone challenges your feelings, that creates a little icky feeling. Or if someone does change their perspective, they're called a flip-flopper. Is that not the stupidest thing ever? I mean, now that's become my love language. Like if you can change my mind about something, can you think of a better gift like i i was lying to myself about reality about myself about my relationship and now you've helped me see the world more clearly can you like what better gift could there possibly be yeah it's a strange one that was so attached to our points of view that losing them or letting go of them is kind of tantamount to destruction at least to the ego and uh i'm thinking about beliefs that people have now which might be useful but that or that create success or whatever but in the future quietly limit you later on or beliefs that people hold now that previously were effective or helpful in some sort of a way but now are holding us back that kind of blind spot with regards to belief and the tool where it was then where we are now.

46:53How do you come to think about updating beliefs over time in that sort of a way? Yeah, where do we begin?

46:59Nir Eyal:I think one of the challenges that I think is becoming more and more prevalent is that we have these cultural nocebos. So, placebos come from the Latin, I will heal. Nocebos come from, I will hurt. And it turns out these nocebo effects are contagious. that when we tell people that they might be suffering from some kind of malady, it spreads. I'll give you a great example. There was this case in, I think it was Portugal, if I'm not mistaken, where on one particular night, there was this epidemic. The hospital rooms were filling up with young girls with intense intestinal discomfort. They were filling up the ERs.

47:41Nir Eyal:And people thought it was some kind of virus. People thought there was something in the water like what had happened was really weird that it only affected girls of a certain age and nobody knew what it was turns out there was a very popular tv show i think it was called strawberries and cream and uh on that show the main character the protagonist had some kind of similar intestinal malady where she was very sick and that actually caught on and created this this kind of mass nocebo effect and this goes we see this repeated again and again every few years somewhere in the world, there'll be some kind of outbreak of some kind of psychosomatic disorder.

48:18Nir Eyal:In the literature, one case that really blew my mind, there was this guy, they call him Mr. A, he was anonymized. And Mr. A had a very difficult breakup with his girlfriend. And he decides that he wants to end his life. So he takes a bottle of pills, opens it up, he takes the entire bottle of pills, swallows everything. And a few minutes later, he changes his mind, he decides he wants to live. So he rushes over to his next door neighbor. He tells him he took all his pills. Neighbor rushes him to the ER. Mr. A barges through the emergency room, crashes on the floor. He's almost unconscious and he says, I took all my pills.

48:56Nir Eyal:I took all my pills. Help me. They rush him into the operating room. His blood pressure is dangerously low. His heart rate is plummeting. And they're trying to figure out what did he overdose on? Well, they look at the jar of pills and all there is on the jar of pills is a number to call. It turns out that Mr. A had been part of a clinical trial for depression and he took all these pills that he was given in the study. They called the number and they say, what is this drug? What did he just overdose on so that we can try and resuscitate him? And again, all the physiological symptoms of overdose, the heart rate, the plunging, blood pressure, all the things that you would expect with an overdose are happening to Mr.

49:36Nir Eyal:A. on the other line the doctor says um this person took placebos he did not get the active ingredient they tell mr a this that he took nothing but placebos within 15 minutes chris mr a is completely revived his heart rate is back to normal his blood pressure is back to normal and he's fine he's ready to walk out of the er now if we can have these incredible physiological effects solely based on our beliefs, solely based on our expectations of what we think will happen in this crazy simulation that's running in our heads, if that can be done to this extent, what does that mean for all the other nocebos in our life?

50:18Nir Eyal:What happens when we assign ourselves all kinds of labels that we keep tossing around? If you open up social media, people are prescribing the hell out of each other with all kinds of maladies that let alone have no actual psychological basis, imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is not a thing. It's not in the DSM. There's nothing that makes the imposter syndrome. You can't get diagnosed for imposter syndrome, but it sounds so official. People think it's a diagnosis. Well, when you think you have imposter syndrome, guess what? Now you have imposter syndrome. You've manufactured it. Whether it's true or not, that's not what I'm arguing about.

50:53Nir Eyal:What I'm arguing about is does it serve you? I'm not a morning person. I'm having a senior moment. I'm no good at public speaking. I'm whatever. When we create this identity, that's the problem. Out of a label, that label becomes our limit. In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated? Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids.

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52:05Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Elements' most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. The example that you used with the mouse, it believed that it was going to be saved. I have to assume that in order to work out how long a mouse swims for before it drowns, you have to let it drown.

52:40So in a lot of these studies, it actually didn't get saved. So it had an erroneous belief and that erroneous belief -

52:45Nir Eyal:It was a new group of rats. Yes. It lifted the ceiling on when the rat was going to be able to swim for. Right. So you can spiral belief up toward a version of you that you want, one that broadly gets better outcomes in life, but you can also spiral it down, which is I took sugar pills and now I think I'm having a heart attack and my brain's going to explode. Right. So in both situations, the interpretation and the belief is causing an effect within the person. Right. And both are very powerful. I think when it comes to something like imposter syndrome or concerns about public speak, sexual performance, right?

53:32Some guy that gets real nervous before he gets into, I think that's like psychosomatic, mental impact on guys struggling to get it up is a vicious spiral that happens to dudes and then they can't get out of it. They're worried about it and this thing's going to happen and it goes all the way down.

53:50Nir Eyal:Insomnia, depression, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, IBS. Many of these things are highly responsive to both nocebo and placebo effects. But sorry, I interrupted you. Continue. Yeah. Just someone is on the spiral going in the wrong direction. How do they intervene? How do they intervene and reverse that direction to go back in the other? Because one of the things that I imagine a lot of people think is, oh God, well, yeah, there's some contributing elements that are grounded in reality, but much of this is filtered through my perception, my expectations, my own simulation, my beliefs, what a piece of shit am I that I can't fix?

54:29It's all on me. I'm causing this problem. This means I'm even worse than I thought I was. So I think getting practical about, okay, someone feels that they have one of these beliefs and it is spiraling in the wrong direction. It's their erectile dysfunction or inability to wake up on a morning or it's their mood or it's whatever. Take me through the steps that someone goes through to halt the downward spiral and turn it into one that works for them.

54:56Nir Eyal:Absolutely. So this comes a lot from the research around chronic pain. And the medical community is really in the middle of doing a 180 on how to approach pain. And there's this new technique that's been quite validated called pain reprocessing therapy. and the reason I like to talk about this extreme version is because if we can do it in the most extreme versions, when people are suffering through chronic pain, like the kind of debilitating pain that comes from these type of conditions, then we can also do it for more minor maladies like erectile dysfunction or insomnia or anxiety. So that's why I like to talk about those more extreme cases.

55:35Nir Eyal:But the way pain reprocessing therapy works starts by understanding that pain is not the same as suffering. Pain is always real. Even though all pain is in the brain, all pain is in the brain. Where else could pain live? Pain is not in your arm. It's not your back. It's pain. All pain receptors lead to an interpretation in your brain. But pain is nothing more than signal. Pain does not necessarily mean that anything is broken because there's a difference between a sickness and an illness. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. So for many conditions, there is something broken, some kind of malady that has to do with sickness, something in the body.

56:17Nir Eyal:But you can be sick without being ill, and you can also be ill without being sick. How can that happen? If you have cancer, you know, we all have tiny cancer cells, but let's say you have some kind of malignant tumor, but you haven't, you don't know you have it yet. God forbid that this should happen anyway, but it does. You can be sick, but not realize that you have any symptoms, so you're not ill. Conversely, and what is very, very common in fact that accounts for about 80 percent of our health care expenses is the symptoms the illness which is in the mind okay the perception of those symptoms and many times for example in the case of chronic pain which is defined as pain that persists for more than six months with no known physical causes so the most important thing is to eliminate those possible physical causes but if you continue okay so you you wouldn't have or that you wouldn't be diagnosed with chronic pain if you had a big bit of wood sticking out of your leg exactly exactly we we know that's the cause.

57:09Nir Eyal:Exactly. Although as a little tangent here, I mean, there's cases, you know, where did placebo science first come from? It came from after World War I, when there was reported cases of soldiers dragging their buddy on the battlefield to the medic and saying, medic, medic, you need to help my friend. My friend just got shot. Help my friend, help my friend. And the medic turns to this guy pulling his buddy and says, soldier, you're missing an arm. And the soldier was completely unaware that half their arm had been blown off. because of the power of attention. They'd been so focused on their buddy that they didn't pay attention.

57:41Nir Eyal:They turned off that information that was coming to their brain from their conscious mind, right? Because again, 11 million bits versus 50 bits. So back to this question around chronic pain and how that teaches us, what that teaches all of us about how do we manage changing our beliefs per year question. What pain reprocessing therapy tells us is that neuroplastic pain is the kind of pain that persists even with no physical causes. And the key is shutting off what is called the fear-pain-fear loop. That at the heart of these chronic conditions, which are real, I'm not saying pain is fake. I'm not saying it's your fault.

58:22Nir Eyal:I'm not saying it's in your head. All pain is real. There's no such thing as fake pain. All pain is real. And it is also true that all pain is in your mind. Turns out that the brain has this amazing ability to turn down the pain or turn up the pain dial based on what it thinks is important, based on what it pays attention to. So for example, in the case of hypnosedation, people, and I've seen the tapes, and tens of thousands of people have done this. This guy that I interviewed by the name of Daniel Gisler, the most analytical, no woo-woo, no nonsense type of guy, he used to be a commodities trader.

58:59Nir Eyal:This guy went under surgery, and I've seen the video of operation. I wouldn't believe unless I've seen it. This guy had metal bolts wrenched from his bone, scapel cutting into his skin with no anesthesia, no general anesthesia, no local anesthesia for 55 minutes. His heart rate didn't increase. His blood pressure stayed level. He did not experience these physical symptoms of pain or the suffering that comes from pain. He didn't experience it because he had learned this amazing ability to focus his mind through the power of beliefs and so he trained himself to not feel this intense discomfort now if we can do that with surgery without requiring anesthesia we can do that for all kinds of things on the flip side by the way it makes having a having surgery without anesthetic makes your erectile dysfunction feel like limp actually yeah but but But it's, because the ED question around like, can it cause this negative spiral?

1:00:02Nir Eyal:Well, when you think about these chronic conditions like fibromyalgia, that's an exclusionary diagnosis, or chronic pain, or ED, or insomnia, or anxiety, I mean, the list goes on and on, of these maladies. It turns out that what's at the center of these are this fear-pain-fear loop, that what the conversation sounds like, and by the way, I used to have terrible back pain as well. and the first thing that happened in my mind was every time I would feel back pain, the conventional wisdom is pain means damage. Pain means harm. Well, if it's damaged, if it's broken, how long is it gonna last? Is this always gonna be this way?

1:00:35Nir Eyal:What if it never gets better? What does that mean for my future? And I start spiraling and ruminating, spiraling and it would drive me crazy. And guess what? It would turn up the pain dial because that experience of feeling that fear is incredibly uncomfortable. It creates physiological responses, right? You start sweating, Your mouth gets dry. You start, your heart starts palpitating. All these physical sensations feel shittier and jittier. And so your body pays more and more attention thinking it's under threat. So what you have to do, step one, is to realize that your body is not broken. And this is after you've excluded everything, okay?

1:01:11Nir Eyal:After you've done the tests and looked at and make sure there is nothing physically wrong, where the problem is this neuroplastic pain, now you have to convince yourself that you're assuming that the body is not broken, that this is just information. That's all it is, just information. The next thing we do is we stop trying to fix the pain. Part of our problem is that we have this urgency that I must fix this problem because we live in a time where we expect this to happen. By the way, this has never happened before in 200 ,000 years of human history. You know, like the French kings used to have all kinds of tooth decay and syphilis and all kinds of, they were constantly in severe what we would think is today severe pain.

1:01:52Nir Eyal:But people for 200 ,000 years had this ability to tune out discomfort because it was just information. They didn't walk around constantly moaning and groaning. I'm sure they were in a lot of pain and suffering, but because that was always part of the human condition, it was something that they carried on with, we think. Whereas today, because we live in an age where we have so much modern medicine, we have the ability to turn off a lot of our suffering like a switch when it comes to sickness rather than illness, we become hyper-fixated when we think that there's a problem that can't be solved.

1:02:19Nir Eyal:and we expect it to be urgently addressed and to go away immediately. So step two is to stop trying to fix that pain. And then what you want to do is to prove that you're safe. Prove that you're safe. And so to constantly remind yourself, this isn't danger. This is a pain signal. It's not danger. One of the things that pain reprocessing therapy does is advise people to add lightness, to add some kind of humor. So telling yourself, ah, I see what you're doing there, pain response. Not going to give me this time. I know this is nothing to be worried about. What I used to do when I felt my back pain, and this was pretty bad back pain.

1:02:54Nir Eyal:I mean, I have to lay on the floor and I followed all the conventional advice of, you know, I have to, you have to ice. No, you have to warm. No, you have to immobilize. You can't do anything. What I started doing was every time I felt that twinge in my back, I would intentionally do whatever caused that pain 10 times. Okay. And again, disclaimer, after I'd known that there was nothing actually physically wrong, it came from an injury originally that I had in the gym. Yeah. Like if you get a splinter in your foot, putting 10 more splinters in your foot isn't going to take the splinter out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:03:21Right, exactly, exactly.

1:03:22Nir Eyal:But after the splinter's out, it's healed. We can't detect any kind of actual physical damage. It was just neuroplastic pain. I had to teach my brain over and over and over again, I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. Pain is just a signal. I'm not in danger. And then over time, lo and behold, it went away. And the same, I imagine, would be true for people with chronic fatigue, ME-CFS. Yes. Again, assuming that you've not got underlying whatever that's going on. I feel like we need to do this throat clearing so it doesn't sound like fucking victim blaming all of the people who - Right, right. Let's say that you've, good example, me and half of Austin apparently live in houses that have got toxic molds.

1:04:00Toxic mold is particularly brutal for certain people with a genetic susceptibility to it and it causes them to be really tired. You get out of the houses, you follow a shoemaker protocol, you detox all of the mold or most of the mold from you. And now, oh, hey, the system is more functional, but my expected work capacity hasn't caught up to where my real gas tank is. And that repatterning of the pain, of the fatigue, of the lack of fatigue, the inability to sleep. I'm not a good sleeper. I wake up lots of times throughout the night. I need to go to the bathroom all of the time. That's kind of a real common one for people who just think I need to wake up and go to the bathroom two or three times throughout the night, even if I haven't had that much to drink, even if I know that when I go to the bathroom, oh, it's a problem, it's a prostate, it's a whatever.

1:04:53It's like, well, you know, if you've had all of the things checked, it's not.

1:04:57Nir Eyal:It could just, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that I've adopted is these mantras, these prayers that they're not, maybe they're not prayers because they don't have a religious connotation, but I have many mantras that I repeat throughout the day. And I used to have terrible insomnia and I tried everything. I tried the pills. I tried all kinds of things. And then as I was doing this research around the power of the mind and beliefs to change our bodies, that your beliefs really do become your biology. And I'm sorry, it took me so long. I'm 48 now, but it took me a long time to realize this.

1:05:29Nir Eyal:I tried to eliminate the fear. And when you eliminate the fear, you also eliminate the suffering. So my mantra, when I wake up at 2 a.m. and I start ruminating about, oh my gosh, if I don't get to sleep soon, I'm going to have an awful day tomorrow and I've got this big interview with Chris and what if I don't do well and I better get to sleep and I can't get to sleep. Well, it turns out the number one cause of insomnia is worrying about insomnia. That is the number one cause of insomnia. And so we take medication to knock us out so we stop worrying. But really, I found the most effective thing I ever did was to replace the fear with a new belief.

1:06:08Nir Eyal:That new belief is, and this is what I literally say to myself every time I wake up at 2 a.m., I close my eyes and I repeat to myself and I take a deep breath on the way in, I say it, and then I say it again on the way out. I say, as I take a deep breath, I say, the body gets what the body needs if you let it. The body gets what the body needs if you let it. So that's a deep breath in, a deep breath out. And what I'm doing is reminding myself that, you know what? If I don't get a good night's sleep tonight, my body will make up for it the next night, right? That if I let it. Now, the biggest problem is, why do I say if you let it?

1:06:42Nir Eyal:Because if you went to bed at 1 a.m. and you need to get up at 6, that's on you, right? You didn't plan properly. But if you let it, if you give your body the time it needs to rest, it's going to rest or it doesn't need it. And if I stay up for an hour or so and I read my Kindle in bed, that's okay too. That's fine. That there's nothing that's wrong with it because it means the next night I probably will get to sleep. So repeating those simple mantras and I read the Kindle after I've tried that mantra and if it doesn't work then I read the Kindle. That works 99 % of the time. I always have a boring book on my Kindle by the way which is amazing because it scrambles that rumination cycle and then you can finally get back to sleep.

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1:08:19Talk to me about the neuroscience of agency because we're talking about an interesting balance here. one element is almost a letting go it's my body will give me what it needs if i let it so that's a relinquishing of the need to be the person that's pushing specifically around something like sleep right or i i don't need to check on the pain uh but at the same time we know that agency is the thing that most people desire. It's one of the top three, even if nobody knows what it means. I think it's what they want, right? They want independence, action, the ability to happen to life as opposed to life happen to them.

1:09:03Talk to me about neuroscience of agency. Yeah.

1:09:07Nir Eyal:So agency is what I call the third power of belief, that beliefs can change not only what you see. We talked about how beliefs shape your vision of reality. They shape how you feel internally, whether it's chronic pain, whether it's going through surgery without anesthesia, and most importantly, beliefs change what you do. Now, it changes what you do based on what you think is possible for you to do. And so not only can you have these nocebo effects that we talked about earlier, just as a quick recap of how your labels can become your limits and make you more, I'm sorry, make you less agentic because you think, well, that's impossible, I can't do it.

1:09:41Nir Eyal:certain beliefs allow you to be more agentic. So for example, one of the, I interviewed this guy by the name of David Feigenbaum, who had this incurable disease. And he was, I mean, he tells me how a nurse came in and told him, hey, guess what? You have this disease. I've never, ever heard of it, but at least it's not cancer. And then he does a Google search and he figures out actually the mortality rate is even worse than cancer for this disease that he has. You've got super cancer. You've got super cancer, exactly. And so he finds the one expert in the world who knows this disease backwards and forwards.

1:10:18Nir Eyal:And he told me that he, yeah, exactly. Well, kind of. He tells me about how he had this Santa Claus theory that his whole life he thought, well, if I just find the right person to send my wish into, just like Santa Claus, well, surely they'll have a solution. So this doctor recommends a medication, does not work. And then he asked the doctor, well, okay, what's the next course of treatment? Nothing. Well, but what's the research that's being done about this? There is no more research. Says, well, what are next steps? There are no more next steps. And so his whole Santa Claus theory that someone's gonna save him never materialized.

1:10:54Nir Eyal:And he decides that night that he has to do something. And he spends the next several years combing through all the research he can possibly find, throws away this theory that someone's gonna come and save me, and he does everything he possibly can. And it turns out he finds a medication that has been already approved for years that's sitting on the shelf that nobody tried for his condition, and it saves his life. And now he actually has a foundation that does this through AI and has saved countless thousands of people through a similar methodology. Now, what David demonstrated was understanding that you have a lot more agency that you think than most of us kind of accept.

1:11:33Nir Eyal:Well, a good patient should just take lessons from the doctor. They should do what the doctor says. You shouldn't do your own research. because we're the experts. Well, David said BS, and he tried to do his own research, and he tried his own experimentations, even when he wasn't sure if they would work. So big picture, we have a lot more agency than we think. And so there's two kinds of agency. We call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. And so people kind of know this research already that external locus of control is about thinking that your life is controlled by things outside of you.

1:12:06Nir Eyal:Internal locus of control means you think you can affect change in the world. Now, what's interesting about this is that even when the cards are stacked against you, even when you have all the right in the world to say that things aren't going well and external factors are controlling you, you still are better off than having an internal locus of control. People with an internal locus of control live longer, they have more friends, they contribute more to the community, they're happier, they have fewer mental health issues. internal locus of control seems to be protective in so many different ways, even when the cards are stacked against you.

1:12:42Nir Eyal:The only case where it's not helpful to have an internal locus of control is when you judge other people. So for yourself, you want to have an internal locus of control. For others, you want to try and give them the grace of thinking, well, they must be operating under circumstances that they can't control. That turns out to be a much healthier point of view. Yeah. Why does the brain default to helplessness then? If helpfulness and agency is so great, why is that not a set point? Yeah. Well, what you just said is actually the exact opposite of what everybody thought for 50 years in psychology, because we thought that helplessness was learned.

1:13:25Nir Eyal:We called it learned helplessness. Seligman and Meyer did these studies with dogs, and they could show that you could train dogs to give up, that they would learn helplessness, that we were born hopeful and then life beats us down and we give up. Just a couple of years ago, these same researchers completely changed their mind. I saw the study. I watched it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oops. Sorry, just half a century of learned helplessness being in the lexicon. Who was it? It was Scott Barry Kaufman on his pod that first talked about this and learned hopefulness. Yes, exactly. Dude, fucking wild. Wild, wild.

1:14:04Nir Eyal:Because we built entire philosophies about why the poor are poor and why these conditions lead to, built out of this research that everybody thought was true. Well, it turns out that we don't learn helplessness. That's our default state. I mean, if you think about it, that's how we come out of the womb. For human beings, we are absolutely defenseless. We require our parents to take care of us. A baby doesn't have claws, doesn't have teeth, can't run away. We need someone to take care of us. So maybe what we think, perhaps the evolutionary adaptation, is that you want, when a baby is in danger, you want a baby to be passive and helpless so that they can be taken care of, perhaps, and that there is safety in passivity, because safety is what you know, right?

1:14:50Nir Eyal:So there is this fight, flight, or freeze response. And so that freeze response is that passivity response. What that means, however, is that we have to learn hope. We have to learn hope. I mean, it would kind of make sense that in a tribal environment, you almost don't want people to be too radical. Like if you think, you know, if you don't want too many people to challenge the tribe chief and to, you know, think that they can change things up, you kind of want stability in a society. So maybe that's where that comes from. I don't really know. I'm not an evolutionary psychologist. But what we do know is that there is a circuit in the brain that's Seligman called the hope circuit that is how we learn our agency, that we have to learn through tiny steps what is possible, what we can do.

1:15:33Nir Eyal:But that must be, in fact, taught. George, my housemate, is currently writing his book, which is all about agency. and uh the the idea that the idea that you don't always you're not always in control but you can believe that you are to me like because i'm just hearing him unload these stories over and over again there's another one from um johan harry did you look at that study of the pain wand was it in the 1800s? So there was a special wand where it was wood wrapped in metal with wires around it and a special electricity box. Oh, the mesmerism stuff. Is that what this is? And they'd wave it over people and then they slowly they slowly took away one element of the wand and they took away they unplugged the electricity then they took away the box then they took away the wires then they took away the metal then they took away the wood and it was just a guy waving his hand over patients and it had the same effect.

1:16:37Nir Eyal:Yeah, yeah. I mean, I used to poo-poo this stuff and think, oh, this is crazy. These are stupid people. They're gullible. I don't say that stuff anymore because if it works and it's cheap and it's not hurting anybody, maybe it's okay. Maybe those placebo pills that are on sale on Amazon are not such a bad idea. I'll give you another one about a non-pharmaceutical one that blew my mind. Do you know the story of Serena Williams at Wimbledon and her coach Patrick? Have you heard about this one? No, no. So Serena Williams was not doing well at Wimbledon. She was going to lose. And her coach comes up to her and he says, I have some amazing news for you.

1:17:15Nir Eyal:When you rush the net, you make 80 % of the points. She says, what are you talking about? I suck at the net. He's like, wait, look, hey, I don't, you know, the stats don't lie. The stats said that when you rush the net, you make 80 % of the points. Now, what he had noticed is that she was lying to herself. She was already delusional. Her confidence was broken because she wasn't doing well, and she wasn't doing what she had to do. And so she was telling a story in her head. She had a limiting belief that I shouldn't rush the net. So he knows this. He can see it in his player. And he tells her what turns out to be 100 % fabrication.

1:17:53Nir Eyal:It's not true. She is not scoring 80 % of the points when she rushes the net. he tells her this he says can't lie with the stats she then goes on to start rushing the net and turns out wins wimbledon so he likes to say he has this score where he says you see sometimes the lies can become reality and so that's that's the real takeaway here beliefs are tools not truths is it true that she wasn't good at rushing the net kind of sort of not really is it a fact no it's a belief is it true that she's good at rushing the net and scoring points kind of sort it's a belief, right? Neither are facts, neither are laws of physics.

1:18:32Nir Eyal:So based on what you believe, you can turn that belief into reality, not in a metaphysical way. There's no quantum whatever. It's all about motivation. It's all about what those behaviors get us to actually do. It feels like a lot of what, one of the big mechanisms for humans here is potential and understanding how much of our total capacity we're currently tapping into or not. I am not a morning person. My potential for getting up on a morning is limited. Well, yeah, there's circadian rhythms and there tend to be set points. Some people are morning larks and some people are night owls and so on and so forth.

1:19:12But your potential to do this is largely determined. So this is a good way to think about it. There is a window. This window is determined by physical reality. It's determined by how much training you've done. It's determined by how fit you are. it's determined by your reaction time or your height or your genetics or whatever it might be, right? This is the window. This is not within your beliefs control. Within this window is almost exclusively within your beliefs control. And that two-step model, I think, of potential and how it works really explains, people get it confused. They think that their window is way narrower than it actually is and way lower than it actually is.

1:19:55What they don't realize is they're just looking at a little microcosm sliver of what is a much wider window. And there is probably a lot more upside than that's available to them. What was that story about the dude with the snake? What was that one? Was he in Australia or New Zealand? Oh, Mortimer? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Did I put that in

1:20:19Nir Eyal:the book? I don't think that made it into... No, no, no, no. But I've heard you talk about it. And I think that it makes a lot of sense here too. Yeah. Oh, it's a good one actually. Now that I think about it. Back to the talk around, uh, about nocebos. That's a good one. Yeah. So, uh, this guy is a pain researcher, Mortimer. I think his last name is Gosley. I can't remember. Australian guy. He, he goes to the outback. He's on a camping trip and, uh, he gets bitten by one of the most deadly snakes in the outback. It was all kinds of venomous snakes. He gets bit by one of them, rushed to the hospital, barely survives.

1:20:49Nir Eyal:He's in days and days of excruciating pain. He, I think they had to put him in a coma. It was incredibly traumatic. Months, months later, I think it was like six months until he got the courage to go back to the Outback and go camping again. He's on a hiking trail and he decides to go by the river and he wants to go in the water or something. And all of a sudden he feels something nip at his heel where he got bitten the time six months before. He collapses onto the ground. He passes out. It turns out it was nothing more than a twig that scratched him. But he had this expectation. Again, his body had this belief about what that means.

1:21:31Nir Eyal:And then he produced this nocebo response, not because of choice. He wasn't a bad person. He didn't lack willpower. He didn't will it on himself. But he had been trained based on priors to have this hypervigilant response. And so that's exactly what's going on with many of these other conditions as well. what is your guide for secular rational prayer placebo prayer placebo prayer take me through the the protocol for placebo prayer yeah so i think you have to find what works for you and what uh worked for me was engaging in some kind of of regular practice and and what i was particularly curious about is what to pray for.

1:22:14Nir Eyal:Because I didn't think that, I didn't want to ask for stuff. I don't believe in some kind of cosmic slot machine that Santa Claus is going to give me, you know, give me this, give me money, give me health, give me wisdom, give me all that stuff. What I was asking for was not even for life to get easier. I was looking for ways to get stronger, to reinforce the tenets, the attributes that I want to cultivate myself. So patience, tolerance, gratitude, that's what I pray for. I pray to be cognizant of how incredibly lucky I am to live on this tiny marble dot in the universe that's swimming around in a vacuum of space, that we live in this time and place to even have this conversation with conscious awareness you're in Austin, I'm in Spain and we're talking over the internet right now like how amazing is this future or is this what I would have thought would have been a science fiction future and today we're actually living it so to be consciously gracious and humble about that that's something I try and remind myself through a practice of prayer and it turns out that doing that on your own has benefits of course it's also a form of problem solving so many times when I pray it's a little bit different from meditation So when I used to meditate, I used to meditate quite a bit.

1:23:37Nir Eyal:And I don't really meditate as much anymore. It's not that I'm anti. I think it has all kinds of benefits. But the role of meditation, at least the kind of meditation I would practice, was being aware of your thoughts and then letting your thoughts go. That's not what I do anymore. Again, not that it's bad. I think it helps lots of people. There's a lot of great research about how wonderful it is. I've kind of moved on to a point now where now prayer almost becomes a form of problem solving. where by just thinking, by just letting my mind think about the problem in a specific time and place, not in between tasks, not for a minute here, a minute there, but just to contemplate.

1:24:16Nir Eyal:Sometimes I even do it through writing. That can be a form of prayer for me. That problem solving of, and even religious people who have a faith tradition, when they have that conversation with God, many times it can open up those opportunities for them to make change in their life, that if they had not made that time to have that conversation with their maker, that they wouldn't have found those opportunities. Now, when you layer on top of that a community, that's amazing. This is what the Catholic priest said to me. He said, people come to mass and they come with all kinds of requests. They say, God, please help my daughter, help my business, help me heal, help me this.

1:24:56Nir Eyal:What they don't realize is that many times the way God answers these prayers is with the people next to you. That when you're in church with people in the pew who could help you with the business, could help you with your health, could help you with that relationship you're seeking to mend or build or find. And so there is a place for that community that I think many times secular people, free thinkers like I am, we miss out on. And so what I now do is to take part in those communities. Whereas before, I was so wedded to the fact that it had to be true, that I had to believe everything. And frankly, I think congregations also demanded that.

1:25:31Nir Eyal:Like I kind of felt that if I don't, you know, I don't belong unless I believe everything they tell me, I'm an imposter. But now I've kind of relaxed that, right? Like it's don't ask, don't tell. Nobody asks the Pope exactly what he believes, right? Nobody questions him. There's no faith test on the way out to ensure that you, yeah. Some places do that, but I don't want to be part of those places. It's a very utilitarian view of this. Look, it seems to make people live longer and be healthier and enjoy life more. Why would I not try this particular tactic? Okay, so you're doing it on a nighttime?

1:26:10You're doing it in the morning? Are you saying it out loud? Are you doing it with a partner? Are you doing it on your own? What have you found?

1:26:15Nir Eyal:I do it whenever I pass a religious institution. So if the doors open, I walk in. I didn't know you could do that, but you can. You can just walk in, even if you're not a member of that congregation, even if it's not your background, and you can go in and you can pray. unreal dude i uh i think this is a much needed book i think it's a and i appreciate that you managed to balance the you have got control of this with the way that you feel is not unreal and not fake and i think that walking that line is a really difficult one because it it switches people off immediately if they feel like they're being victim blamed for something that they feel and being able to empower somebody to you can make changes to this.

1:27:00And also everything that you're going through is completely 100 % real. That is a, it's not an easy one. So congratulations, man. Where should people go to check out everything you got going on?

1:27:11Nir Eyal:I appreciate it. Thank you. So my blog is nearandfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name. That's N-I-R-N-F-A-R.com. And we actually have a special bonus. We put together a five minute belief change plan, which you don't have to buy anything. you don't have to sign up for anything. It's completely free. We just couldn't fit it in the book. And that is at nearandfar.com forward slash belief dash change. That's nearandfar.com belief. Sorry, nearandfar.com forward slash belief dash change. Heck yeah. Nia, until the next time, get writing. We'll talk again. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting, but there wasn't a list of them.

1:27:57So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found. And you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying to get through a single page, go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die. That's chriswillx.com slash books.