Stanford Habit Expert: Why You Can’t Focus, Why To-Do Lists Fail & How to Become Indistractable | Nir Eyal

0:00Nir Eyal: We measure ourself by productivity. That is the wrong metric of success. Did I focus on what I said I would do with my time for as long as I said I would? That's it. I feel like in this day and age, we're all so distracted. Why are we so distracted? We talk about distraction. It's not a character flaw. You don't have a broken brain. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just that you haven't learned a skill. Nobody taught you how to deal with... That's all it is. I think that the cause of distraction is much more interesting and much more empowering than just blaming our phones. And what is that cause?

0:36Nir Eyal: Okay, so, you ready? Absolutely. Let's do it. Nir Eyal is a behavioral design expert, former Stanford lecturer, investor, and best-selling author. He is the author who taught Silicon Valley how to build habit-forming products in Hooked, and then taught people how to become indistractable in his second book. Nir has sold millions of books worldwide, And his most recent book, Beyond Belief, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Only 10 % of the time that you check your phone, 10%, is it because of a ping, ding, or ring? Wow. 10%. So what's the other 90 %? Internal triggers. So if 90 % of the time, it's because of boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety.

1:17Nir Eyal: If 90 % of your distractions are beginning from within, why do we keep blaming our devices? What should we tell ourselves in those moments so we don't give in into that external noise? I think this is the competitive advantage of the time we live. I think there are so few people who will just freaking deliver. We should be generous with our money because we can always make more, but stingy with our time. Because that is a non-renewable resource. What does that look like? It means asking yourself.

1:53Nir, for people discovering your work today, how would you describe who you are and what is it that you do?

1:59Nir Eyal: So I study human behavior. I'm a former lecturer at Stanford, the business school there, and later at the Hasselbladner Institute of Design. I've written three books that are all about the psychology of human behavior. So I wrote Hooked, which was how to build habit-forming products. Then I wrote Indistractable, which was about the other side, how do you break bad habits, not to the same products, but to different products. And then my latest book, Beyond Belief, is about how our behavior is defined by what we believe. And so if we are going to find our full potential, if we're going to live a life that is free from regret as much as we can, then we have to understand what really drives us.

2:36Why are these topics important? And if somebody stays with us for the duration of the episode, what do you expect them to learn? I think that what I've learned is what you need to know before you listen to any other self-help content.

2:55Nir Eyal: Because we live in an age with so much information. How many podcasts have we listened to? How many YouTube videos? How many books have we read? How many gurus have we listened to compared to what we've actually put into practice? A fraction. And we have more information than ever before. We know what to do. The problem is not a lack of information. we all know what to do. The problem is, why do we keep getting in our own way? And so I think by the end of this episode, people should have some very tangible tactics for what they are missing that's keeping them from accomplishing what they are capable of.

3:28I'm already super excited. I feel like in this day and age, we're all so distracted. Why are we so distracted?

3:35Nir Eyal: So it's not just this age, we've always been distracted. That in fact, Plato talked about akrasia in the Greek, the tendency to do things against our better interests, that was 2 ,500 years ago. So humans have always been distracted. We like to think that it's these devices. That's a very lazy excuse because people have always been this way. And you think, honestly, like let's say we got rid of the smartphones, right? Instagram shuts down, no more TikTok. You think people are gonna go back to, you know, reading Shakespeare and Chaucer in their spare time? No, most people will go back to frivolity, right?

4:07Nir Eyal: We've always struggled with distraction. It's part of the hardwiring of our brain. And so the reason we're distracted is not just the proximal cause of what's on our devices. That's new, and so that's what we tend to blame. And of course, that does have some responsibility. But really, it goes much, much deeper. I think that the cause of distraction is much more interesting and much more empowering than just blaming our phones. And what is that cause? Okay, so, you ready? Absolutely. Let's do it. So to understand distraction, we have to understand what is the opposite of distraction. So the opposite of distraction, most people, if you ask them, what's the opposite of distraction?

4:44Nir Eyal: They'll say it's focus. It's not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. If you look at the words traction and distraction, they're opposites. Both words come from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. And you'll notice that traction and distraction end in the same word. They end in action, reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. We like to say, oh, my phone distracted me, my kids, my boss, these things outside of me distracted me. But no, distraction by definition is an action that you took that pulls you away from what you plan to do. That's the definition of distraction.

5:22Nir Eyal: Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. So this is the first thing we need to realize. It's not the behavior itself. It's not checking TikTok or watching a YouTube video. It's not about the behavior. It's about intent. Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you want to go watch sports or hang out with your friends or read a book or scroll TikTok, it doesn't matter. That stuff's fine. That's not the problem. It's that you didn't do it on your schedule and according to your values, you did it based on someone else's values and schedule.

5:57Nir Eyal: So if you plan that time ahead of time, it's traction by definition. Conversely, just because something's a work-related task doesn't mean it's not distraction. This used to happen to me all the time. I would sit down at my desk and I would say, okay, I'm gonna work on that big project. I need to prepare for this presentation. I'm gonna do this thing. I'm gonna focus on it. Here I go. I'm gonna get started. But first, let me check some email, right? How many times a day does that happen to you? Because you say, oh, it's work-related. I'm checking email. That's a good thing, right? That's part of my job.

6:28Nir Eyal: I'm doing my email. But if it's not what you plan to do in advance, that is the most dangerous kind of distraction because you're justifying it to yourself saying, oh, that's a work-related task. It's okay to do. But if it's not what was on your schedule, it's just as bad as going on Facebook or putzing around, right? If it's not what you said you were to do in advance, it is by definition a distraction. So you have traction, you have distraction. Now, what prompts us towards those actions? We have what's called triggers. There's two kinds of triggers. What we tend to blame are called the external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings.

7:02Nir Eyal: That's what everybody says causes them to get distracted, these things outside of them. But studies have found, Alberto, that only 10 % of the time that you check your phone, 10 % is it because of a ping, ding, or ring. 10%. So what's the other 90 %? Turns out 90 % of the time that you get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of you. It's because of what's happening inside of you. These are called internal triggers. So if 90 % of the time it's because of boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, if 90 % of your distractions are beginning from within, why do we keep blaming our devices?

7:40Nir Eyal: There's something more to it. That does play a role, right? There is something there that we are turning to, and it's easier than ever to get distracted. But that's the proximal cause. It's not the real cause of the problem. So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you will always get distracted unless you know the root cause of the problem. Okay, so now to answer your question, what do we do about it? We work through these four points. So step number one, you have to master internal triggers or they become your master. So if you keep blaming the stuff outside of you and you never deal with the stuff inside of you, you're always going to find distraction.

8:16Nir Eyal: Again, it's a 2 ,500-year-old problem. Plato was talking about it 2 ,500 years ago. It can't just be caused by our phones. There's something more to it. So that's step number one, learn to master internal triggers. Step number two is making time for traction. How do you plan the time? Because you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you show me your schedule and you've got nothing on it, what did you get distracted from? Everything's a distraction unless you plan your time.

8:49Nir Eyal: but people don't know how to plan their time because people don't know their values. So what you have to do is to turn your values into time. And we can talk about how to do that. The next step is to hack back the external triggers. So that's the 10 % of the distractions that begin from outside of us. Even though it's only 10%, it's easy stuff, right? That's stuff about making your phone indistractable or your computer indistractable. That's kindergarten, it's easy peasy. The harder stuff is what about those stupid meetings you didn't need to attend? What about those emails that didn't need to be sent and received?

9:20Nir Eyal: Those are those external triggers we don't like to talk about, but we have to deal with, right? Our kids, we love our kids, but they can also be a source of distraction. But good news is we can systematically go through each and every one of these external triggers and find a way to hack back these external triggers so that they serve us as opposed to us serving them. And then finally, the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pacts. Pacts are what's called a pre-commitment device. So we can use these pre-commitments to make sure that we don't get distracted in the future because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought.

9:54Nir Eyal: This is one of the most important lessons I want people to remember. I'll say it again. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. What we're talking about when we talk about distraction, it's not a character flaw. You don't have a broken brain, right? We love to say, oh, I probably have ADHD, which I have ADHD. We love to say, oh, I probably have undiagnosed this or that. Most people, the vast majority of people, that's not the problem. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not a bad person. It's just that you haven't learned a skill. Nobody taught you how to deal with your impulses. That's all it is.

10:22Nir Eyal: It's just an impulse control issue. But if you leave it to the last minute, they're gonna get you, right? If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone every night, the first thing you reach for in the morning before you say hello to your loved one is gonna be your phone, right? If you're on a diet and the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're gonna eat it. It's too late. But if you plan ahead, there is no distraction you can't overcome. So that's how you do it. So basically, when we're distracted is when we're doing things without intention.

10:56Nir Eyal: So distraction, by definition, is any action that is not what you intended to do beforehand. So it's not about the action itself. So if you want to watch TV, if you want to take a walk, if you want to go on social media, great, do it. There's nothing wrong with those behaviors. but people get so fixated on, oh, social media and video games bad, but watching football on TV, that's okay? Why exactly? They're both pastimes. What's wrong with them? Because my now wrong understanding of this was that based on how technologies, including social media, are designed, they're shortening my attention span and they're keeping me hooked and engaged.

11:34So then that's basically my destruction. but what you're saying is that it's okay to use those things as long as you have control over when you use them.

11:43Nir Eyal: That's right. You're deciding in advance how you will use them and that's according to your values. So what are values? Values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. Attributes of the person you want to become. Not the person you are, you want to become. Exactly, because it's about how you plan to spend your time in the future. You know, we're so cheap with our money, right? When it comes to money, we clip coupons and we put our money in a safe and a bank so nobody can touch it. And we look for deals and sales and we'll do anything to save a buck somewhere. But when it comes to our time, just give it away, right?

12:24Nir Eyal: Whoever wants it, whenever they want it, sure. You know, some silly thing in the news that's got nothing to do with me, sure. Some rumor, okay. hey, you know, some stupid thing that takes up my time. Yeah, give it away, give it away, give it away. The problem is that with time, you cannot make more of. Money, you can always make more money. You can always find a way to make more money. But I don't care how rich you are. If you're Elon Musk or Bill Gates, you cannot make more time. We all get 24 hours in a day. So most people are stingy with their money and generous with their time. We should be exactly the opposite.

12:58Nir Eyal: We should be generous with our money because we can always make more, but stingy with our time because that is a non-renewable resource. What does that look like? It means asking yourself, how would the person I want to become spend their time? Just like how we have a budget for our money, right? If we have a limited amount of money in our bank account and we have to figure out, okay, I want to pay rent. I need my school tuition for my child. I need, you know, I want to spend money on this, that, or the other. I have to think a little bit about that or I'm going to be in debt. I'm going to look back and say, oh, why did I buy this and that?

13:27Nir Eyal: Why did I buy all this junk? I should have spent my money in a smarter way. same thing goes with our time. That you have to turn your values into time. If you want to know what someone's values truly are, don't ask them. They can't tell you. They'll lie to you because we lie to ourselves. If you really want to know what your values are, if you want to know what someone else's values are, you look at two places. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. Whether or not they know it, that is their values. And if we don't spend those two things correctly, we will live with regret.

14:01Nir Eyal: That's what this is all about, by the way. What is this all about? Like, why should someone listen to this episode? For me, and I write my books for me more than anyone else. I can tell you about exactly why I wrote this book and why I was so distracted. For me, I want to look back on each day, each week, each month, each year, a lifetime, and say, you know what? I spent it as much as possible the way I wanted to, according to my values. So do you want me to go into how do you do that? Okay. Okay. So what you need to do is look at the week ahead. Okay. Blank calendar, the week ahead. That's the time you get to spend.

14:36Nir Eyal: Okay. You're only going to have that one week in your life coming up that you can decide how you're going to spend it. And what I want you to do is to think about how the person you want to become would spend their life in three life domains. The first life domain is you. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people, you can't make the world a better place. So you have to take care of yourself. So what does that look like? How would the person I want to become spend time taking care of themselves? You know, you ask people, what's important to you? What are your values?

15:10Nir Eyal: Oh, health, health, very important, health. Health is number one. Well, do you have time on your schedule to exercise, to take care of yourself, to buy nutritious food, to make sure that's part of your life? People say, oh, it's very important to be educated, to be smart. Well, do you have time in your day to read a book? When was the last time you read a book? If you think that's important, right, to educate yourself, to be a continual lifelong learner, is it on your schedule? Well, if that's one of your values, I'm not saying it has to be, but if that's one of your values, show me where you are turning your values into time on your schedule.

15:43Nir Eyal: It could also include video games and social media, right? I love social media. It's wonderful. I love video games. and it has a time in my calendar. 8 p.m. on weeknights for one hour, I go on social media. That's how I want to spend my time. It's in my calendar. That's how the person I want to become would spend their time. Along with exercise and taking care of myself and all that stuff, that's in my calendar. That's the you domain. Then, the relationships domain. Part of the reason I think we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that the institutions that used to have apportioned time in our schedule, we don't have them anymore, right?

16:23Nir Eyal: We used to have time for our community in the church group or in the Kiwanis Club or in the bowling league. We had time on our schedules when we would see important people in our community, people who are important to us. For many people, that's disappeared, but we can bring it back. So for example, I have my best friends all have time on my schedule every week. You know, relationships don't typically die. We think about like, why are you not friends with somebody you used to be a friend with? It's typically not because you got in a big fight. It's because relationships starve, right? You say, oh, I haven't talked to them in a few weeks.

17:01Nir Eyal: Now it's kind of awkward. I'll call them next month. And the next month becomes next year. Well, we haven't spoken in years. So maybe we're not really friends anymore. Whereas if you put time on your calendar, which I have, Jeff has time on the calendar, Travis does. We have time every single month. We have that time on the calendar where we're gonna check in. We don't have to coordinate that time. It's on both our calendars. I do that with my best friends. I do that with my wife. I do that with my daughter where we have a portion time together. My wife, for example, right after this, tonight we have a date night.

17:29Nir Eyal: It's on the calendar. We don't have to debate and find time. I know twice a week, Sunday morning walks, and we have one tonight as well where we're gonna get time together. So have for those relationships time on your schedule to be in touch with the people who are most important to you. Don't leave them to get whatever scraps of time are left over, if that's part of your values. The next life domain is work. And work can be separated into two kinds of work. We have what's called reactive work, and then we have what's called reflective work. Reactive work is what we'll be very familiar with, reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to meetings.

18:06Nir Eyal: That's how most people, knowledge workers, spend most of their time, reactive work. The problem is that we can become very intellectually lazy and just do that. Because in many ways, reactive work tells us what to do. I feel the internal trigger of uncertainty. Let me look at my email. Especially with AI. With AI, especially. Why with AI? Because we are outsourcing our decision-making to AI, right? Can be, can be, yeah. Yeah, but even before AI, right? I think people do this all the time. I used to, certainly. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be working on. email, right? I'm bored for five minutes, email, right?

18:41Nir Eyal: Let me check Slack. Let me let other people tell me what I should be doing with my time right now. Because thinking for myself, wait a minute, what's important to do takes work. So that reactive work time you need to have on your schedule. All of us do. You need time for email. You need time for meetings, but it can't be your entire day. Because if it is, I promise you, you're running real fast in the wrong direction. So in addition to that reactive work time, which you need to schedule, you also need to have reflective work time. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction.

19:16Planning, strategizing, being creative,

19:18Nir Eyal: thinking for God's sakes, requires you to work without distraction. So at least some time in your day has to be apportioned out and reserved and kept sacred for reflective work time. Now, here's what's gonna happen. You do you, your relationships, and your work. You put that time in your calendar. How much time would the person I wanna become spend on these things. Without a doubt, every single time, there will be not enough time for all the things you wanna do. And that's the point. That's the point. What most people do is they use this goddamn stupid technique of a to-do list. And to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity.

19:57Nir Eyal: Because to-do lists have no constraints. To-do lists become this list of things you want to have done, right? I want to do this. I want to do that. So I'm going to put it on my to-do list. When does it get done? I don't know. So what happens? You work all day. You run yourself ragged. You come home tired. You look at this to-do list. And here's all these things you said you were going to do that you didn't do. Liar. Loser. You're no good at time management. Look at all the stuff you didn't do. And so what we start doing is we reinforce this myth, this lie to ourselves that we're no good at time management.

20:30Nir Eyal: There must be something broken in our brains. Technology is causing our attention spans to shrink. No. There's nothing broken about you. It's the stupid time management technique we keep using. So putting things outside our brain, putting things down on a piece of paper, that's great. Or in an app, wonderful. But that's just the first step. The most important step is to decide when you are going to do it and what you will decide not to be doing. So now that you have that time box calendar and it's overflowing, you've got all these things you want to do, but you don't have time for, now you have to make some choices.

21:03Nir Eyal: Okay, and it sounds difficult. that now I do this every single week, Sunday nights, 9 p.m. I do this every week. It takes me maybe 10 minutes, right? Because now I've got this Google calendar where most of it is just repeating week after week. And now I can adjust and say, oh, you know what? I really want to meet with Alberto. So that means I need to move my time with my daughter and I need some writing time and I've got this meeting. So I need to adjust a few things, but it takes very little time. But that first time, when you can see what your ideal day would look like for the first time and actually live that day, let me tell you, People tell me, and I will tell you for myself as well, it is a life-changing experience.

21:39Nir Eyal: I cannot tell you how many people have never experienced even one day that they can remember that was spent the way they wanted to. Not pulled and yanked from this notification, this thing I have to do, this emergency, and this fire drill, but here is how I wanted to spend my time, and I did. It is the best. It's an amazing system. There's a bit more to it, but that's kind of the short version of how we turn our values into time. What would you say to someone who wants to test this time boxing methodology instead of the to-do list from tomorrow? And they plan the week ahead. And then in day two, they feel like they're a little bit behind and they start developing this feeling of failure.

22:18Because I set out to do this and you told me that it's fantastic, but it's not working for me. Yeah, great question.

22:24Nir Eyal: Okay, so here's the thing. The biggest myth about time management and time boxing in particular is that time boxing is about finishing things. That's what you said, right? I started working on it. I didn't finish it. Now I'm behind. That is a to-do list mentality. To-do lists are about checking off cute little boxes so I can feel good about myself. I used to, Alberto, this is so embarrassing. I used to finish a task and then say, hey, I finished that thing, but it wasn't on my to-do list. Let me write it on my to-do list just so I can check the box and feel good about myself. I did that too. Right?

22:54Nir Eyal: How silly is that? It's so dumb. Why do we do that? We waste time so we can feel good. Oh, wow, you're so productive. We measure ourself by productivity. That is the wrong metric of success. In this day and age, you need to measure yourself, not by how many boxes you checked off, because that's stupid, right? Because what happens? What happened with me? I would do the easy stuff, right? I would do this fun stuff, because I can check the box. But the hard stuff that took a lot of time, well, that's what I procrastinate day after day, right? And I wouldn't do. So rather, the right metric of success is to not finish anything.

23:29What?

23:29Nir Eyal: Not finish anything? How does that make any sense? The right metric of success is one thing and one thing only. Did I focus on what I said I would do with my time for as long as I said I would? That's it. Not did I finish, but did I work without distraction? Did I do what I said I was going to do for as long as I said I would without distraction? It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, doesn't matter how long, but nothing else. Just that task. Why? Why is that so important? One of the worst things that a to-do list does for you is that it doesn't have any feedback, right? So what most people do, they say, work on presentation.

24:08Nir Eyal: That's an item in my to-do list, right? Work on that presentation. Okay, I'm gonna work on that presentation. Here I go, I'm working on that presentation. Oh, I just got a Slack message. Oh, okay, let me respond to that. Oh, there's an email. And you know what? I really could use a refill on my coffee. Let me just go get some coffee. Hey, Janet's at the water cooler. How you doing, Janet? Wait, what was I working on again? Yeah. Right? We call this time confetti. We work in these little increments of time And then it takes us a lot of time to get back to that task, right? As opposed to, if I say to myself, I am going to work on this presentation for 30 minutes, and I don't care what happens.

24:39Nir Eyal: I got to go to the bathroom. Too bad. I'm working on the presentation. Janet comes over. I can't talk right now. Janet, I'm working on this presentation. I get an email. Nope, that's all shut down. Phone is put away. 30 minutes, only working on the presentation. Now I have a feedback loop. Now I can say to myself, hey, I worked for 30 minutes. I need to make this presentation, I don't know, 30 slides long. I got through three slides in 30 minutes. So that means I need nine more time boxes to finish the entire task. You see how much better that is? What most people do, they work on it for five minutes and they procrastinate, this comes up, this fire drill, this thing I have to do.

25:12Nir Eyal: And then at the last minute, what do they do? They pull all-nighters and they do crappy work just so they can hand it in. And they know they're not doing their best and they're totally stressed out. And what do they blame? Technology. No. Or even worse, they blame their broken brains. Also, no. It's that procrastination isn't a problem if you can plan ahead. Remember, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. When we plan ahead in a stress-free fashion, we can say, okay, I learned, takes me about this much time, so I need to budget in that many time boxes in order to finish the task. Now I have a feedback loop.

25:52During the time that we are exclusively working on a task that requires for us to not be distracted, if a thought arises that is a thought that would make me distracted, like I need to answer this email or I need to pick up the phone because somebody's calling me, I think sometimes the internal feeling that we get is of, I wouldn't say failure, but we don't like to say no to other people or other stuff because we sort of like prioritize that into our priority list. What should we tell ourselves in those moments so we don't give in into that external noise?

26:26Nir Eyal: Wonderful. So we jumped ahead to step two. Remember, step one was mastering internal triggers. So you said you feel bad when you don't get back to somebody. Go a level deeper. Why? Why do you feel bad? Because I don't want to, I feel like there's a sense of urgency, which perhaps it doesn't have merit, but when I receive an email or somebody calls me like, that's urgent. Okay. Why? Keep going. Why? What's the feeling? Because I don't want to lose momentum over responding that email. Deeper. Why? Why don't you want to lose momentum? Ultimately, there's going to be a sort of failure. So if it's a personal relationship, that person is going to get upset with me.

27:04If it's a professional relationship.

27:05Nir Eyal: Failure and someone gets upset with you. Why? Why does that matter? Because ultimately, you want for people to have a good impression of you. And they don't. Okay. Why does that matter to you? because it can impact your personal or professional life. Okay, why? So why does that matter to you? Because you want to have a good life. That would lead to happiness. And if it doesn't, if you don't have that good life, what? Then I'm going to be unhappy. Okay. And what's the feeling of, so you might be unhappy and the feeling is? Failure. Yeah. And fear. And fear. At the end of the day, it's just fear.

27:37Nir Eyal: Yeah, it's fear. They won't like me. This won't work. I might fail. It might not turn out the way I want. It's not real. Yeah. It's not real, Alberto. it's up here yeah so that's why the most important first step is to master the internal but we all get this right you've come across this oh my god why do you think i wrote the book this is me i needed it more than anyone else yeah uh i worked with a lawyer a few years ago who read the book and he said hey look great book i appreciate that you did this research it works for other people it's not going to work for me you see i have these clients they pay me a lot of money and they need to be responded to instantly and you know when they say something's urgent i have to get on it right and i said okay no problem let's figure out how we can deal with these urgent requests that come to you so often so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to ask your secretary if it's okay with you i want to give her access to your inbox and when you make those focused blocks of time okay we talked about earlier how you have to make that react reflective work time okay so put the reflective work time when you can actually concentrate when you can really think nothing's going to interrupt you and if an urgent email comes through your secretary is going to see it immediately.

28:40Nir Eyal: And if it's really urgent, she's going to come in and tell you right away. Because he kept saying, I have to constantly look at email because, you know, I'm afraid someone needs something urgent for me. She does this for the first day and he doesn't get any knocks on the door. And he comes to her and says, what, what, did you check my email? What's going on? How come you didn't? And she says, sir, there's, there's nothing here. That's, I can't wait for 30 minutes for you to finish your time block. Okay. Next day, same thing. Next day, same thing. An entire Their week goes by and there was nothing that urgent that couldn't wait 30 minutes or an hour for one of his focused work time blocks.

29:15Nir Eyal: Now, he did have time later in the day. That was the whole idea. It's not that he's never checking email. He's going to check email. But he checks it twice a day as opposed to 200 times a day. How did this benefit his life? Well, because now he could actually do focused work. He could think. He could create. He could plan. He could strategize as opposed to you can't do it for 30 seconds and then say, oh, let me check an email. or let me think hard about my strategy or my life or how I do something big, that requires conscious awareness and attention, right? You need to think without constant distraction in order to make your big moves, in order to know where you're going.

29:48Nir Eyal: Because again, if you don't do that, you're gonna run real fast, but in the wrong direction. This is what happens. People spend their entire life running on fifth gear, super fast, and then they look back and say, what the heck was I doing? That's not what I wanted to do, right? My business failed because I wasn't paying attention to the stuff that was right there that I knew I needed to do, I kept procrastinating on. My relationships fell apart because I wasn't putting the time and effort into people who matter to me. My health deteriorated because I wasn't making that time to go to the gym or to do something I really wanted.

30:18Nir Eyal: Or I became an ignoramus because I wasn't spending time reading quality books. That's what I'm trying to help people avoid, right? I'm not telling people how to spend their time. I want people to spend the time the way they want, the way they know they want, but they feel they can't because of all these distractions. And so what I want to do for folks is to liberate them like I've been liberated by becoming indistractable, by learning this methodology so you can do what you say you're going to do. Because it turns out that people love people who do what they say they're going to do. People want to do business with someone who delivers.

30:53Nir Eyal: People want to date someone who never flakes. People want to be in friendships with someone who's dependable and has integrity. But if we can't demonstrate integrity to ourselves, that we're gonna do what we say we're gonna do, I think this is the competitive advantage of the time we live. I think there are so few people who will just freaking deliver. If you say you're gonna do it, do it. And that starts with doing it for yourself, right? If you say you're gonna exercise, do it. If you say you're gonna write the book, do it. And it's not about willpower. People think it's about willpower. It's about some kind of super strength.

31:28Nir Eyal: No, it's about a system. It's about a methodology. Turns out we have lots and lots of research. There's 30 pages of citations in my book for exactly these peer-reviewed studies. It's all right there. We just need to learn the methodology and actually put it to use. Are all external factors distracting us in the same way? Or perhaps some of them, like technology, social media, distract us more because they are designed with that intent? Well, remember, every form of media is designed to hook you, right? Not the pot calling the kettle black, but what do you think we're doing right here? Right? Your podcast, the fastest growing podcast in Europe.

32:08If you were boring, nobody would watch.

32:12Nir Eyal: But you have interesting guests. You're interesting. You ask good questions. Why are people tuning in right now to know what's going to happen next? What's going to be the interesting thing that happens? What are they going to learn? What are they going to get out of this? But there may be a difference, right? So perhaps this could be labeled as healthy content because what you're getting away something that can be constructive in your life. But perhaps if you're doom scrolling on social media, there's a final in between constructive and destructive, right? Like shallow content. And do you think social media has any good aspects?

32:38Yeah.

32:39Nir Eyal: Of course it does. Paul Virilio, the philosopher said, when you invent the ship, you invent the ship wreck. So is the internet good? Yeah. Is the internet bad? Yeah. Is social media good? Yeah. Is social media bad? Yeah. Right? It's both. You get both. Now, if you use it only the way the media companies want you to, and I'm not saying social media, all media, do you think the BBC will tell you, hey, please go have a life. Stop watching so much news. Do you think FIFA is going to say, hey, stop watching so much football. You're watching too much. Are they going to tell you that? Are the alcohol companies going to say, hey, you know, give it a rest.

33:13Nir Eyal: Don't drink so much. No, they're not going to do that, right? You're in the restaurant business. Are you going to tell a customer, hey, hey, hey, hey, you're eating too much of my delicious food. Your job is to produce delicious food. It's the customer's job to moderate their behavior. Now, I don't want to live in an age without an Alberta who makes me delicious food. I'm so thankful I live in a time where our biggest problem is that things are too good and we like them too much. Are you kidding me? This is what we're complaining about for 200 ,000 years. Humans have starved to death. This is the first generation in human history where we have more calories than we have people to feed.

33:54Nir Eyal: The first time in human history where there's no mass starvation anywhere on the planet. All starvation is caused by humans, not for a lack of food. It's caused because of conflicts. We do it to ourselves. It's not because we don't have enough food. That used to be the struggle was scarcity. Now our struggle is abundance. This is a much better problem, right? This is a much better problem. So, oh, but the algorithms and the scientists and the psychologists and they're hacking our brains and they're addicting us. That is what they want you to believe. If I want to get you addicted, you know how I'd get you addicted?

34:24Nir Eyal: I'd give you a substance and I'd tell you that this is something you can't stop using. I think the social media companies love it, love it when we tell ourselves we're addicted. If you think about the word addiction, it comes from the Latin addictio, which means slave. And so when someone believes they're addicted, and there is such a thing, of course, addiction is real. But when someone believes that they're addicted, what's their incentive to do something about it? I can't, I'm addicted. I'm a slave. There's nothing I can do. So what do they do? Nothing. They give in. They give in. They say, well, it's impossible.

34:57Nir Eyal: There's nothing I can do. And so what I'm trying to fight against is to realize, look, something can be addictive and not addict everyone, right? You have a glass of wine with dinner. Does that mean you're an alcoholic? No. Lots of people drink alcohol. We're not all alcoholics. We have sex. We're not all sex addicts. We use social media. We're not all addicted to social media. What we are is distracted. but when we call it what it really is, when we say the truth out loud, I don't like that. Can't I just say I'm addicted? Because then it's a tech company's fault. They're doing it to me but when I call it what it really is, I'm distracted.

35:33Oh crap, that means I have to do something?

35:36Nir Eyal: So I'm not saying that these tools aren't built to be distracted. I know they are. I wrote the book Hooked. I understand exactly. I stole their secrets to write Hooked so I know exactly what they do to get you hooked and yet it's good. It's not that good, okay? It's not mind control. It's not addicting you unless you believe it is because then you do nothing to fight it. So here you go. I spent five years writing this book to tell you exactly what to do to become indistractable and it's sold over half a million copies. I know it works. It's helped thousands and thousands of people change my life.

36:08Nir Eyal: It just has to be put into practice. But you know what? Most people listening to this right now, they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but the products are definitely addictive and they'll do nothing about it. And you know what? They're right. For them, it won't work because they didn't do it. But if you can't sit down and say, wait a minute, is the fact that I'm checking my phone when I'm with my family member at breakfast, if you can't sit down and have breakfast with your kid without checking your phone, it's not the phone. It's not the phone. It's that you don't know how to deal with that discomfort.

36:41Nir Eyal: And look, this is not your fault. I wanna be very, very clear. It is not your fault, okay? You didn't invent TikTok. You didn't invent the iPhone. Not your fault. But it is your responsibility. Because who else's responsibility could it possibly be? Are we going to wait for the government to fix this? Are we going to wait for the social media companies to fix this? Hey, Netflix, stop making your show so interesting. Apple, your devices are too user-friendly. Is that what we're going to wait for? It's never going to fix that way. So we can do both. We can pass legislation. Yes, we can do this. We can do that.

37:09Nir Eyal: But also right now, today, right now, there are so many things that we can do to fight this problem. But do you think that we do live in a world right now that is becoming increasingly harder to not be distracted because companies are becoming better and better at understanding consumer psychology and then hence they're giving us what we need so then we're hooked forever? Well, that's the price of progress. The price of progress is things get better. That moves one direction, hopefully. Hopefully. It doesn't have to, right? If civilization collapses and we have wars, things don't get better. But we have been lulled into thinking that this is a problem.

37:47Nir Eyal: That's not a problem. That's progress. We want things to get better. We want more calories. But of course, the problem of a world with so much food abundance is that now we have new problems. Now we're not dealing with starvation. Now we're dealing with obesity and cancer and all these problems of excess. But remember, the job of technology is not to solve problems. The job of technology is not to solve problems. the job of technology is to give us better problems, better problems, which require new solutions. So what has mankind always done? Whenever there's a problem, right, what do we do? We do two things as a species.

38:23Nir Eyal: We adapt and we adopt. So we adopt new norms, new manners, ways of doing things. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I remember, and I grew up in the 1980s. I was born in the 70s, but I remember the 80s. and I remember when I was a kid, you know, your younger listeners won't believe this, but there was a time when you walked into everybody's home and there was an ashtray in the middle of the living room. Everybody, I don't know what it's like in Europe. In America, everybody had, every family had an ashtray. Even if you didn't smoke, you had an ashtray in the middle of your house because when people came over, right, they just expected to light a cigarette in your living room.

39:01Nir Eyal: Can you imagine if that would happen? If someone walked into your living room and just took out a pack of cigarettes and started smoking, that would be crazy, right? That would be ridiculous. And arguably, cigarettes are way more addictive than social media. Agreed? And so what changed? What changed? Was there a law that said you can't smoke in someone's living room? No, there's never been such a law. At least I don't know of any law like that. What changed? Well, I remember my mom, who never smoked. My dad used to smoke. He quit. One day, a friend of hers came over, took out a cigarette, and immediately thought that she could just light it up in the middle of our living room.

39:33Nir Eyal: And she said, no, no, no, no, sorry. We are non-smokers. If you'd like to smoke, if you could please go outside. And yes, at first the woman was a little offended. How could you tell me to do that? And now it's normal, right? Now it's normal. That's what we have to do when it comes to distraction. Agency. Yeah, well, and norms, right? We're adopting new norms, new manners of behavior. So I think, and I already see it happening. You know, I used to teach at Stanford. And when I first started teaching, in the middle of my class, students were on their phones. It doesn't happen anymore. It literally doesn't happen anymore.

40:08Nir Eyal: You don't, because people now know that's rude, that if we're having a conversation, we're going to have lunch. If you start checking your phone, you're kind of being a schmuck, right? Like that's not a very nice behavior to do. So people learn this kind of thing. So we've adopted these new behaviors. Smoking in certain settings, can't do that anymore. It's not socially acceptable. We adapt with new behaviors and we adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies. So remember I said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. When was the last time you heard about a shipwreck?

40:36Nir Eyal: Never, almost never do you hear about a shipwreck. Why? Do we sail fewer ships? No, we made ships safer. And that's exactly what's happening. So we are making the technologies safer and safer. Can you think of one other product? Name one product where the product helps you use it less. None. And yet your phone comes with Apple Screen Time, with Google Wellbeing. Instagram has a feature that will tell you, hey, a notification, you've used it for 15 minutes. Do you want to keep using it? These roadblocks. The devices come built in with ways to help you use them less. Does the BBC or the New York Times do that?

41:17Nir Eyal: No, they're media companies. They're in the same business. They're turning your eyeballs into attention or into advertising dollars for their sponsors. Same business model. They don't do that. These tech companies are doing that. Now, are they lily white? No, of course not. Could they be better? Absolutely, they could be better. And yet the tools are right there. right? If we do what we've always done. So I think we're going to be okay. We adapt and we adopt. That's how we get through this. I was thinking of some gym equipment. I was thinking I'm pretty sure they're designing it so we don't want to use them because they're so hard.

41:48Jokes aside. I feel like sometimes if somebody wants to break free from something, it helps if we understand the mechanics behind how that thing is built. So how is technology or how is social media built in a way that keeps us engaged and hooked? Sure.

42:07Nir Eyal: So I wrote hooked because I wanted to democratize these techniques. I stole them, right? I stole them from the Silicon Valley tech companies. I stole them from the casino industry that's been using this for a very, very long time. And so what I found was that many of these same psychological tactics are used in all kinds of products. And I wanted entrepreneurs to use them for good. And that's exactly what's happened. So FitBot was built with the hook model from day one in order to get people hooked to going to the gym, which I got into shape because of this app. It's awesome. Another, Duolingo uses the hook model to get people hooked to learning a new language.

42:49Nir Eyal: Financial services products, all kinds of products out there are now using the hook model for good. So that was always the intent. And the way to build a hook model is to start with that internal trigger, okay? What's the frequently occurring uncomfortable emotional state that your product is addressing? Loneliness, boredom, fatigue, uncertainty. What's that problem, that itch that your product is going to scratch? Then comes the action phase, the simplest behavior in anticipation of a reward. Open an app, scroll a feed, push a play button. A very, very simple action. The easier you can make it, the more likely people are to do it.

43:25Nir Eyal: Then comes the variable reward. and this is kind of the engine of the hook model. A variable reward comes from the research of B.F. Skinner, who was a psychologist who did these famous experiments. He took pigeons and he put them in a box and he gave them a little disc to peck at. And every time they pecked at the disc, they would receive a little reward, a little food pellet. And at first, Skinner could train these pigeons to peck at the disc whenever they were hungry. By the way, the experiment didn't work if the pigeons were fed. It only worked if they were hungry, reminding us that these tech products also don't work unless we have some kind of emotional hunger, unless we have that internal trigger, that itch.

44:01Nir Eyal: So if the pigeons were hungry, they would peck at the disc and immediately get a reward. This is called operant conditioning. So when you train your puppy or your spouse, if you do this, you get that, or your kids, that's operant conditioning. But then one day, Skinner had a problem. He walks into his lab and he checks his pockets and he realizes he doesn't have enough of these food pellets. so he can't afford to give it to the pigeon every time they pecked at the disc. He could only afford to give it to the pigeon once in a while. So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disc, no food pellet. The next time they would get a food pellet.

44:36Nir Eyal: And what Skinner saw was that the rate of response, the number of times a pigeon pecked at the disc increased when the reward was given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. Wow. So when you think about, you know, why do people love watching sports on TV? You know, some plastic ball or leather ball that's bouncing around on a court. Who cares? Well, we want to know what's going to happen next. It's exciting because there's uncertainty. Who's going to win? When we think about why we like watching television or movies or reading books or watching podcasts, it's about what's going to happen next.

45:08Nir Eyal: It's about uncertainty. The news, the first three letters of news, N-E-W, what's new? What's different? Slot machines, why do people gamble? It's because of games of chance. We don't know what's going to happen. Why do we scroll social media? Same story. It's all about variable rewards. We're just like those pigeons. The good news is we can use it for good, right? When you go to the gym and you're not sure if you can beat your PR or you can do an extra set or rep, that's also a part of variable rewards that we can use to get people to change their habits for good. And then finally, the last step is called the investment phase where people put something into the product that makes it better and better with use.

45:44Nir Eyal: So those are the four steps. It's a trigger, action, reward, and finally investment. This is how our habits are shaped and our tastes are formed. Can you give me this hook model as an example through Instagram so people can relate to it? Yeah, absolutely. So Instagram, so probably the internal trigger is boredom, right? Come home from work. I want to just veg out for a bit. People used to watch TV or read a book or call a friend today. The way they alleviate boredom is opening a feed. That's the action. That simple step of click a button and now you've got some kind of interesting content that's auto-playing.

46:16Nir Eyal: That's the action. The variable reward is what is in the content. Is it interesting? Is it funny? Is it depressing? Does it make you angry? Some kind of entertaining content that instantly solves the boredom. It entertains you with a click of a button. Now the investment. So how long you watch. Do you scroll to the next one? Do you like? Do you comment? Do you share? Do you save? All those things are giving the company data to make the product better with you. So Instagram is getting better and better the more you refine the algorithm. So it's gonna give you more of what it thinks you want in the future.

46:51If somebody wants to hack your indestructible time boxing methodology and they think, I like social media, but I'm going to only use social media with intention, so I'm going to use it 10 times a day. Is that not distraction? Why is it distraction?

47:12Nir Eyal: Because social media is labeled as distraction. Well, you tell me. So if the definition of distraction is an action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, if I plan to use it on my calendar, I'm going to use social media from 8 to 9 a.m. And then I'm going to use it on my lunch hour from noon to 1. I'm going to use it again from 8 to 9 p.m. If I plan that time, how is it a distraction? Is it unhealthy if we overdo that, even if it's planned? I mean, I don't think it's up to me to tell people what's unhealthy, right? Like, you know, I love London. I walk by the bars. We all know that alcohol, there's no safe quantity of alcohol.

47:53Nir Eyal: Is it unhealthy? Yeah, it's probably unhealthy, but I can't tell a grown person what to do with their bodies. I don't think I can tell a grown person what to do with their time. If you enjoy Instagram, can someone explain to me why spending an hour on Instagram is not good, but an hour watching football on TV is okay? I don't know. Why is that? I mean, you walk into a bar during the World Cup, during a match, and you try and turn off that TV. You're not gonna leave that bar with your life, right? And so I find that a lot of things that we do are just as engaging, just as potentially addictive, but we don't care about those things.

48:32Nir Eyal: We don't talk about those things because they're old. They've been around for a long time, so they're not scary anymore. And that's, by the way, that's exactly what happens now. I remember, you know, a few years ago, it was all about social media is melting your brain. Now AI is melting your brain. And then the next thing will melt your brain. You know, we've been doing this forever. If you look back at the history of moral panics, you know, when I was a kid, TV, oh, they called us couch potatoes because we watched too much TV and rap music. Oh, rap music. Oh, it's here. It's melting your brain and Dungeons and Dragons.

48:58Nir Eyal: Oh, that's terrible. You can't do that. That's totally melting kids' brains and Mad Magazine. And like the history of media is always something's melting our brain. Not that it doesn't have deleterious effects. We can definitely go overboard, but we don't necessarily have to. That if we know that we are using it in a way that serves us rather than hurts us, if we're doing it with intent, it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I mean, I love social media. It's great. You know how many people I've met? I mean, we were in touch through this technology. We should be in many ways thankful that we have it.

49:29Nir Eyal: I mean, we get to connect with people all over the world for free. And what we're paying for is access to us with ads. Does anybody not know, right? Does anybody not know that's exact same way that television makes money, that the newspapers make money? It's the same business. They're selling your eyeballs for money. Does anybody not know that? That's the business model. So does that mean that we shouldn't read the news because you could do it too much? No, it means we have to spend our time responsibly. If all you do all day long is worry about some conflict thousands of miles away that's got nothing to do with you and ignore your kids and your health and your job, that's also going to be unhealthy.

50:07Nir Eyal: So I think anything that we are not doing with intent, that we are not planning ahead according to our values can be a distraction.

50:20What would you say to someone who can't sit still and they feel like they don't have enough willpower to focus on one thing alone with intention? Is there something in your life that this comes up for? Is there something specific?

50:34generally when i've had this discussion with other friends some people feel like they are naturally have less willpower to to focus on one single thing and then they start outsourcing or blaming other factors like oh this is because of social media because it's keeping me stimulated and overly stimulated and that's why i can focus all right let me let me share us a wonderful case

50:55Nir Eyal: study i guess also the question is like do we all have the same amount of willpower no um but also we don't have the same amount of skill at anything. All right. If you practice something a lot, you get better at it. So we can all become very good at this. It's a skill like any other. So there was a guy in the case literature by the name of Mr. A. And Mr. A was anonymized, right? And Mr. A had this terrible breakup with his girlfriend. And he decides one day that he can't take any more. He's gonna end his life. So he goes to his medicine cabinet. he pulls out an entire bottle of antidepressants.

51:33Nir Eyal: He takes every single pill. He says, that's it. This is my last day on earth, okay? As he swallows the last pill, he changes his mind, and he decides he wants to live after all. So he runs to the neighbor's house. He bangs on their door. He tells them what happened. They rush him to the hospital. When he gets to the hospital, he collapses on the floor, and he tells the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. You have to help me. They rush him into the ER. They take his blood pressure, and they see that it's dangerously low. His heart rate is falling and he's going in and out of consciousness.

52:04Nir Eyal: They're trying to figure out what has he overdosed on and they take this pill bottle and they try and figure out, okay, what is this drug that he took that he's clearly having an overdose? And they notice that it doesn't say the name of the antidepressant, it has a phone number on the pill bottle. They call this mysterious phone number and they determine that Mr. A was in a clinical trial, that in fact he was in the control group. He had taken an entire bottle of placebos, a completely inert substance that could not have caused his overdosing symptoms. They tell Mr. A this. And within 15 minutes, Alberto, his blood pressure normalizes, his heart rate is back to baseline, and he walks out of the hospital completely fine, maybe a little embarrassed.

52:51Nir Eyal: So what's the moral of the story? if believing that you have overdosed when you haven't on an inert substance causes physiological symptoms in your body right his heart rate his blood pressure he was going in and out of consciousness if it's that powerful the power of beliefs when you believe I am overdosing you can't tell me that at least in some part our labels aren't our limits this is one of the most important things I learned writing this book is that we have to be very, very careful about these labels. We love labels, right? I am someone suffering from ADHD. I'm someone with low willpower.

53:32Nir Eyal: I'm not a morning person. I'm this on Myers-Briggs. This is my anagram. I'm a Sagittarius. I'm a this, I'm a that. Is it helpful or is it hurtful? Because clearly it's not 100 % any of those things. It could be. Look, I've been diagnosed with ADHD, but can I be 100 % sure that when I get distracted It's 100 % my ADHD. Here's what happened, by the way. I got my ADHD diagnosis. And at first it felt amazing. It felt great because it explained so much about what I'd been struggling with my whole life. And then something terrible started to happen. You see, every time I was working on something and I got distracted, I would immediately, now that I had this diagnosis, there's my ADHD.

54:12Nir Eyal: It's a chronic brain disease. And how am I gonna finish this paper? How am I gonna finish this chapter? I've been working on it. What if my editor is mad at me? And if it's no good, and why do I have to struggle with this? And other people don't. And what did I do? I would go down this anxiety spiral and all my attentional focus would be on my suffering, why I was cursed with a chronic brain disease. And none of that attention was focused on the task at hand. So this belief became reality. Now, can I be sure that it's 100 % my ADHD that distracted me? 100 %? Could it be 99 % and 1 % psychosomatic?

54:51Nir Eyal: Like just like Mr. A? 100 % of Mr. A's overdose was psychosomatic. 100%, he took nothing that could have caused the overdose. So it was 100 % in his mind. Can I be sure that it wasn't 100 % in my mind? Maybe it was 2 % of my mind? 3%, 4%, 50 %? I don't know. I don't know. Now, I'm not a doctor. This isn't medical advice, but I will tell you, holding onto the belief, I have ADHD and that's why I can't focus because I have a chronic brain disease. One, that's inaccurate. it turns out that many people can overcome the symptoms of ADHD. There's no blood test. There's no x-ray. And many adults, about a third of adults can overcome these symptoms, right?

55:29Nir Eyal: But you don't hear that. You hear it's a chronic brain disease. And so that's what you infatuate on. So just like your friend who said, I have low willpower. Do you? Is it like your eye color? Something you can't change? It's a fixed trait? Really? I'm not a morning person. Really? I'm having a senior moment. You sure about that? Why? Even if it's true, even if it's true, let's say that my brain is different, which I'm sure it is. Every brain is different, but let's say I'm, you know, some kind of neurodivergent. Does it help me to believe that I have a chronic brain disease or does it benefit me to think that I'm acquiring a new skill?

56:10Nir Eyal: Does it benefit you to think the tech companies are addicting you and there's nothing you can do about it and I have low willpower and I can't do it? Or does it benefit you to think I'm learning a new skill? I'm learning a new skill. Right? So I think there's a much better way to look at our labels. If we look at our labels as who we are, it does what we call identity foreclosure. This is a psychological term, identity foreclosure. When we believe I am something, that's it. That's it. Done. Case closed. Nothing else can be done. And of course, what do we do? Nothing. What else can we learn from your latest book?

56:43Because I fundamentally agree with you that that there are some beliefs that are limiting us?

56:48Nir Eyal: So I wrote Beyond Belief because I started getting some funny phone calls. And the funny phone calls came from people who, I do these office hours. Every week, anybody who's read one of my books, we can talk, I do an hour, 15 minute increments of four calls a week. And not every call, but maybe like one out of 20 calls, someone would call me and say, hey, Nir, I read Indistractable. I really like it, but it didn't work for me. And I'd say, oh, you know, tell me more. I spent five years on that book. There's 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. Let's go step by step so we can figure out where it didn't work.

57:20Nir Eyal: So let's start with step one. How did step one go for you? Mastering internal triggers. They'd say, oh, you know, I read that. I read it. I just didn't do that part. I'd say, okay, no problem. Maybe you skipped it. Let's go to step two. How did step two go? Making time for traction. Tell me how that worked out. I read that too. I just didn't do that part either. and so I kind of was scratching my head here why is it that people would wait months to talk to the author of a book who they had read but they wanted to tell me that the thing that they didn't do didn't work and that kind of started to fascinate me because I think it's very endemic of our times right I'm guilty of this I have bookcases full of books that I haven't put into practice I've listened to podcasts and videos and talked to gurus with great advice that I didn't do anything with why and so that's what beyond belief addresses and I think the the reason why is that knowing what to do and wanting the benefit isn't enough.

58:18Nir Eyal: That classic economics teaches us that if you want someone to do something, a behavior, you have to give them a benefit. So you have your paycheck so that you do your job. But there's something missing. Because if it was just that easy, if all we had to do was want the outcome and know what to do, well, we would all have six-pack abs and be multimillionaires. Because the information's out there. We know what to do, right? It's all the information's there. Read the book or ask AI, ask ChatGPT. you can get the answers. What's missing is that long-term motivation is not just about knowing what to do and why you're doing it.

58:49Nir Eyal: You have to have three things at the same time. You have to know the behavior, what to do, the benefit, why you're doing it, and most importantly, the belief that holds it together. So for example, if I don't believe in my boss, maybe I don't believe in their leadership. Maybe I don't believe in the direction they're taking the company. Maybe I don't believe that they're going to give me that promotion. Am I going to work hard for them? No. I'll slack off and eventually I'll quit. What we see much more common is if I don't believe in my own ability to do the behavior. I see that with my second book, Indistractable, all the time.

59:22Nir Eyal: People say, oh yeah, I heard your methodology. It makes lots of sense. I know there's tons of science that supports it, but I can't do it. And they're right. I could never make a time box calendar. It's too rigid. It wouldn't work for me. You're right. You never tried it. So when you believe you can't do something, even when you know exactly what to do, step by step, I know what to do. And you've seen these people all the time. You know, I call it talking protein. You see the people in the gym who are arguing about, no, you need this peptide and you need this protein and this whey and this creatine.

59:53Nir Eyal: And meanwhile, they're not working out, right? So we have to make sure that we not only know what the behavior is to do, why we want that behavior, but the belief is what holds it all together. That's what sustains long-term motivation. And so the book is really about these three powers of belief. The power of belief is to change what you see, literally to change what you see. I'm not talking figuratively, but actually what some people can see differently from other people based on their beliefs. Yeah, so there's a wonderful, maybe you can put this up in the YouTube video, show people what's called the coffer illusion.

1:00:23Nir Eyal: The coffer illusion is a picture where when I show it to one group of people, they see circles. Another group of people will see squares. Same image, same image. But based on where you grew up, you will see different things. Interesting. Yeah. I can show you a quick demonstration of another one. You want to see? Yeah. Okay. Here's another one. Take a look at this image. Okay. Have you seen this before? And we're going to place this image somewhere here, but yeah, I've never seen that image. You've never seen this image? No, I've never seen that image. Tell me which square is darker, square A or square B?

1:01:01Nir Eyal: Which square looks darker? A. A, absolutely. 100 % of the people, 100 % of the time, will tell you square A looks darker than square B. Okay. Okay? Yeah. Now, in fact, square A is not darker than square B. It is a fact. There's no trick here. Square A and B are the same color. You see, if I take two gray bars, it's still two gray bars, and I put them side by side, you'll see square A and B are, without a doubt, the same color. Agreed? no i still see square okay put your okay no problem put your finger in between square a and b like do this with your eye so that you see square or you can put it right over the image so you see they are in fact the same color no put it put it between the two okay you see they're the same color yeah okay it's it you agree with me it's a fact yeah there is no trick i'm not lying to you.

1:01:53Nir Eyal: No trick here. A and B, same color. Agreed? Yeah. Convinced? Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Now tell me, Alberto, which square looks darker? A. A. A. So you see what this means? We should all be freaking out right now. Yeah. Because what this means is that even when you know the truth, even when I convince you and you agree with me that reality is a certain way, without a doubt, I've shown you evidence, you agree, it is the way it is, your brain keeps lying to you. You keep seeing square A is darker. This should blow everyone's mind. We should be rioting in the streets. This makes no sense because if that little stupid illusion proves to you that your brain continues to lie to you, what else is your brain lying to you about?

1:02:54Nir Eyal: Everything. Everything. You don't see reality clearly. You see reality filtered based on your beliefs. You have always seen your entire life that checkerboards work a certain way. Dark light, dark light, dark light. That's what your brain believes the world should look like. and even when it doesn't look that way, your brain can't see it any other way because of what's called your priors, your prior beliefs. So your brain doesn't see reality clearly. Why? Right now, your brain is processing 11 million bits of information, 11 million bits. The light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, your brain is aware of all this stuff.

1:03:37Nir Eyal: It's processing all that information. To put that in proportion, 11 million bits, that's like reading 2 ,000 pages of text every single second. Imagine reading War and Peace twice every single second, 2 ,000 pages of information. But conscious awareness, what you call the real world, that's only 50 bits per second. That's one sentence per second. So imagine War and Peace twice versus one sentence. So your brain can't handle all the information. It just can't handle it. It's too much data. So what does it do? the brain looks at reality through this tiny pinhole of attention that we call the real world and so we don't see things as they are we see things as we believe them to be that that should that should give everyone pause because once you realize that that you don't see your own reality clearly how do we possibly see things through other people's eyes we have a relationship with somebody and we get in a fight and we say, how dare you say that to me?

1:04:40Nir Eyal: I can't believe it. When you argue, when you said that you meant to hurt my feelings and you intended to do that, you really think you know? You really so sure? We don't. We don't, right? So that's just one example. So that's one power of beliefs. The power of beliefs to change what we see. How can we change what we see? How do we change that? In many ways, we can't. You know, as many times you see square A and B are the same color and you look back and forth and back and forth, you will not see square A and B as the same color because you have this prior understanding that's very difficult to reprogram.

1:05:11Nir Eyal: So we don't necessarily need to change our beliefs. What we need to do is to ask ourselves not what is true, but what is useful. You see, facts have a specific definition. A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether or not you believe it. Square A and B are the same color, whether or not you believe it. The world is round, whether or not you're a flat earther. I'm sorry, flat earthers, the world doesn't care what you believe. The world is a sphere. You cannot change it based on your beliefs. On the other side of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence.

1:05:49Nir Eyal: God rewards the righteous. You're never gonna convince somebody with evidence who has that faith to change their mind, nor should you, it's a matter of faith. But between fact and faith is something very special, which is a belief. A belief is defined as a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. So what makes beliefs so powerful is that unlike faith, which people almost never change, unlike fact, which you cannot change, beliefs are malleable. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So instead of asking ourselves about these things about the future, these predictions, I'm no good at this, I can't do it, this is too hard, all these predictions about the future, what we need to ask ourselves is, is this belief serving me or hurting me?

1:06:37Nir Eyal: It doesn't have to be true. It has to be a tool that we adapt based on what we need. That's the key. And in fact, once I learned that, what we talked about, one of the powers of belief is the power to change what we see. A big one, the second power of belief is the power to change what we feel. Not just our feelings, but our physiological state. Do you know through the power of the mind, and I'm the least woo-woo, hocus-pocus person you'll ever meet. I need to see the data. And I have seen video of people undergoing surgery for almost an hour with scapel cutting into flesh. I've seen metal screws yanked from bone and people undergoing these surgeries fully awake.

1:07:22Nir Eyal: No anesthesia. And it happens tens of thousands of people have done this. It's not magic. It's using the power of the mind by focusing. Remember the 50 bits of information among the 11 million bits? These people have learned how to focus their attention away from the suffering and somewhere else in order to separate pain from suffering. It's amazing. And we all actually have that ability. How? Meditation? It's called hypnosedation. It's a technique that they learn, just like any other technique you learn. There's nothing magical about these people. They're not special in any way. We all have this power.

1:07:55Nir Eyal: They just have trained themselves to be able to refocus their attention. And just to be clear, I'm not doing it. But why do I tell you this? And I'm not advising people to do it. Because if humans can do this, there's nothing special about these people. They just learned a technique. And if they can do it, what does that say about the rest of us? Because when we do studies on what's the most important trait on whether someone succeeds at a goal, whether it's a health goal, whether it's a business goal, whether it's a relationship goal. Why do people not achieve their dreams? The number one reason, it's not intelligence.

1:08:32Nir Eyal: You know a lot of entrepreneurs, they're smart. They're not the smartest. A lot of them are mid at best. It's not necessarily resources. A lot of people who have tons of resources accomplish very little, and yet some people who start with very little go on to do amazing things. Turns out the number one trait is persistence. It's whether or not you quit. That is the number one most determining trait. So if we know in order to get your goals, The number one most important thing is whether or not you quit persistence. Well, how do you persist? Why do we quit? The number one reason people quit is because it hurts.

1:09:06It's hard.

1:09:08Nir Eyal: So you see why I'm telling this story about hypnosedation, about the power of the mind to overcome the pain of surgery? Well, if you can do that with surgery without anesthesia, what could we do for, I don't wanna go to the gym. I don't wanna work on that relationship. I don't wanna start that business. This is too hard. It hurts. It's all pain. Because if there's one thing I've learned in my, what, 15, 16-year career now studying the psychology of human behavior is that all human behavior is about the desire to escape discomfort. All human behavior, everything you do, everything you do is about the desire to escape discomfort.

1:09:43Nir Eyal: Even wanting to feel good. Right? Think about it. If I desire something, if I crave it, if I'm hungry for it, if I want it, I want to feel good. It's the wanting, it's the feeling bad that makes me go do the thing I need to do to go get the thing that makes me feel good. So all behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, which must therefore mean that time management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. Money management is pain management. It's all pain management. And how do we manage pain? We separate pain from suffering. Those are two separate things. And how do we separate pain from suffering?

1:10:27Nir Eyal: We do it through the power of our beliefs. This is so powerful. What is the third element that we can learn from your book? The third power belief is the power to change what we do. So see, feel, and do. And this is where the power of our beliefs change what we are physically capable of accomplishing. I'll give you a great example. Serena Williams, a few years ago, was playing in Wimbledon. And she was not doing well that year at all. And the reason she wasn't doing well is the same reason we talked about earlier was fear, right? That fear underlies our limiting beliefs. And what she was fearing was rushing the net.

1:11:00Nir Eyal: She thought she was bad at rushing the net. And in that level of tennis, if you hesitate for even a millisecond, you're going to lose the match. Her coach, Patrick Monteglue, calls her over and he says, Serena, Serena, look, I've been looking at the statistics. And did you know that 80 % of the time that you rush the net, you score a point? She says, what are you? I thought I was terrible at the net. He says, well, look, statistics don't lie. This is the best news of the day. And he's right. Statistics don't lie. But he did. He completely made it up. She was not scoring anywhere near 80 % of the points at the net, not even close.

1:11:34Nir Eyal: But here's the thing. When he told her that, he unlocked what was already within her. And the lie became reality. After he told her this, she did start scoring 80 % of the points at the net, and she ended up taking Wimbledon that year. And people listen to this and they say, wait a minute, are you telling me to lie to myself? Are you telling me to gaslight myself? Should I just be delusional? Guess what? You're already lying to yourself. You're already delusional. You think you see reality clearly? I just proved it to you. You don't. None of us see reality clearly. You're just picking the wrong lie.

1:12:08Nir Eyal: You're picking the limiting belief versus the liberating belief. Did you ever notice, by the way, you can't spell belief without a lie? There's a lie in every belief. Now, don't read too much into that. There's nothing mystical there. It's just a nice reminder that inside every belief is a lie because beliefs are not facts. Beliefs are not facts. Beliefs are tools, not truths. And what you believe directly impacts what you can do.

1:12:37Some of my friends are parents now. What should they do or not do so their kids can grow up without these limits in beliefs? Okay. Okay, the most important thing you can do is to do this yourself.

1:12:54Nir Eyal: That if you want to raise indistractable kids, you have to be an indistractable parent. You know, how many times I consult with parents all the time and they tell me, yeah, you know, I really have to do something about my kids. My kid is constantly using Fortnite and TikTok. Can you fix them? Can you do that? And meanwhile, they're checking their phones. Yeah. Right? And the same goes with our limiting beliefs. If you want to raise kids who are unshackled by these limiting beliefs, you need to do this yourself. You want me to show you how I did it? Let me demonstrate. People oftentimes want to know, like, okay, well, tell me something practical.

1:13:25Nir Eyal: How do I change my limiting beliefs? So I'll tell you what the area of my life that most changed for me when I started doing this research was my relationship with my mom.

1:13:39Nir Eyal: Because my mom's a very judgmental person. She's very hard to please. and one year, it was her birthday a few years ago while I was writing the book and I wanted to do something nice for her. So I wanted to send her some flowers. The problem was that I was living in Singapore and she was in Central Florida where I grew up and getting flowers to the other side of the world isn't so easy. I had to stay up till one in the morning. I called the best florist I could find in Florida and I found the best bouquet and I had them sent to her and I was sure that I'd do such a good job that she was gonna call me up the next day and tell me what a great son I am.

1:14:16Nir Eyal: That's not what happened. What happened was I call her up the next day and I say, hey mom, did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yeah, I got the flowers, but just so you know, they arrived half dead. So don't order from that florist again. To which I say, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers or something like that. And I'm embarrassed I said that, but that's what happened. Now my wife, who's my editor as well, that's Julie Lee, and she hears this entire conversation. She was on the birthday call with my mom, and she turns to me and she says, Nir, would you like to do a turnaround on this?

1:14:50Nir Eyal: To which I say, no. I don't want to do your hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo, touchy feely. I need to vent, because that's what we're told we're supposed to do. When someone hurts our feelings, we're supposed to speak our truth. We're supposed to tell them how we feel. We're supposed to tell them what they did to us, right? Turns out I knew enough about the psychology literature to know that that's exactly what we're not supposed to do. That when we complain about people, when we vent about them, what we're doing is reinforcing our beliefs about them. So we don't see people as they are, right? We don't see reality clearly.

1:15:24Nir Eyal: I just proved to you how we don't see reality clearly. We definitely don't see people clearly, especially the people we know best. We see people not as they are, we see people as we are. And so every time I said, oh, there she goes again, she's doing it again, this is so like her, I was reinforcing my beliefs and I would see more of that judgment and hard to please. So I took a step back and I said, okay, fine. I'll take some of my own medicine here. And I did a technique called inquiry-based stress reduction. And this has been around for several decades and it's now been scientifically validated in many, many studies.

1:15:57Nir Eyal: And it's a process that actually comes out of the work by Byron Katie, who was a woman who developed these four questions that then got turned into this methodology. And actually, if you look at it, what she did actually was channeling Aristotle from over 2000 years ago, that people have been doing a similar technique in different variations for a very, very, very long time. But I really like Byron Katie's example. So it's one technique that I talk about in the book that's really helpful at helping you see your limiting beliefs. So do you want me to walk through? Okay. So anybody listening right now, you can do it right now.

1:16:27Nir Eyal: And I encourage you to take out a piece of paper. You can do it right now, Alberto, if you what I want you to do is to think of where you're suffering in your life. It can be in any dimension. I've seen people do this. I saw a woman use this technique with a terminal brain tumor. She had brain cancer and she used that as a source of suffering. Or just write this down? Yeah, just write down whatever. I'm not going to ask you to share unless you want to, of course. And if you're listening in this episode, please do this. I think you'll benefit from it a lot. at least I certainly did. So where is one area of your life where you're suffering?

1:17:00Nir Eyal: It could be a relationship. It could be a goal that you're not doing that you've been wanting to exercise year after year and it keeps coming up on your New Year's resolution. You find yourself doom scrolling too much. You're annoyed that you get annoyed in traffic. It could be anything. It doesn't matter how small or how big, okay? And it's just for you. This is an exercise just for you. For me, what was causing me suffering was my mom. That's what was causing me suffering, my relationship with my mom. Now, the next question, why? Why are you suffering? What's the reason that this thing is causing you suffering in your life?

1:17:35Nir Eyal: For me, my reason, to give you an example, was that my mom is very judgmental and hard to please. That's the why. She is very judgmental and hard to please. So think about this for yourself, right? Maybe for whatever you wrote down, what's the why? You know, I need to exercise. I know I want to go to the gym, but I don't because I don't have time. My kids are really annoying because of X, Y, Z. My wife does this. My husband does that. My boss is a jerk. I don't know. What's the why? What is annoying to you about that? Where is the suffering coming from? That's going to be the belief we're going to work on.

1:18:13Nir Eyal: For me, again, it was my mom is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, now inquiry-based stress reduction asks us four questions. And this is, again, from the work from Byron Katie. She says, to ask yourself, is it true? Is it true? My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. That's a pretty dumb question. Alberto, when someone sends you flowers from the other side of the planet, the right response is to say, thank you. Exactly. We're friends. That's exactly what you say. You don't complain about the flowers being not pretty. You say thank you, right? Clearly, my mom is being too judgmental and hard to please.

1:18:47Nir Eyal: So question number one, stupid question. Let's skip that one. Question number two, is it absolutely true? Sounds like the first question, right? It's a little bit different. Is it absolutely true? Do I know 100%, no doubt about it, there could be no other reason that this is the reason why I'm suffering, right? Like I talked about that ADHD example before. Is it 100 % my ADHD? Can I be 100 % sure that in any way it's not just a skill I'm learning? is it 100 % sure that my mom is too judgmental and hard to please and that's why I'm suffering I couldn't be sure I couldn't be 100 % sure there might be another reason I don't know what that other reason might be but I can't be 100 % okay third question who am I when I hold on to this belief right how do I feel so if you're listening right now close your eyes for a minute and just feel that belief.

1:19:47Nir Eyal: Okay, for me, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. When I hold on to that belief, how do I feel? What's going on in my body? You're stressed. Stressed. Yeah, you're tense. Tense, yeah. For me, I felt like this 13-year-old version of myself that I didn't even really like. Right? Okay, now we're going to do the opposite. Fourth question. Think about that belief and ask yourself, who would you be without that belief? How would you feel? And this is just pretend. Okay, we're not asking you to change that belief in any way. We're just asking if the belief didn't exist, it never existed, it just dissolves.

1:20:26Nir Eyal: Okay, if you close your eyes and you imagine, how does my body feel right now? The belief is gone. It never existed. It's disappeared. Just pretend. How do you feel? Free. Free. What else? Liberating. Liberated. Light. Amazing. Amazing. For me, I felt like suddenly this load was lifted, right? I could breathe easier. Like I could literally feel my body relax. So four questions. What, two minutes? What did we learn? Number one, question number one, I was sure that this thing was a fact. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Fact. Question number two, I revealed, actually, it's not a fact.

1:21:05Nir Eyal: It's a belief. Question number three, that I'm suffering because I'm holding onto this belief. That's not a fact. and that four, I feel way better without it. Okay, so now we've opened the door to a possibility. We've opened a possibility to what's called the turnaround and the turnaround asks us to consider a very simple question which your brain is going to hate. So let me prepare you for that. Your brain is going to hate this question. Before I tell you the question, why is your brain gonna hate this question? Because your brain's primary job is not to make you happy. It's not to help you fulfill your full potential.

1:21:44Nir Eyal: It's not to get you rich. It's not to do any of those things. Your brain's primary concern is to keep you alive. That's your brain's most important job. So the best thing your brain can do to keep you alive is to keep you doing and believing whatever it is you did in the past. Because you're here today, aren't you? So whatever got you here worked, you're alive. So your brain is constantly pulling you into passivity. It's constantly telling you lie after lie after lie. Just keep doing what you've always did. Just keep thinking what you've always thought. Just keep believing what you've always believed because it wants to keep you safe.

1:22:21Okay, thank you very much, brain.

1:22:23Nir Eyal: Appreciate it. We're gonna try something else. So know that when you do this, you're gonna find every reason that can't be right, impossible, not true. But we're not looking for truth. We're just collecting a portfolio of perspectives. Kind of like with your stock portfolio. You don't put all your eggs in one basket. You wanna diversify. We just want other potential beliefs, okay? So here's what we do. We ask ourselves, could the opposite be true? Not something similar. Could the exact opposite be true? So let's take in my case. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. What's the opposite?

1:22:57Nir Eyal: My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? She said this mean thing which really hurt my feelings. How could the opposite be true? well maybe she was trying to be helpful could that be true i mean she she did thank me right she was saying a statement of fact the flowers weren't so nice it could also be that she was trying to make sure i didn't get scammed by this florist so maybe she wasn't trying to hurt me maybe she was just trying to be helpful could be okay so now i have two beliefs let's go for a third one the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please could be i am too judgmental and hard to please.

1:23:38Nir Eyal: How could that be true? Well, wasn't I the one who had stayed up till one in the morning rehearsing in my head exactly the words that I expected my mom to say to tell me what a great son I was? And when I didn't get that praise, when I didn't get those words, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? I was. Okay, now here's a fourth belief. The opposite that if my mother is too judgmental and hard to please could be I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. This actually turned out to be the most true because when I'd spent all this time and effort and money doing something nice and it didn't work out the way I wanted, I felt bad.

1:24:19Nir Eyal: I felt incompetent. I felt like I'd screwed up. And this is a very important concept in psychology we call misattribution of emotion. A misattribution of emotion is when we feel bad on the inside and so we want to attribute it to something on the outside. Right? I can't believe she said that. How could he do that? This thing happened in the news. The AI is taking our jobs. The tech companies are doing all this stuff outside of us. That's why I feel shitty inside. That's why I feel crummy. That's exactly what I was doing to my mom. So let me ask you, Alberto. Four beliefs now. Okay, I started with one.

1:24:53Nir Eyal: Now I have four. Which one of these beliefs is true? They could all be true. Which one is false? They could all be false. who cares? Who cares? We spend so much time arguing about, no, when you said you meant and you did this, who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. The useful one is the one that matters. Exactly. The first one, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I was sure that was a fact. That's the way things are. But with that belief, the only way I could stop suffering is if she changed. You don't know my mom, but I'm telling you, that's not going to happen. whenever we wait for other things other people outside circumstances to change so we can stop suffering if you hold your breath you're going to suffocate no doesn't work that way the other three beliefs i could do something with now does it mean we have to be best friends no doesn't mean we have to hang out every day no none of that none of that it just means i don't have to suffer so if i have now access to a different belief set that eases my suffering that increases my motivation because think about it how motivated am i to be in a relationship with someone who's judgmental and hard to please if i think that is a fact i'm not going to work on that relationship right meanwhile my suffering goes up she's not even in the room she's halfway across the world and i'm suffering because of that yeah suffering doesn't happen out here suffering's not here suffering's here all suffering is here and so that's an example of how we can take a limiting belief and find other potential liberating beliefs to increase our motivation and decrease our suffering.

1:26:31And this is so powerful because as you've mentioned, our brains cannot differentiate reality from imagination. And as I said, who cares? We just need to pick the one that serves us best. That's right. That is more useful. That's right. Beliefs are tools, not truths. Nir, my last question to you is my favorite question on the show because it's the only question that I get to ask to every single guest. Okay. And the answers are very varied. so there's not a right or wrong answer. If you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential piece of advice that we all must implement in our daily lives, what would it be?

1:27:10Nir Eyal: Have the intellectual humility to realize that you cannot see reality clearly. I think if we understand that, that it's impossible. It's impossible to see reality as it actually is. Because we interpret things through our beliefs. So having that humility, I think is a great power. Most importantly, in terms of how we see our own limitations, because we are capable of doing far more than we think we can based on our beliefs. This has been, thank you so much for coming. This has been so revealing in so many different ways. But perhaps the most important one for me is not only doing things with intention, but taking agency because I believe, and I can speak on behalf of so many of my friends and family members who fall under this category, including myself, that when we have a problem with something, whether it's being distracted over whatever it is or being uncomfortable with something, we tend to outsource or point fingers at something else, someone else, not looking inwards.

1:28:14And taking that agency and understanding that it is up to us to change our perspective of how we see things, because reality, from what you've been describing, it seems to be a choice rather than a black or white thing. Right, right.

1:28:27Nir Eyal: And they're not mutually exclusive. We can change things outside as well as inside. It's not either or. But what I used to do, I think what many people still do is we wait for the outside things to change. I think that's a mistake. That the easiest thing to do is to first change how you perceive your own suffering because who wants to go through life suffering? And we don't have to. So the suffering part can be a choice. Thank you so much. I've enjoyed it deeply. And for anybody that wants to follow your work, we're going to leave across all of our descriptions in every platform, a link to buy your latest book and also to follow the work that you've been doing over the last years, because it's been over the last two hours, incredibly powerful for me.

1:29:09But I cannot believe that if we dig deeper into what you've been uncovering year after year, we can only unlock a better version of ourselves and just feel more content with who we are and our own version of reality.

1:29:20Nir Eyal: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, and if people want to learn more, my website is nearandfar.com. Near is spelled like my first name. And I'll give you, I prepared a five-minute belief change guide, which anybody can use totally free. We couldn't fit it in the book. So I love giving it to folks who listen to this podcast. And that's at my website. And I'll give you a link for the show notes as well. Thank you, Nir. Thank you.