Nir Eyal, Nir and Far: Behavioral design, habit-building, and the power of beliefs in productivity

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have a special guest with us today, none other than Near AOL near uh I mean I read all his books. I'm sort of a a fan there. You probably did too. So in indistractable is a great one. Hooked is another good book of Near I would describe him as first a professor then he got his MBA at uh at Stanford. He launched uh companies with his student uh students of his right.

So that was ad nectar. I believe it was a Facebook media advertising company. You founded other companies since then. But uh nowadays you're traveling. You have another book coming on. So near tell us what's up and uh what's good in your life right now. Thanks so much. Great to be here with you Charles. I appreciate it. Yeah. So uh let's see. So right now I'm in Singapore and uh uh enjoying my time here and next month I'll be in Paris for two months and I've got a few speaking engagements throughout Europe.

So I'll be there and then just a quick intro to my background. So I'm what you call a behavioral designer. So I help companies build habit forming products to improve people's lives through healthy habits. So I've worked with all kinds of companies from uh uh companies like Dualingo to help people get hooked onto uh language learning, companies like FitBot.

I'd use my Hook model to get people hooked to exercise. And so that really came out of my first book, Hooked, which was came out of a class I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which is all about how do you build habit forming products for good. And then my second book is kind of about the other side where we want to get hooked to certain products and services.

We want to get hooked to the exercise app, to the language learning app, to the personal finance app, but then we also want to disconnect and not be quite so distracted from other things that might take us off course. So not using uh you know social media so much, not constantly checking email, being fully present with our family, not drinking too much, not smoking too much, not eating too much, anything that is too much that is is a distraction from being the kind of person we want to become.

That's what indistractible my second book is all about. And now I'm working on a third book which will be published in about a year uh which is which is I think the most exciting uh work I've ever done. I'm I I it's really changed my life over the past five years writing this new book. This new book will be about the power of beliefs. And so that's still a year away, but I'm starting to share content on my blog uh in terms of the research that I've uncovered and how it's changed my life.

And how did you first get into this? Were you obsessed about human psychology, self-help? Was it to uh improve your own life? Like how did you get into this at first? Yeah. So, uh, one of my mentors, uh, Gretchen Rubin, who's a very successful author, she told me that research is me search. And so I've always kind of followed that mantra that uh I'm not one of these authors that teach you what I know.

I teach you what I want to know. Meaning that my curiosity is what drives my writing. And so for most of the problems I have in my life, and I have no shortage of problems. Everyone does. I just lean into those problems so that I can uh help myself, frankly, quite selfishly. And so most of the time, you know, I'll I'll journal about it. Maybe I'll talk to my wife about it.

Maybe I'll talk to one of my good friends about a problem I'm having. And if I still haven't found the answer, maybe I'll find a book about it or um you know, some guru and and and kind of figure out what what I need to do. But then every once in a while, maybe once every five years or so, there's a challenge in my life that I can't find a good resource for that doesn't help me.

And so that's exactly what happened with Indistractible. I read every book on the topic that I could find about how do I stay focused? How do I do what I say I'm going to do? How do I live a life that is not full of regret? because I was, you know, scrolling too much or watching too much or drinking too much or whatever the case might be. How do I live my life without regret?

And the books out there on the topic, you know, basically kind of said the same thing. You know, get rid of your phone, stop checking email. Well, that's that's not really useful advice. That's the kind of advice that maybe only a a tenure professor could give. But people in the real world, we need these tools. These tools are super helpful. So, that's not really a a good piece of advice to just stop using email, stop using technology.

It's stupid. So I really wanted a a practical solution and once what what I thought was going to be of kind of you know here's the tips and tricks and if you only find the right app and the right way to do it and if you find the right infrastructure and the life hacks turned out to be everything but that. In fact what I learned very quickly was that the root of all distraction is the root of all human behavior which is a desire to escape discomfort.

And that is worth contemplating for a minute because I think it's a huge misconception. I think most people think that human behavior is about carrots and sticks, right? Rewards and punishments. And it turns out that is not the right paradigm. That in fact everything we do, everything you do, all human motivation stems from a desire to escape discomfort.

So that must therefore mean that time management is pain management. I'd never heard that before. I'd never had that frame. In fact, money management is pain management. Weight management, if you're trying to get in shape, is pain management. Everything we do is about the desire to escape discomfort. Now, I know somebody's saying, "Yeah, but don't we do things because we want to feel good?" Absolutely.

But what spurs us to action, what spurs us to to feel good is the wanting, right? The craving, the desire, the lusting to feel good is itself psychologically destabilizing. That's a really really profound insight I think and and something that I kind of look at the world through today because now when I don't do something I know there's only one reason.

If I procrastinate, if I delay, if I'm not doing my best work, I know why. It's pain. It's just discomfort. It's a feeling. Fascinating. Right. And so that's that's kind of that was the genesis of uh of writing this book. Sorry. Right. It's why I start with the pain points when I do outreach. one of my main companies called the top leads and I always start with the pain point people uh they will want to ease to to not get into trouble uh before they want a reward they will they won't want uh to to risk their reputation for example and feeling more pain rather than they would want to get the stick uh the carrot at the end of the

stick right um but what about a guy like me and a bunch of um cos and founders that I talked to that go directly where the pain is you Like I'm in this office of mine here. I have a bunch of uh Spartan 50k medals 100k here. Tyron man there. Are we just wired differently? Did we do that consciously to just evolve with time? Because this life arguably is getting harder, right?

So you're sorry, just so I understand the question, you're saying why do people like you lean into the pain? Why do you seek the pain? Yeah. Well, the best cos and founders seem seem to lean into the pain. So have we just cracked the algorithm? you're probably like that as well. You seek discomfort rather than you try to avoid it. Is that the the number one uh tip that you would advise for people to scale in terms of uh living a better life?

So what's interesting in the research for my next book uh which is tentative tentatively titled beyond belief. What I discovered was that very few people I didn't meet anybody in my in my five years of researching this topic who was like the way you are in everything. So here's what I found. Uh this this story illustrates it perfectly. I was at lunch with a a a new friend the first time we had met and this guy I was super impressed with.

He had climbed Mount Everest twice. He was a public speaker. He did consulting. He, you know, talked to he trained uh Fortune 500 companies, an amazing guy, super, you know, the like the the epitome of willpower and determination and grit. And we sit down for lunch together and our food arrives. And uh this is the first time we've met, okay, we're not really close friends yet.

And I get a steak fritz. So I I get these uh these uh these fries with truffle fries on them, you know, so he can really smell them. And the whole restaurant can smell them. They smell amazing. And here's a guy who climbed Mount Everest twice. And as soon as my like literally the minute that my plate hits the the table, he reaches across and says, "Oh my gosh, truffle fries.

I love those. I can't resist." Right? And this we see this all the time. The person who's amazing at business, terrible with their family. The person who's unbelievably athletic can't manage their money. Right? The these these this dichotomy. So what we find is that people have very empowering beliefs in one area of their life and yet somehow it doesn't carry over which is exactly the insight I'm trying to propagate with my new book and I think it's it really changed my life that I think the way we're taught about uh personalities I think is fundamentally flawed that when you think about personalities as this is

who I am right and and of course uh evaluations like the MyersBriggs are you familiar with the MyersBriggs where you take this long test and it tells you what kind of person you are. Turns out it's complete hogwash. There's very little scientific validation of it. It's total [ __ ] Um it's basically a horoscope. And I think it's actually actively harmful.

Now, there are personality assessments, we call them the big five in psychology. There are uh personality assessments that do seem to be more consistent over lifetime. They are not what the MyersBriggs assesses. And there's others, right? There's anagram, there's all kinds of these personality assessments. And what they do that I think is fundamentally flawed is that they tell people here is what you are.

They might as well say you're a Sagittarius or a Pisces or Aquarius or whatever. And it has the same delotterious consequences because once you bucket yourself as this is who I am, you begin to live out that archetype. We know this is a fact. Yes. Right. And so what happens is that as opposed to thinking this is who I am, what's much more realistic in fact is that in certain scenarios you are that type of person and in other scenarios you can be a completely different person.

Why why does that happen? It's not because of the personality, it's because of your beliefs. And so it's like I adapt to these different scenarios to perform better, to survive better. Like we're great actors as humans. That's exactly right. It's very adaptive. Well, it can be adaptive that I want to be this type of person in this type of situation.

And so when we ask people about MyersBriggs, we sit them down. We give them an evaluation. They're thinking about their business context. And so in that context, yeah, that's probably how they they tend to behave. But in other context, they could be completely different. And so it doesn't serve them as well. Rather, when we look at our beliefs, our underlying concepts of what we believe is true about the world and our place in it, we can get much much more profound insights.

And so to answer your question about you know that certain people why do certain people seem to seek discomfort? Well again it's about their beliefs that if I'm the kind of person who uh the pain of not doing the pain of not proving to myself what I am capable of maybe not proving to others what I'm capable of that pain is higher than the pain of just running the race or the triathlon.

It's still pain. It's still pain. Even even if I am doing a behavior that other people would say, "Oh my god, that's so hard. That's so painful to me, there's still that that incentive of if I don't do it, it's more uncomfortable." Fascinating. I'm not sure if that's how I think. I don't do it for the medal either. Like my mentality is if I do this well, I'm going to be a better businessman.

I'm going to be a better husband. I'm going to be more patient. Uh, but you're saying this is pretty rare and I love No, no, I don't I don't think it's rare. I don't think it's rare at all. In fact, anybody who's a parent has experienced this same thing. Raising a kid is really hard, right? I don't know if you have kids. Harder than a hiring man. Exactly.

Really, really hard. We do it anyway, right? Because what we want, exactly what you said. It's not about the metal. That's an exttrinsic reward. It has nothing to do with this with sustained motivation. Very few people are doing it for the metal. you're doing it because of these these deeper reasons, right? That it's you're you're saying to yourself, I want to be a better such and such.

It's about that that belief about your identity, right? I want to be better at business because if I prove myself in this area, you know, I'm I'm telling myself something. I'm telling myself a new story. I'm giving myself evidence about my agency. And fundamentally, it's about control, right? That if I if I can control this, I can control other aspects of my life.

And so, it's the same. So we will endure a lot of pain. Most people in their life there's something that they will do where they will endure a lot of pain for some kind of longer term benefit and other areas where they they can't do it at all. It's too too painful. Uh and so what we need to do is to evaluate which beliefs serve us in that area where we're very very strong and which beliefs hurt us in those areas where we're weak.

Right? Because I think I rewired my brain to do these uh crazy events. But the last 100k that I did, I think I got a bit of PTSD and I'm I'm doing 110K this uh this year and I'm like pretty much uncertain. So, how should I go with rewiring my brain uh like Gogggin style, you know, to just like be motivated by this this pain that's coming my way that's unevitable?

Interesting. Well, you you've been through it a few times. What what got you through before? What what were some of the attributes, the belief that you held before? And it doesn't necessarily have to be about the iron man or the 100k that you did last time, but give me an area of your life where uh where you believe you're consistent, where you you're you you believe that you're you're good at it.

What are your beliefs there uh that that serve you? Yeah, business is definitely one that uh I can calculate and every year I'm earning more. I'm uh I'm getting more profits. I'm being more successful. Um and the white I I'm doing these ultras. I'm running them with an ex-coounder of mine and he's a great buddy and this is just fun. Nature is great as well.

Uh but I also think it's like an Iawaska trip without like getting any drugs, right? It's uh you just go through it and you in the end you have like great memories but yeah that that sort of affected me and the the underlying belief like I said is is very much like if I do this I'm just going to be a better human being and it's the fastest cheapest way to get from mental mentality A to mentality B.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I found in my research is that these um these beliefs that either hurt us or serve us, what I call limiting beliefs or empowering beliefs, they have these three powers over us. The first power is the power of attention that our beliefs literally change what we see. And I'm not I'm not speaking figuratively like literally.

We know that people who have beliefs around um a fear of heights see distances as further away. We know that people who are dieting What's that? I have a fear of heights. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So, you literally see heights differently than I do. I don't have I'm a private pilot. I don't have a problem with heights. We literally see those things differently.

We know that people who are on a diet see food differently. People who are on are dieting see food as bigger. Like literally physically bigger. So, our attention is manipulated by our beliefs. For entrepreneurs, this is a big one. We know that people who are entrepreneurs see opportunities differently. They they do what I call make their own luck. That that that that that they can literally see opportunities.

They see $100 bills on the floor that other people don't see, right? And they take advantage of those opportunities. So that's the first aspect is the first power of belief is the ability to see things that other people can't see because um uh of this power of attention. The second part is anticipation. that beliefs give us the power to expect certain things to happen.

And so this this uh closely relates back back to our discussion of pain. If pain is the seat of motivation, if all human motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort, how you anticipate that pain dramatically affects how you experience it. Because remember, pain doesn't happen in your legs when you're running. Pain doesn't happen in your finger if you get a cut.

This is not where pain happens. Pain happens here. All pain, all pain happens here. Now, there's two kinds of pain. There's the pain that comes from damage, right? And then there's the pain that's called neuroplastic pain, which is pain that occurs, I'm sorry, self-created. It's not necessarily self-created. It's it's learned. So, neuroplastic pain is a kind of pain that consists that that uh persists even after the damage has been fixed because again, it's just all in your brain, right?

All pain is here. Pain is a sensory response. It's not a physical response, right? So even if the damage is here, the the assessment is here. So we have these amazing stories of, you know, people in World War I, World War II who uh are dragging their their buddy to the medic and telling the medic, "Hey, my my friend is unconscious. Help my friend. Help my friend.

He's, you know, he's he's just been shot. Help him." And the medic looks at the guy and says, "Buddy, where's your arm?" And the guy looks down, notices he doesn't have an arm. Why? Because again, it doesn't matter. It's not necessarily about the damage. It's about the perception. And so this is why there's a difference that most people don't recognize between sickness and illness.

Do you know there's a difference? So sickness is what happens in the body. Illness is what happens in the mind. It's two separate things. So you can be sick and not ill. For example, if you have, god forbid, cancer, but no symptoms, you're sick but not ill. More interestingly, you can be ill without being sick. So you can perceive pain in the body without having anything wrong with you because of this response happening in your brain.

So if you can anticipate pain differently and so this gets back to your question about well how do I get myself over this very difficult occurrence? The people who you know the the the the ultra marathon runners they have these techniques where they put themselves in what they call a pain cave. Have you heard of this before? Yeah it's my house. There you go.

Okay you get it. So this is this so you actually well tell me how you do it. I'd love to hear from you actually. How does how does it work for you? Uh gogggins is one. So gogggins in my ears when I'm running. So it just justifies the full thing and I guess like positive imagery. So yeah and just distracting my mind I guess when I'm uh doing these things.

It's enjoying nature. It's chitchatting with my running buddy and I guess breeding is a good one as well. Uh, but the pain cave itself, it's it's a dungeon, you know, it's a it's a celebration of of pain. It's very masochistic. Right. Right. And what what I've heard from interviews with ultramarathon runners is uh that that they don't necessarily try and distract themselves, meaning they don't try and take their attention away.

They focus more intensely on the attention and observe it. And so this is actually the same exact technique we see with people who suffer from chronic pain. There's a technique called pain reprocessing therapy. So, people who have back injuries uh that are totally healed and yet they still feel chronic pain. Uh people with fibromyalgia, fibromyalgia is this uh condition that when when doctors don't know what the hell's wrong with you, you have fibromyalgia.

It's kind of a default diagnosis. And it turns out that PRT is incredibly effective. And all it does is essentially noticing the sensation. You can do this on a on a ultramarathon run or you can do it if you have back pain like I used to have. It first comes to observing that that that discomfort. Just observing it. Not judging it, but observing it.

Then the second step is assuring yourself that you're that you're safe. Because it turns out that the cause of pain, why do why do we have pain? Pain is a signal to tell us some there's some kind of danger. So it's essentially fear. So if you can turn off that fear reflex, if you can get comfortable with that discomfort enough to say nothing's harming me, nothing's going to happen.

Everything's fine. So, I have a little back pain. Big freaking whip. Like, it doesn't doesn't matter, right? That it's not necessarily a sign of damage. It's just a sign of a signal. It's all it is. So, getting comfortable with this fact, I say, "Okay, I'm feeling a sensation." And then by adding a bit of humor or levity, that's step three, adding a bit of levity to that, right?

Adding some some joy. So, you're saying like being aware of your surroundings, what happens over time is that the pain doesn't necessarily go away. It's not about turning the pain off. It's that the brain refocuses attention away from it and onto other things because it anticipates that nothing bad is going to happen. And so that's really the formula that we see.

And what's interesting that can help people who are doing incredibly painful things like in the book I document somebody who went under uh had a ankle surgery where they literally were cutting into his bone and he had zero anesthesia. None. Not even topical. Right. Incredible. And then he it was so easy for him that he did his colonoscopy the same way.

No anesthesia whatsoever. Oh my god. Yeah. Incredible. And it's all because of this power of anticipation and attention. And the third part that we didn't talk about, the third pillar of belief, the power is about agency. So anticipation uh uh uh attention and agency. Agency is this power of beliefs to help you do what you say you're going to do. So, when you feel in control, when you have power, when it's your decision, not somebody else's, not your bodies, not uh the environment, but you're going to focus on what you can do, that's an incredibly uh uh empowering belief to have.

Yeah, I love all of these. And I guess the breath work, it calms me down just to remind myself to breathe slower because yeah, I noticed, you know, I'm in Mexico and that I I took a new bath the other day and there there was these three big dogs barking and as soon as my body saw that, I saw my my stomach cramp, you know, and yeah, these stomach bugs when you're running,

it can really affect you because most of the energy comes from your gut. So, you really need to calm yourself down. I love the humor one. I started the founderhumor.com which is like a a newsletter for founders and it's really silly. It's built by AI. We're going to get to that eventually today. But to your thesis, it's sort of reducing the cortisol and uh increasing dopamine and serotonin so that the neural pathways can uh fire in the right direction and make memories and solidify.

Is that it? I I don't I don't like talking too much about the neurotransmitters because um uh I mean it's it's maybe a good metaphor but but very few people even the experts really know what they all do. I mean, it's it's okay if you need evidence as why why this works. And if that's a good metaphor for you, fantastic. I I like to get more in terms of these three pillars of what can I do in terms of how I'm focusing my attention?

What am I paying attention to? What am I anticipating would happen and how can I use different exercises to anticipate what I want versus what I don't want? And then finally, where do I have a agency and control? And so, it's not so much about, you know, that, you know, there's a joke in the neuroscience community, what's the role of dopamine in the brain?

The role of dopamine in the brain is to confuse neuroscientists because dopamine does like everything, right? Like some people think it's like the like the cocaine molecule. It's not the cocaine molecule. Some people think it's the reward molecule. No, not exactly. It's really about the molecule of desire. But anyway, that's that's a whole another discussion.

But if it's useful for you as a metaphor, it's almost like, you know, the way people use serotonin and dopamine these days, it's almost like, you know, the Greek god Zeus and uh Apollo and uh Dionices, like these forces in your brain. And okay, if that's a useful metaphor, terrific. I I find a lot more comfort uh in instead of you the problem with the brain chemistry stuff is that that doesn't always feel in our control like where's the button I can push to release endorphins.

I can't. What I can do is a specific exercise or a thought process that in the result of that the byproduct might be that I feel better. And does it really matter if it comes from endorphins or dopamine or serotonin? Not really. Very interesting. And at what stage are we in terms of brain research? Like we hear about Neurolink nowadays that is plugging stuff into brains.

There's neuro and PET scan that has been going on in the last couple of decades. Uh what would be the next exciting steps for you to discover more about what's going on in there to uh create more solution to help people think better? Yeah, that's that's a great question. uh the uh the state-of-the-art right now, which is incredible, is really about uh translating uh brain signals into uh motion, right?

So, giving a quadriplegic the ability to move a cursor on a screen in a way that they weren't able to do before or to, you know, to talk in a way that wasn't done before. And that's that's essentially, as I understand it, uh is around pattern matching. We're looking at, uh, you know, an algorithm looking at, hey, when these different frequencies are moving at a at a particular rate, that then translates into XYZ.

So they literally the way they train this is they show someone a picture and then they see what the brain is doing when they're looking at that picture and then when we then we do it in reverse. When we see that pattern that means that picture amazing but that's kind of one directional at the moment and it will be for quite a while. Remember we we don't know jack [ __ ] about the brain like in relative terms we we pretty much understand a lot about the body.

We don't know anything about the brain in terms of of I mean if you look at where psychology and psychiatry has come over the past you know 50 years compared to where cancer research and heart uh heart attack research you know cardiovascular research we we have been at a standstill when it comes to our understanding of the brain. We we don't understand consciousness.

Where does that come from? How does it work? Where does it live? We're just scratching the surface. And in fact, you know, we in 50 years, we've reduced the rates of cancer dramatically, which is the second leading cause of death. But mental illness has gone up. We we do not know how to cure mental illness. And I'm not I'm not talking about the the hardcore stuff like schizophrenia, depression, we have no idea.

Anxiety, insomnia, uh OCD, uh ADHD, rates of this stuff are going up and up and up. Now, part of that is because we are, I think, overmedicalizing society. A big part of it, too, is that we just have no clue. And so we're just kind of giving out prescriptions like candy. And many of these turns out are not only ineffective actually some of these prescriptions are actively harmful.

And so we are we we we need to I think the average person doesn't understand uh how how little we actually know about how the mind works. And I think we will look back in in in 2030 years and look at today as the dark ages. I mean the how we give out prescription medication to children and give everybody diagnoses for one thing or another. uh we you we're using very very blunt instruments today.

I hope techn new technologies like Neurolink will give us more insights into how how the brain is actually working because right now we have very little clue. And my thesis is that uh your best shot at helping people fix their own uh mental stuff would be your books. I think people still read books, right? and your content and all of that, but isn't the most promising and scientific uh therapies nowadays about psychedelics has isn't that like showing tons of promise?

Uh yes and no. Uh I think that uh like many things in the hype cycle, it's it's it's a fad. I think it can help certain people. I'm not anti, of course. Uh I don't think it's for uh for the average person at all. Uh we know that there can be very negative consequences uh if it's not done properly. I think it's really an like all pharmaceuticals should be the last resort.

Uh I think we we tend to in society because we've made so much progress when it comes to the things that pills can do in other areas of our life. We think that it can fix everything. And that's a big big mistake. And we've seen this again and again and again that uh we think there's some kind of magic pill, we take it, we're supposed to get better. And we should be we should be careful about anything we put in our bodies, but especially anything that messes with our brain.

So if there's a severe condition, right, that is we've we've exhausted all other options and we've got nothing left, of course, pharmaceuticals. What else can we do? But I think way too many people are jumping into whether it's ADHD medication, whether it's psychedelics, whether it's whatever before they do some hard work. And this is a real pitfall.

Like if you're [ __ ] going doing Iawaska or LSD before you haven't cracked a book on how to have a good relationship with your spouse, you're looking for the magic pill. Big mistake. You're going to create more problems for yourself. Now, what psychedelics do, and here's the big secret, they don't fix your brain. Now, even the people who will who who say psychedelics are awesome.

One of the things I hate about psychedelics is that people who are into them won't shut the [ __ ] up about them. And that tells you something, right? It tells you something because it becomes an obsession. It's not physically addictive, but it is psychologically addictive because I got so much progress. I did so much with them. Now, they just won't shut up about them because they want to tell everybody to normalize their own feelings about what they've just done.

What they've just done. Information bias. Exactly. Exactly. What they've just done is is is cheated. They went the shortcut route. What what does it eventually get you? What does what does psychedelics really do for you? Psychedelics take your perspective and they say, "Okay, your normal life, you've been seeing things this way. Now, look at them this way." Now, when you think about your mom without psychedelics, you kind of feel that the uh that person really bothers me and now I feel like a teenager and now I remember the things she did to me and why I don't like her.

And now we're going to think about your mom with psychedelics. Now you're going to see her with love and compassion and and and acceptance. Awesome. But guess what? You can do that without psychedelics, too. And I would argue prescribe an iron man. But I think I would prescribe them a marathon, a 21 care something. You would prescribe them a book because in my opinion, I mean, I've been the greatest of book worms.

I have all your books. I have like probably thousand books on my audible. And I think that books became some kind of shortcut. Uh uh but yeah, we're going to get to the AI part of it because nowadays I don't consume books. I consume uh very long chats with Chad GPT and deep research which I think is amazing and apps like Perplexity.AI and so forth. But isn't a book a shortcut in itself?

Like I used to be that guy just buying all these kinds of [ __ ] books to try to solve my problems. And in the end, yeah, they did have an impact. But I think an ayawasco retreat is a way harder and and better commitment than a a book. It's it's really hard to do these things. It can be. And uh but it it it goes back to kind of what kind of skill are you developing?

And again, I'm not anti any of this stuff. Hey, if it works for you, do it. It's your body. It's your life. What do I care? But I think it's not I think it's become kind of sexy and trendy uh without the underlying without the underlying progress, right? And we've all seen these people. We've all seen these people who who turn a healthy behavior into its own addiction.

And I don't use that word lightly that an addiction is is a uh is is is a destructive dependency on a behavior or substance. And look, you can get addicted to all kinds of stuff. Of course, you can get addicted to to various drugs. You can also get addicted to exercise. You know, when you're at that starting line and you look around to your left and to your right, you're going to see people who exercise way too much.

Why are they doing that? Oh, yeah. Because they're trying to escape their reality through exercise. Because when they're in the ma mind state of this pain cave, that pain cave is much less painful than their real life. And they're running from something, not running to something. Yeah, I would agree with that. And 25% are addicts, you know, like a bunch of ultra runners and Iron Mans, they're [ __ ] addicts.

I can tell that. And and they're weird as hell. They're weird as hell. And you see people like this in the in the in the self-help community, too, right? A lot of my fellow authors are some of the most weird, messed up people that you've ever met. you can't hold a conversation with them because they're they're they're they're struggling with so much and they're tell that's the word the worst part is that most people won't are not upfront with their struggle.

a bunch of coaches I will tell you as well they become coaches to sort of fix themselves right but they they never really fix the the root cause but let's get to some of the stuff that uh you do but before we get to that let's talk about society right like how society is nowadays um I mean you you are you were born in Israel uh you lived in US I think US right now is quite [ __ ] up um I mean Israel as well to some degree I love Israelis that I probably 25% are my clients right now.

It's like startup nation. They're very good at starting uh businesses. Uh but yeah, they're also pretty good at u protecting their their own stuff, right? And uh there's war going on. US it's really divided, right? And I often talk on this podcast about uh social media, right? And how Facebook specifically uh [ __ ] the the full world at least a pretty high degree um in the name of capitalism.

So, if you could tell us about what happened back then with people's attention and Facebook, right, and and why Facebook was designed the way it is and how that upgraded to today with X, we've seen Elon sort of take over the the elections, right, and promote Trump and nowadays it's it's even more outrage and Trump is in second term right now. So if you could describe society specifically how US is right now what's the problem and what are your predictions uh with AI coming up in the mix [Laughter] that was a lot I know but that's how my brain works give me something more uh that's a lot that's like uh tell me the future of everything but give me something more uh specific if you can give me

okay let's let's give this another shot so um okay um Trump is in power right now and people are getting their uh attention hijacked the [ __ ] out. So, how can we stay sane? I don't use social media on my end. I do post in there, but I don't consume anything that's in there. I use AIS. I think they're they're way more educative and I I can feed way more off that.

Am I on the right course? Is my attention healthy right now? And uh how should normal people that are not not like me that get uh really angry reading all the [ __ ] there is on social media, how should they behave to stay sane and keep growing? Yeah. So uh this actually links a little bit to what we were talking about earlier is that we need to understand why we go off track.

Why do we get distracted? So let let's define what is distraction. The best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction? Most people tell you the opposite of distraction is focus. But that's not exactly right. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction.

So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you say you want to do. Things that you're doing with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite is anything that is not that. Anything that is not what you said you would do, which is distraction.

So it really comes down to one word and that one word is intent. So I am not going to be one of these people who tells you, "Oh, Facebook is the source of all of our problems and Trump did this and Elon did this and blah blah blah blah blah." Stupid. What? Like talk about agency. We talked about the three powers of belief. When you believe that something else is doing this to you, that the source of all these problems is somebody else, you're giving away your agency.

You're making your life miserable. Rather, what you want to do is to figure out what do you have control over? What what kind of change can you affect with yourself, with your family, with your relationships, with your community who you know it people get so addicted, back to this term addiction, they get addicted to the news. Why we call them news junkies, right?

Why do they do that? And by the way, it's not social media. It's I think Fox News and CNN and BBC and Al Jazer are way worse than what you see on Facebook and and and Instagram. at least then I can tailor my feed and get, you know, different opinions as opposed to what the editors at the New York Times or CNN or Fox News tell me all day long, right?

Nobody talks about old media. They're just as much giving you, I mean, uh, onesided perspective, at least on social media, I can decide to see both sides of the argument. So, in that respect, I think it's much much better. But, you know, they don't tell you, hey, you've had enough news. You know, the BBC or Alazer is not going to say, hey, you know, you should get a different perspective here.

No, they're not going to tell you that. They're not going to tell you've had enough. How come nobody's complaining about them? They're just as dangerous. So what we need to do is to ask for ourselves when we think about our media diet. Are we serving the media or is the media serving us? And for most of us, we are serving the media. You know, all these companies, social media, old media, legacy media, all media is monetizing your eyeballs into dollars.

And CNN and Fox News and Alazer and BBC are in the same business as Facebook. It's the same business. They are selling your attention to advertisers. So, are they going to give you what you need? No. They're going to give you what's going to get you emotionally excited so you keep watching this melodrama of wars happening thousands of miles away that have nothing to do with you.

They don't care if you waste your life away watching TV. That's what they want you to do. So, it's not just social media is doing it. No, that's the big lie. The big lie is that social media started this. No, all media is the problem. Now, does that mean media is bad? Absolutely not. It's wonderful. You should be informed about what's happening in the world.

But you have to do it on your terms and your schedule, not someone else's. So, the best thing you can do, if that's one of your values, is to stay informed about the world. If you only use the media when you're bored and tired and lonely, it's going to perpetuate that. It's going to make you feel more bored and more lonely and more tired and more angry because that's what the media does.

And it's not just social media. I'm telling you, you'll find the same crap on every media platform. Rather, what you want to do is don't use those media sites when you feel like [ __ ] Use them on a schedule. So ask yourself, how much time would the person I want to become, this is the definition of values? What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become.

How much time would the person I want to become spend catching up on the news? How much time? It won't be, oh, I'm going to use I'm going to check up on the news when I feel tired and crappy at the end of the day. No, it would be, you know what, I'd like a nice morning digest that tells me the big headlines so I kind of get a a grip of what's happening in the world and I don't want to spend more than 15 minutes on it.

Guess what? There are amazing tools today. I mean, there's so many out there that will deliver exactly that to your inbox every morning. So, that's a healthy way to consume media. That's where you are using media as opposed to what they want you to do is check every time I feel like crap. Right? That's called an internal trigger. An internal trigger is the source of 90% of our distractions.

These uncomfortable sensations. That's the wrong time to to use the media. And people that don't have values, identities, are they just outside of your ICP and you can't do anything for them? No, absolutely not. I think everybody the first step should be to define your values. That's actually the first step. Yeah. How do you do that? how you define your values.

So what are values? So my definition of values are attributes of the person you want to become. And then the best way to define your values is not to just sit there and say, "What are my values? Let me think about it." What you want to do if you really want to know someone's values. You look at two places. You don't look at their mouth. You don't listen to what they say because people say all kinds of stuff.

What you do is you look at two places. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time. That's your values. Oh, I like that in their interview. Yeah. It's how you spend your money and how you spend your time. Now, money, it's amazing because most people understand, you know, oh, I have to have a budget. Uh, I'm going to, is this a good purchase?

Is this not a good purchase? Oh my gosh, I have a coupon. I'm going to split the check. We're very, very stingy with our money, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be stingy with because money you can always make more of. You can always make more money, right? You can sell something, you can find a way to make more money. You cannot make more time.

I don't care if you're Elon or you're Bill Gates or whoever. I don't care how much money you have. You cannot make more time. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and those days are limited. And so we should be very stingy with our time and generous with our money. Most people are the opposite. They're very stingy with our money, but time. Oh, the media wants to tell me about some stupid war that I have nothing to do with.

Yeah, sure. Let me get all upset about that. We give our time to anybody who wants it. But we should be very stingy with our time and generous with our money because we can always make more. So, how do we determine our values? We sit down and we calendar. We look at our calendar and we ask ourselves, how would the person I want to become spend their time in these three life domains?

I use these life domains as a as a road map to help you fill out that calendar. So 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 ask yourself, how would the person you want to become spend time taking care of themselves? Now, what does that include? It includes uh exercise.

You know, people say, "Oh, what are your values?" "Oh, health. Health is number one. Health is so important." Okay, but is it in your calendar? If it's not, it's not one of your values. Then uh rest. You know, I used to yell at my daughter and say, "You have to go to bed on time. You past your bedtime." And then she looked up at me and she said, "Daddy, do you have a bedtime?" And she was absolutely right.

I didn't have a bedtime. Now I have a bedtime because I know rest is one of my values. The person I want to become gets good rest. Right? Uh if if you like playing video games, you like going on social media, awesome. Do it. But put it in your calendar. That's how you avoid checking because you feel crappy, those internal triggers, but rather, hey, it's on my calendar to check the news for 15 minutes or to watch Netflix or to play with my kid or to play a video game.

Do it. It's not the technology. It's not Facebook's fault. It's that you're not scheduling the time to go check Facebook. That's the problem. You should put it in your schedule if that's part of your value system. Then after you comes your relationships. Okay, this is why we have a loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that we don't have regular occurrences on our schedule.

You know, now that fewer people are religious, myself included. I'm secular. I don't go to church. I don't go to synagogue. I don't go to mosque because it's not on my schedule. Right? So, I've had to replace that with other social interactions. We need people in our lives that we care about and who care about us. And you can't give them whatever scraps of time are left over.

So, schedule time with your best friend, schedule time with your spouse, schedule time with your kids, schedule time to call your parents, put it on your calendar, just like anything that's important to you has to be on your calendar. Then finally, the work domain, okay, which is where people start, but actually is where we should finish. And work has two kinds of work.

We have what we call reactive work. This is how most people spend their entire day reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to emails or to to meetings all day long. Reacting reacting reacting because they they get habituated to well when I don't know what to do, my email will tell me what to do, which is awful. That is not how to be productive.

Rather, what you want to do is what's called reflective work. Reflective work requires you to work without distraction. And that's where we do our best work. Planning, strategizing, being creative, thinking for God's sakes, we have to do without distraction. So you must put that time on your calendar. So now what you will have is called a time box calendar.

And this is the only way to be indistractible because you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I'm going to say that again. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you feel like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much going on and I'm so overwhelmed and this is happening and my boss wants this and my kids want this and did you see what happened in the news?" I guarantee you it's because you do not have a place to look at and say, "Ah, that is what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

So you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. And the only way to fight that is to say this is what I'm going to be doing now. This is what I'm going to be doing later. This is what I'm going to be doing after that. Now it doesn't mean you finish anything. The goal of time boxing is not to finish. Big misconception.

You will never finish. That's not the point. The point is to work on that task without distraction so that you can see how long it takes you. This is the big problem that people don't understand with to-do list and why to-do lists suck is because to-do lists have no feedback mechanism. When I say, "Okay, my first task of the day, I'm going to write that presentation." What happens?

You work on the presentation for five minutes and oh, you know what? My coffee is empty here. Let me go get some more coffee. And oh, Janet's at the water cooler. Hey, Janet. How's it going? Amazing. And then you get back at your desk. Wait, what was I working on again? Oh, yeah, the presentation. I forgot. Whereas instead, what I do, what I propose, and what's worked really well for me, change the game, is I'm only going to work on that presentation for 30 minutes.

That's it. 30 minutes. I'm not going to finish. I'm just going to work on that presentation for 30 minutes. So that I can see, ah, okay, in 30 minutes, I finished about three slides and the whole presentation needs to be 30 slides. So that means I need to budget in nine more time boxes to finish the task. as opposed to what I used to do with the stupid to-do list method, which is work on every task for two minutes and your whole day is just emails.

Is then, oh my gosh, I didn't finish the presentation the night before. Hey, I'm so sorry, honey. I'm not going to be able to come home from work tonight. I have to finish this presentation. Is that my wife's fault? Is that my kids's fault? No, it's my fault because I didn't use this methodology that we know works. So that is the game changer in terms of figuring out your values putting turn your values into time and now you know the difference between what is traction things that you said you were going to do and distraction is everything else and this is a gamechanging practice in people's lives right I want to show you something it might cause you uh PTSD but let's do it so

that's my calendar um and usually that way I still feel very much at peace into that so yeah That's because I probably read your books and use your your meth your methods. But what about um stacking AI on top of that and constantly asking the AI like, "Look, I struggle with that to-do. I started the timer. I did it uh 15% faster than I thought I would.

Do you leverage uh some kind of AI in your tech stack to help you improve and be more productive?" It's funny you should ask that. I have not. I've resisted doing that because I wanted to I wanted to offer solutions that anyone can use. So my methodology is just Google calendar. That's it. That's all I use. But you can use a paper calendar. You can use any calendaring software.

Now recently, it's actually really funny you say that. Just yesterday, I started diving into motion. Do you know motion? Nope. That it's a it's a it's it's exactly what you were saying. It's an it's an AI powered calendar. And I'm not endorsing them. I am a small investor and so that's why it came up yesterday u because I like the value proposition but I have not used it so I can't endorse it to you but I'm working on playing with it myself to see if I should recommend it.

Essentially it does what what you said it looks at your calendar and said hey um you know if you're behind on this task it's going to automatically find where you can find more time to finish that task if it's a priority and it also informs your team. Like one of the one of the things I don't like about Notion and some other products is that it's it's very good in theory but not in practice.

Because if somebody is behind schedule or got sick or whatever, where's the process to then push everything over and find the time to do the task? Because you can have a million tasks and this is why I hate to-do lists. You have a million tasks, but that's just the output. For every business that has output, you need input. Well, what's the input for knowledge work?

It's time and attention. So where's the time coming from? You can't do the things unless you have the time to do it. And so that's what I think new tools like Motion, which apparently uses AI to figure that out, are supposed to do. Again, I can't endorse it, but hopefully I I'll have more information soon. And what about a tool that records everything that goes on on your computer and that could eventually be a better near?

Uh do you feel that AI agents are going to totally uh change the market and eventually you're just going to chill with your wife and daughter while this thing is working in the background? I I think it's already helping me a ton. So, I I created a nearbot uh a custom chat GPT bot that basically I uploaded my books and all my articles. And what's wonderful is when someone sends me an email and they ask me a question that I know I've answered before and I don't want to type it in up again.

Uh and so I'll basically just cut and paste their question into the nearbot spits out an answer and I I'll have to modify it a bit. It's never perfect, but it gets me, you know, 80% of the way there. Incredibly helpful. Um so that that's fantastic. It's, you know, AI is amazing at resurfacing what is already known, what's already been said. What it's not good at is making novel connections.

So, you know, for for this third book, I've used AI quite a bit for research. Unbelievable. So helpful. I mean, I can do in in an hour what used to take me a week of research. So incredible. Uh words smithing, unbelievable, right? If I give it an outline for for a chapter, uh it can do a really great job putting together, you know, I don't need to worry about should I use that or which, you know, I don't need to words smmith.

That's not my zone of genius. What it's terrible at is surprise me. Give me novelty. Give me something I haven't seen before. And for me, that's what I that's what I do, right? My specialty is taking this crazy story about this person you've never heard of and this study you've never heard of and maybe something you have heard of and putting it all together in a way that makes sense, that's compelling, that's memorable that AI is really really bad at.

Um, I think the the the the the long and the short of it is it's great at wordsmithing. It's terrible at novelty. And I guess the best test of this, by the way, and when I will actually be worried about my job uh because of AI is when AI can tell a good joke. So AI today can tell jokes, of course, but most of the jokes are puns, right? They're puns.

And I disagree with that. Yeah. Go check my founder humor uh newsletter. It is [ __ ] hilarious. Yeah. You just need to Yes. Uh I mean it is in the way that it is a joke that hasn't been uh done before. For example, me it's about VCs for example and their silly Patagonia vest for example. Uh, so I did prompted it the right way. Um, but it it is a new gag.

It is a new scenario. It won't come up with it. But I also had that with AI. I was like, AI AGI is going to happen when it this is going to crack funny jokes and it did. Um, I'm going to send you my best pieces of work. I'd love I'd love to see it. I I I so I need to be more specific. It's it's I think AI is very good at generative, right? Like it's it's derivative, I should say.

So if it's, you know, Patagonia is a known is a known thing about VCs. So it's really good at doing more of that. Is it good at doing something that's never been said before like a brand new like a a Dave Chappelle joke? Can AI tell a Dave Chappelle joke or George Carlin joke? It's not there yet. Uh if it has the data, it it does, you know. So just a data thing, but like we could argue has Near done everything like ver really novel?

No, you've started from a branch that was prior to you. Like we can't really create new information that that weren't there. Um, I know we're almost on time. I just I think what it does what I can do I think what humans will do for a while is the novelty of the connections that I mean AI is getting there. I I'm sure at some point it will happen. But I think the value that I add is not that I bring up new things.

It's that I bring up new connections between things. I think that's that's still valuable. Yeah. And especially the human part like you're you're good at like yeah connecting it with human minds and I think that AI is not going to be able to replace that uh in a while. Last question I want to ask you like um have you done uh everything that you wanted to have done in this life?

Have you are you like proud of what you accomplished? Like if you would die tomorrow like would you be like yep I've done everything and this life has been good. uh what's next for you? Yeah, that's that's a great that's a deep question. Yes. And I think uh the reason I can say that today, I would not have been able to say that before. Uh yes, I could die right now.

I I don't want to die. I really enjoy life, but if that were to happen, I'd be very very satisfied. Why? Because everything I've done uh in terms of my books has really about been about minimizing regret. It's exactly this question of when I look back on yesterday, on last month, on last year, on a lifetime, do I look back and say, you know what, I I did what I wanted to do versus what the media wanted me to do or what uh my culture wanted me to do or whatever.

I did what I thought was important with my time and attention. So, that's very much been deliberate. And what's next is that I finally finished this book. I'm handing it in next week. And uh I'll spend the next year or so um finding folks who are interested in this in this uh philosophy of of engineering our beliefs and that's going to occupy my time for the next year or so and then just spreading the message.

That was uh so good. Thank you Near for the the wisdom. So that was Near Aal. You can find him at nearandfar.com