transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, what if you could do what you thought was impossible? My Google Drive is a graveyard of unfinished projects. Aborted novels, abandoned business ideas, deferred dreams. Maybe your drive looks the same way, or your filing cabinet, the wood shop in your basement. Wherever it is that your big ideas meet their quiet demise. If you're anything like me, you give up because at some point in the process, you come face to face with reality, with hard truths. You realize, who am I kidding? I'm not a novelist. No one would ever fund this. It's too late. The thing is, these aren't hard truths. They aren't even truths at all. They are beliefs.

Speaker 2:
[01:09] A belief is defined as a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

Speaker 1:
[01:15] That's Nir Eyal, author of the new book Beyond Belief. The thing about beliefs, Nir says, is that, Beliefs change.

Speaker 2:
[01:25] We can use the ones that serve us and discard the ones that hurt us because Beliefs are tools, not truths. That's the biggest revelation of this book.

Speaker 1:
[01:34] Our beliefs about who we are and what we're capable of are malleable. And by learning how to update them, you can change the course of your life.

Speaker 3:
[01:49] Today's episode of The Next Big Idea is sponsored by Fabric, Factor, Granola and Shopify. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance that you can get done today. Apply on minutes at meetfabric.com/nbi. Factor is offering listeners of this show 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Head to factormeals.com/idea50off and use code idea50off. Granola is a no brainer for people in back to back meetings. Try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai/idea. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com/nbi.

Speaker 1:
[02:39] Nir Eyal, welcome back to The Next Big Idea.

Speaker 2:
[02:43] Oh, it's a pleasure to be back. I'm honored.

Speaker 1:
[02:45] I think it's been six years or so, Nir, and you were one of the very first people we had on the show. You've been hard at work since then.

Speaker 2:
[02:52] Yes. So, does that mean I'm one of the first to come back then?

Speaker 1:
[02:55] Well, I think you put more love and time into this book.

Speaker 2:
[03:00] I'm kind of expecting the jacket for the repeat guests that you get if you get some badge.

Speaker 1:
[03:06] We'll work on that. Nir, for openers, I'd like to invite you to share a story. Daniel Gisler, a 56-year-old former derivatives trader, is lying on the operating table. A surgeon is about to cut into his ankle with a scalpel. Could you describe this scene?

Speaker 2:
[03:26] Sure. So, let me start three years before, where Daniel has a freak accident, where he shatters the bones in his ankle, and he has to have pins put into his ankle in order to let these bones heal. And now, three years later, he is on the operating room table, and he is about to have these pins removed. But in the interim, Daniel has stumbled across a YouTube video. And this YouTube video teaches him about the power of the mind to overcome pain. And he goes down this rabbit hole, and in a six-month course, he learns this technique called hypnosedation. And by the time he's done with this course, he is able to sustain this 55-minute procedure where flesh is cut with a scalpel, where metal is yanked from bone. He is able to undergo this entire procedure without general anesthesia, without local anesthesia. There isn't even an anesthesiologist in the room. And I'm telling you, Rufus, if I didn't see this video with my own eyes, talk to the doctor, talk to tens of patients who have also gone through these procedures, I would not believe it. You know, I'm allergic to anything that's too woo-woo, and there's a lot of stuff I had to exclude from the book that didn't pass scientific muster. And this is one of those things that I was dead wrong about, that this is real. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about Daniel's case is how unremarkable it is, that tens of thousands of people have also undergone surgery without anesthesia simply by learning to use the power of their minds. Now, I don't tell this story because I want people to go do surgery without anesthesia. I'm not doing it anytime soon. But it demonstrates to us this hidden power that we all have, in fact, to separate pain from suffering. It's kind of a Buddhist concept, but I think Daniel demonstrates it in that, if we think about why don't we reach our goals, right, whatever that goal is, professional, personal, relationship, whatever it might be, what's keeping us from reaching that goal? Well, the number one reason we don't reach our goals is because we quit. Simple as that. It's not resources, it's not intelligence, it's not skill level. It turns out to be we quit. It's not that success is guaranteed through persistence, but quitting guarantees failure. So you're much more likely to succeed if you persist. Now, why do we quit? The number one reason we quit is because it hurts. It's hard. I don't want to go to the gym. I don't want to work on that relationship. I don't want to do that effort because it's hard. It's suffering. And so if Daniel was able to undergo a 55 minute procedure without anesthesia, if he was able to use his power of the mind, focus through beliefs to overcome what would be excruciating pain for the rest of us, well, what does that say about our inborn capabilities? You know, people say, oh, well, there must be something special about Daniel. Maybe it's his genes. Maybe, no, he just learned a skill, just like learning to read or ride a bike. It turns out that this skill to separate pain from suffering is actually something all of us can do.

Speaker 1:
[06:28] Yeah, if our beliefs could enable us to undergo surgery without anesthesia, what else can we shift? I don't aspire to surgery without anesthesia, although it does have health benefits, but I have discovered that when I get into a cold plunge, now I'm a big sissy, so initially I get into a cold plunge and there's 30 seconds of yelping and my face knotted up like a fist, but then I have discovered that I can shift to an appreciation of the ability of my body to radiate heat from inside, and oddly the cold plunge can become an exercise in enjoying the warmth of my body, right? And all it is is a shift in focus.

Speaker 2:
[07:12] That's exactly right. So this is the first power of belief, the power of attention, the power of our beliefs to change what we see. So the three powers of beliefs, the first power is the power of attention, anticipation and agency, the power to change what we see, feel and do. And it turns out that our beliefs literally shape what we are able to see, feel and do. It's not figurative. We know that people who are on a diet see food as larger. People who are afraid of heights see distances as further away. How we shape our beliefs literally affects how we feel, not just psychologically, but physiologically. There are cases that I talk about in the book of people who cure chronic pain, cure fibromyalgia, cure these conditions that they think are lifelong chronic diseases. They are able to cure themselves, not of the disease. There is a difference between sickness and illness. So sickness is in the body. Placebos don't fix broken bones, they don't cure cancer. That's not how placebos work. Your beliefs will not cure cancer. But the suffering, the illness, which is always in the mind, is actually something that's highly malleable and influenced by your beliefs. So it's something that actually I think we should lean into more. I mean, if we have this innate power within us and we can practice that ability, you know, we know that 80% of healthcare spending is spent on illness, not sickness. Only 20% is actually on the underlying physical malady. 80% of healthcare spending is spent on the perception of that malady, the suffering that comes from it.

Speaker 1:
[08:41] Yes, and we all have these limiting beliefs, which you write, whisper to us in the background. That was resonant for me, right? It's involuntary. I'm a klutz. I'm not creative. I'm not a math person. It's too late for me to start over. What kind of limiting beliefs do you think are most prevalent? And how empowering is it to modify them?

Speaker 2:
[09:05] So these limiting beliefs, I think they get interpreted kind of as like positive thinking, and that's totally not what I'm talking about. In fact, I take positive thinking to task. There's a chapter in the book called The Negative Side of Positive Thinking, where I actually look at the research of why positive thinking and manifesting and even envisioning exercises, if they're done incorrectly, actually have negative consequences. They actually backfire. What I'm talking about is something very different. A limiting belief is a belief that saps your motivation and increases your suffering. That's the definition of a limiting belief. It decreases motivation, increases suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that increases motivation and decreases suffering. I guess the best demonstration of limiting versus liberating beliefs and the power of knowing the difference could be demonstrated by what happened with my mom. Maybe I'll share this anecdote. A few years ago, it's kind of a hard story to tell because it doesn't make me look very good, but I'll tell it anyway because I think it's important. So a few years ago, my mom is 74th, and I wanted to do something nice for her, and so I decided I was going to buy her some flowers. Now, I was in Singapore where I'm right now, and she was in Central Florida where I grew up. Getting flowers from Singapore to Central Florida is not easy. I had to call a florist and look at Google reviews and make sure that the exact right flowers that she would like would be delivered, and they would sustain the Florida heat, blah, blah, blah. I order the flowers, I go to bed, it's around 1 a.m., and I am assured that the next morning, I'm going to talk to my mom, and she's going to tell me what a terrific son I am. That didn't happen, Rufus. What happened was, I called her up the next day, and I said, happy birthday, mom, did you get the flowers I sent? To which she says, yes, I did, thank you. But just so you know, those flowers that you sent, they were half dead, so don't order from that florist again. To which I said, thanks, I guess I'll never order you flowers again. And that went over just about as well as you'd expect. Not so good. My wife was sitting right next to me and she heard this whole conversation. She was on the call for my mom's birthday. And she turns to me and she says, Nir, would you like to do a turnaround on this? To which I said, no, I do not want your touchy feely, hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo, I need to vent. That's what we're told we have to do. We have to vent when someone hurts our feelings. We're supposed to speak our truth. We're supposed to tell them how they offended us. We're not supposed to keep our feelings bottled up inside. So, I knew that that's actually a myth. That the research literature shows that when we vent, when we actually gossip about people or unload about people and vent about people, what we're doing is actually just reinforcing this effigy of the other. We don't see people as they are, we see people as we believe they are. So, I had enough sense to know that that's not what I was going to do. And instead, I used a technique called inquiry-based stress reduction. Now, inquiry-based stress reduction is the scientifically validated version of what's called the work that was developed by Byron Katie. And even she was channeling Aristotle 2,500 years ago, used actually a very similar technique, but she actually consolidated into four very useful questions. So, maybe I'll demonstrate here what I did. I first wrote down the belief. The thing that I believed was a fact and was causing me my suffering. The reason I was upset was because my mom was clearly being too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, so I wrote down that belief and then I asked this first question. The first question in Inquiry-Based Stress Reduction is, is it true? Now, Rufus, you heard the story. Back me up here, right? It's true. Clearly. It's a fact. That's a rhetorical question. I don't actually need your commentary here. It was clearly a fact that my mother was being way too judgmental, right?

Speaker 1:
[12:57] I am on your side of this, Nir.

Speaker 2:
[12:58] Thank you. I appreciate it. Enough said. Question number two. That's a dumb question, the first one. Let's go on to question number two. Is it absolutely true? Sounds like the first question. It's a little bit different. Is it absolutely true? Is it absolute means always, in all cases, there is no other possible reason why she did what she did other than she's being too judgmental and hard to please. Well, I couldn't say that, could I? Because there could possibly, maybe in some kind of alternative universe, maybe there's another explanation. I don't know what the explanation is. Fine. Maybe it's not absolute. There might be another explanation. Third question, who am I when I hold on to this belief? When I believe that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm short tempered. I'm not very nice. I'm kind of this 13-year-old version of myself that I don't really like. Fourth question, who would I be if I didn't hold that belief? If I had a magic wand and poof, this belief disappeared, who would I be? How would I feel? Just asking that proposition, I kind of felt lighter. I felt less angry. I felt like I could be myself, actually, if I didn't have that belief. So now, in just 30 seconds and maybe four questions here, we've determined that number one, the thing that I thought was a fact wasn't a fact. It's not an objective truth that she's too judgmental. It's a belief. Two, I learned that holding on to that belief was not serving me. It was causing me suffering. And that if I could somehow let go of that belief, I'd be much better off. I'd feel much better. So now, we do what's called the turnaround. The turnaround asks us not necessarily to change our mind because the brain hates changing its mind, hates it, hates it, hates it. So we're not going to change our minds. We're going to collect a portfolio of perspectives. We're just going to collect other ways of looking at things. That's it, okay? So we do that by asking ourselves, and by the way, you could do this with any limiting belief, whether it's, you know, it's too late, I'm no good at this, this is going to hurt, this sucks, whatever, any limiting belief, any excuse. When you ask yourself, why haven't I done that thing I want to do? And you have a good reason that you think is a fact, this is where you can bring it up and ask yourself whether it's really true or it's just a limiting belief. So what we're going to do with that limiting belief is turn it around by asking ourselves, could the exact opposite be true? Could the exact opposite be true? So my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, that's one belief. The opposite could be my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? Well, she did thank me for the flowers after all, and maybe she was trying to help me, right? Maybe she was just trying to make sure I didn't get scammed by this florist. So maybe it wasn't actually judgment, maybe she was just trying to say a statement of fact that the flowers weren't so great and I should probably get my money back. Okay, well now I have two beliefs. How about a third one? The opposite of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please could also be I am too judgmental and hard to please. Because to be honest, I had rehearsed this script of effusive praise that I deserved to hear and when I didn't hear it, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? I was. Okay, here's a fourth belief. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That when I did this nice thing and I put in a lot of effort and time and money and it didn't happen exactly the way I predicted, I felt stupid. I felt incompetent. I felt like I screwed up. And this is what's called a misattribution of emotion. Whenever we feel bad, we look to attribute it to something else, or someone else. And that's exactly why I unloaded on my mom. So now I have four beliefs. Okay, now I have four. I used to have only one. Now I have four. Which one is true? Which one's false? All of them? None of them? Who cares? We spend so much time trying to figure out what the facts were, right? What you intended to hurt me and what you said that was clearly, you know, I'm going to prove to you why I deserve an apology.

Speaker 1:
[17:10] Yeah, I'm right.

Speaker 2:
[17:12] Well, the funny thing is that of that first belief, trapped me that when I believe that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please, the only way out was that she had to change so I could stop suffering. You haven't met my mom, Rufus, but I'm telling you, that's not going to happen. It ain't going to happen. When we depend on others to change, our circumstances outside of us to change, if this war would stop, if the economy was different, if the AI was not taking our jobs, if that person would stop being a jerk, then I can stop suffering, you will always suffer. Whereas when we have an alternative belief, this portfolio of perspectives, we can choose and say, wait a minute, I don't have to suffer. How motivated am I to work on the relationship with my mom if I believe she's too judgmental and hard to please? I don't want to be around that kind of person, but I'm much more motivated when I think one of these alternative beliefs that decrease my suffering and increase my motivation to work on that relationship. So that would be an example of discovering that limiting belief and proposing an alternative liberating belief.

Speaker 3:
[18:20] I recently had one of those days where it was just wall-to-wall meetings. And maybe like halfway into meeting 287, I realized, wait, I'm trying to be present, I'm trying to participate in this conversation, but I'm also, what was that thing that guy said five minutes ago? And do I need to follow up on that? And also that meeting earlier this morning, what are the next steps there? And oh gosh, did I write that down? It's overwhelming. But then I remembered, it's all good, because I have Granola. Granola is an AI-powered notepad that's built for the way real people actually meet. Here's how it works. You take rough notes, just like you normally would. But while you're doing that in the background, Granola is securely transcribing the entire meeting. And then it takes everything and turns it into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. So that means you get to actually listen instead of frantically typing every word. And you still walk away knowing exactly what was decided, who's doing what, and what comes next. I remember the first time I fired up Granola. I think it was over the summer. And I was instantly blown away about the quality of the notes. I mean, they're just super well organized. They're thoughtful. They're detailed. They have action items. And I'm being completely honest when I tell you, it's only gotten better since then. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free for three months. Just head to granola.ai/idea. That's granola.ai/idea to get your time back. Get three months free at granola.ai/idea.

Speaker 1:
[19:54] My wife thinks I have an online shopping habit. She would say addiction. I think that's a strong word. It's true. I've been taken lately with beautiful spoons and spatulas made of wood, running shoes, colorful backpacks. We all have our weaknesses. The frustration of course comes when you find the perfect item and then you see the dreaded credit card entry page. Such a chore. Then you sometimes see the purple pay button that has all your information saved, making checkout as simple as a tap on your screen. Shopify makes checkout easy. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US., from household names like Allbirds, Cotopaxi and Gymshark to brands just getting started. Shopify is your e-commerce expert with world-class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. See less cards go abandoned and more sales go with Shopify and their shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/nbi. Go to shopify.com/nbi. That's shopify.com/nbi. It's always struck me that there are things about the world that are true, and there are things about the world that are useful. And there's a subset of things that are both true and useful. Right, but not everything that's true is useful. And the question is, how much can we, how much can we in our own mind sort of manipulate that analysis? I mean, I'll give you one example in my own life. Like I've kind of concluded that we all are constantly involuntarily analyzing other people's motives. Why did this other person do this? Why did this other person treat me this way? Many years ago, I kind of concluded, you know what? I'm going to assume the most generous interpretation of what other people's motives are around me. Why? Because probably their motives are more generous than maybe my first reaction might be. And secondly, I've found that their future behavior tends to be better when I treat them as if they have the most generous possible motivations. So it results in a better world. So arguably, there's some self-deception here, right? There's some sort of fantastical thinking. I'm going to choose a certain belief about other people's intentions that may be delusional, because I like the way that it impacts the world that I live in. Having said that, I think it's also rational to say, we don't know for sure. And if we don't know, we should choose the beliefs that serve us, as you say. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:42] I mean, this is probably the most common critique of this line of thinking, is, are you just telling people to gaslight themselves? Are we just supposed to be delusional and just make up our beliefs and believe whatever we want to believe? Well, first of all, in the definition of a belief, I don't know. I think we skipped this, but it's very important to differentiate between what is a fact. A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether or not you believe in it. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat earthers, the world doesn't care what you think. That's a fact. Faith is something else. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. That's a matter of faith. There's no amount of evidence that I can provide to somebody that would change their faith on that conviction, nor should it, right? That's great. They have their faith. That's wonderful. But between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is defined as a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. And what makes them so powerful is that unlike faith, which almost never changes, and unlike facts, which you cannot change, beliefs change. They don't have to be fixed. We can use the ones that serve us and discard the ones that hurt us because beliefs are tools, not truths. That's the biggest revelation of this book. You do not see reality clearly. You do not know what you're capable of. You're capable of far more than you think. And beliefs are tools, not truths. You can pick and choose them. And so, here's the thing, you are already delusional. You think you see reality clearly, you don't. Nobody does. It's impossible. You cannot see reality clearly because your brain simply cannot absorb all that information. And so your brain has to filter reality through your beliefs. And so if you are delusional already, if we are already creating the simulation of our mind, pick the right belief. Pick the one that serves you. Pick the ones that decrease suffering. So it's interesting that you came, you were early to this, but after doing this research over the past six years, I adopted a liberating belief that replaced the way I used to interact with people. I used to get really annoyed. It's funny, I did this webinar recently for people who bought the book and they'd been fans of my work, subscribed to my blog and had been following my books. And somebody said, you know, Nir, are you happier because you seem so much lighter. You seem so much happier. What happened? And I don't think I'm happier. I just think I suffer so much less. Because now I've replaced the small everyday annoyances. You know, the person who cuts you off in traffic or the baby who's crying on the flight or, you know, I spill my cup of coffee. Like these things used to bug me and ruin my day. It doesn't bother me anymore. It's not suffering anymore. So how did this affect my relationships?

Speaker 1:
[25:23] Yeah, and suffering you've learned is optional.

Speaker 2:
[25:25] That's right. But how do you make it actually practical? You have to install and constantly remind yourself, at least I do, of these liberating beliefs. Because your default state is constantly to pull you back to your limiting beliefs. Because that's what keeps you safe. Your brain wants to always pull you back to those default beliefs because that's what served you in the past. So it's probably going to serve you in the future. But the brain doesn't care if you're happy and fulfilled and meeting your full potential. It just wants to keep you alive. So we have to constantly remind ourselves of these better liberating beliefs. So for me, you know, with these common everyday annoyances, now, my liberating belief that I constantly remind myself is love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. Love is measured by the benefit of doubt. Just a little phrase, just a little liberating belief that I tell myself constantly. What does that mean? I remember the day my daughter was born. And I held her in my arms and she came from my fingertips to my elbow. She was exactly that size. And I remember washing her for the first time. And I remember thinking that I love this little creature more than anything. And I would do anything for her. Like this new part of my heart just opened up. And I gave her ultimate benefit of the doubt. There was nothing that she could do that would make her, make me love her any less. When she cried, she wasn't crying to annoy me. She was crying because that's the best tool she had. And I loved her giving her ultimate benefit of the doubt. Now, why is it, Rufus, that when these babies grow up, we stop giving them benefit of the doubt? We judge their actions as intended to harm us. My mom was using the best tool she had. It's like asking my mom to speak Latin. My mom can't speak Latin, okay? So for her to behave the way I expect her to behave and be disappointed and create this theory in my mind that she was doing this in order to hurt my feelings, is silly. Love is measured by the benefit of doubt. If I love her, even in just loving my fellow man, just loving mankind means giving them the benefit of doubt, realizing that we are all operating with the tools we have. Now, is that true by the way? Is it actually a fact? I don't know. I don't care. Beliefs are tools, not truths. I can choose to believe that because it makes me better off.

Speaker 1:
[27:46] A variation on that is the marriage advice from, I believe this was from Ruth Bader Ginsburg's mother-in-law who said, sometimes it helps in marriage to be a little bit hard of hearing. Which that's always stuck with me. But maybe that's selective hearing might be benefit of the doubt. Yeah. Is it a good idea to believe that you're lucky? And do you think some people are actually more lucky than other people?

Speaker 2:
[28:14] Okay, so a few interesting things about this. The studies do seem to suggest that lucky people see things differently. Here's the study that show this. They did a study where they asked people to do a very simple exercise. All they had to do was count the number of images inside a newspaper. So just open up the newspaper that these researchers gave them and count one, two, three, four, five, how many images. Now, there were two groups. One group of people were people who believed they were lucky, and another group believed they were unlucky. Now, it wasn't a fact. The researchers didn't go follow these people around and actually determine if it was a fact, whether they were lucky or unlucky. These were people who just self-identified as either lucky or unlucky. Now, the unlucky people to do this very simple task of counting the images in the newspaper, they took on average two and a half minutes. The lucky group took just 11 seconds. Now, why the difference? Because on page two of this newspaper, one of the images in Big Bold Letters said, there are 43 images in this newspaper, collect your reward. The lucky people saw that image, they read it, they comprehended what it said, they got it from their seat, they got their reward, and they were out the door in 11 seconds. The unlucky group sat there and counted, one, two, three, four, five. Fascinatingly, they counted correctly. They counted that image that said how many images there were, but they didn't process it. They didn't enter their conscious attention. Why? This is the big problem that our brains have, is that your brain cannot see reality clearly. None of us do. Why? No. Because right now, your brain is collecting 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits of information. The light entering your retina, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature, the room.

Speaker 1:
[30:03] Astonishing.

Speaker 2:
[30:05] All this information is about the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. But your conscious attention, what you believe is so-called reality, that is only 50 bits of information. That's the equivalent of one sentence per second. So War and Peace every second, twice versus one simple sentence. So your brain simply can't handle all that information. So it has to predict reality based on your beliefs. So if you believe you are lucky versus unlucky, your keyhole of attention will focus on different things. Just like Daniel Gissler's ability, based on his beliefs, to focus on separating pain from suffering, these lucky versus unlucky people saw different things. They actually perceived reality differently. It wasn't figurative. It's, you know, we like to say that, I'll believe it when I see it. Actually, the exact opposite is also true, that we see what we believe.

Speaker 1:
[31:07] Yes, indeed. And I imagine, you know, there's also this distinction between spotlight attention and lantern attention. And it seems that lucky people are spending more time seeing the whole context, right? I mean, which enables us to seek connections and maybe see things more generously. I love, Rumi said, live life as if everything is rigged in your favor. Which I was not, was kind of wrong.

Speaker 2:
[31:32] A liberating belief, right? As opposed to there's a conspiracy theory against me and everybody's trying to harm me. That's exhausting. Talk about suffering, right? And we have these beliefs. We should probably talk about why we have these limiting beliefs. It's because the brain is just trying to keep us safe. You know, there was a concept in psychology that everybody believed. And that concept was called learned helplessness. Everybody knew this theory. It was Seligman and Meyer. And Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association. It was gospel, right? It explained persistent poverty. It explained all kinds of problems, that if you try and try again and you keep failing, well, you learn to give up. You learn helplessness over time. Turns out, a few years ago, to their credit, as the scientists that they are, they reanalyzed the data. And not only did they conclude that learned helplessness was wrong, that the correct conclusion looking at the data was in fact that the exact opposite was true, that we don't learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state. What we have to learn is hope. So what that tells us is that we are constantly being sucked in to passivity. The brain constantly wants to keep us safe. It doesn't care if we're flourishing, doesn't care if we're happy, doesn't care if we're meeting our full potential. Evolution doesn't care at all about any of that stuff. Evolution wants to keep you alive and procreating. That's it. And so whatever served you in the past, that's what your brain wants you to believe in the future, whether or not it's good for you, because it keeps you alive. And so realizing that fact, that your brain is constantly fighting truth and nail to keep you doing what you did before, keep you believing what you did before, this is why you're stuck. This is why that thing that you know you can do, you don't do, because your brain is trying to convince you of that fact, just because it's trying to do its job, it's just trying to keep you safe. But that doesn't mean that we can't outsmart our minds.

Speaker 1:
[33:28] Yeah, it's a fundamentally kind of conservative and cautious frame. And it strikes me that one of the understanding how the environment we live in today is different from the environment in which we evolved, I found to be one of the big unlocks. And we live in a world that is less threatening than the one in which we evolved. And so we don't need to be quite as cautious and we're more rewarded, I think, for a higher degree of trust, a higher degree of...

Speaker 2:
[33:52] That's right, yeah, thank goodness, right? Thank God we live in an age...

Speaker 1:
[33:55] More generous beliefs.

Speaker 2:
[33:56] Yeah, that is so relatively safe. But it's amazing how even in a time where things are getting better, we make up problems where they don't exist. It's called prevalence inflation. That we look... And this is even saying it, I have to be honest with you, even when I say to you out loud that the world is getting better, I actually feel like a liar. And I'm sure people listening right now are like, this guy's insane. Is he not reading the news?

Speaker 1:
[34:22] Right, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[34:23] And yet, it's true. Like Factfulness, I'm sure you read Factfulness, Hans Rosling.

Speaker 1:
[34:28] Yeah, wonderful.

Speaker 2:
[34:30] Everybody should read that book. To know that university professors who took this quiz on the state of the world, the most educated people on earth scored worse than monkeys on this test. Because we do not have an accurate portrayal of the way things actually are, because we are only fed a media diet through this pinhole, through a pinhole of attention, focusing on blood and gore and guts, and problems we can't solve. That's what keeps us glued to our television sets and to watching, to reading on the internet. And so it completely skews our perception of reality so that we create problems where they don't even exist. And it turns out that studies have verified this. They did a study where they had purple circles and blue circles, okay? Blue circles, purple circles. And they asked people to just identify the purple circles. That's all they had to do. And so over time, unbeknownst to the participants, they decreased the number of purple circles.

Speaker 1:
[35:26] Yeah, this is really interesting, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[35:28] The rate stayed constant. People started seeing those purple circles where they didn't exist because that's what they expected to see.

Speaker 1:
[35:36] Yeah, that is so fascinating, this kind of anticipatory, the way that our brains kind of deliver a perception of the world that we expect, right? And actually, one of my favorite examples of that, Nir, is this wonderful study in which people are presented with a $5 glass of wine and a $45 glass of wine with descriptions of what happens.

Speaker 2:
[36:00] Yeah, so this is an example of how beliefs shape what we feel through the power of anticipation. So this is what I call the experience loop, where what we believe dictates what we anticipate, and what we anticipate dictates what we feel, and then we confirm that feeling, which reinforces the belief, and it enters this loop. A great example of this is this study where they took people into what's called an fMRI machine. An fMRI machine tracks blood flow in various areas of the brain, so we can see which areas become most active. And they asked people to test two kinds of wine. They said, the first wine, this is a very cheap $5 bottle of wine, what do you think? People said, oh, you know, it's a little harsh, I wasn't a big fan, and that's so great, okay? They flushed out their mouth, they drank some water. Okay, here's the next squirt, and they gave them this little tube in their mouth with a little squirt of the next wine. Then they said, this is a very expensive, this is a very fine wine, it's very expensive, it's a Chateau de something something, what do you think of this wine? And people said, wow, you know, this is a very smooth wine, I can taste the hints of oak and cherry, and you know, all the stuff that wine snobs say. Turns out, it was the same wine. And yet, not only did people say that the more expensive wine tasted better, which you could say, well, maybe they were trying to just give the researchers what they wanted to hear, they could see in their brains that the reward centers became more active when they believed they were drinking the more expensive wine. So it shows us that people actually liked the wine more, they actually experienced it as more delicious because that's what they expected, because price is a signal of quality. I used to previously think that marketing was kind of BS, that it was just for stupid people, that trying to convince them to buy stuff they don't need. I don't think that anymore. I think that the role of advertising is not necessarily to promote awareness of the product. For maybe your dry cleaner or your restaurant, okay, well, Luigi's opened up on the block. But when you think about Coca-Cola, we know about Coca-Cola, they're not increasing awareness of Coca-Cola, right? Why do they keep advertising it if we all know about Coca-Cola? Because it's not for you. It's not for the person who doesn't drink Coca-Cola. It's for the person who already drinks Coca-Cola, and they want them to enjoy it more. Because they are incepting an anticipatory response of what Coke should feel like. That's the purpose of display advertising. Look at, look, there's a brand that I profile called Liquid Death. Liquid Death. Yes, yes. It's water, it's just tap water, okay? It's always been tap water. There's nothing, even the founders tell you there's nothing special about it. It comes from Austria, but the only reason it comes from Austria is because it's the only factory they could find that could put water in a can versus in a bottle. It's the only reason, it's nothing special. It's clean, just as much as a municipal tap water would be. And yet, people get the Liquid Death logo tattooed on their arm. They tell you how it really does taste different, because there's an anticipatory response that this edgy, funky, heavy metal drink that if you're in the know, you know, should taste better. And therefore, it actually does taste better even if it's just plain old water.

Speaker 1:
[39:16] Yeah, I love this research. And I think I've even encountered studies that show that sommeliers, the professionally trained wine experts, also fall for this kind of, are very bad at actually perceiving, telling the difference between different glasses of wine. I probably enjoy wine a little too much near. But I've always been curious about, like, how much of this extraordinary experience of a beautiful mouthful of Bordeaux am I bringing to it? And how much is the wine bringing to it, right? And it's both, I guess, depending on your point of view, discouraging and empowering to realize actually your anticipation, your framing of this experience is doing a huge amount of the work of delivering that experience and determining what that experience will be. I think I end up landing, as you do in the book, on the view that this is actually tremendously empowering, that we, here's what you say, you say every day, whether you realize it or not, you are constructing simulations. So, what do you mean by this?

Speaker 2:
[40:23] So, back to this idea of predictive processing, that our brain cannot process 11 million bits of information consciously, it can only process 50 bits of information consciously, and so it can't see reality as it is, it has to create this simulation of reality, based on our beliefs, filtered through our beliefs. I think we should lean into that. I think this is a great unused tool to increase our well-being and decrease our suffering. Whether it's decreasing pain, psychological as well as physical, whether it's increasing the enjoyment of the products we use. I used to think, what a deception, all this wine snobbery. You know what? What else is there? Like, you can find joy in life, in getting into something and analyzing the differences, and even if it isn't really that important, who cares? It brings joy to your life. As long as it's not breaking the bank, as long as it's not causing severe adverse health consequences, why not?

Speaker 1:
[41:26] The incredibly empowering thing here, I think, is that we can, you know, you can go to the fanciest restaurants in New York City or Singapore and have a meal that will bring you to tears, or you can get a Philly cheesesteak on the corner for $6 and you could be brought to tears, right? And the $5 glass of wine can cause your body to be covered with goosebumps as can the $45 glass of wine, right? I mean, these are somewhat choices that we make about what we choose to appreciate. I've always loved this view that like, the beauty of being a photographer is that you bring a certain kind of attention and appreciation to the act of seeing. The beauty of being a novelist is that you bring a deep focus and appreciation to your observations of the world. You see more beauty and this is, it's in the eye of the beholder. You can see what you want to see on some level.

Speaker 2:
[42:25] Right. And that these are malleable, that I think one of the common questions I get is, well, how do I change somebody else's mind? I get that a lot, right? Not my limiting beliefs. I don't want to talk about my limiting beliefs, but I see these limiting beliefs in other people. How do I change their beliefs? One of the best ways is to prompt with this question of, is this serving you? Is it helpful? Is it causing you suffering? You know, you don't have to suffering. That's not necessary. It's not a fact that these things are so, right? These aren't laws of physics. These are beliefs. These are perception problems. You know, relationship problems are not facts. They are perception problems. You can have the same exact thing happen to two different people. One will say, My father abused me. And one will say, My father abused me. That's the reason I'm miserable. And the other will say, My father abused me. That's why I'm successful.

Speaker 1:
[43:15] Right. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[43:16] It can go that severe. You know, this is why we're starting to really get a backlash on so many things in psychology these days, from trauma culture to the overdiagnosis epidemic, I think. You know, we're really starting to question the validity of these things that keep people stuck in these behavioral patterns without asking, okay, but what about right now? Like, we can uncover this Freudian, you know, digging deeper into our past and why this person hurt us and why we do what we do. And that does have some validity in that beliefs do come from somewhere. We don't always choose our beliefs. But for right now, that's what's important, right? How do we perceive reality today? And are we using an outdated set of beliefs that may be served in the past, but maybe no longer do so today?

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[47:34] Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, as is any time we quit something. Oftentimes, we quit too soon. I'll give you a study that I think really demonstrates this that blew my mind. In the 1950s, there was a researcher by the name of Kurt Richter. He had a very simple question. He's a biologist. He wanted to know how long a wild rat could swim. How did he-

Speaker 1:
[47:59] Oh, yes. I love this.

Speaker 2:
[48:00] It's a great study. He takes these rats, he puts them in a cylinder of water, and he stands there with a stopwatch, and he times how long a wild rat can swim. And it turns out 15 minutes, the rat starts to give up and drowns. Now he wants to see, can he extend how long the rats are able to persevere? So he takes a new group of rats, he puts them in these cylinders, and this time at the 15-minute mark, he can see the rats are beginning to struggle. He reaches in, he pulls out the rat, dries it off, let it catch its breath for a minute, and then plunk back into the water it goes. Now he does this a few times. He conditions the rat to believe that salvation might be possible, that if it persists, as long as it doesn't quit, it might be saved. So you read the book, so you know the answer, but when I ask an audience, how much longer did the rat swim for? It started with 15 minutes. How much longer could the rat go for? People say 30 minutes, 45, maybe an hour, which would be crazy, right? And imagine if you could persist four times longer. That would be amazing. That would be unprecedented. Imagine if instead of procrastinating on something or delaying something, if you could persist four times as long, that would be unprecedented. But the rats didn't swim for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or even 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours.

Speaker 1:
[49:23] It's unbelievable.

Speaker 2:
[49:24] 60 hours of nonstop swimming.

Speaker 1:
[49:27] Why?

Speaker 2:
[49:28] What changed? Their bodies hadn't changed. Their environment hadn't changed. Same cylinder of water. What changed was something fundamental about their beliefs. We can't ask the rats, of course, but it's the only variable left. Something switched in their minds. Some kind of unlock occurred where suddenly something that was always there. Just like Daniel Gisler's ability to go under surgery without anesthesia, we all have that skill. Now, it may not be developed, but it's always been there. Just like for these rats, they could always swim for 60 hours. They just didn't know they could. They didn't believe that salvation was possible. So this is kind of a long-winded answer to why we quitted anything. What is procrastination all about? It's because of this fundamental belief that this task, this thing is judged to be suffering. That's the problem. That it's a judgment that I don't want to do that thing. That thing's gonna hurt. And so it hurts me less to not do it and have that nagging annoyance of I should do it, I should do it, I should do it, until the very last minute where I can't avoid it and the pain becomes too uncomfortable. And now I have to do it because there's no other choice, but I left it to the last minute and I'm not gonna do very well. So the trick, the unlock is to believe differently. That's actually, when you look at people like Adam, who is not a procrastinator, he's a pre-crastinator, he can't help but do things. What we find is that those people see the same signals, right? The same pain that Daniel Gisler was experiencing, the same signal, the same 11 million bits of information, they don't interpret it the same way. So for you, like what's a task that you hate doing, that you procrastinate on?

Speaker 1:
[51:22] Well, I can tell you a task that I used to procrastinate on, but I've gotten better at this, is reading the next book, reading a book a week, starting the next book.

Speaker 2:
[51:32] Interesting. Okay, so what changed?

Speaker 1:
[51:35] What changed is I actually learned that if I, as soon as we finish our conversation, I will begin the next book, because I have found that it's the fear of starting. I mean, that as soon as I start the next book, I'm gripped and I can't stop reading it. Basically, creating a habit of beginning that process, basically eliminates the fear of the pain, as you say, of the work.

Speaker 2:
[52:02] Do you remember what was causing you, like what was the belief that caused you to procrastinate before? Why didn't you start it when you wanted to before?

Speaker 1:
[52:10] I think I used to feel that I deserve to rest on my laurels and enjoy sampling all the various podcasts and reading that have been tempting me, opposed to getting sort of locked in to the next 300 page commitment.

Speaker 2:
[52:27] Great, great. So all of these are beliefs. None of them are facts. So they're judgments on, you know, if I commit to this book right now, then I'm missing out. That's the, I think that's what I was hearing, that if I start this next book, I'm going to miss out on the podcast. Now you have perhaps a new belief that actually, by diving into this book, this is where it's at. This is where the gold is. This is what I can't, you said, I can't stop reading once I get into it. Yeah, exactly. So there was probably a belief change process where you took something that felt like, like you were depriving yourself, now becomes an indulgence. And that's the secret. That's the secret. When you look at high performers in every field, whether it's sports, whether it's the arts, whether it's business, you find that people have the same exact information, the same signal entering their brain, but they perceive it differently. They don't see it as suffering. They see it as a privilege. Another one of my liberating beliefs is this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. I don't have to do this, I get to do this. Sounds like something like that might have happened to you. I'm not depriving myself that I get to read this book. This is a privilege, authors send me their books before the rest of the world and now I'm going to have a conversation with them and get to go deep. What a privilege, that's amazing. People would pay for that privilege, a lot of money to get a chance to do that.

Speaker 1:
[53:52] Yeah, Cal Newport has this great reframing, which is think of your to-do list as a menu in a beautiful restaurant. You get to do these things, what a great privilege. The other thing I think I've learned, as you point out, the anticipatory anxiety of procrastinating is much worse than the discomfort that I'm avoiding. And it turns out that the discomfort that I believe that I'm avoiding is actually not discomfort at all, that it's gratifying. And this is another thing you talk about, which is kind of reframing discomfort as a rewarding challenge, right? I mean, some of the challenges that we avoid turn out to be deeply gratifying when we tackle them.

Speaker 2:
[54:38] That's exactly right. And because of this, these new liberating beliefs that, you know, I've seen people use inquiry-based stress reduction on things you cannot imagine. I mean, I've seen people talk about severe trauma and abuse and things that I thought, wow, there's no possible way that you could possibly do a turn around on something so severe, where what could possibly be, I remember I was, I saw a woman do inquiry-based stress reduction about a brain tumor. I mean, if there was something that you would say, wow, that is objectively awful. There's no way to, I mean, that's a fact. That's terrible. I mean, even I would really struggle. You know what? She did this process, the same four questions we talked about earlier. She did a turnaround. Everybody in the room was a gasp that she would even consider. And you know what? It relieved her suffering. She found a way to see the judgment, the limiting belief was this tumor is awful, which everybody would agree that I know that that's a fact. And she opened up the possibility of another truth. And then she really did, I mean, you can tell that she gained so much peace from realizing, you know what? Like, this is actually a gift, that I get to fight this, I get to show I'm courageous, I get to be an example for others, I get to show what a life well lived, I get to be an example for my children, I'm gonna beat this, and even if I don't, what's the worst that can happen? I die. And then I'm not here to suffer anymore. Like, I saw her do this, and I was just blown away. Because again, in these most extreme cases, that's why I like talking about the surgery with that anesthesia, the woman who has a brain tumor, who's able to get over this kind of stuff, as an example of, you know, I just want to go to the gym. Like, I'm just trying not to procrastinate here. If we can titrate the heavy stuff for our specific situation, my goodness, is that powerful.

Speaker 1:
[56:32] Yeah, exactly. Well, and this gets back to this distinction you made between disease and illness, right? And illness is in our heads. It's our psychological experience of disease. And that can be powerfully removed, or very effectively removed, with placebos. Your section on placebos was just fascinating to me. Obviously, placebos are not gonna cure cancer. But there were, I mean, we all know about the placebo effect, and we all think there's not much to learn here. But there's some new research that you described that was really surprising to me.

Speaker 2:
[57:11] Yeah, there's, it sure is. I mean, just in the last five, 10 years, there's been some remarkable developments. So one of the things that blows my mind about placebos is that even when you know it's a placebo, it's still effective. That we used to think that placebos required deception, right? So for a double blind controlled study, the person receiving the placebo and the person prescribing the placebo can't know they're taking placebos, that they have to, nobody knows. Turns out Ted Kaptchuk a few years ago, this placebo researcher calls patients into his office, does this study for irritable bowel syndrome, which has been shown to be highly influenced by the placebo effect. He calls in his patients, he shows them, this is a placebo, it says here right here on the jar.

Speaker 1:
[57:54] It is a placebo.

Speaker 2:
[57:57] It's on the label. He tells them this isn't a nerve substance. However, here's the important part. It has been shown to relieve the symptoms in some people. And wouldn't you know it, it was as effective as the leading pain medication for IBS. In fact, some people after the study came back to Dr. Kapchuk and said, Dr. Kapchuk, can you please prescribe me more of those placebo pills? They work like a charm. More so, if you go on Amazon right now and search for placebo pills, you will see for sale jars of placebo. It says placebo right on the label. And underneath the listing, you will see five-star reviews for fast acting relief. No joke. You can go check for yourself on Amazon. It's crazy. So you see, are people delusional here? Like what's going on? Like don't they know that like they're faking it? No, it's that placebos are not fakery. They're real. In fact, we know that the placebo effect is getting more effective. Do you know that? That it's actually becoming more effective.

Speaker 1:
[59:01] As more people understand the placebo effect.

Speaker 2:
[59:03] That's right. This is a massive problem because the pharmaceutical companies, you know, you can't just prove that a medication is better. You have to prove that it's more efficacious than a placebo. And so this is a huge problem for the pharmaceutical companies.

Speaker 1:
[59:14] Interesting.

Speaker 2:
[59:16] Their drugs keep failing because it's not more effective than a placebo. Why? Because more people have heard that placebos work. And so they become more and more effective. So it's not, you know, people say, oh, placebos are fake. No, well, what do you mean by fake? If I feel better. So to be very clear, I want to make sure this is very clear because there's a lot of controversy here. Placebos do not cure cancer. Placebos do not heal a broken arm. They do not cure sickness. They cure illness. Different things. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. But illness accounts for 80% of our health care spending.

Speaker 1:
[59:49] That's an astonishing statistic.

Speaker 2:
[59:50] Astonishing, right? We should be using way more placebos because no side effects. Highly effective at these subjective symptoms, the illnesses that we're struggling with. We should be using them more, not less.

Speaker 1:
[60:04] Yeah. There are any number of illnesses, as you say, such as I think of like I'm now in my 50s near, and I have a lot of friends that suffer from various pains, right? Back pain is a real problem in this country. And it's one of those problems that compounds as you sort of, your fear that a certain movement is going to cause you pain, causes you to move less, which exacerbates the phenomenon and your other muscles compensated. You get all contorted, twisted, and it just sort of compounds, right? And there's an astonishing ability to just release that belief that you have this problem and solve this 80% of healthcare costs, as you say. But one of my favorite details of El Fesivo is in your book here is, it turns out larger capsules are more effective than smaller ones. I mean, again, these are inert substances. They're doing nothing, right? Red and orange pills seem to work better as stimulants, whereas blue and green pills seem to work better as sedatives, right?

Speaker 2:
[61:13] And shots work better than pills, and sham surgeries work better than shots. That's right, because of the expectation effect here. But the thing that I keep coming back to around these placebos time and time again is how important it is to separate the fear aspect that comes along with chronic pain. So, for example, with back pain, I used to suffer from terrible back pain. And the conventional advice is to isolate, you know, rest, heat pad, cold pad, this kind of thing, take some Advil, and it turns out that there's a real backlash to this over-fixation on pain management. You know, it used to be, I don't think they do this anymore in America. I'm in Singapore now, and they don't do it anymore, but I don't think they do it in America either. It used to be that it was a vital sign that people would take, you know, the doctor would take your blood pressure, your heart rate, your temperature, and ask you to rate your pain. Remember those scales where it had those sad faces to happy faces? And turns out, you know, we don't do that anymore because it caused people to hyperfocus on their pain, which exacerbated their pain. The more we fixate on it, what we're doing is that tiny keyhole of attention, that 50 bits of information. When you hyperfocus on the pain, and then you add fear to that sensation, you begin to judge it more, focus more on it, become hyperfixated to the point where you start ruminating on it, and that actually makes it much worse. That is the formula for chronic pain. And all these exclusionary diagnoses, like fibromyalgia, for example, it's an exclusionary diagnosis. When we can't figure out what's wrong with you, we give you this diagnosis. It turns out that it is curable. There's a wonderful book called The Way Out, which I highly recommend, which I cite in the book, which talks about pain reprocessing therapy, which is this amazing technique that has been shown to be more effective than leading medications, more effective than many of these treatments, and the basic process is breaking this fear, pain, fear loop. That what you're doing is basically, this is how I cured my back pain. That every time I felt that twinge in my back, that little ache in my back, that sometimes would stop me cold, and it was very painful, before I would say, okay, don't move, immobilize, I hope this never happens again, what if it doesn't go away? Last time this happened, I was out all day, and I had to lay on the floor, and it was terrible. As opposed to that, I take a deep breath, and I do the same movement 10 times. I would not recommend, this is not what you do if you've just had an injury, okay? So chronic pain is defined as pain that has no physical source after six months, okay? So six months is enough for your body to heal itself, it's enough for your brain to reprocess how it thinks about pain, and it can either amplify or turn down that pain signal. You know, there's actually, you know where placebo studies come from. In World War I, there were soldiers that would come to the medic, dragging their buddy, and they'd say, medic, medic, my buddy just got shot, you have to help my buddy. And meanwhile, the medic would look at the soldier who carried his friend over and say, soldier, you're missing an arm. And they wouldn't realize that half their arm was blown off. And so this is where we discover this amazing power that the brain has to turn off pain signals, because all pain is real, all pain is real. Nobody's lying, nobody's making it up, all pain is real. And all pain is in your brain. Pain doesn't live in your back, pain doesn't live in your elbow, pain lives in the brain. It is a interpretation of that 11 million bits of information. So when I force myself to do the thing that hurt me 10 times every time my back hurt, my brain learned, chill out buddy, it's not dangerous, it's just information, it's just signal. So it turns out that if you go to a doctor and say, hey doctor, my back hurts, they're going to find a slip disc. They're going to find something wrong with it. Even though there is no correlation, when they showed a surgeon's back scans, x-rays of back scans, there's no correlation between a slip disc and pain. Do you know that? There's no correlation between an x-ray that shows, that when they showed a doctor, does this person have a slip disc? Yes, this person has a slip disc. There's no correlation with whether that person has back pain. Because we can turn down the pain signal. Of course, we can't think about it. For 200,000 years, we didn't have anesthesia. You can think the kings of England, who were suffering with sores and abscesses and syphilis and all kinds of parasites.

Speaker 1:
[65:41] Oh my gosh, think of the dental, think of the decaying teeth.

Speaker 2:
[65:45] Oh my God! Their brains learned to turn, I'm sure they still had acute pain as well. But you couldn't stand a day as a modern person with what a few generations they had to suffer through. Because their brains like ours have this ability to turn down the pain signal. Now, unfortunately, with modern medicine, we have this expectation that I should pop a pill and I should be cured. The pain should go away instantly. And when that doesn't happen, we freak out. And when we do that, we amplify our fear, we focus on our pain, we actually make the problem worse.

Speaker 1:
[66:23] That's right. And this is, and actually there's an interesting parallel here between focusing on pain exacerbates the pain, focusing on the dysfunctionality of our relationships or our fear about what's going wrong in our lives can exacerbate all those problems as well. That the power of belief is kind of adjacent to the power of focus here, right?

Speaker 2:
[66:46] That's right.

Speaker 1:
[66:46] But a big unlock for me here, you know, is this notion that, as you say, pain is real, suffering is an experience we choose to have or not to have. I think an old saying, this might be an old Buddhist saying, is suffering is pain times resistance, right? We can choose to sort of accept things. And this applies both to psychological pain, which is probably most of the pain most of us experience as well as physical pain. And it seems to me that some of our limiting beliefs, we have some limiting beliefs that are individual to each of us. And we have some limiting beliefs that are cultural, that might be true of like the vast majority of Americans, like the beliefs that we need more to be happy, or that bigger is better, or that accomplishment is something that we do individually instead of collectively. Is that something that you've thought about? Collective limiting beliefs.

Speaker 2:
[67:52] I definitely think that there are societally propagated, limiting or liberating beliefs. Our hyper-focus on certain social problems over others. What gets reported, what gets emphasized, what do we look at? We know crime has been on a steady 50 year decline in America, and yet when you poll the average American, they'll tell you crime is getting worse and worse. Because that's what they see. It becomes your belief system. Why? Because the brain doesn't see reality as it is. It sees reality filter through beliefs that are probabilistically determined. It's called predictive processing. When we see the prevalence of something increase, we see more of it, just like those blue dots versus purple dots. If that's what you expect, that is in fact what you will see. And I think it can go the other way as well. What is patriotism but a belief that our country is special in some way? That's a belief for the shining city on the hill. It's a belief. And we see this actually in corporate America as well. I think a wonderful example of this is in terms of corporate culture. What is culture but codified beliefs? I mean, take a look at Amazon. Amazon has these beliefs, these sayings that you will, it sounds corny, but they say it to each other all the time. The Amazonians will literally repeat these little saying, these mantras all the time. One of them is it's always day one. What does that mean? It means that we're still a startup. It's always day one. We're never going to be complacent. We're never going to become that big company that fades off into irrelevance. We're always going to look for savings. We're always going to be scrappy. We're always a startup. It's always day one. Now, Rufus, this is objectively false. It is not true by any stretch of the imagination.

Speaker 1:
[69:37] This company is a juggernaut. It's huge.

Speaker 2:
[69:40] It's worth in the trillions now. It's huge. It's been around for much longer. But again, beliefs are tools, not truths. And so if that belief works, if it's part of our company ethos, that that is what is more important. We're going to believe it, whether or not it's true because it serves us. Great. That's what great company culture and a great national culture, I think, is built on.

Speaker 1:
[70:02] And maybe that has something to do with the kind of agency that a startup feels about its ability to reinvent itself, to move quickly. And I think that you say that among our beliefs, one of the most important is believing in our own agency, our ability to affect change in the world. How important is this?

Speaker 2:
[70:23] Huge, huge. And so this is a great example. There was a year when Serena Williams was competing in Wimbledon, and she was doing very poorly. And the reason she was doing so poorly is because she wasn't rushing the net. She was hesitating. And when you hesitate in tennis, you know, every millisecond counts, and she was going to lose the entire thing. And her coach, Patrick Montaglou, sees what's happening. He calls her aside, and he says, Serena, I was running some numbers, and it turns out that you score a point 80% of the time that you rush the net. 80% of the time. She looks at me and says, are you crazy? I thought I was terrible at the net. He says, well, look, statistics don't lie. It's the best news of the day. And he's right, statistics don't lie, but he did. The coaches do. The coaches do. And she wasn't scoring anywhere near 80% of the time that she rushed the net. The interesting thing is that after he told her this lie, she did start rushing the net. She changed from this limiting belief into a liberating belief. She ended up winning the match and winning all of Wimbledon that year. Now you say, well, aren't we lying? Isn't this, you know, is this ethical to do to people? He wasn't pulling it out of thin air. He knew that she was capable of that, but that she was limiting herself. He knew what she could really do. And she did end up scoring 80% of the points at the net when she believed she could. So, the job of a great coach is to show the person they're coaching what they are possible of. It's not, you know, he didn't tell her, oh, you can flap your wings and fly. He wasn't telling her something she couldn't do. He was telling her something that she could do, but she didn't believe that she could do. And so, I think this is a wonderful example of how using these strategic deceptions, as we call them, to unlock our real potential can be super helpful.

Speaker 1:
[72:17] And you point to research that shows that people who have greater certainty or confidence in their ability to affect change in the world, in their control of their environment, are happier, more effective, more successful, make more money, all this stuff. Something I find kind of fascinating in my own experience is that on the one hand, you know, I have long, ever since college, questioned the existence of human agency, we questioned human free will. I've had conversations on this show with Sam Harris and Robert Sapolsky on this topic. And I would probably say, if you, you know, ask me on a scientific basis, what's the probability that humans have free will, I would say, you know, it's relatively small. However, having said that, that's not an idea that I can hold in my brain for long periods of time. My daily experience of the world is one in which I feel I have enormous agency, right? And I've always thought to myself, Rufus, believe that you can change endlessly and assume that other people will not change. It's not to be cynical, but assuming that other people won't change and you have to adapt to them and change your behavior to interact successfully with the people around you has struck me as a wise point of view. And believing that you yourself can change over time seems to be so important. So this would appear to be a belief that I have chosen despite skepticism.

Speaker 2:
[73:44] Yeah, well, I always have taken issue with the whole free will debate. The people who really believe that there is no such thing as free will, they make the definition of free will smaller and smaller and smaller until I think it becomes irrelevant. We have free choice. Don't call it free will, free choice. We clearly do. It's common sense. And even if we don't, you know, the synapses fire milliseconds before, and those studies are pretty questionable, I think, if you really dig into them. At the end of the day, what really, really matters is to improve our lives, to decrease our suffering, to help other people. And that comes, it turns out, when we have what's called an internal locus of control. So an internal versus an external locus of control. Turns out the people who have an internal locus of control, who believe that they can affect their circumstances, as you said, they make more money, they have more friends, they contribute to their community, they live longer, they have fewer mental health issues. All the good things happen to people who have an internal locus of control. What's fascinating is that even when it is an objective truth that you are discriminated against, that you are downtrodden, that you are at the bottom of the socioeconomic totem pole, that you have disadvantages, the studies find that even if that is an objective truth, you still do better when you have an internal locus of control. The only circumstance where you don't do better is when you judge other people. All right, this is called the fundamental attribution error. So the right way to live, I think, what increases happiness, decreases suffering and all those other good things is believing I have an internal locus of control. I'm gonna do the best I can for the things I actually can control, but to view other people as having extenuating circumstances. Back to what I talked about about love is measured by the benefit of doubt. Giving other people the benefit of doubt to know that, hey, you know what, I may not agree with them, I may not like what they're doing, but they're operating with the best tools they have.

Speaker 1:
[75:38] On the topic of beliefs that are useful versus beliefs that are less useful, it is useful to have religious faith. There's a lot of data on this. You have not always had religious faith, but you have come to believe in the power of prayer.

Speaker 2:
[75:55] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[75:56] This sounds like it's a meaningful change in your life. Can you tell us about this?

Speaker 2:
[76:00] Definitely. I would say I still don't have faith in the supernatural, and I haven't for all my adult life. I did used to pray when I was six. My family was in the United States for just a few years at that point, three years, and they lost everything they had. I got scammed by some American who saw a family who couldn't speak English well and basically stole everything they had. That's awful. Yeah, it was a tough time. I remember my parents getting into terrible arguments that I can still hear in my head. They were on the verge of leaving the country because they didn't have any money. They had to go back to Israel where I was born. I remember I would go outside, and I would lay on my driveway, and I would talk to God, and I would talk to this voice in my head that at the time was very helpful because the voice told me that things are going to be okay. Then as I grew up, I stopped praying. I stopped having that conversation because I thought, well, if I can't prove that someone or something is listening, then I'm just talking to myself. What's the point? In the course of writing Beyond Belief, I kept coming across this amazing research around the power of prayer. But whenever I saw this research, that's unequivocal. I mean, people who pray, again, live longer, happier, they fewer mental health issues, they make more money. All these good things seem to happen to people who pray. But I thought, well, that's not for me because I don't have a particular faith in the supernatural. So, you know, nice for them, but not for me. And then I found these studies that showed that prayer works even without faith. That in these studies where they had three groups of people, one group of people prayed with some kind of faith tradition. So, you know, a Christian or Muslim or Jewish, Buddhist, they had some kind of faith tradition. Another group were people who were agnostics or atheists, who they taught how to pray, but they said for the word God, substitute whatever is meaningful to you. Mother nature, the universe, some of all forces, whatever is meaningful to you, just substitute that word. And then there was a third group, the control group that didn't do anything. Turns out that people who prayed had a much higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't learn to pray, the control condition, even if they prayed without faith. So that prayer seems to have this amazing protective effect, which I think is incredibly important in the United States right now, where the largest religious group are the nuns, the N-O-N, not the Catholic nuns, N-O-N-E, people like me who don't have any kind of faith tradition. Turns out that people who are spiritual but not religious have much higher rates of anxiety and depression disorder. They're much more likely to have mental health issues. And I think part of the rise, I think there's multiple causes of why we're seeing more mental health issues, part of the rise is that more people are secular, which I am, right? I don't subscribe to them particularly. And you know what? I'm suffering because of that. That it kept me from accessing something that has been shown through the millennium to be incredibly effective. And I kept telling myself, well, if I can't prove the fact that everything in this holy text happened the way it said, that I can't step foot in a religious institution, why? Nobody has a monopoly on prayer. It's so good for you. It doesn't have any side effects. It's free, even if you do 10 minutes every morning. You know, when I walk by a religious institution, if the door's open and they'll let me open into the church or the synagogue or the mosque or the Buddhist temple, I walk in and I say a little prayer. I don't ask for things. I don't ask for the, I don't believe in this cosmic slot machine type of prayer, gimme, gimme, gimme. I ask for the strength to overcome challenges. I don't ask to remove challenges. I ask for the strength to overcome it. Give me patience. That's what I'm looking for.

Speaker 1:
[79:54] And it's a gratitude exercise, isn't it, as well, right?

Speaker 2:
[79:58] Yeah, beautiful. It's one of the best things. We've known around the power of gratitude for ages, but having that in a place that feels meaningful and especially around other people, this is something I learned from. I went to five religious leaders. It sounds like a joke, but this is really what happened. I went to a rabbi, a priest, an imam, a Swami and a monk. I went to all five and walked into a bar, and I asked them basically the same question. How does one pray when you have doubts or uncertainties about God? And they all gave, I thought they would say, get out of here. Like, you're unfaithful, get out. It turns out that they didn't care. They actually said, you know what, there's something you can do with or without perfect faith. And in fact, the father I spoke with, not only did he say that doubt and uncertainty strengthens your faith, but that the way God answers prayers is not gimme, gimme, gimme. It's that when you go to a religious institution and you're around other people, that's how God solves problems. That's how he answers prayers because whatever you're wishing for, well, you know, if you're looking for love, well, you might meet somebody in the pew next to you, or if you're struggling in your business, maybe there's somebody who can help. That community is something we really miss out on, I think, in America as we became more secular. I think people need to kind of lower the bar on saying, well, I can't step foot into a religious institution unless I agree with every single thing they say. But also those religious institutions need to become more welcoming and not have this faith purity test of, well, if you don't have perfect faith and blind faith, then you're not allowed in these doors. I think we would be much better off if we went back to those religious institutions and that those religious institutions welcome people like me back without questioning, well, do you believe every letter and verse?

Speaker 1:
[81:39] There's a line towards the end of your book that I can't help but read. You write, extraordinary lives are not built on grand declarations. They're built on small efforts, actions that create evidence, evidence that strengthens belief, belief that fuels more actions until possibility itself expands. And I love this. And it's a reminder to me that so much of life, I think, is about getting into a virtuous cycle opposed to a vicious cycle, right? Of making these sort of small modifications to our beliefs that then result in positive feedback from the world. Evidence, as you say, that supports those continued incremental adjustments of our beliefs. And we end up in a more collaborative, generous, beautiful world. We do have to focus on the small actions, right? Opposed to some kind of dramatic blind leaps of faith. This is about small incremental changes of beliefs.

Speaker 2:
[82:46] And I couldn't have said it better myself. And those small changes can be something as simple as trying on a new belief. Like, not even a different behavior, because behaviors are downstream of those beliefs. So just trying on that different belief, just could it also be true that there's this other diametrically opposed belief that I've been carrying? How do I feel when I try on that belief? Does it serve me better?

Speaker 1:
[83:13] I love it. Beyond Belief, The Science Back Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results, really a phenomenal book. And thank you, Nir, thank you for this book, and thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 2:
[83:27] My pleasure, Rufus. Great to be back with you. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[83:36] And that's our show. If you enjoyed it, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We read everyone, we really appreciate it. It helps new folks find the show. If you'd like to hear Nir's last appearance on the podcast from all the way back in 2019, actually one of the first episodes we did, there's a link in the episode notes. You've heard me say it a million times before, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention once again that The Next Big Idea is more than a podcast. It's also a book club and community where we bring together the best writers in the world and the smartest readers, people like you. You can learn more at nextbigideaclub.com. I hope to see you in the community. Today's episode was produced by Caleb Bissinger, sound designed by Mike Toda. I'm Rufus Griscom, see you next week.