E183 - Nir Eyal: How Your Beliefs Shape What You See (And Hold You Back)

Nir Eyal joins the podcast to explore one of the most foundational forces shaping our lives: belief. What if the way you see reality isn’t reality itself, but a simulation filtered through prior assumptions, expectations, and unconscious scripts? In this conversation, we unpack the difference between fact, faith, and belief—and why most of our suffering stems from confusing the three. Nir shares powerful research on predictive processing, placebo and nocebo effects, learned helplessness, and how our expectations literally alter what we see, feel, and experience in our bodies. From secular prayer and gratitude practices to Byron Katie’s turnaround method, this episode is a deep dive into how to move from limiting beliefs to liberating ones. If beliefs are tools, then the real question becomes: are the ones you’re using serving you? EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/knowthyself Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee 3/10 Book release: http://geni.us/beyondbelief André's Book Recs: https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com/book-list ___________ 00:00 Intro 01:35 The Difference Between Fact, Faith, and Belief 05:36 Illusions of Reality 07:29 The Core of Our Perception 15:52 Where to Start Enacting Change on Your Life 19:53 Beliefs as Tools, Not Truths 25:28 Ad: Nord VPN 26:32 The Cosmic Slot Machine 37:39 Spotting Your Limiting Beliefs 46:39 The Prison of Our Own Making 51:33 Why We Perceive Threats Everywhere 1:00:18 Becoming Indistractable 1:12:57 What Attention Means Today versus the Past 1:26:44 The Motivation Triangle 1:32:00 Closing Thoughts ___________ Episode Resources: https://www.instagram.com/neyal99 https://nir.substack.com/ https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ https://www.youtube.com/@knowthyselfpodcast https://www.knowthyselfpodcast.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People who consider themselves lucky see literally with their eyeballs more opportunities. You don't have to change your mind. But what you can do is to say, you know what? That pair of sunglasses that I've been wearing? I'm sick of those sunglasses. Let me try and look at the world through a different pair of lenses. Figure out what are those limiting beliefs that are keeping us from what we really want? And then replacing them with what I call liberating beliefs. My family came to America when I was three, and by the time I was six, they had been scammed out of every dollar they had. So your brain is constantly one step ahead based on what it thinks is going to happen. And how does it know that? Based on what happened in the past. And then I came across this study that blew my mind. Learned helplessness is this concept that over time, if nothing you do works, you learn to be passive. Turns out, it's exactly wrong.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  It's to demonstrate that if the power of the mind can exclude pain, can change through its belief, what enters conscious awareness through the power of attention? What else can we do? Each of us creates our own simulation. And how can we show this? It's called the Koffler illusion. It's the same image, and you tell me whether you see rectangles or circles. I know where you're born.

• 1:08André Duqum?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Know thyself Podcast. Our guest today is a bestselling author who teaches and sits at the intersection of psychology, technology, and unlocking human potential. He is somebody that is a really eloquent teacher, exploring habit building, the distracted mind, beliefs, and the invisible forces that are shaping our life, often unbeknownst to us, near y'all. Thank you for being here.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Andre.

• 1:35André Duqum?

  What is the difference between fact, faith, and belief?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Hmm, okay. So a fact is an objective truth. It's something that is true whether or not you believe in it. So the world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat-earthers. The Earth doesn't care what you think. You just lost all your flat-Earth audience.

• 1:53André Duqum?

  I wonder how many there are.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, probably not that many. That's a fact, okay? Now, on the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. What happens in the afterlife? God rewards the righteous. These things don't demand evidence. In between fact and faith is what we call a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. And what's so amazing about these beliefs, that I think most people don't realize, is that we can choose them. That beliefs are not the same thing as facts and faith. That beliefs are not truths, they're tools. And so, just like a carpenter wouldn't say, "Oh, this is the hammer. It is the one and only true tool." A carpenter says, "Okay, sometimes for the job, the tool is a hammer. Sometimes it's a wrench, sometimes it's a saw."

• 2:39Speaker 00

  And the carpenter would use the right tools for the job. We can do the same thing with our beliefs. But of course, that's not obvious to us, that we have these hidden, limiting beliefs that we all carry around. Everyone I've ever met has them, and we can't see them in ourselves, but we can oftentimes see them in others. We can definitely see them in everyone we're close with. And yet, these aren't obvious to ourselves. And so, what's critical, it turns out, in terms of enhancing human performance, happiness, well-being, sense of peace, is to figure out what are those limiting beliefs that are keeping us from what we really want, and then replacing them with what I call liberating beliefs.

• 3:16André Duqum?

  Going from limiting to liberating.

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. And the difference is super important. A limiting belief is something that saps motivation, that increases suffering. Whereas a liberating belief is something that supplies motivation and decreases suffering.

• 3:33André Duqum?

  How important is it for us to understand that distinction between those three and how it changes how we live our life?

• 3:39Speaker 00

  I think that the majority of our personal, interpersonal, and even political problems come from the fact that we don't differentiate between these three things, fact, faith, and beliefs. That far too many of what we think are facts turn out to be nothing more than beliefs. And we hold on to them with this utter conviction as if it is true, because to us, the way the brain sees reality is filtered from our beliefs. Now, how does that happen? We know that the brain is taking in, in every given second, 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits. So the light hitting your eyes, the sound of my voice into your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. This is creating 11 million bits of information.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  To put that in perspective, Andre, that's reading War and Peace twice every second. Okay, tremendous amount of information. The brain can't consciously process all that information. So what it does, it can only actually consciously process about 50 bits of information. 50 bits of information is about one sentence per second. Okay, so your conscious mind is processing only about 0.0045% of the information coming into it. And so how does it deal with that information? It uses what's called predictive processing. Your brain doesn't see reality as it is. That's impossible. It can't. So it's actually creating a simulation of reality. So your brain is constantly one step ahead based on what it thinks is going to happen.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  And how does it know that? Based on what happened in the past, based on what we call your priors, your prior beliefs, your prior understandings, your prior experiences in the world that shape this tiny kewel of attention that you can see reality through, that is filtered through our beliefs. And so if we know that the brain is creating our own personal simulation of reality, filtered by these beliefs, you better pick the right ones because that determines whether you have a more accurate view of reality or a distorted view of reality.

• 5:36André Duqum?

  Do you think that you can see reality as it actually is?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  No, impossible. Because the reality you see already happened. Your brain is still processing it. So it has to keep ahead of what reality actually is by creating this simulation in your mind. It's not like The Matrix where we all live the same simulation by aliens. It's that each of us creates our own simulation. How can we show this? We can, when we show people, it's called the Koffler illusion. It's the same image, literally the same image. And if I show it to you and you tell me whether you see rectangles or circles, I know where you're born. I can tell, based on how you answer that question, either you will see circles or you will see rectangles. You can look it up, type in Koffler illusion on Google.

• 6:19André Duqum?

  It's on screen right now.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Well, it turns out, if you're looking at it on screen, that if you were born in an industrialized country, you most likely see rectangles. But if you were born in a pre-industrialized country, you most likely see circles because of your prior experience, whether you grew up seeing hard edges, like we do in industrial societies, or more organic shapes. I can show you another illusion called the checkerboard illusion, which you can hopefully see right now. That you can look at it and you will see that square A is darker than square B. Plain as day, absolutely. But when I show you the truth of the matter and I connect those colors together, you can see that they're actually the same color. Now, the really fascinating part

• 7:04Speaker 00

  is that even when you know the truth, even when you have seen and you agree with me that these squares are the same color, if you look back at image one, you still think they look differently because your eyes are lying to you. Because processing doesn't happen in your eyeballs, processing happens in your brain. And so, these are just some examples of how we think we see reality and we absolutely don't. And we can prove this time and time again.

• 7:32André Duqum?

  To me, this is one of the most important topics to explore because we have these strongly held assumptions about what life is, who we are, how we should engage with life and reality, so much of which has been embedded in our minds without us having conscious awareness of it. These millions of bits that we have access to in every given moment that we're only actually perceiving consciously a small percentage of, then go on to shape our perception in so many ways. You know, the person wearing yellow sunglasses doesn't actually see yellow snow. It's become the way in which they view the world. So, congrats on writing your new book, Beyond Belief. One thing you say is that what you believe shapes what you see. What you see shapes what you do.

• 8:13André Duqum?

  So, can you walk us back through the thread of causality? And do you believe belief then is the origin? Or is there something deeper that is really at the core of how we're shaping our perception?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  I think it is these priors, these beliefs, that are your operating system. So before the personality types, before the big five, before all that, I think that there is this layer that dictates, from what the research literature shows us, dictates not only how you see reality, but also how you feel reality. It literally shapes the experiences in your body to a very large extent, which is something that people have a tough time understanding. Like, my experiences are real, I feel what I feel, that can't be influenced by what I believe, and nothing could be further from the truth.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  One study that, or one example that blew my mind, is hypnosis sedation, which I'm a pretty skeptical guy. I need to see the studies, I need to see the research, I need to see the video to really prove that this kind of stuff really happens. And anyone can pull up these videos. I've seen this specific one myself, this guy by the name of Daniel Gisler. And Daniel was a commodity, is a commodities trader, very numbers guy, super analytic, and doesn't believe in anything he can't touch and feel. And in his early 50s, he breaks his ankle, he had a freak accident, and he had to get some pins put in his ankle. And then a few years later, he has to have them taken out. And in the meantime, he came across this technique called hypnosis sedation.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  And hypnosis sedation, it's not magic, it's not like stage hypnosis, it's not an act, it's just the process of teaching your brain to focus on different bits of information. So again, there's 11 million bits out here entering your brain, but you're only processing 50 bits of information. So he could learn how to pick and choose those 50 bits of information. And so what that gave him the power to do was that when he went inside the operating room, and I've seen the tapes, I wouldn't believe it unless I had actually witnessed this, he went through a 55-minute operation where scapula was cutting through flesh, where metal was screwed out of bones, taken out of his body, completely

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Under hypnosis with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, all through the power of his mind. So why do I say this example? It's not to convince anybody to do hypnosis. I'm not an advocate for that necessarily, even though many people see remarkable results. Tens of thousands of people have done it in Europe. Many hospitals in Switzerland and France do this. It's to demonstrate that if the power of the mind can exclude pain, can change through its belief, what enters conscious awareness through the power of attention, what else can we do? All the things that block our path, all the pain, all the suffering that leads us to quit our goals, whether it's quitting that business we want to start, giving up on that relationship,

• 11:11Speaker 00

  giving up on that goal that we have for ourselves. It's because of pain. That's the primary block. And so the path forward is with persistence. So if we can unlock that capability that we all have within us through the power of beliefs, what can't we accomplish? There's so much we can now do.

• 11:30André Duqum?

  How do expectations come into this? I saw you refer to in your book, the wine study. There's many different examples of this. I'm curious how, what we are expecting to experience colors how we feel about the experience.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you've got how beliefs shape what we see. That's called attention. We have how beliefs change what we feel. That's called anticipation. And we have how beliefs change what we do. That's called agency. And when it comes to anticipation, it's also fascinating, how these expectations of what we think is going to happen, our beliefs around what we think will happen next, back to this predictive processing of that's how the brain perceives realities by what it expects. It will create a reality that's not even there. And the studies are tremendous.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  The wine study you mentioned, where they took participants and they put them in an fMRI so they could scan the blood flow in their brain. And they gave them the first wine and they said, "This is a cheap wine. We want you to taste it. Tell us what you think of this wine." They gave them a little squirt of the wine. They said, "Okay." The participants said, "It's all right, wine. Tastes okay, a little flat, but it's all right." Then they said, "Okay, here's the next wine. It's a very expensive bottle of wine. You ready?" "Yes." "Okay." They gave them a little squirt while they're in the fMRI machine. And they said, "Well, what do you think of this wine?" "Oh, this wine is much, much better. It has hints of oak and I can taste the cherry and you know, what wine snobs say." They elaborated on how tasty the wine was.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  And then, of course, the trick here is that it's the same wine. But the fascinating thing is not only did the participants say the wine tasted better, we could see what was happening inside their brains as they experienced the two kinds of wine. And what was happening was that the wine they expected to taste better because it was expensive, actually tasted better in their brain. They weren't lying. They weren't just telling the study participant, the study authors, what they wanted to hear. They were telling them what they were actually experiencing, that the pleasure centers in their brain lit up, so to speak, because they expected them to. And so they actually yielded more joy, more pleasure from the more expensive wine, simply

• 13:46Speaker 00

  because they expected that there's a correlation between expensive wine and better taste. And so, and we see this time and again and again. We see it on the positive, right? Many products, the reason that products are advertised is not just to spread awareness, but to incept the enjoyment of the product before you even experience it. So when you hear that a certain thingamajig that you buy might have certain results, you are prompting the expectation and then it will likely, more likely, actually occur and make you feel the way you expect to feel. This is, you know, classic placebo effect. It can also go in reverse, that if you expect something to be not as enjoyable or painful, then that's also going to happen. And so, of course, if you expect people to be untrustworthy, you're more likely to see scams.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  If you're, if you expect people to be unkind, you're more likely to see them treating you poorly. And so this is all based on these expectations, even so far as to color the opportunities we see as possible. And this is mind blowing. That we know that you can actually manufacture luck, that people who consider themselves lucky see more opportunities, like literally with their eyeballs, see more opportunities. There's a beautiful study where they asked people who were self-identified as lucky people and people who were self-identified as unlucky people. So someone who says, "Oh, I'm unlucky," or "Yeah, I think I'm very lucky." And they asked them to do a very simple task. The task was, "Look at this newspaper, flip through, and count the number of images."

• 15:14Speaker 00

  That's it. Just count the number of images. The unlucky people took about two and a half minutes to finish the task. The lucky people took 11 seconds. Why? Because on page two of the newspaper was one photo that said, "There are 43 photos in this newspaper. Collect your reward." The lucky people saw it and read it. The unlucky people sat there, one, two, three, four, and they just counted for two and a half minutes. So they literally saw a reality that the unlucky people didn't even see. And so this happens time and time again. There's so many amazing studies that demonstrate this principle.

• 15:53André Duqum?

  Hmm. So then, how do we extrapolate that into some sort of change in our day-to-day life? For everybody that's listening right now that has these two examples of these studies that you referred to, all right, well, we have so many different beliefs that are shaping our expectation. Therefore, we're deriving meaning and coloring our experience in so many different ways. In many ways, the quality of our life is very directly correlated to what we expect from it. So, Walkus, yeah, where do we go from here? For somebody that wants to see how they can take that analogy and those studies and incorporate it into their life?

• 16:30Speaker 00

  The best thing to do is to realize that much of the suffering in your life comes from these beliefs. And so if there is an area of your life, I call it the muck, right? The goal that you've had for years and years, the New Year's resolution that you've had forever, the relationship that still annoys you and is unfixed and you can't seem to repair it. Wherever you have those areas of your life with these persistent problems that bring you suffering, that's where we want to look for the limiting beliefs. That tends to be what's blocking you from making progress, from easing your suffering, is some kind of underlying limiting belief. So that's the first step, is to identify that area that's troubling you, and then

• 17:15Speaker 00

  follow a process, because limiting beliefs are like your face, that you can't see your face. Right now, you can't see your face, right? The only way you can see your hands, you can see your feet, you can't see your face. But we all have our faces. The only way you can see your face is if you look in a mirror, and you have to do some reflecting. And so there's a process to uncover these limiting beliefs, examine them, not necessarily change them. It's not about belief change, per se. It's about asking ourselves, does this belief serve me or hurt me? And the only way to know that is to try on other beliefs. And in that process, we do what's called a turnaround. This comes from the amazing work of Byron Katie, and I'm a big fan. And her process, actually, the more I research it, there's actually quite a bit of scientific research now that backs up her process, these turnarounds.

• 18:00Speaker 00

  And it actually goes back all the way to Aristotle. It's very, there's a direct line from what she's channeling. It's a 2,500-year-old technique of intentionally looking at a different belief. And people hate this, absolutely hate it, because our psyche is built in with this psychological immune system. It's called an immunity to change. So just like your body rejects foreign bodies, right? That's what your immune system is meant to do. Anything that's not supposed to be there, it fights. The same thing happens with our beliefs. We hate changing our beliefs. We despise it. And even the most open-minded people hate it, because it's very uncomfortable, right? It turns out, we used to have this concept in psychology, it was called learned helplessness.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Learned helplessness is this concept that, over time, if nothing you do works, you learn to be passive. Turns out, it's exactly wrong, that the authors of those studies, Martin Seligman and Myers, they, a couple of years ago, completely reversed the conclusion. And what they found was, is that you don't learn helplessness, helplessness is our default state. Helplessness is our default state. What you learn is hope. That when we are born, we're born helpless. We have to have the assistance of others. And that, that evolutionarily, there's safety in what's worked before. There's safety in passivity. And so, when I feel in danger, when I feel stressed, when I feel like my, you know,

• 19:28Speaker 00

  that I'm not safe, when I'm scared, when I'm in fear, I always will retreat to my existing beliefs, because that's safer. And so, this is why we find you have to actively challenge these beliefs. The ones that are most uncomfortable, the ones that you think are crazy, the ones that can't possibly be true about your relationships, about your goals, about whatever is blocking you, those are the ones you most need to explore. That's where you'll find the most growth from.

• 19:56André Duqum?

  Where do you make the distinction? You referred to beliefs as tools, not truths. How do you delineate between seeing beyond beliefs altogether? And questioning their falsity or their truthhood, like in Byron Katie's framework, through that process of inquiry? Or optimizing them, just making beliefs better? You know? Because I think especially, you know, we can get quite existential on this podcast. We love exploring all different themes. And, and there is the very real, human, character logical self that has these subconscious beliefs that very directly impact the quality of our relationships, our career.

• 20:35André Duqum?

  And then there's the waking up to a, the reality beyond any beliefs having real existential weight beyond somebody that holds them. And I'm just curious how you think about beliefs in that context?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. I've, so for the majority of our decisions in our life, I'm very pragmatic. I want to learn the stuff that's not only interesting, but is actually useful to my life. That brings me peace, that helps me contribute to my family, to my community, that, that makes me a better person, someone who, who, who gives to the world. And that, that I feel better in, right? The better I feel, the more whole I am, the more I can contribute. That's what I'm really interested in. And that's not how I used to be. I used to be someone who, I need to know exactly what is true. And if it's not a fact, then I can't do it. There's the other extreme where, well, I just think it's true because it feels

• 21:30Speaker 00

  true and I'm just gonna have faith in it, which has a place in our life. But that's not actually where most of our important decisions come from. Most of our important decisions are based on beliefs. Should I marry this person? Should I move to this city? Should I take this job? These aren't laws of physics, right? These aren't facts. They're beliefs. And so that's what guides our life. And so that's what I'm most interested in. So for me, for example, the last time I prayed was when I was six years old. My family came to America when I was three, and by the time I was six, they had been scammed out of every dollar they had. Some Americans saw some new immigrants that didn't really speak the language and took nearly every penny they had.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  And I remember I used to pray because the voice I was talking to brought me a lot of comfort. And then as I got older, I kind of lost touch with that. I didn't really find much value in spirituality and the supernatural, and I just, I stopped praying. But as I was doing this research, I kept coming across these amazing studies around the power of prayer, that prayer has incredible benefits. People who pray live longer, they have more friends, they contribute more to their community, they make more money. All these good things happen to people who pray. And I thought that was closed off to me. Why? Because I didn't believe that what they said in their sacred texts was a fact. So I can't do those things.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  And then I came across this study that blew my mind, that we have this standard protocol for testing pain tolerance. And one of these protocols are we ask participants to put their hand in very, very cold water. And then we see how long they can last before they have to take their hand out. We measure, you know, how much they're complaining and their face grimaces, things like that. And in this study, they took three groups of people. One group, it was a control group, so they didn't do anything to. The second group were people who already prayed, they were people who regularly prayed, and had some kind of faith tradition. And then they had a third group of people who didn't pray. They taught them how to pray, and they said, you don't have to substitute the word God, you don't have to say God, you can say whatever you want. You can say some of all forces, or Mother Nature, whatever's meaningful to you.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Okay? It doesn't have to be some kind of faith tradition. And it turns out that the people who learned how to pray, even without a faith tradition, had equal improvement in their pain tolerance as people who had a faith tradition, which was much, much higher than people who didn't pray at all. So there does seem to be some kind of pain tolerance effect to pray. And so I wanted this. I was jealous of this. I wanted these psychological benefits. And in fact, it turns out I'm not alone, that the biggest religious community in America today are the nuns. Not the Catholic nuns, not N U N, N O N E. People who call themselves spiritual but not religious. Those people have the worst outcomes. People who are spiritual but not religious,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  meaning they don't have any faith tradition, they have higher rates of depression and anxiety than people who have a faith tradition. And so they are the worst off. And I think it's because we have missed out on these ancient benefits that are there for a reason. And so I went to five religious leaders. It sounds like a setup for a joke. I went to a rabbi, a priest, a monk, a swami, and an imam. And I asked them the same question. How do you pray when you have uncertainties about God? And each one of them gave me a principle that anyone can use. And so that's what I've integrated in my life. I use these secular prayers. And I've stopped asking myself the questions that obsessed me of, is it true? Is it a fact? Because you know what?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Andre, I'm never gonna know. I'm never gonna know. None of us are gonna know. We're never gonna have that certainty. So either it's blind faith or a belief. And for me, that really works because I do these things because they improve my life. They improve the life of others around me. And so I can use these beliefs as tools, not necessarily truths.

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• 26:29André Duqum?

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• 27:35André Duqum?

  What does prayer look like for you? Because I think a lot of people earlier on are maybe familiar with like just asking for things.

• 27:41Speaker 00

  The cosmic slot machine.

• 27:43André Duqum?

  Yeah, to the sky daddy somewhere who's gonna grant you something if you're lucky versus more of a grounded approach. What is your thoughts there?

• 27:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't like the cosmic slot machine type prayer. To me, that's not meaningful. You know, you can pray for whatever you want. It's your business. To me, that wasn't meaningful. So I do a few things. So, one, whenever I pass by a place of worship, if the doors open and they'll allow me, I step in. I always walk in now. And if I'm allowed to, I'll just sit there and I'll pray. What do I pray for? First gratitude, always gratitude. The studies again show that a gratitude practice is incredibly beneficial. It actually brings, you will become more lucky the more gratitude you show others. I mean, if you've, you know, the more you write these thank you notes and, you know, never miss an opportunity to show gratitude.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  And so prayer is yet another opportunity to, to think about what I'm grateful for. And then I will focus on attributes I'm working on. Okay. So one of, one of my mantras is that things don't get easier, you get stronger. And so I focus on what am I looking to strengthen? Patience, be more calm, be more thoughtful, be kinder. How am I looking to get better? That's, that's another thing. And then the last part, I will contemplate a problem perhaps I'm working on. And I'll just, having that space to bring awareness to, how can I solve this problem? Right? If, if there was some kind, you know, what kind of solutions? How would the puzzle piece fit together so that the problem I'm, I'm working on right now could be solved?

• 29:19Speaker 00

  And some people will, will have a conversation with a higher being for that problem solving. And, and studies find that that can be very, very helpful. But, but to me, I can do that even without necessarily having that supernatural force. And then the other thing I do is that throughout my day, I have these, these little prayers or mantras that I repeat, that when I find a limiting, a limiting belief, I will then immediately look for the liberating belief and turn that liberating belief into a prayer, into a mantra. So for example, the, the mantra I say that it doesn't get easier, you get stronger. Okay. Why do I have that?

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Because I had this terrible habit of telling myself, that's just my luck. This always happens to me, right? Like traffic again, or this, and I would pay attention to, I would focus on these negative aspects. And I would constantly expect things to be smooth, right? That I would judge what was happening. And of course, we have what's called a negativity bias, that we focus on the negative, not on the positive. That's just in our evolutionary DNA. And that was definitely me. I would look for those negatives and reinforce them. And so when I realized that that was my limiting belief, that that was keeping me from being the kind of person I wanted to become, the adverse of that is this liberating belief that chaos will always be there.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  That chaos, in fact, Schopenhauer said that life, the very definition of what is life? Life is that which fights entropy. That is the definition of life. It fights chaos. And so that attitude that chaos isn't something to be overcome. You overcome chaos when you die. That's when you dissolve into nothing. That chaos means you are alive. Thank God that you can be in a chaotic situation, that the kitchen is a mess and the kids are screaming and you've got all these things on your to-do list. Yeah, guess what? You're alive. And so it's not going to get easier. The chaos is always going to be there until the day you die. But you get stronger. And so I have many of these kind of secular mantras and prayers that I've made for myself to repeat throughout the day to remind me of these liberating beliefs.

• 31:25André Duqum?

  Yeah. Do you want to share anything else there on the nocebo?

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Where do we start? The nocebo effect is remarkable. And one of my favorite examples is of this guy by the name of Mr. A. He was anonymized in the academic literature. There's a study that talked about him. Mr. A had a very bad breakup with his girlfriend. This is a true story. You can read the scientific literature on this. And after this very bad breakup, he decides he wants to end his life. And he has a pill of antidepressants, a pill bottle of antidepressants. He takes the entire bottle of pills and he says, that's the end. I'm done. And then he changes his mind. And he says, you know what? I want to live.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  He rushes to the neighbor's house. He asks his neighbor to rush him to the hospital. By the time he gets to the hospital, he's feeling awful. He crashes onto the floor and he tells the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he gives her the bottle, the empty bottle. They rush him to the ER. They strap a heart rate monitor on him. They realize that his heart rate is dangerously low. His blood pressure is falling. He passes out. And they want to immediately figure out what is this antidepressant? What is in this pill? And they look on the bottle and all it has is a phone number. Because Mr. A was in a drug trial for these antidepressants. They call up the phone number and they said, what was this medication? We need to, you know, this guy's overdosed. What do we do?

• 32:59Speaker 00

  What's the medication? They look his name up on the computer and they say, oh, this guy didn't take the pills. He took the placebo. He just didn't know. It was a double-blind control study, so he didn't know he was taking the placebo. He thought he had taken antidepressants to kill himself. Turns out, he had taken an inert substance. And yet, from that placebo, what we call a nocebo, the opposite of placebo. Placebo means I shall heal. Nocebo means I will hurt. His physiological reaction was that of decreased blood pressure, falling heart rate, all these symptoms of someone who had overdosed. Within 15 minutes, Andre, in 15 minutes, all his vital signs were back to normal. He was revived and he walked out.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  So what does that tell us? That if the power of the mind is so powerful to create these real physiological symptoms that we think are facts, absolutely, look, look at the heart rate, look at the, all these metrics. Objectively, these are facts, right? He overdosed. But he didn't. It was in his mind. And his mind manufactured a reality based on what he expected. And so that's why we have to be very careful with our labels. Because what the research shows us is that if we misapply these labels, whether it's, I'm having a senior moment, I'm not a morning person, I'm a Sagittarius, and therefore I have to be, I'm an ENTJ, whatever case, I have ADHD, which I do have.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  If those labels becomes our identity, we get into trouble. So labels can be very helpful as a map. A diagnosis can be very helpful as a map. But you are not the map. Okay? When you become the diagnosis, your labels become your limits. And that's very, very dangerous. They essentially become your nocebo effect. I'll tell you personally. So I was diagnosed with ADHD. And for a long time, every time I had a difficulty, every time I got distracted by something, there's my ADHD. Right? And I hear this all the time. I'm not a morning person, or I haven't had my coffee yet, or mercury's in retrograde. I don't know. It's some reason that I can't function.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  And it's many times, these are not facts. They're beliefs. And what happens when we focus on what we think is this limitation? Is that we are focusing on the why we can't. And we've forgotten about what we're even trying to do. When I said, oh, there's my stupid ADHD again. Now I'm thinking about this limitation versus what was the thing I actually wanted to do in the first place? And so even if it's true, okay, let's say you don't agree with what I'm saying. Yeah, but I have real limitations. Granted, let's say it. Does it serve you to believe in those limitations? Does it actually serve you? Even if you believe, okay, I'm not a morning person. You have utmost conviction. Does it help you? Does it make things better? If I have two people running a marathon. And let's say they're both equally capable or incapable of running a marathon.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  And one tells you, I can't do this. And one tells you, I can do this. Who's going to finish the marathon? Equal physical level. Many people don't finish marathons. But if you had to bet on one, who's going to finish the marathon? It's the one who says they can. Because the one who says they can't instantly quits, stops running.

• 36:10André Duqum?

  Reminds me of that rat study.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  Which one? Oh, the Kurt Richter study.

• 36:12André Duqum?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Kurt Richter study is amazing. And what he did is, this was in 1950s. You can't do these kind of experiments anymore. But in the 1950s, he wanted to figure out how long a rat can swim for in water. Kind of weird experiment, but that's what he wanted to find out. So he took these wild rats, put them in a cylinder of water that was halfway full. And he stood there with a stopwatch and saw how long they paddled until they gave up. And at 15 minutes, turns out, the average wild rat gives up, sinks out of the water and dies. Now, he knew that after, you know, after he did the first leg of the study. He took another group of wild rats. And now, this time, he put them in the cylinder, timed how long they were swimming.

• 36:55Speaker 00

  And at the 15 minute mark, right before he knew they would give up. He took out the wild rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and plunk, put it back in the water. Now, he did this a few times and conditioned the rat. And he wanted to find out, could he increase how long the rat would swim for? And the rat did swim for longer. People know that there's a trick here, right? There's something remarkable happened. But what people have no idea of is how much longer the rat kept swimming. So when I tell people this, I know you've read the book, so you know. People say, okay, maybe twice as long, maybe three times, maybe four times as long. The rat went from 15 minutes to an hour. Wouldn't that be amazing? Like, if you could increase your perseverance by 4X, that'd be incredible. Run a marathon four times longer, work on that difficult project,

• 37:39Speaker 00

  have the patience and perseverance to keep going on something that's difficult. Amazing, life-changing, that'd be incredible, headline news. But the rats didn't swim for an hour. The rats did not swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 60 hours of swimming, 240 times more persistent. What changed? Their bodies, same bodies, nothing physically changed. Same experiment, same challenge. What changed? We can't ask the rats what they believed, but the only factor left was that something was unlocked in their minds. Now, they could always swim those 60 hours. That was always within them. But they couldn't. They gave up at 15 minutes, even though they were capable of 60 hours,

• 38:22Speaker 00

  because they didn't realize that salvation was possible. But once they were conditioned to see that something might save them, that there's a reason to keep swimming, something was unlocked. And that's exactly what happens to us. That when we change our beliefs into these liberating beliefs, what we thought was impossible for us now becomes possible.

• 38:42André Duqum?

  Makes me think of Viktor Frankl's book Therapy.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:45André Duqum?

  It's such an important reflection, and I just want to, I want to get your thoughts on diving a little bit deeper here. When you referred to this earlier as, you know, you can't see your own face. You're looking through it, right? Alan Watts says you can't bite your own teeth, right? That is part of the problem. When, you know, if you don't brush your teeth for a week, everyone around you will notice, but you actually won't, because you become acclimated. You're so close to your own BS with these limiting beliefs so often. And so, when you, you know, the importance of reflecting and being able to, whether it's journaling, whether it's through conversation, whatever means we can externalize our internals to be able to see what's actually... Actually going on, the mechanisms beneath the surface is so important.

• 39:26André Duqum?

  And so now I feel like we've laid out the reason for why this is critically important. There's not an area of life where examining, questioning your beliefs, not only seeing beyond, but also incorporating ones that are more beneficial for you is very important. What is the process?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:45André Duqum?

  To identify and to externalize and to see what are my limiting beliefs if we're so close to it?

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Sure. You know, I'll tell you my example.

• 39:53André Duqum?

  Okay.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  And this one is hard to share because I'm not proud of it, but I'll share it anyway. A few years ago was my mom's birthday, her 74th, and I wanted to do something nice for her. And so I wanted to send her flowers. I was in Singapore at the time and she was in Central Florida where I grew up. And I wanted to make sure she got beautiful flowers on her birthday. So I stayed up in Singapore till 1:00 in the morning, calling places, looking at reviews, and making sure that the van could get the flowers to her on her birthday and they wouldn't spoil in the Florida heat. Finally finished 1:00 AM, I went to sleep and I said, you know what? I'm a good son. I did a nice thing for my mom. I called her up the next day and I said, hey, Mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers? She said, yes, I did. Thank you very much.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  So you know, they were half-dead and don't order from them anymore. To which I said something like, well, that's the last time I order you flowers, which I regret. But that's what I said. And after the call, my wife could feel the tension and she said to me something like, do you want to do a turnaround on that? And I said, no, I do not. I don't want your touchy-feely, hocus pocus. I want to vent because what we're told is that when you have something inside, you need to get it out, right? You need to vent. You can't hold on to your emotions. You need to get, you know, you gotta get them out. Turns out the science doesn't say that, that in fact venting is not the right thing to do,

• 41:25Speaker 00

  that it's actually harmful because what venting does, it reinforces your effigy of people. Because we don't see, just like we don't see reality. Reality as it is, we definitely don't see people as they are. And the people we know best are the people that we most see an illusion of. We don't see our beliefs about, we don't see people as they are. We see our beliefs about people. And so when you vent, you're reinforcing layer upon layer, this effigy of what you think someone is like. So I knew that at the time and I had the sense to not vent. And then I sat down and wanted to do one of these turnarounds. And so again, this is, you know, credit to Byron Katie. I've modified the process a little bit, but in short, the first question that she asks is, is it true? Okay, is this belief true? What was the belief?

• 42:08Speaker 00

  The belief was that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, that was the belief that I was holding on to. My mother was too judgmental and hard to please in that moment. Now, is that true? Andre, back me up here. That was obviously true, right? She was being, well, who does that to their son? I sent her flowers, cost me a bunch of money. I stayed up till 1 a.m. and she wasn't grateful for that? Obvious. Okay, question number two. Come on, let's go. Question number two was, is it absolutely true? What, what does absolutely mean? Absolutely means in all circumstances, 100% of the time, no exceptions.

• 42:41André Duqum?

  Can you be certain?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Can you 100% be certain?

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• 43:45Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe not. Like, maybe there, I don't know why, I don't know how, but... Okay, maybe there's some kind of excuse as to why she wasn't being judgmental, but I don't know what it might be. Okay, but maybe there's a little bit of uncertainty there. Question number three. Who are you when you hold that belief? So when I was holding on to the belief that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please, I was short-tempered. I said something I regretted. I wasn't being myself. I was being a 13-year-old. Fourth question. Who would you be without that belief? So if you had some kind of magic wand that you could wave around and poof, the belief disappears, who would you be? And if I'm honest with myself, I was a little embarrassed. That's not me, right? I wouldn't do that to a stranger.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't act in such a way. I regretted what I said, that frankly, if I didn't have that belief, I'd be more myself. Okay, so now we've established in about 30 seconds that the belief might not be true, that holding that belief isn't always serving me, and that getting rid of that belief might actually be a good thing to do. Okay, that is already a lot of progress. Now, we're doing the shortened version, but you can do this with literally any belief you're holding. Wherever you feel stuck in your life, asking those four questions will get you to, now here's the me, the turnaround. And the turnaround asks you to look at the diametric opposite of what you believe is a fact, okay? I believed, as if it was a fact, that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Now, I can still hold on to that belief.

• 45:14Speaker 00

  That's belief number one. I'm not asking anybody or myself to change a belief with this process. Keep your existing belief, no problem. But let's collect a portfolio of perspectives. Let's see what else might be true. So what would happen if I flipped that belief? Now, this is where people hate the process. This is where people give up. It's so obvious. Why would I possibly look at any other alternatives? That's what happened. It's a fact. But it's not a fact. It's a belief. So beliefs are tools, not truths. Let's collect more tools. Let's just see, for the sake of discussion. What would be the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please? The opposite of that would be, my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Now you have to figure out, how could that be true in that scenario? Is there any way that could be true? Well...

• 46:01Speaker 00

  She was just stating a fact, right? She did thank me. Maybe she was trying to help me. Maybe she just didn't want me to be scammed by this florist. Okay, could be true, right? That's not crazy to think. So now I have two potential beliefs. What's the third? Now, this is a turnaround to the self, what Byron Katie calls it. Now, it's not my mother's too judgmental and hard to please. What if I turned that around and asked, "I am too judgmental and hard to please"? How could that be true? "I am too judgmental and hard to please"? Well, the more I thought about it, I had a script in my head that when I sent her flowers, she should thank me the way I want to be thanked. And when I didn't get that effusive praise, I lost it.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  So who was being judgmental? I was, right? I was judging her response as inadequate. So I was being hard to please, wasn't I? Okay. What's the fourth belief? "I am being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself." This one was the hardest to admit. Because the more I thought about it, when something I had spent time and money on didn't work out the way I planned, I took that to mean I was inadequate. That I had done something wrong, that I was a bad son, that I was incompetent somehow because things didn't work out. And I had this what's called a misattribution of emotion, which happens all the time, a misattribution of emotion. That I was feeling bad about myself.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  And what do we do when we feel bad about ourselves? We look for the first person that we can blame it on. And that's what I did. But the truth of the matter was that I felt bad that I'd messed up, that I picked the wrong person. Now, that's also just a belief. But now I have four beliefs. One of those beliefs, "my mother's too judgmental and hard to please", there's only one way out. One way out was, "you have to change so I can be happy." That ain't gonna happen. Hey, don't hold your breath, you're gonna suffocate. The other three beliefs gave me options. I could do something with those. Which one is true of those four beliefs? Which one is true? None of them, all of them? Who cares? Which one serves me best? This one definitely didn't serve me. This one is the one that made me impatient, rude, not myself.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  These I could do something with. That's the process. You don't have to change your mind. But what you can do is to say, you know what? That pair of sunglasses that I've been wearing? I'm sick of those sunglasses. Let me try a different pair. These sunglasses are old and ugly and scratched up. Let me try a different pair. Let me try and look at the world through a different pair of lenses. Try it for a week, see what happens. If that one doesn't work, that's okay. I can go back to my old ones, I can try a new one. That's the process.

• 48:39André Duqum?

  Amazing, thank you.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 48:40André Duqum?

  Thank you for sharing.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 48:42André Duqum?

  Yeah. It's funny to see how we live in a prism of our own making and the projections and the blame that we often externally attribute to others as a reflection of where we're holding the energy within ourselves.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:54André Duqum?

  It's a trip, how life's a mirror like that.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Right. And notice, by the way, I don't have to invoke any psychobabble. I don't have to diagnose her as anything. I don't have to call it trauma. I don't have to say... All I need to look at is what other lenses could I look at it through?

• 49:11André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  And then it doesn't necessarily matter what is the right one. That's not the goal here. We're not looking for truth. We're looking for what's useful.

• 49:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, is it serving?

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Is it serving you? Exactly.

• 49:23André Duqum?

  It also creates this tension sometimes where there are still scripts that we're running subconsciously that in many ways do make us suffer to some degree. But because we've created distance from believing how true they are it makes it almost harder to make contact with them because you don't really believe them as real. So it creates distance from the suffering, but it also, for me, makes it harder to actually make contact with those things. Does that make sense?

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Hmm. Say more, tell me more.

• 49:54André Duqum?

  Like, I mean, in the Buddhist contemplative practices, you're waking up to a space of self, a level of vastness of awareness that contains all content of experience, the greater context of awareness, you know? And so, the thoughts, the emotions, the belief, instead of being forefront, forebrain screams, they become background chatter.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:17André Duqum?

  You know, they become less prevalent, still there to some degree. And so, they're more subtle to work with. Doesn't really dissolve completely, but does that make sense?

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and what the literature says, that the fear part of that is supercritical. That, for example, when it comes to chronic pain, that what drives chronic pain, and this is pain that persists six months after you can find any kind of physical cause, it's called neuroplastic pain, as opposed to physical pain, where there's, okay, something broken, but when there's, we can't see anything is broken, there's no physical damage, but the pain persists for more than six months. That's what we call this neuroplastic pain. And it turns out, we used to think that the right thing to do, for example, if you have back pain, okay, when I had really bad back pain, you know, I was told, "You need to ice it, you need to heat it, you need to lay on the floor,

• 51:08Speaker 00

  you need to immobilize, don't move, don't feel it again." And what that script that I was learning was to be fearful of the pain, was to do everything I could to not feel pain. That, and that, in fact, what we know is that, what does it do with this model that I laid out earlier of the power beliefs? It causes you to pay more attention to the pain, to anticipate the pain returning, and to give up your agency because the fear drives the fact that it's out of your control. So you start ruminating, "What if it comes back? And what am I gonna do? And what if this medication doesn't work?" And that fear, that rumination, accentuates the pain and creates this awful feedback loop. And now, the medical community is really reassessing pain.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  That now, there's what's called pain-reprosicing therapy. That the way that works is, step one... Is that you pay attention to how you are safe. That pain does not mean you're not safe. Which is our default reaction is, oh, something's wrong. I have to fix it. I have to fix it. Something must be broken. Many times, nothing's broken. It's just that your pain dial has been cranked up to maximum volume. Because you're paying attention to it all the time. So what pain reprocessing therapy tells us, and there's many studies that have found its effectiveness, is that by reminding yourself that you're safe, that discomfort does not necessarily mean damage. And then step two is that you release the urgency. It's a big part of it.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  That because modern science has given us all these medications and treatments, if we don't get urgent results, we freak out. Is it ever going to go away? When can I get past it? What if this is forever? Am I always going to suffer? And so if we can stop expecting that urgency, that things need to be solved right away. And then three, if we can lighten the mood. If we can add agency to the situation. So for example, what I do, I'm 48 years old. So every time, yeah, I do feel a pain here or there. But I don't tell myself, oh, I'm getting older. And it's inevitable decline. Rather, what I tell myself is, okay, that's just a signal. And instead of immobilizing or worrying about it or ruminating about it, which I used to do, I'll do the same movement 10 times. Like literally, the same thing that just caused me pain, I'll do it 10 times until by the 10th time, it doesn't hurt anymore.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  And so we can use that technique in all kinds of areas in our life where we feel discomfort. By training ourselves to use these three powers of belief, attention, anticipation, agency, we can teach the brain to leverage these beliefs to help us, even if we feel the pain, we don't necessarily have to suffer from it.

• 53:38André Duqum?

  It makes me think deeper about the level of expectations we hold and how there's a mismatch how we evolved in the ancestral world compared to modern society. How we're very much so wired to perceive threat in an environment where we're still looking for it, but isn't actually there.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 53:55André Duqum?

  What do you think that mismatch is costing us when you look at how marketing and branding is kind of preying on this psychology?

• 54:05André Duqum?

  And yeah, what is the cost of that unexamined area of life?

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Right. Well, certainly with media, that's what media sells us. We have what's called a negativity bias, that we pay attention to threats much more than opportunities. So, and why does that happen? Because evolutionarily, something good is nice, but something bad can kill you. So you're much more likely to pay attention to what's that rustling in the in the bush that could be a tiger that's about to eat me than, oh, there's a couple berries over there. So you're much more attuned to threats. So in modern society, the first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. So I'm going to worry about some war that's 6,000 miles away. It's got nothing to do with me. I'm going to see what's happening in the nightly news that somebody got killed or some, you know, statistical fluke, you know, if there's a

• 54:54Speaker 00

  the news will report about a plane crash, but they won't tell you about all the planes that landed safely every day, because it's not interesting to us, because we are constantly on alert for possible threats, things that we have to do something about. And we should be aware of that, because that's another belief. Now, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that unless it's causing you suffering. And today, many people, I certainly, before I started this line of research, was not at peace. I was suffering because of all the things that are happening in the world. And that wasn't good for me. And I felt like I had this responsibility to constantly have an opinion about everything all the time. And so I needed to reassess that about how my beliefs were causing this kind of suffering.

• 55:38André Duqum?

  We can't think about the beliefs that we have in our life without thinking the places in which they originated. And I've heard you refer to Renee Jard's memetic theory and how so much of what we want is culturally indoctrinated into our mind. It's what we, what others want is we've learned to want for ourselves. How do you clarify the signal of what you actually want and not what somebody else describes of what they want for your life?

• 56:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's important to realize that, you know, probably the biggest criticism, I'm very aware of opposing perspectives, and one of the most common I hear is that, isn't this self-delusion? Right? If you're saying beliefs are tools, not truths, then are you telling me to gaslight myself? And I would argue, you're already gaslighting yourself. You're lying to yourself every day, because your beliefs have been programmed into you just without your approval. You've accepted them without consent.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  Whether it's your upbringing, what happened to you in the past, your culture has a huge influence, the media you've consumed, all these things have informed your belief set. You're already gaslighting yourself, right? Because you don't see reality as it is. What I'm arguing for is to change that lens once in a while, to try on different perspectives so that you can finally, for the first time, choose the belief that actually serves you best. So it's not believe what everybody else is believing. That's, you know, Gerard with memetic desires, that we want what others want, again, for an evolutionary basis. If you see everyone rushing to get some, something, right? If everybody wants those berries, those berries must be valuable. Let me go get some of them as well. We see this all the time, right? Every few years, there's, you know, the, the, the hot thing that everybody wants. Does it actually make us happier?

• 57:20Speaker 00

  No, but we want it because other people want it. That's, again, it's just a belief. And oftentimes, it doesn't serve us.

• 57:28André Duqum?

  There's three things that come up, like, one, how can we safeguard ourself from the continual stimulus of everyone's highlight reel? So we're continuing, continuing to program ourself. And subconsciously, when we see somebody's life that's in this, that's being rewarded societally and everybody seems to admire and have adoration for, there's like a pull into that, right? That's the memetic desire that's pulling us into that and that imitation. So like, I'm curious your thoughts on how we can, one, safeguard from that, but then, two, like, how do you really clarify the signal of what it is that you want to do, your desire, your intention? Of course, that's not fully in a vacuum of no influences. That's not realistic either, but is like really true and aligned to your nature and what you want.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you need to know when to quit. And I think you can misinterpret what I said earlier about the rats, you know, that they became more persistent. And we do know that, that persistence is a defining trait of success in all areas of life, that it's not intelligence. It turns out that if you are persistent, the more persistent you are, the more adaptable you are, the more likely you are to succeed at every endeavor.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  But does that mean you never quit? No, I think there's definitely times to quit. Lord knows, I've quit relationships, I've quit businesses, I've quit book projects, I've quit all kinds of things. It's not that quitting is wrong. It's that quitting too soon is the problem. That's when we squander human potential, human capital. So when is the right time to quit? Number one, You have to set a checkpoint, not a deadline, a checkpoint. Meaning, I will try this hard thing for X number of days. I will try this new belief. You know, people have a lot of resistance to these new beliefs of, uh, maybe that person didn't intend to hurt me. That's a big one. People have a really tough time saying, no, that person caused me trauma. That person was trying to hurt me. Why was that person so evil to me? Trying on a different belief can feel like a lie. But again, beliefs are tools, not truths.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Try on that belief, try on that perspective, see if it brings you better, uh, more peace, and then see what happens. And again, it's not excusing the person, it's not necessarily even forgiving the person. It doesn't mean you have to be around that person. But if that belief is causing you suffering, it's worth turning it around. And you can apply this to pretty much every endeavor. If it's, I want to try this business, I want to, um, you know, exercise more, whatever the case might be, whatever that goal. So having a checkpoint where you say, I'm going to try on this new belief for X number of days. Because if you don't set that checkpoint, as soon as it gets hard, I don't want to do it anymore, right? So setting that checkpoint is say, I'm going to try this new belief on for size for a week, a month, a year, X number of days. And I'm not going to reevaluate it until I get to that checkpoint.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  At that checkpoint, I can say, hey, is this really serving me? Is this, is this giving me what I want? If what I want, if my values dictate, I want greater peace, I want wisdom, whatever your values are, am I getting those things? Then the second, uh, reason to quit is, am I learning? So, uh, just because you're failing, it doesn't mean you're not learning. People interpret failures as a reason to quit. That's exactly the opposite. For example, if I told you that whatever it is you want, I traveled into the future and I know that if you fail five more times, the sixth time, you're going to succeed. You're looking for love. I know, Andre, if you go on five more dates, the sixth one is going to be the love of your life. What are you going to do?

• 1:00:48André Duqum?

  Go on six dates.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  You're gonna go on those dates as quickly as possible, right? I need to get through those five dates so I can meet the sixth girl, right? Well, that's not how most of us think about failure. Most of us think, hey, I'm failing and failing and failing. I need to quit. It's a sign it's not working. But in fact, if you're still learning from your failures, if you're making progress and getting smarter about this path, then failure's fantastic. You're just filtering out what doesn't work. So that's the second criteria. The third criteria is, does persistence pay off? So in many areas of life, persistence does not pay off. So for example, I used to work at a company I'm not gonna mention that had a terrible workplace culture. Really, like, I would break out in hives on Sunday night because I had to go to work on Monday morning.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  It was a really toxic workplace environment. Persistence would not have made a difference, right? I'm not gonna outlast the company culture, so I quit. In many areas of our life, however, persistence does make a difference. So for example, physical fitness, right? When you start exercising, I used to be clinically obese, and many times on my path to better health, there were plateaus where I'd lose weight, I'd get stronger, and then I would just kind of flatline for a long, long time. But persistence through that, eventually you do break out. You do actually start making progress. So that's an example of an activity where persistence really does make a difference. So those are the three criterias. Number one, did you meet your checkpoint? Number two, are you still learning even though you might be failing? And number three, does persistence make a difference?

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  That's when you decide when to quit. And that's when you realize, is when I'm working on something, I should continue.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

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• 1:03:23André Duqum?

  Well said. I think this goes also nicely with your work with Distractible. Because that level of information, I think, is really important, both from the technology standpoint, but more so the internal emotional triggers that are more at the root cause. When you go on that process, you know when to quit, you're clarifying what it is that you truly want, then there's this knowing and doing gap, right? You know what you should do, but you fail to execute, you fail to have the consistency and what some people feel is the discipline and willpower. But you have a great frame on how to actually close that gap. So could you set the stage for a bit of that work? Because I think it tailends this conversation quite nicely.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So the best place to understand how to fight distraction is to start with what is distraction? What are we even talking about? So what is the opposite of distraction? Most people think the opposite of distraction is focus, but it's not focus. The opposite of distraction, if you look at the origin of the word, the opposite of distraction is traction, right? Obviously, now, when you look at them side by side, they're opposites, traction and distraction, they're opposites. They both come from the same Latin root, "trehore," which means "to pull." And they both end in the same six-letter word, "acti," and that spells "action." So traction is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Actions that move you closer to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become, those are acts of traction.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  The opposite of traction, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, further from your goals. Now- The thing that I think most people get tripped up on is that they think that certain behaviors are distractions, and that's not true. If you want to watch Netflix, you want to listen to a podcast, you want to play a video game, great, that can be traction, as long as that's what you said you were going to do with your time and attention, not the media company, not some outside influence. But I said, this is what I'm going to do in advance. As Dorothy Parker said, "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." So if that's what you said you were gonna do, enjoy it. And why should we say that playing video games or watching Netflix is somehow morally

• 1:05:31Speaker 00

  inferior to watching golf on TV? What's the difference? It's a pastime. If you enjoy it, do it. But plan for that time. That's how it becomes traction. Conversely, and this is much more common, just because something is a work-related task doesn't mean it's not distraction. So this was my daily routine. I would get into work, and I would say, okay, I've got this big, important project to work on right now. I gotta get started on this. Nothing's gonna get in my way. I'm gonna start working, but first, let me just check some email. Right? Because email's part of my job. I gotta check email sometime today, so let me just check email. But if that's not what I said I was going to do, it's a distraction. If I said I was gonna work on this big project, but now I'm checking email, email, even though it's a work-related task, is just as much of a distraction.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  It's even a worse distraction, because you don't even realize you're distracted. Right? If you're scrolling Instagram while you're at work, okay, that's pretty obvious. You're not supposed to be doing that. Right? But if you're checking email, I'm being productive. But if that's not what you said you'd do, it's by definition a distraction. So you've got traction, you've got distraction. Now you have the triggers. We have two kinds of triggers. We have external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, all these things in our outside environment. And you've got internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states. Now, it turns out that 90% of our distractions, okay, this blew my mind when I saw this study, 90% of the time you check your phone... It's not because of an external trigger. It's not the pings, dings, and rings. 90% of the time you check your phone, it's because of an internal trigger.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is why, if you look at your behavior throughout the day, most of the time you check your phone, it's not because it's ringing. It's because you're feeling something you don't like to feel.

• 1:07:11André Duqum?

  It's soothing.

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  Exactly. And so it becomes this pacifier that we've learned that whenever I feel this thing I don't like to feel, this is the salve, this is the solution. And so that's why we're distracted by things. It's that we've, the brain has been taught that to fight this discomfort, there's a solution here. And so we keep checking and checking because of a feeling. Now, does the technology facilitate that salve? Of course. But that's not the whole story. You can blame the technology all you want, but it turns out that the pings, dings, and rings are only 10% of the problem. The 90% is up here. That we don't know, we haven't been taught how to deal with these uncomfortable sensations. Because distraction is not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw, it's not a conspiracy. It's that we just haven't learned

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  how to deal with discomfort in a healthy way that leads us towards traction. And so we try and escape it by scrolling it away, by drinking it away, by smoking it away with distraction. So that's the basic framework.

• 1:08:10André Duqum?

  What is it then, those emotional triggers? What is the origin, in your perspective, of that discomfort?

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  Being human.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  What is the origin of motivation? What is motivation? Motivation, we used to think, was carrots and sticks. Right? I want to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. That's motivation, carrots and sticks. Wrong. We now know that when you look inside the brain, we can see this through FMRI studies, that the brain is not motivated by pleasure. That's a metaphor.

• 1:08:43Speaker 00

  Only one thing drives motivation. The desire to escape discomfort.

• 1:08:47André Duqum?

  Jung said that pleasure is tension reduction.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:52André Duqum?

  Seven in.

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  Why? Because, and now we can see it's actually true and how the brain works. And people say, yeah, but I do things because I want to be with my friends and I, I love delicious food and I, I want this and I want that. So isn't that the motivation to feel good? Well, but why? Why does that spur you to action? Because wanting, craving, hunger, lusting, all of these things feel bad and that's what makes us go get them so we can feel good. So it's exactly right. Once you realize that fact, that all motivation is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, now you realize that everything is pain management. Time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management, just pain management.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  So to me, that's incredibly liberating because that means that once I can control these, these interpretations of my pain, if I can control the suffering and separate it from my pain, and there are wonderful techniques to do this, I'm free. I'm not a slave to these sensations.

• 1:09:53André Duqum?

  So each of us individually has our own go-to coping mechanism. Everybody knows the person that pulls the phone out at the party because there's anxiety, right? The substances, the pornography, the videos, not necessarily moral failings at all, but you're speaking to this distraction as being sort of rooted in a dysregulation of your nervous system. There's a discomfort, there's something that you're avoiding. So is it then a skill issue to be able to learn how to be with discomfort? To be able to go back in the direction of traction and not distraction? Or if we want to reclaim and live the life we want, that we plan and intend to live, then how does one cultivate that traction?

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  Right. So the first step, there's four steps. The first step is to.

• 1:10:43Speaker 00

  Is to master these internal triggers, or they become your master. So if you just think that you should know this skill somehow, I think you're deluding yourself. That this is a skill just like any other. And especially when we have these potential distractions with us at all times, it's very easy to go off track. Now, again, I don't think it's the distraction. It's not the action itself that's the problem. It's why you're doing those things. If you are, I'll give you a good example. So I remember when my daughter was younger, we had some daddy-daughter time together, just some, an afternoon together. And we had this book of activities that dads and daughters could play together. Do a Sudoku puzzle, have a paper airplane throwing contest, all kinds of little games.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  And one of the questions in this book was, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question verbatim, but I can't tell you what my daughter said. Because in that moment, I thought, hey, honey, hold on one second. I just got to check this one thing on my phone. And by the time I looked up from my device, she was gone. Because I was sending her a very clear signal that this was more important than she was. And she went to go play with some toy or something. And why did I do that? I did that because I was bored, right? There's only so many hours that you can play with a six-year-old before you need an escape, right? And I didn't know how to handle that discomfort. And so that's when I decided, you know, if this is happening with my daughter, someone I love so much, and I don't know how to handle that feeling, I need to figure this out. And I can't keep blaming the phone because there's always going to be some kind of distraction.

• 1:12:13Speaker 00

  In my generation, it was my dad was watching the TV while, you know, or what, you know, before that was the radio. Before that, there was always something that has distracted people. For, you know, Plato used to talk about akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. So this is part of the human condition. Distraction has always been with us. You think it's Facebook's fault? It goes back way, way, way far than that. Because we haven't, most of us haven't learned that skill, right? We'll find it, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook. We're going to find some distraction unless we know how to deal with that discomfort in a healthy way. And so it's just a skill like any other. So step number one is master the internal triggers, or they will become your master. So having a toolkit, ready to go, that you can say, okay.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  I'm feeling this urge. I want to get distracted and do something else that's not what I said I was gonna do. What do I do with that? Do I just escape it? Or do I have some kind of practice? One, there's dozens of different techniques you can use. One of the techniques that I use almost every single day, you know, I've been a professional author now for over a decade. Writing sucks. Writing's hard. Like, I've had three books published and it's really difficult work. And all I wanna do when I'm writing is anything but the writing. I wanna go do some research. I want to go check my email. I wanna go do, check sports scores or stock prices or anything but the actual work. But I can't do what I said I was gonna do. And so, one technique that I use is called this 10-minute rule. This comes from acceptance of commitment therapy.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  And the idea of the 10-minute rule is that you are telling yourself in advance that you will give into that distraction. Okay, you can do that thing, but not right now. Because we know that strict abstinence, unless you can remove the external trigger, strict abstinence backfires. So if you can remove the external trigger, like if you're in rehab, for example, removing the paraphernalia, finding different friends, the things that reminded you of an abusive substance disorder, that can be very helpful. How exactly are we supposed to remove our technology? Like, we use it for work, we use it for entertainment, we use it to manage our lives. How do we remove it? Same goes with food. You know, I was obese. You can't stop eating.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  So instead, what you have to do is to learn how to gain greater agency over it, to learn how to manage these internal triggers. And so, the 10-minute rule is just one of many techniques where I will tell myself, "I can give into that distraction, but not right now." So I'm not saying "no," I'm saying "not yet." Because if you say "no" to yourself, "It's bad to check your phone, I shouldn't do that, that's bad of me," it elicits what's called psychological reactance. Reactance is that feeling that when someone tells you what to do, you wanna rebel. Right? We've all felt it. If your boss micromanaged you, if your mom told you to put on a coat out, you know, when you go outside, "Don't tell me what to do." That's reactance. Then the crazy thing is that we can elicit psychological reactance even when we are telling ourselves what to do.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  That's how crazy the human mind is, that we can literally elicit that same feeling. So the way we disarm that reactance is to tell ourselves, "I can do it. I can smoke the cigarette, I can eat the chocolate cake, I can check social media, I can do it, I'm allowed." I choose not to do it right now. I'm going to do it in 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes are too long, five-minute rule, two-minute rule, doesn't really matter. And what you're doing over time is to say, is to find that, hey, you know what? I resisted for 10 minutes, right? I worked on whatever I was going to work on. And then I will give into that distraction in 10 minutes. And then what happens over time? The 10-minute rule becomes the 15-minute rule, becomes the 20-minute rule. And you're proving to yourself, you're showing yourself that, wait a minute, I do have agency here. These things aren't addicting me. I do have some control here. And you're building that muscle over time.

• 1:15:49Speaker 00

  So that's one of many, many techniques. There's over a dozen that you can use for step one. And not every technique works for every person, every time. You want to have kind of a portfolio of, okay, 10-minute rule, surfing the urge. There's all these different techniques that you can use.

• 1:16:03André Duqum?

  I'm curious your thoughts on, I personally love the intersection of neuroscience and what the contemplative wisdom traditions have been saying for a while. Where do they converge? What are they, what are we verifying with science? And backing up from what the yogi, you know, yogis would say. And one thing that's interesting for me is just what attention is from their perspective. And really, the goal for moving from unconsciousness to consciousness, from this compulsive reactionary state that we find ourselves in, often originating in this sense of discomfort, towards agency, towards responding instead of reacting. And I'm curious your thoughts on that because they would, the way that a lot of

• 1:16:45André Duqum?

  those wisdom traditions would phrase it is that tanha, which is craving, which is the pulling towards, you know, the craving and the aversion, this like a grasping for, is actually rooted in avidya, which is ignorance. Ignorance of self. You, in many ways, slip into like a hypnotic state when you, when you are getting pulled by like that dopaminergic urge for pleasure because you can't be with discomfort, like you're speaking to. I'm curious what you, what you thought there and any interesting findings in the two.

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  I have to believe in ignorance because I'm not really conversant in the yogic tradition. So you know, you know much more about them than I do.

• 1:17:23André Duqum?

  Well, I'm just curious your thoughts on how, like, I'm always looking to go back into the root and the origin of why something's happening. Because then you have actual, you can, you can affect the actual chain of causality instead of just working on the surface level, right? We try to change our thoughts, but like, we don't examine often the beliefs that are, the thoughts are originating from often. And when it comes to attention. I love how you brought it back to the discomfort is the motivating force that puts us in a direction where it's like unconsciousness. I think of life as like time and energy, like a certain amount of time and energy. And what we're doing with our attention at any given moment is what we're doing with that time and energy. And for me, it's like a really painful realization when you think that you might be living your

• 1:18:07André Duqum?

  life unconsciously, not in the way that you intend to.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, I think the big picture of why I do all this, you know, I write my books for me. I'm really glad that millions of people have enjoyed them. That's wonderful. I'm super happy about that. But these are problems I'm struggling with. And the reason I write the book is because I've read other books on the topic and they don't fix the problem. So I have to go back to first principles and understand what's really going on here. So the surface level explanation is it's all the technology is doing it to us. But distraction has always been with us. And even when you get rid of the technology, you'll still be distracted. So there has to be something deeper going on there. And so for me, the reason I do all this is because I'm trying to minimize regret.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  And very few people have experienced even one day that they can remember that they lived their life according to what they wanted to do. Very few people have experienced how blissful that is. Even one day when you say, this is what I'm gonna do today, and then you do it according to your values. And when you can turn your values into time, you're living your authentic self. You're doing things that are consistent. You are living with integrity between what you said you were gonna do and how you actually lived your life. And that is, that's the best. There's nothing better than that.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Visible puts the ultimate wireless hack in the palm of your hand. With unlimited 5G wireless data and hotspot designed to keep you connected. Powered by Verizon's 5G network. And no contract holding you back. Plans start at $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code HACK. Make the switch at visible.com. Terms apply. See visible.com for details.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

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• 1:20:35André Duqum?

  Yeah, and just an important highlight there from what you said is like, to be distracted, you have to know what you're being distracted from.

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:20:45André Duqum?

  And so I'd love for you to elaborate a bit on that because unless you have a plan, unless you know what it is you actually value and want, then you're just swimming in a sea of pleasure-seeking. And you don't have really a north star in which you don't want to be distracted from.

• 1:21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the part of the difficulty is people somehow are really good with those long-term goals, right? The vision boards and the aspirations and here's what I want, big picture.

• 1:21:08André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  But when it comes to, how about tomorrow? Like, how do I want to spend the next 24 hours? Can you time-box your day? No, I can't do that. I need to stay with the flow. I need to do, you know, my life is too chaotic and I've heard every excuse. I've talked to literally thousands and thousands of people over the years and I constantly hear, "You don't understand my life. I have a distributed workforce. I have a busy family. I have this." And nobody who actually doesn't desire to do this can't do it. Now, if you say you can't do it, okay, case closed, you won't do it. But just trying a time-box schedule where I say, "Look, I want to have breakfast from this time to this time, then I want some time for email, then I want to go check social media, then I want to get to work."

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Having just a plan for how I'd like to spend my ideal day, based on my values. Now, what are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. And most people never ask themselves what their values are. What are the attributes of the person you want to become? And if you want to know what someone's values are, you look at two places. You never look at what they're saying. You don't, people will tell you all kinds of rubbish because we lie to ourselves every day. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend your time. That demonstrates your values. And most of us spend our money and our time unconsciously, right? We spend it on things that people tell us we need and we spend our time, you know, if the news wants our time, if this gossip wants our time, we just give our time to whoever wants it.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  Which is funny because we're so cheap with our money. Right with our money, we clip coupons, we look for sales, we'll drive across, you know, further down the street so we can get a better price on something. And we're very, very stingy with our money. We put it in banks so that nobody can steal it. But our time, we think it's limitless. We give it to anybody who wants it, right? Without considering that, in fact, time is the thing we should be stingy with. Because you can't make more of it. You can always make more money. As long as you live, you can always make an extra buck somehow. Time, you can't make more of. Everybody, it doesn't matter how rich you are, everybody has the same 24 hours in the day. So I think we should be very stingy with our time and generous with our money. Because we can always make more money. But you can't, as you said, you can't call something a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from.

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  So if you're living your life day to day with nothing more than a to do list, which is just a register of the things you want to have done. And you're saying, wow, I can't seem to get things done. I can't seem to focus. It's probably because you haven't planned your day. It's as simple as that. It's not a very difficult practice, but you're turning your values into time. And what will invariably happen, and here's why people have trouble with this, is that they, they think they can do everything. Right? They have a mile long to do list. And by the way, to do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your productivity. And they don't understand why they can't fit everything in. Well, the fact of the matter is, there's a constraint of how many hours they're on the day. So when you have this constraint, it's forcing you to make trade offs.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  So the, the suffering of not, I don't have enough time in the day, comes from the fact that we think we can do it all at the same time, which you can't. So one of the uncomfortable steps that we have to do in order to seek the ultimate comfort of being indistractable, is deciding the trade offs. Is saying, you know what? If I'm gonna watch TV, that means I can't go to the gym. If I'm gonna be with my kids, that means less time at work. Whatever the case might be. But having those trade offs made in advance versus after the fact is a whole nother story. After the fact, that's when you live in regret. That's when you say, ah, why didn't I ever write my novel? Why didn't I start that business? Why didn't I spend more time with my kids? Why didn't I have more time with my friends? Well, it's because you didn't make the time. You didn't plan for it. And so what did you do?

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  You watched TV and scrolled Tik Tok. Because those became your defaults, because you were looking for emotional escape. As opposed to, yeah, go on Tik Tok, watch YouTube, it doesn't matter. But decide to do that. Do make that consciously versus doing it emotionally.

• 1:25:01André Duqum?

  No, it's such a good reminder. I wonder how many people listening have lived life, lived a single day completely intentionally. It sounds like, I mean, I think it'd be very hard to, at least at not one point in the day, get pulled into, you know, some sort of distraction. But was there a moment when you really realized that there was a lot of potential on offer for you that was, that was, that you were not accessing because of how distracted you were?

• 1:25:30Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:25:31André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I mean, I was, the thing that really opened my eyes was what I was doing to my daughter. It's terrible, right? I mean, I only have one child and every day with her is precious because I know eventually she's going to go off to college and start her own life outside the home. And here I was squandering it. And it would happen when I would say, oh, today's going to be the day that I eat right. And today I'm definitely going to start exercising. But I didn't and I wouldn't. Today's the day I'm going to work on that big project. And then it would delay till the next day and the next day. And then I procrastinate and then, you know, stay up till three in the morning, trying to finish it and do a pretty crappy job. So people have no idea how much potential they have when they not only do the right things.

• 1:26:15Speaker 00

  We think, you know, if we have the secret knowledge that someone will tell us exactly what to do, then we'll need our full potential. But actually, what's more important is not what you should do. What are you not going to do? That's equally important. And in fact, I think it's more important because today we basically know what to do. If you don't know what to do, Google it, you know, ask ChatGPT. You'll find the answer for what I should do. That's not the problem. It's how do you stop getting in your own way? How do you stop getting distracted from what you know you should do?

• 1:26:43André Duqum?

  Yeah, and you referred to how like a lot of us know those kind of big overarching goals. Not all of us, but many of us are kind of know what we essentially want from life. But we suck at reverse engineering and actually making a plan for it that we can actually stick, stick to and follow through on. Any other thoughts or advice there? I mean, in terms of time blocking, that's, that you already mentioned.

• 1:27:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, I think with time boxing, it's interesting. The biggest misconception, a lot of people say, well, time boxing didn't work for me. I've never met anybody who doesn't work for if they do it right. So what's the biggest pitfall? People think that time boxing is I'm going to work on this thing for an hour and then finish it. Wrong, incorrect. That is a to-do list mentality. To-do lists, you get points every time you check off a box.

• 1:27:26André Duqum?

  Why does that suck? By the way, you mentioned to-do lists suck.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  Oh, to-do lists suck for so many reasons.

• 1:27:30André Duqum?

  Okay, but sorry, I don't want to interrupt.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  No, no, it's good. Okay, why do to-do lists suck? To-do lists suck because to-do lists are a register of things you want to have done. They're outputs, outputs. Now, it's not that to-do lists on their own are bad. It's that people use them incompletely. Because a to-do list without a calendar is outputs without inputs. So let's say you want to, um, my daughter has a birthday party, and I want to go get a bunch of cupcakes for her. Well, I need to go to the baker, and the baker's gonna tell me, "Okay, if I'm gonna make 20 cupcakes, I need flour, I need sugar, I need butter, I need all these inputs to make the output of the cupcakes." So for us, we have this to-do list of all the things we want to do. Right, I have to make the presentation, I have to cook dinner, I have to, you know, make those sales calls, all these things I have to do. And where is the time to do that? Where's the input?

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  So if you wake up in the morning and you have all these things you said you were gonna do, and you haven't figured out when you're gonna do them, you know what's gonna happen. You're not gonna do them. Uh, another thing that's terrible about to-do lists is that people who use to-do lists, and this happened to me all the time. I'd come home from work, and I'd still have a to-do list that's a mile long. I said, "Well, I didn't do all these things." Right? "I said I was gonna do all this stuff. I worked all day, and now I didn't get them done." So what happens? If that happens day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you are training yourself to think that you are incompetent. And so people think, you know, they come up with all these crazy excuses, "I'm no good at time management," or "that doesn't work for me," or whatever the reason. It's not that you're broken, it's that this stupid time management technique sucks. That's what's broken.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  So because to-do lists have no constraints, you just add more and more and more and more. Whereas a time-box calendar forces you to make trade-offs and say, "Okay, I'm not gonna work on that project today. I'm gonna work on this project today. That one's more important." And so if you, if you don't do that, you can't judge what is traction and what is distraction. So the kicker is, the person, here's how a person with a to-do list works. A person with a to-do list says, "Oh, okay, that's a very important project. Let me start working on that." And they start working on it, five minutes go by, and then they say, "Oh, let me just check email for a minute." "Or, you know what, I could really use a cup of coffee. Hey, Janet's at the water cooler. Hey, Janet, how's it going?" And they start talking. Wait, what was I working on again? Oh, yeah, that presentation, I forgot. Whereas a person with a time-box calendar... The goal is not to finish. The goal is not to finish.

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  The goal of a time box calendar is to work on a task for as long as you said you would, or to do anything, right? If it's spend time with your kid, if it's to watch YouTube, it doesn't matter. Do whatever it is you said you were gonna do for as long as you said you would without distraction. Not to finish. Why is that so much better than a to-do list? Because with a to-do list, when you work on a task for five minutes here, two minutes there, you don't ever learn how long things take. You never learn. Which is why we have what's called a planning fallacy, that we know that on average, people underestimate the time it takes them to finish a task by a factor of three. It typically takes you three times longer to finish a task than you think it will. Whereas when you use a time box calendar, now the goal is to say, okay, I'm gonna work

• 1:30:26Speaker 00

  on this slide presentation, let's say, for 30 minutes. No more, no less. 30 minutes, that's all I'm gonna do. And I'm not gonna do anything else. And now, at the end of the 30 minutes, I can say, okay, in 30 minutes, I finished three slides. And the whole presentation needs to be 30 slides. Well, that means I need nine more time boxes to finish the whole presentation. Now I have a feedback loop. To-do lists never give you that.

• 1:30:48André Duqum?

  It feels like, between your last two books, they really complement each other and go hand in hand. To like examine who you are and the beliefs that constitute so much of what we think we want in life, and then to like realign with who we are, what our values are, and then to actually follow through with that and learn how to do that. So, good work, man.

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  They definitely do align. I mean, this is why I wrote Beyond Belief, because knowing what to do isn't enough, right? That you can know what to do. I can give you all the productivity tactics, right? I can tell you exactly what to do. I mean, it's an hour and a half read, I'll tell you how to be indistractable. But will you do it? If you don't... Did we talk about the motivation triangle?

• 1:31:32André Duqum?

  No.

• 1:31:33Speaker 00

  Okay. So, we... Most people think that motivation is a straight line. That if I want the benefit, I'll do the behavior. That's kinda how our jobs work, right? If you do your job, okay, I'm gonna... That's the behavior. I'm gonna give you the benefit. I'm gonna give you the paycheck, okay? So, straight line. But there's something missing. That I can know that I want the benefit. I can even know what the behavior is that I need to do, but I still won't do it. If it was as easy as a straight line, I want the benefit, so do the behavior. We'd all have six-pack abs. We'd all be multimillionaires. There's something missing. What's missing is we don't have the belief. So if I don't believe that I will get the benefit. For example, let's say I have a boss who I don't believe has my best interests at heart.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  I don't believe I'm going to get the promotion. I don't believe I'm going to get the raise. Am I going to work hard? No, because I don't trust my boss is going to give me the benefit. Much more common is even when I know the behavior I need to do, if I don't trust myself, if I don't believe, if I have a limiting belief about my own abilities, even if I want the benefit, if I don't believe I will do the behavior, I'm also going to quit. So it turns out that the heart of motivation, what holds this triangle together of benefit, behavior, is belief. That's the base of the triangle. If you don't have the belief, it doesn't matter if you know what to do and you want the benefits, you're not going to do the behavior.

• 1:32:55André Duqum?

  What's the biggest thing that you hope somebody reading your book, listening to this conversation would really like take home in their life?

• 1:33:04Speaker 00

  Number one is that we need to realize we do not see reality as it is, that we need a lot more intellectual humility, that when you are sure that you're right, and again, these limiting beliefs are hidden. Right, that's the nature of them. We have to examine them because we all hold these limiting beliefs. We all have, in one area of a life or another, we're holding on to these limiting beliefs, that it's important to constantly reassess our certainty around our beliefs, that we don't see reality clearly.

• 1:33:37André Duqum?

  My good friend-

• 1:33:38Speaker 00

  Oh, and there's a second one. Sorry, one more.

• 1:33:40André Duqum?

  Hit it.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Is that we are capable of far more than we know. And those go hand in hand.

• 1:33:44André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 00

  That our limiting beliefs keep us at the 15-minute mark and really, we have 60 hours in us.

• 1:33:52André Duqum?

  On the first note, my buddy Peter Crone has this good saying, self-righteousness is the poor man's version of self-worth.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  Mmm, oh, that's good.

• 1:34:00André Duqum?

  You know?

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  That's really good. So true. Yeah, so true. That, you know, if you, if you really want to understand something, and this is why I, I don't get into politics, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't talk about that stuff because I only want to talk about stuff that I can argue both sides on. And that's how I kind of release myself from this. For me, it was a stressor that I had to have an opinion about everything. I had to take sides, I had to judge everything. Well, you know what, if I can't in good faith argue both sides and steel man my best argument for both sides, I should probably shut up. Like, that's not my job, right? I should focus on the things that I know deeply and I can't argue both sides about so that I can contribute to the discussion.

• 1:34:42André Duqum?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Speaker 00

  As opposed to this false certainty of, oh, yes, I know who the good guys are and the bad guys, I know the right and wrong of every issue. I've judged everything into little, nice little cute boxes that are very convenient for me. That's this permanence self-worth.

• 1:34:54André Duqum?

  Yeah. Is there anything that we haven't touched on today that you feel like is essential to add in the context of this conversation?

• 1:35:00Speaker 00

  I mean, we could talk about studies for hours. There's a lot more. But yeah, I think we, I think we had some good ones. Anything else that's on your mind?

• 1:35:11André Duqum?

  What do you think it means to know yourself?

• 1:35:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I was thinking about that earlier.

• 1:35:19Speaker 00

  What's the thy, right?

• 1:35:21André Duqum?

  The thyself, yeah.

• 1:35:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, the thy part.

• 1:35:27Speaker 00

  Once I... Yeah, it's no, inside the definition of thyself,

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  it's not just a physical body, obviously, it's the psyche. And what is the psyche? The psyche is know your beliefs. Know this operating system that's operating in the background that you don't even realize, the software that's been installed for you.

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  That's, I love, I love that that's the, the name of, of the podcast because this, this is the essence of it. This is, this is how we see reality clearly, is to know thyself, is to know what, what script am I running that I'm not even conscious of, of running? And is it helping me or is it hurting me?

• 1:36:06André Duqum?

  Yeah.

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• 1:37:06André Duqum?

  One thing I just, I feel called to bring back up, just because we've had on a lot of cognitive scientists, psychologists, consciousness researchers examining from many different lenses and disciplines, how we do not see reality as it is. I think for many people, it can be destabilizing. For many people, it can be quite liberating, because then you start holding your beliefs and presumptions a bit more loose.

• 1:37:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:29André Duqum?

  Which gives you more access to freedom. How does that insight, that like, we are really looking through reality through like a straw hole?

• 1:37:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:39André Duqum?

  There are millions of bits of information that we have, that we don't have access to, that we're perceiving, but we're very selectively perceiving a very small amount of. I'm just, I'm just curious, any, when you've done your research in that arena, and when you've seen how we are this predictive machine that is, that is, that is happening, and you see how much we are essentially kind of like simulating our reality, what has that done for you, like ontologically, as, as a human being, how you navigate life?

• 1:38:09Speaker 00

  I think the biggest thing is that I've become aware of how I created problems that weren't there.

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  There's a wonderful study that was done at Dartmouth, where they took a group of women. And they told them, "We're going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements." And they put a large scar on their cheek. And they said, "Okay, you're part of this study. We're going to put you into a room with a participant in the study, and you're going to note how they treat you when we put this large scar." And so they put this like, you know, horror movie type of big scar gash on their cheek. And it looked very realistic. And they were about to go in the room, and just as about to go into this room, they said, "Wait, wait, one second, let me do a quick touch up." And unbeknownst to the study participant, they took off the scar. Right? In the mirror, they had just seen the scar, and now they had taken the scar off. And what's amazing is that these women, who didn't have the scar,

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  reported that in a conversation, they were stared at, they were treated with disrespect. People acted as if they were disgusted by them. And all this had come to their minds because of what they anticipated, not because of what was actually occurring. There was no scar. But because they expected this to happen, they did. They saw a problem that wasn't there. And that was me. And I think that's a lot of people. That we invent these problems that a lot of times aren't real. We're expecting them. And then we, of course, suffer from them. And so I think it's helpful to put in perspective that...

• 1:39:47Speaker 00

  And I'm not dismissing problems. I mean, is there a lot of suffering in the world? Is the world a terrible place? The world is a terrible place. Lots of terrible things are happening. And also, at the same time, it's the best it's ever been, and it's getting better. Those two things could be happening at the same time. There are terrible things happening in the world. It's a terrible place. And also, it's the best it's ever been and getting better.

• 1:40:08Speaker 00

  They're both true. And our perspective shapes reality. That if you give up, if you say it's terrible, and that's the only belief I'm going to let into my consciousness. Well, what do you do? What's worth it? What's worth fighting for, then? Everything is going to hell. And that's a lot of people's attitudes today. Whereas when you have a historical perspective, you know, a lot of times, they do these surveys where they ask people, is this the worst time in history? Would you like to go back to any other time in history? Most people say, oh, yes, it was so much better back in the good old days. When was that? Right, the 1400s? You want to go live like a French king? You'll live like the richest person of the day back then. You don't have plumbing. You have fistules and sores all over your body. You probably have syphilis.

• 1:40:52Speaker 00

  Your teeth are falling out. Is that the reality you want? So, we oftentimes forget that perspective that allows us to not suffer so much, to not create these false realities. So, that's what's changed most for me, is not seeing, not creating these problems that don't exist in our life. And so, I consciously, constantly have to remind myself of, is this true? You know, and I think a good place to start, by the way, because if you jump too far into this too fast, it can be destabilizing. Because again, your psychological immune system does not want to change your beliefs. But you can start with minor annoyances, like the minor suffering, you know, the person who cuts you off in traffic, the long line at the TSA at the airport,

• 1:41:37Speaker 00

  the baby who's crying at the shopping center. Having that, like, so for example, another one of my little secular prayers that I repeat constantly is, "Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt." That's how I measure love. Love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. What does that mean? When my daughter was born, right after she was born, I was allowed to go wash her hair, to wash the baby. And I remember holding her arm. She was this big. It was one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life. And in that moment, she was completely helpless. And I gave her complete benefit of the doubt. She cried. I don't care.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  You know, she poops, who cares? Because you give that person all the benefit of the doubt. You love them so much.

• 1:42:30Speaker 00

  And somehow, when we grow up, we fail to give that benefit of doubt. Because we think that people are trying to annoy us, that they're trying to hurt us. A baby, when a baby cries, they're not trying to annoy us. It's the best tools they have. That's all they can do. You know what? We're all big babies. That's the best tools we have. When someone hurts us, when someone offends us, that's the tools they got. Doesn't mean we have to excuse it. Doesn't mean we have to forgive it. No, do we have to expose ourselves to it? No, we can definitely remove ourselves. If we're not equipped to handle it, that's totally in our control as well. But also, it gives me greater peace to remind myself that love is measured by the benefit of doubt. And that's one of those... Whenever I have one of these annoyances,

• 1:43:15Speaker 00

  to love your fellow man means you give them the benefit of the doubt.

• 1:43:20André Duqum?

  Yeah, there's something so powerful about seeing how somebody cannot hurt another person in consciousness. Like, by nature of doing something that is betraying somebody or hurting somebody, there are internal forces that we do... that they do not have agency over to the degree we would probably say that they would, you know? And to me, that understanding of examining free will and seeing that, you know, if somebody was to murder somebody and go to prison, they of course have the consequences that are necessary there. But if we were to then discover there was a tumor pressing on their amygdala, it changes the circumstances, right? And how the compassion we have for them. So I think it's a beautiful place to arrive to, to be able to look at all life and people

• 1:44:05André Duqum?

  as phenomena to themselves. And of course, doesn't disavow the consequences and the responsibility that comes from different people's actions. But I think it's a beautiful note to end on. And yeah, something I resonate a lot with.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:44:21André Duqum?

  Yeah, man. Congrats once again. We'll leave links down again in the description where people can find you, your work, your book. Any other last words?

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, just some information to find out more. We actually have a belief change guide, a five-minute belief change guide that's totally free. You don't have to buy anything. There's no requirements. It's at nearfar.com/belief-change. Free five-minute belief change guide that gets you started on exactly how to do the techniques.

• 1:44:50André Duqum?

  Good work, man.

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Thanks.

• 1:44:51André Duqum?

  Thank you. It was a pleasure to connect.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  Thank you. This was fun.

• 1:44:54André Duqum?

  Yeah. All right, man. Until next time, be well.

• 1:44:56Speaker 00

  Sounds good. Thank you.