Nir Eyal on belief, motivation, and the end of suffering

Nir Eyal is the author of Hooked, which became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, Indistractable, on taking your attention back, and the new book Beyond Belief. He taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and is one of the sharpest thinkers on what to do with technology. In this episode of Summation, Nir and Auren discuss: Why to-do lists set you up to feel like a failure and what to do insteadWhy 90% of the time you check your phone, it's an uncomfortable ...

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

• 0:03Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. My guest today is Nir Eyal. Nir is the author of Hooked, which is the book that became Silicon Valley's playbook for building habit-forming products, and then the book Indistractable, which is all about how to take your attention back. And now he's got his latest book, Beyond Belief, which just came out. He taught at Stanford Business School, and he's really one of the sharpest thinkers on what to do with technology, and a friend of mine as well. Nir, welcome to Summation.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Thank you. Great to be with you.

• 0:32Auren Hoffman?

  Very excited. By the way, going on the habit stuff, what actually makes a habit versus maybe like an addiction?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great question. So I intentionally didn't call the book Hooked, my very first book, this came out in 2014, so it's been a while. But the book is not called How to Build Addictive Products. It's very intentional. It's called How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Because an addiction is a consistent compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user. So you would never want to build an addictive product. That's sadistic. That's harmful. That's unethical. What you would want to build is a habit-forming product. A habit is simply defined as an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought. So not all of us have addictions. We all have habits. Because half of your day-to-day behaviors are driven by an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  About 50% of what you do every single day is a habit. So the goal of a habit-forming technology is to improve people's lives by changing their habits. And that's exactly what's happened since Hooked came out. Every conceivable industry, industries I couldn't imagine could become habit-forming, have used the Hooked model. Everything from education to healthcare to fitness and wellness, all kinds of products, SaaS products, enterprise products, all kinds of products can use the Hooked model if they need people to come back consistently to their product.

• 2:00Auren Hoffman?

  What's an example of a great habit-forming product that maybe I wouldn't appreciate?

• 2:05Speaker 01

  That you would not appreciate?

• 2:07Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, that maybe I haven't thought of. Like, I haven't thought of this kind of...

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Maybe I can examine your life a little bit. We can see if we can find the Hooked model in something. Do you find a product that you turn to every day with little or no conscious thought? Are there any apps on your phone?

• 2:20Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, there's definitely things I like, where I probably also have somewhat of an addiction to. Like, I probably am somewhat addicted to X or something like that as well.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, but yeah, or like checking Slack or email or these types of things. But I'm not sure if they're good habits or bad habits sometimes.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's what Indistractable is all about, is figuring out how to keep the good habits, right? Keep the habit to Fitbod that gets you hooked to exercise, keeping your habit to Duolingo that teaches you a new language, and deciding what's traction and what's distraction. And we can talk about that whole methodology, about how to make sure that we have the good habits. That's what Hooked is all about. And yet we break the bad habits. That's what Indistractable is all about, and to different products, right? We may want to stay hooked to the exercise app or the app that makes us more productive while getting rid of the habits that become distractions. But to kind of walk folks through the methodology very quickly, let's take, what, email, X, you decide. Let's take email. Email is kind of the mother of habit-forming technology

• 3:22Speaker 01

  because it exhibits these four steps of the Hook model. So every hook starts with two kinds of triggers. The most obvious is what's called an external trigger. We'll get to the other one in a minute. But the external trigger is something that tells the user what to do. It's a ping, a ding, a ring, something in your outside environment that's called an external trigger that prompts you to action, okay? One of these ping, dings, and rings. We see them all the time. The next step of the Hooked model is the action phase, defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. So when you get an email, there's some kind of notification, some kind of call to action, you know, open this email that's implicit in that little red meatball icon that you see in your phone. The action is just open the app. The simplest behavior done anticipation of reward.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And the first rule of interaction design is the easier something is to do, the more likely it is to occur. So that's where we're going to look at things like mental load and physical action and cost, all the things that might present friction in the user's way, and reduce that friction as much as possible to get to the third step of the Hooked model, which is called the variable reward. And so this is something a little different from what you see in traditional behavior change models that are just about giving the user what they want, which is nice. But for a habit-forming product, the reward has to have an element of variability. And this comes out of the work of B.F. Skinner, the father of operant conditioning.

• 4:47Auren Hoffman?

  What would be an example of email of a variable reward?

• 4:50Speaker 01

  So there's three types of variable rewards.

• 4:51Auren Hoffman?

  Sometimes people reply to my email, sometimes they don't.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Well, it could be, but think about more the contents of the email. What causes you to want to see what's in the email? Well, who's it from?

• 5:02Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, so sometimes it's really valuable, and sometimes it's spam.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's one of your companies has a great announcement. Sometimes it's spam. What's the content of the email, right? Sometimes it's good news, sometimes it's bad news. And so that's part of what makes it variable. And this comes out of the classic work of B.F. Skinner, where he took these pigeons, he put them in what today we call a Skinner box, and he allowed them to peck at the disc and receive a reward. And he could train those pigeons to peck at the reward and receive the disc, peck at the disc and get the reward whenever they were hungry. And as long as the pigeons were hungry, they would peck at that disc and get the reward. But one day Skinner had a problem. He came into his lab and he checked his pockets and he realized he didn't have enough of these food pellets. He could only afford to give it to the pigeons once in a while.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  So sometimes a pigeon would peck at the disc, no food pellet. The next time the pigeon would peck at the disc, they would receive a reward. And what Skinner observed was that the rate of response, the number of times a pigeon pecked at the disc, increased when the reward was given on what's called an intermittent schedule of reinforcement. So the more variable, the more uncertain the reward is, the more likely the user is to respond. So that's a little different.

• 6:12Auren Hoffman?

  So I'll check my email every hour. Even sometimes I don't even have really any new things coming in my inbox.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  It's like a slot machine, right? It's, why do we watch sports, right? Who cares about some stupid ball bouncing around a pitch? It's because it's variable, right? Why do we like gambling, right? It's games of chance. There's uncertainty. Why do we watch the news about some stupid problem that's got nothing to do with us, a war tens of thousands of miles away? Because we want to know what's new, what's different. We don't care about boring stuff. We want to know what's different, what's new, what's uncertain. And then the final and most important step, and this is something that I think is kind of my contribution to the field, is the investment phase of the Hook. And that's where this concept that I call stored value comes from, that one of the hallmarks of a habit-forming product, and I was saying this back in 2012, is that it accrues value with use.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  And that's something really novel that products couldn't do previously. You know, we think about, Henry Ford famously said, "You can have any color of Model T as long as it's black." Because back then, it was really hard to make cars of different colors. Well, today you can get cars of all kinds of colors. But when we look at the world's most habit-forming products, they are making an experience for a market of one. So based on your investment in the product, and that comes in many different forms. It can be data, it can be accrued skill, it can be connections, it could be all kinds of things that improve the product with use. So that a hallmark of a habit-forming product is that unlike a product in the physical world, your clothing, your car, your couch, they depreciate with wear and tear.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  A habit-forming product appreciates. It stores value. It gets better and better. So that through successive cycles, through the Hook, trigger, action, reward, investment, eventually you don't need the external trigger. That's when you know you have built a habit with your product. You don't need the pings, dings, and rings. You're prompting the user based on the second type of trigger, which I mentioned earlier, I hinted at. That's called an internal trigger. What's an internal trigger, unlike an external trigger? An internal trigger, and this turns out to be 90% of the time that you check your phone, it's not because of a ping, ding, or ring. 90% of the time, it's because of an internal trigger, which is an uncomfortable emotional state. Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So that's when you formed a habit, is when the user is using the product not because of spammy advertising or annoying messaging, but because they have triggered themselves because of some kind of uncomfortable emotional state. That's when you've built a habit.

• 8:42Auren Hoffman?

  Got it. But let's talk about workout or something like that. Like, in the last thing, I do push-ups. And when I started doing push-ups five or six years ago, like, I wasn't that good, and now I do it more often, so I'm better. And I like the progress of it. Now, like, is it actually good for me to do lots of push-ups? Like, I don't know, maybe not. But I like the fact that I could do more push-ups today than I could do a year ago. And I like the fact I could do more a year ago than I could do the year before. Like, I see the progress happening there. Like, I assume that's like part of it. It's like you can see you're just getting better at this thing.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  It could be. I'm not sure I would make the push-ups the habit, per se, because again, the definition of a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious thought. So if you're grunting and working and trying to beat your PR, your number of push-ups, I wouldn't necessarily call that a habit. And I think people get into a gray area, a difficult area. They kind of beat themselves up, saying, "Hey, I'm following all the rules of habit formation. It's not easy. It's not autopilot. Where's the magic button that turns things into a habit?" Doing push-ups is never going to become a habit. It's always going to be hard. Meditating. I hate when people say, "Oh, I'm trying to get into a meditation habit." What are you talking about? If you're meditating with little or no conscious thought, you're asleep. A writing habit. There's no such thing as a writing habit. By definition, you can't write without thinking. I don't know how to do that. I'd love to know. If somebody could please tell me how to do that. I've written three books.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  You have to think. It's really hard work.

• 10:06Auren Hoffman?

  The way you're really defining a habit is like something you're almost unconsciously doing or something.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  That's right. Well, that is a psychological definition. What you're describing is a routine. A routine is a series of behaviors frequently repeated. Now, you say, "Ah, tomato, tomato. Who cares?" It makes a real difference. Why? Because when we read some guru's book about how to build habits, and we think, "Oh, I can turn everything into a habit." What happens is, when that thing doesn't become easy, you know, when people say they want something to turn into a habit, what that is code for is that I want to have done it.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  I don't like it, but I want to have done it because it sucks. So I want an exercise habit. I want a writing habit. I want a meditation habit.

• 10:46Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, there's some, isn't there something like about eating right? Like where, yeah, I would prefer to be eating donuts all day, but I don't. And I try to have some things maybe I don't like love to eat or something like there's. And I'm trying to make it a quote unquote habit, or is that a bad way of thinking about it?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  So there's two different, and this is the big difference between indistractable and hooked. So hooked is about building new habits and you can use that formulation to build a new habits in your life. But when it's something that you're trying to resist, it's about breaking bad habits. It's a completely different psychology. One is about making the behavior very, very easy to do. And if you can't make it something done with little or no conscious thought, it is not going to become a habit. Whereas breaking a bad habit is about dealing with discomfort. It's about unpacking those internal triggers we talked about earlier. That is the source of our distractions, right? It's, it's these uncomfortable sensations and learning better ways to overcome them. So it's a very important distinction that makes a huge difference because here's what happens. People try and build a habit.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  They try it for some makeup made up number. People think there's some kind of magic number, 44 days, 60 days. There is no such magic number in the research literature. And then when it's not easy, they say, oh, there must be broken, something broken about me. Maybe I have bad willpower. Maybe my brain is messed up. They, they blame themselves. No, it's this, it's this, that they've been taught the techniques incorrectly. So it's very, very important to distinguish between a habit and a routine.

• 12:10Auren Hoffman?

  Now, what about like, okay, coffee, you have coffee in the morning or you have wine at dinner? Or you have like, these are like, are they, what are they? Yeah. So they're just things, they're kind of like things people have and they do and kind of do it unconsciously. But how would you classify that?

• 12:27Speaker 01

  So if the selection is done with little or no conscious thought, take driving, for example. You know, many routines can become habits, but not every behavior can become a habit. Some will always stay routines. So for example, when you first learn to drive a car, you had to pay a lot of conscious thought.

• 12:43Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  You were white knuckling it when you were 16, 17 years old, learning to drive a car because you had to put a lot of thought to it. Now you can drive the car, listen to the radio, have a conversation with a friend, chew gum, right? You can do all kinds of things at the same time, meaning that if it's done with little or no conscious thought, it has turned into a habit. But if it's difficult, if you have to think about it, if it's really hard, don't try and make it to a habit. Keep it a routine.

• 13:06Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, that makes sense. Well, now you, you, you know, you, you wrote the, your, your, your first book hooked 12 years ago. What would be different today if you wrote it today?

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, I just wrote a, you know, we've sold over half a million copies and I just wrote a, thanks. I wrote a new forward just a few weeks ago. So this is a very pertinent question and nothing actually changed in terms of the hook model itself. Nothing changed across time, those same four steps, trigger, action, reward, investment. Exactly the same in industry, exactly whether it's enterprise, consumer web, across cultures, same exact psychology holds true. Because people are fundamentally, we all have the same basic psychology. What changes across people and across time is what people find reward in. Okay. Like when I wrote, yeah, so when I wrote hooked in the beginning, it was just the dawn of social media, right?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Like it was, you know, this was only a few years after the Apple App Store. It was like, it was virgin territory. And so what people were using to satisfy those internal triggers of boredom, loneliness, fatigue changed over time. Right? It used to be people would go home and watch TV. Well, now I don't know anybody who watches TV. We watch on our computer and we watch on our phone. We scroll Tik Tok or, you know, we just do different things to scratch that emotional itch. So the way we satisfy that, that internal trigger might change. It might change in America. Maybe you watch football. If you're in Japan, you watch sumo wrestling. So that can change how you satisfy that itch, but the same emotional need remains and the same four steps remain.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  What I put into the, into the, into the book in the forward is a few things that I actually predicted in the, in the very first edition of the book around the morality of manipulation. And that's, that's a section in the book that I wrote way back in, in 2012. And then it was published in 2014, where I knew, you know, at the time I had to convince people back in 2012 that these products could manipulate your behavior. They could coerce you to do things maybe you would later regret. And I spent a lot of time on the ethics of, of how to use this stuff properly. But back then, nobody cared. Like people thought, ah, you know, Zuckerberg and Dorsey, and these guys just got lucky, right? Just lucky. Now the pendulum swung, I think in many ways too far the other way.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Now we've gone to the other extreme where we think we're helpless. There's nothing we can do and neither extremes are correct. Yes, they do manipulate your behavior and you have far more agency than you know. And that's a big reason why I wrote indistractable. So that's something I added in about, you know, that, that ethics are increasingly important. And then I think AI is changing the game because of the four steps in the hook model, trigger, action, reward, investment. The future will be won by companies that understand how to change consumer behavior by using the investment phase. Because now there will be a mass democratization of mass customization.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  That if you don't modify your product based on the customer's use and make it better with, with use, your, your competitor will, and you're going to lose out. People are going to expect the product to, to be, to adapt to their preferences. And that's going to be something that now everybody can afford to do. And if you don't do, you're in big trouble.

• 16:32Auren Hoffman?

  There's all these products that are coming out now, in fact, and people are rolling their own that are essentially N of one products. There's a product that only near would value and literally nobody else in the world would value that product. Right. And you know, there are, there are now cancer drugs that are like only will work for near and not work for anybody else. So there's N of one drugs now, there's N of one. So there are all these things that like, which makes sense. Like how, how, how do you think that changes the game?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  That, that's the future. That, that is, this is what I predicted would happen. And this is exactly what's going on now because I, I call it the Tik Tok-ification of everything. That the fact that you can do this means that customers will demand that you do that. Because the competitor's product is going to be so much easier to use. It's going to be so much more responsive. It's going to do the job so much better when it's built with an AI behind the scenes that's customizing and personalizing. I mean, and personalization has been talked about for a very long time. I think now it is actually economically feasible and will be demanded increasingly by consumers.

• 17:38Auren Hoffman?

  Now, are we losing something by the fact that it's like really hard to be bored anymore?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's, and that's what indistractable is about. Because, you know, I think there, the, the, everything comes with a cost. You know, Paul Verelio said that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So absolutely every new technology is going to have goods and bads. Sophocles, the Greek philosopher, said, nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. So when you have something as vast as the internet, as AI, as mobile technologies, it's going to come with a lot of good and some bads. I'm, I'm a, I'm, I'm an optimist. I, I think it's going to come with much, you know, many more goods than bads. But we need to be aware of those bads because all those bads, you know, I love the saying that technology doesn't fix problems.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Technology does not fix problems. Technology gives us better problems, right? This is the first time in human history where we don't have mass starvation. There has never been a time in 200,000 years of human history where there hasn't been mass starvation somewhere in the planet. This is the first time that we have more calories to feed every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. That's never been happened before. This is the first generation. But along with the green revolution, the fact that we have enough calories comes new problems. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease. But I'd much rather struggle with those problems than starvation. So they're, they're better problems. So boredom, right? If you ask this question to my grandparents who had to suffer through World War Two, they would say, are you kidding me? This is your problem? You complain that you're not bored?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  This is a great problem, but it's problem nonetheless.

• 19:20Auren Hoffman?

  What, what is, I know you don't really write about productivity, but what, what's like, you think the most overrated piece of productivity advice?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  To do lists. To do lists are the worst.

• 19:36Auren Hoffman?

  Really? Okay.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  The worst.

• 19:38Auren Hoffman?

  Interesting. Okay. Why is a to do list the worst?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Okay, there's a few reasons. First of all, to do lists. Well, first of all, let me clarify what I mean by that. If you run your life on a to do list, you've lost. The war is over. What you have to do is use a to do list in addition to the technique that does work, which we'll talk about in a minute. But if you look at the research literature, there is not much supporting evidence that to do lists are good. Because why? There's a few problems with to do lists. To do lists, there is no constraint. Okay? There's no constraint with a to do list. You can always add more to a to do list. So what happens? You come home from work at the end of the day. You look at your to do list and you've been running ragged all day and yet here's this register of all these things you still didn't do. Okay? There's all these things that you said you were gonna do, you didn't accomplish.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  So what does that do day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year to your psyche if you come home and said, I said I was gonna do these things and I didn't? Loser. And so then you start convincing yourself, I'm no good at time management. Maybe I have a broken brain. Maybe there's something wrong with me. There's nothing wrong with you. It's this stupid time management technique that doesn't really have much evidence that it's effective that we keep using. That's broken. That's the problem. So because there's no constraints, it leads to another problem, which is that we have no idea how long things take. When you put something on a to do list, here's what happens. A to do list person says, okay, by the way, this is totally me. I, for years before I wrote Indistractable, I used a to do list. And I would, I would sit down at my desk and I'd say, okay, I've got that big presentation coming up. Here I go. I'm gonna get started. Let me, let me get going here.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Okay, you know, I start working on it for five minutes on that presentation, then, oh, you know what? I could really use some coffee. Let me go get the coffee. And hey, Janice, is that the water cooler? Hey, Janice, how's it going? And we start talking for a little bit and I come back to my desk and let me just check some email and Slack. Let me just do a bit of that. Wait a minute. What was I working on again? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, the presentation. So our day turns into what's called time confetti. We do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and it takes us, on average, studies have found, three times longer to finish a task than we estimate. Three times longer. People are terrible at estimating how long things take, which is why, right before the deadline, we're staying up till, you know, midnight and we're calling to our spouse and saying, I'm sorry, I can't come home tonight. It's gonna be a late night because I've got this big presentation.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, if we had planned appropriately, we had the time, we just didn't estimate correctly. Because to do lists have no constraints. A much better technique, the right way to do it, is called time boxing. Time boxing has been extensively studied. Thousands of peer reviewed studies, you can see references in the back of my book, show how much better this technique is. And time boxes, using a technique that has a fancy name, it's called setting an implementation intention, which just means saying, saying what you're gonna do and when you're going to do it. So you're gonna look at your calendar, and there's nothing wrong, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with getting things out of your head and putting them on a piece of paper. Okay? If that's what you call a to do list, fine. Get it out of your head. That's great. But that's step one.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  The next step needs to be to put it on your calendar. Why? Because your calendar has a constraint of time. Okay? And that constraint forces you to make trade offs. Because if I spend time doing this, it means I can't do that. If I'm gonna spend time at work, I'm not gonna be with my kids. If I'm watching TV, I'm not going to go to the gym. It makes you decide what is traction for every minute of the day and what is distraction. Everything that is not what you said you were gonna do is by definition, distraction. By the way, including if you wanna do the fun stuff. One of the best things you can do to fight distraction is to turn it into traction. How do you do that? Plan time for the distractions. You find you get distracted by X? Awesome. Put it in your calendar.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, how much time would the person I want to become spend on X? Based on my values, how much time would I spend? And say, okay, every night, you know, from eight to nine PM, that's my time for social media. Great. There's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing evil about social media if it's done on your schedule and according to your values. Okay? So that turns out to be a much, much more effective technique. Here's the big misconception. Here's what everybody gets wrong about time boxing. People think that time boxing is about finishing stuff. Because we have this stupid mentality that we've been taught from to do lists, that my productivity is measured by how many cute little boxes I check off. So dumb. I used to do that. You know, I used to do a task, say, oh, I forgot to put that on my to do list.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I would write it down just for the joy of checking it off. How stupid is that? Right? I don't do that anymore. Because the goal of time boxing is not to finish anything. What? That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean? This is about getting more done? What do you mean not finish anything? Yes, the goal is not to finish anything. Here's how time boxing works. You say how long you're going to work on a task and the only goal is not to finish. The goal is to work on that task or do that thing for as long as you said you would without distraction. That's it.

• 24:35Auren Hoffman?

  Okay. So if you say you're gonna work on something for an hour, you're working for an hour. Obviously, if you finish it before.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Half an hour.

• 24:40Auren Hoffman?

  You can give yourself a reward.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no. Just fit whatever amount of time. Fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, twenty minutes, doesn't matter. Just work on that thing and nothing else. You're not gonna get up from your desk. You're not gonna check email. You're not gonna go to the.

• 24:53Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, I assume like, I'll have a thing where, okay, I gotta write this thing, right? I gotta write a blog post or something like that. A time box, you know, a half hour to go do it. If I finish it beforehand, to me, what I, to me, that's like a reward. I finish it. I time boxed thirty minutes. I finished it in twenty-two. Now I've got eight minutes to just like mess around and have fun and that's my reward for finishing it before.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Sure. That happens like one out of a hundred times. But let's just say, that's great. What's much more common is it's not done. Okay? Isn't that a big problem? I didn't finish. I said I was gonna finish and I finished. No, the goal is not to finish. The goal is, now you have a feedback loop. Now you can say to yourself, oh, okay, I worked on that presentation for thirty minutes. I finished three slides. The presentation needs to be thirty slides long. That means therefore that I need nine more time boxes to finish the entire presentation.

• 25:43Auren Hoffman?

  Let me push back on you for a second.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Auren Hoffman?

  My guess is like, again, depending on how people time box, and I do that as well, like, in, for most things, obviously, there's plenty of exceptions, but for most things, you know, depending on what you time box and how you, how you decide what you're going to do, like what do you wanna accomplish during that time? You can, you'll, you'll almost certainly do it in that time if you just, if you actually don't get distracted during that time.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  That, that's not a pushback. That's an agreement. I totally, totally agree with you. So that's much better.

• 26:17Auren Hoffman?

  You will actually get it done. Like, you will actually accomplish it during that time.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Of course, of course. That's the kicker. When we look at the research.

• 26:23Auren Hoffman?

  And often you may accomplish it like way before that. You might time box thirty minutes. It sounds like a very little time and you might get it done in like twelve minutes. Like, actually doesn't take that long to do a lot of these things as long as you like are super focused on it. You know, with, with the exception of like often, like nowadays, like when you're like coding an AI, like you got, you, you put something in and you gotta wait like ten minutes for the AI to like crunch everything and during that time, you've got it, you have, you know, maybe something else you're gonna go do.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, no, that's, that's a, it's a great point. And that's exactly right, that the research shows that the person who doesn't care about finishing the task but uses time boxing gets more done than the person who measures themselves by how many things they checked off on their to do list. That's the kicker, that at the end of the day, they actually do get more done because they can properly plan their time using these time boxes.

• 27:12Auren Hoffman?

  The other thing, just to, just to stress on, you know, you say to do lists are, you know, maybe not good. There, there is something, as you mentioned earlier, about like getting it out of your head. Like, I find that there's so many people out there where they are, they're almost overburdened by all these things they know they have to do, but because they haven't written them down somewhere.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:32Auren Hoffman?

  It's like floating around in their head and it actually causes a lot of people to be unhappy and stressed. I, I, I have found that in general, people I know who use to do lists are like way less stressed, they're way more happy.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Let me clarify.

• 27:48Auren Hoffman?

  They are way more kind of like, they know they're gonna, they know they're gonna get this thing done.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:52Auren Hoffman?

  It's not, it's not, it's not floating around.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally agree. So getting stuff out of your head, awesome. Do it. Write it down. Definitely. That's kindergarten. Running your day on a to do list is what's counterproductive. That doesn't work. If you wake up and say, oh, what am I supposed to do today? And you look at your to do list before you look at your calendar, you're sunk. That's what I'm trying to, to share with people.

• 28:13Auren Hoffman?

  An inbox is kind of a to do list, right?

• 28:18Auren Hoffman?

  So if you have an email inbox or Slack inbox or, you know, whatever you're doing, WhatsApp inbox or something like that, like in some ways, that is a to do list for you. Like, you're going through that inbox and it's, it's almost like somebody else gets to put something on your to do list.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, if you're using your inbox as a to do list, that's what unproductive people do. That's what people who get burnout do. Because you're, you're essentially letting anybody decide what you do next. That's madness. Why would you do that? That, that's what we.

• 28:51Auren Hoffman?

  But in some ways, you, I mean, if you live in today's world, like you kinda have to do at least some of that. Like, you have to, like, there are other, essentially, you have to let all these people put things on their to do list, the inbox. I run my life on these kinda email or Slack or other types of things. You just have, you have to go through it. If you work in an organization, if you're interacting with people in the outside world, like, it is kind of a necessity, right? Or you think like, that's not true.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  No, checking email is part of your job. And I don't agree with these college professors who are tenured, who say, oh, just stop checking emails, stop using social media. Like, great, you're tenured, I'm gonna get fired. Like, it doesn't work that way. Here's the problem. Yes, you need to check email, but you don't need to check it on the sender's schedule. So the big problem people make is, what if somebody needs me? What if they need a reply? What if there's an emergency? And it's almost never a real emergency. It's their feeling that there might be something there, that they might let somebody down. They're scared. And when we are scared, we don't perform at our best. So do we check email? Absolutely. But we check it on our schedule and according to our values, not because we're afraid.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So what we do is we schedule time for what's called reactive work and what's called reflective work. Most people, they love being told what to do. These are what, this is what low performers do. They are constantly checking their Slack messages. They're constantly looking at email because they like the security of being told what to do. That's what low performers do. High performers schedule time in their day when they will be on call. That's called reactive work, reacting to messages, reacting to notifications, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your boss. That's reactive work time. But if you do not plan time for reflective work, reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Planning, strategizing, thinking for God's sakes. If you do not plan that time and hold it sacred, I promise you, you're running real fast in the wrong direction. So you have to, and it depends on your job. Some people all day long, like, you know, if you're an engineer, most of your day is spent doing reflective work. You need to work without distraction. The number one cause of programming bugs is interruption, is distraction. So most of your day is going to be done doing reflective work without interruption. But you know, if you're in an executive position or you know, you're in sales or customer service, yeah, most of your day is going to be spent doing reactive work. But if you do not plan that time, and everybody needs some portion of their day doing that reflective work, you have to plan it and keep it sacred.

• 31:28Auren Hoffman?

  There's all these people talking about kids today, you know, phones and this and that, you know? And there's kind of a moral panic around, around all this. Are they right to have this moral panic or, you know, where do you come down on that?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, you know, the answer to every good question is always the same. The answer is it depends. And I think what is happening right now is that we like simple answers. And simple answers are typically wrong. And so what's missing is nuance to this debate. Are some kids harmed by social media? Yes. All of them? No. And it's much more complicated than screen time. It's a factor of who is using, right? Like some kids can use social media and not have any problems. Others are, if they have, you know, pre-existing comorbidities, they're going to have all kinds of problems. What are they using, right?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  The screen time of my, my, my daughter talking to her grandparents over FaceTime, that's very different from, you know, wasting time on TikTok. So it's what you're doing. What would you be doing instead of using your phone? That's a big one. Nobody ever talks about, as much as we talk about the mental health causes or the mental health aspects of too much social media. Nobody ever tells you that all the things that used to kill kids in our generation, right? Drunk driving, record lows, smoking, record lows, truancy, record lows, homicide, record lows. This was supposed to be the generation of the super predator. You know, they, they built prisons that are empty now all across America because kids aren't going to jail like they used to. So in many ways, this is the safest time in American history to be a kid, but we don't talk about that. Why?

• 33:13Auren Hoffman?

  But there is something like, you know, I don't know if you've seen this like AI friends thing where they take like the characters from Friends if they had phones. And they're all just like on their phones the whole time instead of like getting into the normal Friends antics that they would have in the nineties. Like there is something like when you see groups of teenagers together, like they're, they're on their phone a little bit more. They're less chatting, they're less, you know? So even when they're together, they're on that. Do you, are you worried about that or you're like, oh, that's, you know, that again, or it kind of depends kind of thing?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't like it. And I'm sure it's taking a toll. On the other hand, if you wanted to design a device-

• 33:51Auren Hoffman?

  You've got a teenage daughter, right? Like you think about these types of things.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, she just turned 18, right? Yeah. I mean, but on the other hand, if you think about it, if you wanted to design a device to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, you know what? There's some real benefits, right?

• 34:06Auren Hoffman?

  That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that, yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we, so there is for sure, uh, an increase of teen suicidality from what used to be a record low. It's increased since, and especially among girls. There, there is that, it does seem to be a trend. Now, correlation is not causation, right? We don't know exactly why. I'm sure that there is some attributes that are, that are not so great. Uh, I also think that there is a lot that we can do, a lot that we can do, that I think what, what's really happening. If you ask me, okay, where is the increase of suicidality coming from? I think what's happening is that as a replacement for all the stuff that used to kill kids, you know, the, the drugs, the, the alcohol, the, all the stuff that, you know, is all time record lows, the homicides.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  There's other, like those kids who are troubled, if you mix in, uh, uh, something that they could overdose on, so to speak, that they could get addicted to. Yes, they can get, uh, they can't spend too much time on social media. So the good news is that we have far more agency than we think. There's a whole section in Indistractable, a whole chapter, I think it's the most important chapter in the book, on how to raise indistractable kids. And so I'm not an advocate for social media. I think, I think I want people to use it less if that's what they want to do. But I also don't want us to, to have this moral panic and tech boogeyman because the reason I'm so adamant about this is that when you tell people, you know, your brain is being hijacked, we're all addicted, right?

• 35:32Speaker 01

  The kids are just going crazy for this technology, which is, which is always the hallmark of a moral panic. We did this with television, we did this with radio, we did this with the bicycle.

• 35:41Auren Hoffman?

  It was like that, look, I, I played Dungeons and Dragons and there was a huge moral panic.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Oh my God, oh, it's satanic and you know, it's a cult, of course. We do, yeah. So we need, we need to be cautious. Uh, and, and the, the study, you know, people who are really into the science are the most skeptical that this is actually the cause of what's going on. I, we can talk about what I think is actually going on and causing these mental health issues. But the most important thing is if you think there's nothing to be done, what are you going to do? Nothing.

• 36:07Auren Hoffman?

  Nothing.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  If you think, uh, the word addiction comes from the Latin slave. We're not slaves, we're not all addicted, right? Some of us are, but we're not all addicted. So if you believe there's nothing you could do, then you don't do anything.

• 36:20Auren Hoffman?

  And even if you quote unquote are addicted, there's, there are still ways to break the addiction.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Even then, that's true.

• 36:24Auren Hoffman?

  You have agency, yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And it's, it's really not that hard.

• 36:28Auren Hoffman?

  There's a thing about like, yeah, where there, sometimes there is a little bit in society that we're, uh, uh, and maybe this is like more pervasive today that we're, we're victims in some ways rather than we're actors.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. And I think, um, it's, it's, it's very convenient for us as parents, uh, to believe this sugar high myth. You know the sugar high myth, right? The, the every parent, if a kid is acting crazy at a birthday party, oh, it's a sugar high, it's a sugar high. There is no such thing. There, there's never, it's biologically, there is no, I don't believe me, Google it. There is no such thing as a sugar high.

• 37:04Auren Hoffman?

  I remember my, well, the first time my daughter had a birthday cake and she was like running around like crazy, you know, insane. You think that, that, so that was just like, uh, that was, that was just like a, a random accident or something or?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Well, she's, people get excited about things they like, but biologically, this is the problem. When we think it's biological, well, now it's unchangeable, right? It's, it's chemicals in the brain and that's why it's happening because they're addicting us with their algorithms. And so we make up this very simplistic story because it absolves us of responsibility. That if your kid's acting crazy, okay, they're a sentient being, like they make their own choices and sometimes they act ways you don't like. So if I can blame it on the sugar or the social media, oh, it's not me, nothing I can do. And parents have always done this, oh, it's their friends. You know, I hear parents saying all the time, but all their friends are using it, you know, everybody's doing it. So who exactly bought them their phone? You did.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Who's paying for the bill every month? You are.

• 38:05Auren Hoffman?

  Now, okay, now we, most people, very few people today have a true AI companion. They, you know, I, it's not yet at a point where really, I know very, very few people where they have like a real relationship with an AI where it's a real friend or, or, or even more than a friend or something like that. But like, it does seem like that's coming. Like, how is the world going to change when we have these like companions that are, that are AIs?

• 38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's going to be interesting for sure. And this is, this is something that we, we are, we're sure is coming. It's, it's, it's definitely on its way. And I think that it opens up new opportunities for both coercion and persuasion. So these are two types of manipulation. That manipulation has a bad name, but manipulation is neutral. It's, it's what kind of manipulation? So persuasion is helping people do things that they themselves want to do. And so I, I'll call it right now, I, I've been saying this for years, there will be an AI that's going to be your Jiminy Cricket. Remember the movie Pinocchio? And, uh, in, in the movie Pinocchio, there's Jiminy Cricket and, uh, he represents Pinocchio's conscience. And he, and he whispers in his ear, you know, do this, don't do that.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  And that is going to be the role of AI. If we use it correctly, it's going to persuade us. And that's what habit forming technology, that's what Hooked is all about, you know, getting you to exercise more, getting you to eat right, getting you to save money, getting you to learn a new language. That's persuasion.

• 39:32Auren Hoffman?

  Or you're like, we are about to grab the cookie. Hey, uh, don't do that, don't grab the cookie, you know, then you could, you could obviously not listen to the AI, but like, okay.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Right. But there will be a day, 100% sure, quote me on this, where you will have a little AI in your ear that can see what you're about to do and say, hey, if you want those fries, just so you know, you're going to be over your caloric budget for the day. So maybe think twice. Or, hey, you just said that thing to your kid, you know what? You could have said it better, try saying this instead. Or, you know, this real time-

• 40:04Auren Hoffman?

  For sure, you're going to have this coach in your ear all the time.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And, and that, and I'm really looking forward to that because I think that's our opportunity to put a layer in between us and potential coercion. So persuasion is helping you do things you want to do to be your better self. And I think there's a lot of potential there. The opposite of persuasion is coercion. Coercion is getting you to do things you didn't want to do. And so that's the real risk of not having some kind of Jiminy Cricket in between you and everybody who's trying to manipulate you, is that they can coerce you to do things you later regret. So in many ways, I want that, that, that thing that I own, that's proprietary.

• 40:43Auren Hoffman?

  As long as you know what is right for you, which sometimes people don't always know, right?

• 40:47Speaker 01

  That's right, but at least it's made.

• 40:49Auren Hoffman?

  They think what's right, like, uh, I should just go pick up lots of girls when really what's right for them is to be in a good long-term relationship or something, or.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Could be, right. And so that's where we have an opportunity, I think, to decide based on our values when we're in a cold state. Right? We want it when we're in a rational, cold state, not when the temptation is right in front of us, not when we're in a hot state. Right? Not when we're feeling those internal triggers, the desire, the loneliness, the boredom that gets us to do things we maybe later regret. But when we're calm, we can look at our values and say, okay, you know, hey, Jiminy Cricket AI. Here's what I want. I'm trying to lose weight and I'm trying to be more patient and I, I, I want this and that. Help me do that. So I want you to, before I, I, I give into my, my, uh, uh, worst impulses, I want you to be that barrier. So I think it has an opportunity to, to, to really help us be better people.

• 41:40Auren Hoffman?

  Are you worried? There are obviously these things where like the, the only phone numbers I remember beside from my mind and my wife's are all the phone numbers I. All the phone numbers of my friends from sixth grade, like I remember every single phone number from sixth grade, but I don't know any other phone, you know? Or, you know, it's like, you know, it's harder for me to drive around without using the GPS anymore. Like I've kind of given myself a what, like, are you worried about some of those like cognitive load offloading things that we're doing?

• 42:09Speaker 01

  I, I am and I'm not, uh, because, okay, let's look at the historical precedence. I mean, if you look at the ancient Greeks. You know, uh, Socrates said that this terrible new technology was going to enfeeble men's minds. That's literally what he said.

• 42:25Auren Hoffman?

  Like writing or something like that.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. The written word. And he's absolutely right. You know, we laugh at that quote.

• 42:30Auren Hoffman?

  He wanted people to memorize everything and he thought books were bad.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yes. And he was right. He wasn't, you know, we laugh at that all writing. It's so, it's a great tool. What, what are you talking about Socrates? You got it wrong. No, he got it right. There are things the ancient Greeks could do that we cannot do. They could memorize entire, you know, volumes.

• 42:46Auren Hoffman?

  Homer was, was passed down by, by the, by.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Through song.

• 42:50Auren Hoffman?

  Just speaking it. Yeah, exactly.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  That's right. So there are already so many things. I mean, like, I, I don't know how to make a fire. I mean, theoretically I do, but I've never made up a fire from a scribe. There's all kinds of things I can't do. I don't make my own electricity. I don't like, you know, do my own plumbing. So we already offload a ton. Now, I don't know with AI, I think it, it, it does offer up some interesting questions. I'd love to hear your opinion on this as well. What scares me a little bit, what I've seen recently is as the AI gets smarter, I've been getting dumber. Because, uh, writing for me is such an amazing vehicle for clear thought. And so when I, whenever I've used AI, uh, I always regret it.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Like when I ask AI to do the writing for me, it, unless, word smithing is fine. I don't, you know, I use a spell check. I use a grammar check. That, that's not what I'm talking about. You know, word smithing, that's not what I'm talking about. But whenever I've been like.

• 43:44Auren Hoffman?

  Or coming up with a better headline or something like that.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. But like, give me a first draft. Always regret it. AI is not there yet. And I think it's really stalled. I don't know what you, you've been seeing. I think for some reason the models aren't prioritizing good writing. Cause it's just so obvious, even with the frontier models, it's so obvious when it's AI writing. It's just, it's just garbage.

• 44:04Auren Hoffman?

  I, I don't, I don't think that's true. I don't think it is.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  No, you think it's.

• 44:07Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. I know they have all these like AI detectors and stuff like that, but, um, like I have friends who wrote like whole books with AI.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And you can't tell?

• 44:16Auren Hoffman?

  You're, you're an author. My partner Todd, he wrote a biography of, uh, Dario, the CEO of, uh, of, of Anthropic. Back in February 2020, uh, back in February 2026. And, um, within a week, it became the best-selling biography on Amazon. And it's really well, it's really good. Now, is it as good as Walter Isaacson? Like absolutely not. Like Walter Isaacson would, would definitely write it better. But is it better than like 90% of biographies written? Yes. Uh, like most biographies written are just terrible. Uh, so, you know, so it's just like, I just read a biography on George Schultz.

• 44:55Auren Hoffman?

  Um, and I, I, and I'm so interested in George. I want to learn. So I mean, he's, to me, he's one of the most fascinating figures of our, of, of like the, of the 20th century. I wanted to learn it and I, and I put it down halfway. It was just so boring and so terribly written. And yeah, I'm sure it was scholarly. I'm sure the guy like interviewed like, you know, George Schultz's old girlfriend or something, but like, it just wasn't, it just wasn't, it just didn't. It did, the writing was bad. Uh, and so it's just like, it, you know, so there's something about it where you can still get like a really good thing. Um, with, with like some sort of concentrated effort, but, but maybe you disagree as like a real writer.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  No, no, I, I, I think, uh, I mean, it's made my job so much easier. I mean, the amount of time, the, the months and months I would spend reading boring academic research papers. That now in just a few minutes, I can say, you know, was this study well, wrong or not? It's amazing. In that respect, unbelievable. But in terms of what I, you know, you asked about the, the fear of what are we losing? There, it's almost in some ways too easy to get to the end product. And I find at least that I, that the process of writing is what clarifies my thinking. And I.

• 46:09Auren Hoffman?

  When you write, often you write, you think you're writing about X and then as you're writing, you almost like change your mind about something or you have a new thought or whatever. So I, I agree, like that process does like help clarify thinking, even that like, you know, the, the old memos that you'd write on Amazon. Where you have to write these kind of like six-page memos, I think clarify their thinking. And now they're probably right, like all AI slop. And probably it's just like not actually useful anymore within Amazon.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but to be clear, I like it better this way, right? You asked about boredom. Well, I can choose to plan time to be bored. It's not a forced thing. I, you know, I can say, hey, I'm blocking off today for three hours. I'm going to sit here and meditate. Like I can, I can do that. I, I can choose to write it by hand. I can go back to the old way. So I like the future we're living in, right? I, I, overall, I think these are great because now I have the choice, whereas before I didn't.

• 46:58Auren Hoffman?

  All right. You've got this new book, Beyond Belief. Um, and it basically says like beliefs are tools. They're not actually like facts. Um, and you kind of like can swap out ones that don't serve you. Is that right? Or kind of walk us through the kind of thesis there?

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the big idea behind, uh, Beyond Belief came from, uh, these conversations I'd have with readers. So I do these office hours where anybody can call me, uh, once a week, I do an hour, you can book time with me if you bought one of my books, happy to, to answer any questions. And, uh, every, you know, every once in a while I get a call. Uh, I remember one particular call. It was pretty rare, but a call that, you know, I, I had this one guy call me up and said, hey, Nir, I, I read your book. I read Indistractable and I really liked it, but I just wanted to let you know it didn't, didn't work for me. And I, I said, oh, really? You know, tell, tell me why. I spent five years researching that book, 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. Let, let's walk step by step. Tell me where it didn't work. Let's start with step one. How did step one go? And he said, oh, you know what? I, I read step one. I just didn't do it.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  I said, okay, no problem. I understand. Maybe you didn't like that step. Let's go to step two. How did step two go? Yeah, I, I read that one too. And I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get to that one either. I didn't do it either, but I really liked it. I read it. I read it. I just didn't do it either. I thought, what's, what's going on here? I spent so much time writing this book and it's changed my life and I know it works and, you know, what, what's wrong? Is it my writing? Is it my readers? What, what's happening? And then I realized, you know what? I, I do this all the time. I have books on my shelf from authors that I've read and haven't done anything with. I've watched the YouTube videos and the podcast giving me great advice that goes nowhere. Why? Why is it in an age when we have so much information abundance, when there's, you can't excuse yourself and say, oh, you know what?

• 48:40Speaker 01

  I just don't know what to do. If you don't know what to do, ask chat GPT, ask Google, like read a book. All the answers are out there. So why don't we know? Why do we do what we say we're going to do? That's kind of the, the basic question. And how come some people are so great at doing the things that they say they're going to do and others flounder? And so it turns out that, uh, we don't understand motivation properly, that we think motivation, you know, I was an econ major in college. And they teach you that motivation is all about incentives, that if you have a particular benefit, you will do a particular behavior. As long as you know what to do, you'll do it to get the benefit. But there's something missing. If it was that easy, if all it took was knowing what to do and wanting the benefit, well, we'd all be multimillionaires and have six-pack abs.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  There's clearly something missing. What's missing is that motivation is not a straight line between behavior and benefit. It's a triangle that in order to sustain motivation, you need not only to know what to do, the behavior, not only why you're doing it, the benefit. But most importantly, you have to have the belief. That's what holds it all together. And so if belief is so important, it turns out persistence is the most important trait of whether you meet your long-term goals. How do you have the right beliefs to sustain your motivation? And it turns out that what I thought was just a book about productivity and motivation turned out to be the answer to solving suffering. I mean, I, I don't mean to, to overhype it, but it has completely changed my, uh, my perception of how we view reality, how we view pain and suffering.

• 50:07Auren Hoffman?

  Everyone I know will complain about something and not actually do it, not actually deal with it. Like, I've got like an annoying elbow and I was like complaining about it to my friends and my wife and stuff and like, but I actually don't like, I could just like do PT, but I just like don't do it. So, like, in some ways, like, is it really bad? Like, no, if it was really, really, really, like, it was really, like, making my life terrible, like, I would do something about it. But like, like, to me, the benefit of complaining about it is, is more, is higher than the benefit of actually doing something. Like, I don't real, I'm really, you know, it's like, I'm really not, like, if someone

• 50:50Auren Hoffman?

  keeps complaining about something that they could do, like, in some ways, like, maybe they don't really, maybe it's not that high priority to actually do it.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you can actually look at this exact problem through the lens of this motivation triangle I mentioned. So either you don't believe in the benefit, okay? Either you don't believe, hey, whatever, PT works sometimes, it doesn't work other times, it's probably not gonna work, what's it for? You don't believe in the benefit. Or you don't believe in the behavior. You don't believe that, you know what, even if it does work, I'm not gonna stay consistent. I've tried before, I'm not the kind of person who gets up every morning and does his stupid pushups and whatever, it's not gonna work, it's not gonna help, because I'm not gonna do it. So that's exactly right. You have to have the belief that holds the behavior and the benefit together in order to sustain motivation.

• 51:30Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, like, obviously, if there's a magic shot to go into my elbow to make my shot, and I knew it was gonna work, like, I would of course do it, like, immediately, but it's like, yeah, it's like, it's annoying, it's, it's like, every once in a while, I gotta take an, I gotta take an Advil, but like, I don't know, I just like complaining about it, it's like, kind of fun to complain, it's like, you know, I see people complaining about something, like, they're literally complaining about the same thing for like, for years, or they're complaining about a person, you know, it's like, they work, where they're complaining about something, it's like, well, like, maybe they actually just like complaining, then, like, then they don't really wanna do something about it.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, what's interesting, you can use beliefs to, to motivate you to action, but you can also use beliefs to change your perception of suffering, just by changing your beliefs. So there's a section in the book where I talk about chronic pain, I don't, I'm not sure what your elbow situation, did you injure it, or is it?

• 52:25Auren Hoffman?

  It's, you know, it's like a three out of 10, so it's kind of like a annoy, it's like an annoyance, but not a, if it was obviously eight out of 10, I'd be doing something about it.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  But what, what, did you, did you get in an accident or something?

• 52:37Auren Hoffman?

  No, I have no idea, it's just, you know, who knows, just playing sports, or who knows why, you know, it's called, it's called getting older.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm not a doctor, I don't know what's going on with your, I haven't looked at any of your scans, but, you know, there is such a thing called neuroplastic pain. And unlike acute pain, which is caused by some kind of physical damage, neuroplastic pain, and this is where chronic pain comes from, which is pain that doesn't have a physical source that lasts for more than six months, and, you know, this is fibromyalgia, this is chronic insomnia, all kinds, there's all kinds of these chronic issues, turns out, is highly, highly affected by your beliefs. So for example, pain that flares up when you're stressed, pain that comes and goes based on different situations, migraine sufferers, turns out, there's this new technique called pain reprocessing therapy, which is absolutely crazy.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  I have witnessed, okay, I've seen videos, I wasn't there live, but I've seen multiple videos of people using some of the techniques I described in the book, it's called hypnosis sedation, to undergo full surgery, I saw this video of a guy by the name of Daniel Gisler, who had metal pins removed from the bones in his ankle, scapula, cutting into flesh, and he did the entire 55-minute procedure, completely awake, no anesthetic, no local, no topical.

• 53:58Auren Hoffman?

  What? That is crazy.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing, and I, I am the least woo-woo guy you've ever met, I don't believe in anything of the spiritual supernatural stuff.

• 54:05Auren Hoffman?

  I'm not, I'm not, I'm not starting, I'm not, I'm not signing up for that study personally.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  No, me neither, me neither, I wanna be very clear, not for me, I'm not doing it, but, why do I, why do I share this, and why do I write about it in my book? Because if a human being, and it turns out the most remarkable thing about Daniel is how unremarkable he is, tens of thousands of people in Italy, in France, in Switzerland, that's where the, you can do these kind of procedures, have done these type of procedures under neurosedation, it's actually not that uncommon. So if the human being can do this.

• 54:36Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  What else can't we do? Right? What else are we limiting ourselves based on our beliefs? If people can go under surgery without anesthetic, what does that mean about, oh, I don't wanna go to the gym, it hurts, I don't like working, I don't wanna talk to my, my mom, she's pissing me off, I'm, I'm gonna, you know, I'm, I'm, like, that relationship is, is angering me, that's too hard to fix. Right? It's all about pain management, right? That time management is pain management, money management is pain management, weight management is pain management, it's all pain management. Productivity isn't about getting more done, it's about managing your feelings. We talked about 90% of the reason you check your phone and get distracted is because you feel bad, you don't know how to deal with discomfort.

• 55:21Auren Hoffman?

  And what, what is a, is there a belief that you've swapped out in your own life?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Oh my God, where do we get started? We've been talking for almost an hour, but I can tell you all kinds of beliefs I've swapped. I mean, the, the biggest has been around my relationships. Um, there's, there's a section in the book where I talk about my relationship with my mom, and how much that's changed, and how that affected my relationship with my daughter, that I had this very long-held belief that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please, and that was causing me a lot of suffering. And so I talk about this technique in the book that's called inquiry-based stress reduction, that anybody can use to absolutely revolutionize your relationships, because you do not have relationship problems, you have belief problems.

• 56:01Auren Hoffman?

  Hmm, okay. Inquiry-based stress reduction.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a technique that was developed by Byron Katie, she's a, she called it the work, but actually, if you look at the history of this technique, it actually goes back to, all the way to Aristotle. Basically, what, what this technique does, it forces you to collect what's called a portfolio of perspectives, different beliefs. You see, most of us, we think that beliefs are facts. Beliefs are not facts. Facts are objective truths, they're things that are true whether or not you believe in them. Beliefs are convictions that are open to revision based on evidence, but we treat facts as beliefs and beliefs as facts, but that's not, they're two separate things.

• 56:42Auren Hoffman?

  There are points in people's life where, like, emotion overrides them, and they get very upset, or they get very angry at something, and then later, they wish they weren't so upset, or they weren't so angry at that particular thing. Is it too late, once, once you realize emotions already hit you, to apply any of these things?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Well, there's a wonderful Paulo Coelho quote, he said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

• 57:08Auren Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I love that quote, it hits so hard, right?

• 57:12Auren Hoffman?

  And very true, yeah.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Very true, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision.

• 57:15Auren Hoffman?

  If you keep apologizing, if you keep wishing you didn't do something, you, you're, you're really choosing to do it, whether you like it or not, yeah.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Right, so sometimes we slip, it happens, but that means we have to take steps to figure out, wait a minute, why, why is this angering me? So, you know, I, I did a presentation lately, uh, to my, my email, my newsletter followers, and there was several thousand people there, it was amazing, you know, these fans who had read my previous books, and, um, so one of them said to me, he said, you know, Nir, you seem so much happier, like, did this book make you happier? And I said, you know, I thought about it, it's not, it hasn't made me happier, it's just made me more chill. Like, the stuff that used to bug me, Orin, like, this, I used to be kind of more high-strung, more stressed at stuff that, you know, oh, there's a line at the airport, or traffic,

• 58:05Speaker 01

  or like, that person said that thing, and that really pissed me off, how dare they, or, you know, an angry email, it just doesn't bother me like it used to, because I finally realized that I was, I was at the mercy of my beliefs, but my beliefs can change, they're malleable, that, that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. I can change my beliefs so that I stop having to suffer.

• 58:31Auren Hoffman?

  Uh, this is good, all right, two more personal questions before we go. First, how are you personally using, like, AI day-to-day, like, what do you, what are you doing that's interesting?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  So when I write an article, illustration has been, become really easy and fun with Midjourney, I love using that, so whenever I publish an article.

• 58:47Auren Hoffman?

  Are you still using Midjourney?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, just for illustrations. Why am I not supposed to be using Midjourney anymore?

• 58:53Auren Hoffman?

  No, no, I don't know. I kind of like, I was using it a few years ago and then kind of like, once it got really easy to do it in these other things, I stopped. But like, maybe it's actually really good. Like, I haven't used it in a few years.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Oh, it's amazing. What I like about it is that I find with the other models, if I want a consistent look, I can't get exactly the same stylistic look. It changes too much. Because I want, if you look at my Substack page, all the images look like they're done by the same exact artist. And I could only do that on Midjourney. Maybe there's other ways, but whatever, it works for me.

• 59:22Auren Hoffman?

  So I definitely love- Basically say, like, once you have something you like, you just say, okay, like, hey, this is the look I want. And now, like, keep doing it in this look, and it has it in the memory of this kind of style?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  There's a numeric code. So once you have that numeric code, it knows exactly what style you're talking about.

• 59:36Auren Hoffman?

  Okay, okay. That's super cool.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  And then, you know, keeping track, I mean, where don't I use AI? I mean, in terms of keeping track of, like, in my Notion doc, I talked to Claude to update my Notion doc about, oh, here's a research I'm doing, or did I send this pitch to this editor, the New York Times or Wall Street Journal? And like, what's coming back when? And like, all that stuff is all managed through Claude. Research is a breeze now. It used to be so hard. I mean, I used to have to, like, go to the library and look up research studies. It's now amazing. So that's probably some of the ways it saves me the most time. What's your favorite thing to do that most people don't?

• 1:00:10Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, I have so many little things I do, but I've got all these, like, Chrome extensions that I built. Like, again, N of one things. I built all these products for myself. I like introducing people to other people, so I built all these, like, internal tools to help me, like, suggest people to make introductions to other people.

• 1:00:31Auren Hoffman?

  I have a system that, like, I have my agent look at every restaurant I've ever been to in my life, and every time, and everyone I go to in the future, it asks me for, like, a quick blurb and review. And then I can do, like, a very, very detailed search of, like, oh, uh, like, I went to this, like, Korean barbecue place in New York. I kind of forgot the name of, you know, and it can, like, give me a very, like, specific kind of thing, and like, let me know, and can make the reservation for me. So I'm doing a lot of, like, crazy fun stuff, so it's been really great.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Very cool. Yeah, it is a lot of fun. It can become a distraction, though, let me tell you. You guys, I'm sure you know, it is a lot of fun.

• 1:01:09Auren Hoffman?

  For sure. There's definitely times where, like, I'm probably using it more too much. I'm not spending time with my kids, or, you know, those types of things.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, now you can timebox it, right? And then say, hey, that's my time to play around.

• 1:01:22Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah, the problem with AI is if you're doing something of, like, interesting in AI, like, often it can take many, many minutes to process that thing. And then it will come back, and then you have to just, like, come, then you want to, then you have to actually change it a bit. So if you want to do, like, anything of interesting, even though, like, each prompt may only take you, like, 30 seconds to write or something like that, and you may only need five prompts to get something done, like, the whole thing could take 30 minutes or 40, you know, to do that thing. And so you have to then have to, like, figure out, okay, what am I doing while this thing is going on? And obviously, you could have, like, 10 AI threads going on, which is what some people do.

• 1:02:04Auren Hoffman?

  Or, I don't know, maybe you could do pushups while you're doing it.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  What do you do? Yeah, how do you, I definitely struggle with that of, like, keeping my thought process. Because, yeah, I like to stay with one thing and go deep. But what do you do to remember?

• 1:02:19Auren Hoffman?

  I mean, what I maybe don't do as well as I would like, but I basically do all the things that, like, are the busy work things during that time. So I got to go through emails anyway.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:31Auren Hoffman?

  So I just, like, I got the AI thing going, and then I got, and then, like, and then at some point, you get the notification, because the problem is, you don't know how long it's going to take. It might take, like, sometimes it takes, like, 30 seconds, sometimes it takes, like, 15 minutes to do this thing, right? It's just, like, going. So, like, great, I'll just do my emails or Slack or whatever I have to do, just like the basic stuff. And then, like, ding, okay, so now I can come back to it, and hopefully I still remember it, like, what's going on, and go do it.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  You know what I wish they, maybe, I'm sure somebody on your, from your show definitely is at Anthropic or OpenAI, they need to tell you what model to use. Like, there needs to be first an AI that reads it and says, oh, you know what? This is a task that needs, you know, the extra strong, and this is the one that, oh, this could be super simple.

• 1:03:17Auren Hoffman?

  That would be awesome.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Right? Just tell me, I don't know. I always do the max, and it's a waste of time.

• 1:03:23Auren Hoffman?

  And then sometimes also, like, if you just happen to already have Fable there, you're already using it, you don't, like, switch it, like, in the middle, in the mid thing, but like, and then it's like, oh, then it actually takes, like, twice as long. You didn't need it to take twice as long, and it's burning all your tokens. So that's a great, great feature that it should do. It's like, kind of like an internal open router within Codex or within Claude Code.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  Maybe we could do that manual. I wonder if you just set it to the minimum. I'm just, you know, I'm thinking on the OpenAI interface. If I set it to the minimum and I say, which model should I use for this? I wonder if it would tell me which one would be the best, if that's, if it would be accurate.

• 1:04:02Auren Hoffman?

  It might, it might.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  Because that's instant, right? That'll tell you right away.

• 1:04:06Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a very, yeah, it's a very interesting. This is great. Last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice? And we already went through a few.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, between the to-do lists and that social media is melting your brain, I think that's generally bad advice. There's nothing you can do about it. That's, okay, that's the worst advice. I think the worst advice out there is that there's nothing you can do. I am a huge proponent of human agency.

• 1:04:36Auren Hoffman?

  That's terrible advice, yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Terrible advice. Yeah, that's the worst, that, you know, that you're addicted. And that means there's nothing you can do.

• 1:04:43Auren Hoffman?

  Or you're actually an NPC. Like, you just, you can't, you're just kind of, like, doing in the background. You don't have agency. You can't affect the world. You can't affect other people. You're just kind of stuck in your thing.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'll just toss in a quick bit of research, because I love the psychology research. That's what I'm a nerd about. But there's this concept of internal locus of control versus external locus of control. Internal locus of control, meaning that you believe that you can affect your reality. An external locus of control are people who believe that their external reality controls them. Now, what's amazing is that people who have an internal locus of control do better on pretty much every considerable aspect. So they have more friends, they make more money, they contribute more to their community, they have less incidents of mental health. All the good things happen to people who have an internal locus of control. Even, what's really amazing, here's the real kicker, is that people who believe that they control their circumstances

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  versus their circumstances control them, even when we find that people actually have a valid reason to say, hey, I'm at the bottom of the socioeconomic strata, I was born into terrible circumstances, even when all that is true, they have every reason to believe that they've been, you know, dealt a bad hand. Even when that's true, having an internal locus of control, believing you have agency, you still do better. So even when it's true, you should believe you have agency.

• 1:06:05Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's almost like we talked about before, this idea of being a victim. If you think you're a victim, like, you certainly are. Even if you are a victim, if somehow you don't think you're a victim, like, it's actually good to do that, right? So even when you were victimized, even actually when you, like, all these things, or you truly were discriminated against, or, you know, whatever it might be, like, yet you could maybe turn that into a chip on your shoulder, but if you think, oh, I'm just a victim, then you're just kind of hosed.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Yes. You always want to find where you have control, and what you always have control over are your beliefs. At the end of the day, you control your beliefs.

• 1:06:41Auren Hoffman?

  All right, that's a great way to end it. That's amazing. Thank you, Nir Eyal, for joining us on Summation. By the way, I follow you on X, at Nir Eyal. I really appreciate this. This has been really amazing.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  Thank you so much, Orin. Great to see you again.

• 1:06:52Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I read a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.