986: Nir Eyal | Develop Strategies, Not Just Tactics

Foreign.

Welcome back to the show. I'm Travis Chappell and I believe that if you can connect with the best, you can become the best. So after creating 800 podcast episodes about building your network, I've come to realize that networking is really just making friends if you're doing it the right way. Anyway, join me as I make friends with world class athletes like Shaquille O', Neal, entertainers like Rob Dyrdek, authors like Dr. Nicole Lapera, former presidents like Vicente Fox, or even the occasional FBI hostage negotiator, billionaire real estate mogul, or polarizing political figure. So if you want to make more friends, that help you become a better version of yourself and subscribe to the show and keep on listening because this is Travis Makes Friends. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the show. Today we are doing another episode in our series, Travis Makes Money. Today I'm going to take a little bit of a different approach and I reached back into the vault to an episode we released in 2021 with a guy named Near Eyal near is an educator and the best selling author of Hooked and Indistractable, how to control your attention and choo lose your life. So the reason I wanted to talk, the reason why I wanted to bring this episode back into the forefront, everybody's minds is that one thing that I hear a lot when we're talking about earning more money is the, the, it's always like, well, in what hours, in what time? Right now it might be a little bit different if you're 22 and you don't really have any obligations or responsibilities other than yourself. But if you're in your mid to late 30s and you got kids and a family and you have bills and you have other things to, to not just pay for but do like tasks, responsibilities can be really difficult to find extra hours in the day to work on your side hustle or earn extra income. And so in this episode, we talk a lot about how to be indistractable and how to free up multiple hours in your week so that you can go focus on some of those things that will help you to be able to get ahead in your financial life. And near is the guy to do this. Just a year or two after this interview released, he did this huge segment with mindvalley which is one of the largest personal development YouTube channels that's out there. And man, it was so good. And he talks a lot about the same stuff that he talks about here on my show as well. So without further ado, please enjoy this Episode with Nir Eyal. Nir, thank you so much for joining me on the show today, man. I'm really, really looking forward to this conversation.

Oh, my pleasure, Travis. Thanks for having me.

Of course, of course. I want to immediately start here by building some context for the listeners. You obviously have an incredible resume that we just went through and so many things that you've been able to accomplish in your career so far. So I want to kind of figure out where it all started. How did you get to this point? So talk to me about, let's put an age on it. Let's say 12 year old, near. Okay, so what were your parents doing at the time? And then where did you grow up? Just some information like that.

Yeah, thanks, I appreciate it. I don't think I've accomplished that much. I feel like I'm just getting started. But I appreciate the kind words and yeah, so I think for me, my interest in my field, my field is called behavioral design. So I look into the deeper psychology behind how to shape user behavior, whether that's of products and services or of users shaping their own behaviors. My first book was about how to build habit forming products. So I work with companies in healthcare, education, fitness, enterprise companies, all kinds of companies that are looking to change consumer behavior. And then on the other side of the equation, I reveal some of these secrets so that all of us can take control over our bad habits. That's what my book Indistractable is all about. I found myself getting very distracted over the past few years and so I wrote a book looking at the how we as consumers can finally the subtitle of the book is Control Our Attention and Choose youe Life. And so for me, if you ask about, it's funny you should ask about 12 year old Nir because when I was 12 years old I was clinically obese and I grew up in Central Florida. I remember that geography matters because in Central Florida back then after school pretty much every day what you did is you would go to the community pool. We had this pool in our complex, like one pool for like a bunch of people's condos. And pretty much every day that's what the kids in the neighborhood did. But of course I was so conscious of my weight that I would never go to the pool without my shirt on. I always left my shirt on because I didn't want people to see my roles. And I think that was actually a pretty. Looking back, it was a pretty important aspect of my life growing up because I felt for many years I was obese for quite a while, that food controlled me. That was something that I was not in control of. And I think that started my fascination with how products and services can change our life, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, based on how we respond to them. So that was a pretty momentous part of my upbringing.

I would say so. I would say so. How did that affect your social dynamics and stuff when you came to that realization?

Well, I will say that I had renewed motivation to, to do something about it. You know, when I was in high school and I wanted attention from girls, frankly, I wanted to be the good looking guy. I was never an athlete. It was very difficult for me to be an athlete when I was obese. And probably the reason that I was obese was because I was, wasn't athletic. And the reason I wasn't athletic was because I was so overweight. But then, you know, when I wanted to figure out what to do about it, I finally, you know, I had this added motivation once I got interested in girls and I went through all kinds of yo yo diets. You know, I remember I was on the detox diet where you drink nothing but lemon ju juice and cayenne pepper. The no fat diet. You know, back then everybody always thought that fat free was the way to go. And so I tried everything and I went pretty extreme. And I remember even blaming the food companies pretty harshly. Right? It's all McDonald's fault. It's all the fast food companies, the food industry. And don't get me wrong, I mean, they're not in business to make people thin, they're in business to sell product. But I think a real turning point for me was when I said, okay, how do I do something about what I can actually change? And I think the big turning point in my life was when I realized why I was overeating, why I was out of control.

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With the food I ate.

By the way, this is something that I still struggle with today. You know, today I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm 42 years old. I weigh less now than I did when I was 12 years old. And so like. But it's still a struggle for me. And I think what I realized and I think what's carried over into my work is that distraction, and I mean distraction in terms of doing anything that is not what you plan to do in indistractable. I talk about the opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. Traction is any action that moves you towards what you want to do, towards your values, towards becoming the kind of person you want to become. And the opposite of traction is distraction. Anything that moves you away from what you intended to do, away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become. And so for me, overeating was a distraction. Just as later in life, checking my phone too much, right? Going on social media too much, being distracted with everything that's going on in the world rather than doing my work, that was so important to me. And so it's the same thing. And I think the thing that most people don't understand about distraction, they blame the external triggers, right? They blame the things outside of themselves. The pings, the dings, the rings, all the things outside of us that can cause distractions, certainly. But what I was surprised to find in my five years of research is that most distraction begins from within. That most distraction. The reason we procrastinate, the reason we get distracted, the reason we do things against our better judgment, is because of an emotion regulation problem. It's not a moral failing. There's nothing wrong with you. It's simply that we haven't learned how to deal with discomfort. And this is where the analog to food comes in, in that look, the reason I was obese, it wasn't because food was delicious. I didn't even eat, only when I was hungry. Actually, most of the time when I was eating, I wasn't even hungry. I was eating my feelings, right? And this is very, very common, that I was eating because I was bored, I was eating because I was lonely, I was eating because I felt shame for eating so much. And it's the same thing with our phones. It's the same reason for why we get distracted with our devices. Right? We turn on the news so we can hear about somebody else's problem halfway around the world so we don't have to think about our own. We check Facebook because we're lonely. We go to all different kinds of products and services because we are looking to escape an emotion. And once you understand that, that it's not just about what's happening outside of you, but what is happening inside of you, that's the first step to becoming indistractable. That's where we can say, oh, okay, this is in my control. This is something I can do something about and you can get on that path.

How important is it to make the distinction between the things that you can control and the things that you can't control?

I think it's incredibly important because I think it screens out these one size fits all solutions. I tried meditation for quite a long time. For 365 days actually. I made myself a promise that I would meditate every single day for a whole year. And meditation is great. Okay? I'm not dogging medication meditation. I'm going to get a bunch of hate mail if I do that. I'm not saying that meditation is not good, it's great, but it's a tool in your toolkit. Okay? Meditation and mindfulness is wonderful for helping you deal with uncomfortable sensations that you cannot change. Okay. It's a specific application. However, sometimes for some problems in life, you need to get up off your butt, stop meditating and figure out why you're feeling this discomfort, where is that uncomfortable sensation coming from and deal with it. So it's not that it's not a good tool. It is, but only for a certain application. I think, unfortunately, in the self help community. It's a very fad driven business. Right? Like, okay, everybody, today we're going to all meditate now. Okay? No, no, that doesn't work. No, no, no. Cold showers, cold showers. Everybody do cold showers. Everybody wake up at 4aM and it's always so gimmicky and tactic driven as opposed to strategic driven. Tactics are what you do. Strategy is why you do it. And I think that's what I seek to explain in my work. It's very, you know, I draw in a lot of academic studies to prove that. Look, this isn't just some, you know, a pet project of somebody said, oh, you know, 4:00am showers are a great idea. No, no, the science is here to show you exactly my methodology. I don't think you should take 4am showers, by the way. But there is a lot of other stuff that the research has been around for decades that we can all use to help us.

I think it's important to understand the difference between the action and the mindset as well. It's funny because I was at a conference one time and Naveen Jain was one of the speakers. I don't know if you know Naveen, but he's a multi billionaire and he was talking about the Tony Robbins ice baths and he said people ask him all the time about his routine and the things that he does and he's like, you're missing the point if you're only focused on the actual routine. It's more about the mindset. He was like, you can wake up every single day and take 12 ice baths, but you're not going to be Tony Robbins. It's the way that he thinks. It's the philosophy behind those things that really is the thing that you need to be able to encapsulate and then that's going to work itself out in those routines in a different way for every single person.

Right, right. And so that's why I really try and break down what the research says. I mean there's 30 pages of citations. Again, one of my beasts with the self help community is that it's always, well, this works for me and so it's going to work for you. Well, okay, that's nice, but I also want to see the peer reviewed studies. Right. Let me see the science. Right. And so that's why there's 30 pages of citations of peer reviewed journals. And I break down the model so that you can really understand the strategy. The strategy is you have traction and distraction. Think of it like a number line, right? Pointing to the right and to the left. And then you have these two triggers, external triggers and internal triggers pointing to the center of that number line. And so these internal triggers and external triggers can lead us to traction, things we intend to do or anything else, distraction, anything that leads us away from our values. And so now we have the strategy. And so what we're going to do is we're going to work our way through these four points. This is how we become indistractable. First we master the internal triggers, then we make time for traction, then we hack back the external triggers and then we prevent distraction with pact. And now we can get into the tactics. Right. But unless you understand that strategy and what order to do them in, then it doesn't work.

Yeah, I love that. And I love how this new book that you came out with, it's indistractable. I love how this ties into something that you learned when you were 12 years old that we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation.

And something that I thought was like a moral failing, something I thought was wrong with me, something I was embarrassed about. It turned out to actually be my strength.

Yeah, life's work. Yeah, right.

Yeah, it's true.

I kind of want to get back into the story here for just a second and just kind of complete, you know, from then until now. So you end up getting this thing under control. And to realize that at such a young age, I mean, that's absolutely incredible. How did that translate into post high school? What was the path for you after high school?

I didn't get it under control at 12. I was just obese at 12. It took me a long time to figure it out. Well into adulthood, in fact. But my path after I went to undergrad at Emory, met my wife there, and then we've been married for almost 20 years now. And then we started. Thanks. Yeah. I started out as a consultant. I worked at Boston Consulting Group right out of college as a strategy consultant. Then I started my first business. My wife and I actually started the business together. She went off to banking. I did consulting. And then we left those jobs and decided to start a solar energy business. And this was way back in 2003, back when nobody was doing solar. But it was a really good time. And we sold the company a few years later to a private equity firm. And then I went off to business school at Stanford. And while at Stanford, I started another company, ran that for a few years. And that's where I learned a lot about what I put in my first book, Hooked how to Build Habit for Me Products, because I had a front row seat at what was going on in Silicon Valley Back in 2007, 2008, when a lot of these companies like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and these companies were just hitting their stride. And so I learned a lot of lessons there. And then after my second company was acquired, I had some time on my hands and I just started thinking in public. I started blogging about what I was working on and I really became fascinated with habits. I believe that whatever I wanted to do next, I wanted to involve habits in some way, thinking I was going to start another company.

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And I just started blogging about it after about a year of just blogging and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. Another company to start. One of my former professors at Stanford, talking about your network, read my blog and said, I really like this. What do you think about teaching a class with me? And he said, you know, look, I have this carte blanche from the university to teach whatever and I think your model would be great. So what if we teach a class on habit forming products? Wow. Yeah, so that was great.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah. And so he was very generous and said, look, you know, I think you know enough to create a syllabus for this class, let me know where I can help. And he kind of let me run with it. And so I taught there for many years, the lecturer in marketing. And then I moved over to the design school and that became essentially my first book. That's where I kind of battle tested these ideas and practiced them with students and then put in this years of knowledge and research into this book. The first book, Hooked. That was a way that my network really did help me advance my career.

I'm curious on the decision and I'm sure you get this a lot, but I'm curious about the decision to after you'd already built and sold a Successful business to go back to school at Stanford. Was it more of a curiosity thing? Did you feel like there were certain things about the business that you still wanted to learn? What was the main motivation there?

Yeah, so Stanford was the only school I applied to. And the reason I applied only to one school was that I didn't really want to go to business school if it wasn't to go out to Silicon Valley. Because at the time this was, let's say this would have been 2006. And I started reading in the paper around like, oh my goodness, there's these companies that instead of selling hardware. Right. Instead of selling atoms, you know, I had a warehouse full of solar panels that I was on the hook for that. If they didn't sell, I'd be in debt. So I had. This was very stressful. And yet here are these tech companies who weren't selling things made out of atoms, they were selling things made out of bits.

Yeah.

Wow, that is amazing. How do I learn how to do that? And we just got very fortunate that, you know, I applied. Not on a fluke. I mean, I definitely, you know, took, you know, made a lot of effort to apply and all that, but I just applied to one school and I figured, you know, what, if it's not in the cards to go to Stanford, then it's okay, I'll keep running the business. And it just so happened that after I applied and was accepted that we got an offer to sell the company. We originally thought maybe my wife would continue running the business, but we got an offer that was a great offer. So we decided to take it and then head off to school.

Nice. That's awesome. I just was curious about that. Now what is the big thing for you near what's on the horizon? Do you have anything that's big projects coming up, things that you're working on?

You know, I am really focused to on this goal of helping the world become indistractable. I think that this is such a massive problem. And I think unfortunately, unfortunately what I think happened with food is happening right now with technology that clearly we have such an abundance of delicious food. And therefore I think in many ways it led to or was a contributing factor in obesity. And I think today we have such an abundance of information and entertainment that this leads to a battle for attention. Now I think what's going to happen is that the knee jerk reaction, I think we see that today is that everybody's blaming technology. Just like a few years ago everybody blamed McDonald's. Yeah, I think what we're going to see. Hopefully what I'm looking for is the tribe of people who say, okay, clearly these products are made to be engaging. And of course that's what we would want. We want, you know, do we want products to be built to not.

Right. Do we want crappy products?

Yeah, yeah. Hey, Netflix, your shows are too good. Please stop making such interesting movies. You know, Apple, your devices are too user friendly. Please stop that. No, that's not going to happen. So what I'm hoping for is to find the people who say, look, what can I do about this? You know, my kids are using technology too much. I'm using technology too much. My spouse is using tech. We're getting distracted. How do I do what I say I'm going to do? How do I live with personal integrity? By learning what I can do about the problem as opposed to waiting for, you know, the geniuses in Washington, D.C. to do something about it.

Right, exactly.

Why would we wait? Let's do something about it right now, ourselves. And so that's 100% of my effort right now is just focus on getting out that message.

You said two things there that are extremely important, I think, holistic life lessons. The first thing that you were talking about is taking responsibility. Ultimately, that's what it is.

Right?

It's personal responsibility and taking control into your own hands and not expecting, you know, these companies or the government or politics to come into the equation and make it their responsibility. And then the other thing that you mentioned there was relative to the actual social dynamic of being on those social platforms and expecting that you're going to get this different results out of it. Can you speak more to the power of the responsibility piece that you mentioned? Because I think that, I mean, that is a huge lesson that I've learned in the last few years is how much control that gives you. And I know that's kind of exactly what you like talking about. So if you can just kind of expound on that for a quick second.

Absolutely, yeah. And I want to be very clear. A lot of people think that responsibility is the same as blame, and it's not. Okay. These things are not your fault.

Yes.

Okay. You didn't invent delicious McDonald's hamburgers. You didn't invent Facebook. You didn't invent the iPhone. These things are not your fault, but they are your responsibility. Because the price of progress, the price of living in a world with so many good things in it. Right. Does anybody want to go back to a time before these technologies, I mean, life was never better. In terms of our standard of living than was made possible through these technologies. We don't want to go back in time. There was no mythical time where there was the good old days where everything was better. No, it never existed. And, of course, we have some new problems that have come with these technologies, with, you know, whether that's food technology that makes food more delicious and cheaper, or whether it's, you know, our devices. There are clearly problems that come with it. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean we're powerless. And so the message I want to spread is that while these things aren't your fault, they are your responsibility, and you are way more powerful than you think. You know, there's this scene. Do you ever see the movie Indiana Jones? It's a kind of an older film that you remember. Okay, so you know that part in Indiana Jones where Indiana Jones comes out into the bazaar, and there's this guy dressed in all black, and he has these two swords, and he starts, you know, doing this crazy knife routine and, like, throwing the knives in the air and does it, you know, very intimidating. And what does Indiana Jones do? He takes out his gun, shoots the guy. Right? And that's exactly what's going on. The tech companies, they have the fancy algorithms and the computer processors and then this and then that. Very scary. And all we have to do is. Is turn off the damn notifications. Right. Like, it's not that hard, people. I mean, that's the tip of the iceberg for one type of distraction. But it just goes to show you that we are way more powerful. There's nothing that Mark Zuckerberg can do if you change your notification settings. Right. So we can learn some very basic things that all of us can use and teach our children, teach our organizations, teach our colleagues, teach our spouse to make sure that we control these technologies as opposed to them controlling us.

Yes. Ultimately, you have the final say. Ultimately, you are in control. I love that. Can you talk a little bit near about, obviously, this is a builder network podcast. Talk a lot about relationships and how to go about cultivating connections properly. Can you talk a little bit about how we are technically the most connected society that we've ever. That we've ever. Has ever existed, but also at the same time, least connected in a way because of the distractions that we have and we're not fully engaged in conversation. How have you seen these types of things affect our interpersonal relationships?

Yeah. So one of the things I talk about in the book is about making time for traction, which is all about turning Your values into time. And so I talk about these three life domains of you, your relationships, and your work and how important it is to make time for those things. Because this is one of the central tenets of my philosophy around indistractable is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from. Let me say that again. You can't call something a distraction unless you know what you got distracted from. So if there's nothing on your schedule, you can't complain, okay? Because if you didn't plan your day, somebody's going to plan it for you. What did you get distracted from? You didn't know what you wanted to do with your time. And that includes connecting with others, that critical relationship domain. One of the reasons that we have this loneliness epidemic in this country, it didn't start with Facebook. This is an old problem. Robert Putnam wrote about this problem in the 1990s in his book Bowling Alone. And I think it's, if anything, the excessive use of social media is a symptom of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease itself, according to sociologists, is that we do not reserve time for the important relationships in our life. Right. That when you look at demographically in this country, it used to be that many more people were involved in civic groups. Right. The book was called Bowling Alone because people used to go to bowling leagues every Thursday and Kiwanis club on Fridays and church group on Sundays. The number of people who have social interaction on their calendars has gone down precipitously. This is why we have a loneliness epidemic in our country. This is why we turn to social media when we are missing the real world interaction. The good news is we can wake up and bring it back. Put the time on your calendar for the important relationships in your life. Okay. It is so absolutely critical. If you have a best friend, if you have family members who would like to hear from you, if you have siblings, if you have kids, book the time for them and keep that time sacred. And even if you're on quarantine, I think one of the silver linings of this terrible Corona crisis is that I don't know about in your household, but here in my household, my daughter has more interaction with her grandparents than ever before because she has zoom calls scheduled every week at the same time. And I really hope that's something that continues for people, this regular interaction with the important people in their life as opposed to giving the important people scraps of time that are left over in a day.

Exactly. Yeah. You're just tossing Them, the leftovers, instead of being on purpose with it. And that's everything that we talk about here on the show. Near is basically being more purposeful about the relationships that you're building in your, in your personal life, but also the professional relationships and business connections and things like that. So in an effort to kind of steer the conversation along that path, I'm curious to hear your response to this question. Who you know or what you know, which of those two would you view as being more important and why?

Oh, that's like nature or nurture. That's a tough one.

And to be clear, and I tell people this is like the staple question of the show. Everybody answers this question. So I know it's, I know it's always going to be a little yin and yang there, but if you had to emphasize one of them, which, which.

One would you pick? Oh, I mean, I think we need different things from different areas of our life. You know, when I think when it comes to professional advancement, I think knowing what you want and having a base of information, of wisdom, I would say is very, very important. But not everybody in business needs to have a outcome or a goal for those relationships because many times these, these relationships, you don't know where they're going to end up. So it's, it's great to, I think where you can use what you know is that it can advance who you know. So the more you know, the more you become a person who has wisdom to share, the more people you would want to know, want to talk to you. Right? So, like, people reach out to me now because I know a lot about this one topic and they want to learn more. And so now I get to meet really interesting people who I'm sure will be friends or do business with or whatever. And so I think, you know, what you know can be a vehicle for meeting people you would want to know.

Love it, man. Yeah, no, that, that's, that's, that's a great answer. That's a great answer. You figured out a way to make it both, which I, which I really appreciate to kind of emphasize the importance of maybe some of the relationships you've been able to build over the course of your career. If you're looking back, like blimp view, right? 30,000 foot, zoomed out view of your, of your career up to this point. Are there any relationships or connections maybe that stick out to you like the one you're talking about with your professor, where, you know, maybe at first you didn't really think much of it, but it ended up turning into something that was huge later on down the road.

You know, the first that comes to mind is my wife. You know, we met the first week of school, freshman year, and I mean, I thought she was very cute and I wanted to know her better, but of course, I wouldn't have imagined that she would be my life partner and my business partner. And we're so different. We're so different, right? She's, you know, we come from different cultural backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, different geographic backgrounds, and yet we have so much in common. And she's really been the rock of my life. And I'm so fortunate to have met her, especially when, like, now looking back, to think, oh, my God, we met when we were 18 and 19 years old. That's crazy, right? Like, my daughter's 12. There's no way I can imagine her meeting a future spouse in just seven years, six or seven years from now. That's crazy. But, you know, sometimes, sometimes you, you run into the right people and they change your life forever.

Yeah, no kidding. Such a great story there. I want to just ask you a quick question before we move into the last segment here near. I want to be respectful of your time. Talk to me about your investment portfolio. I know that you have an impressive list of investments, a lot of different companies that you have invested in that have obviously worked out pretty well and paid some pretty good dividends for you. So I'm curious to hear what you look for when you're examining potential investments. And I know this is kind of a one off, out of the blue question, but I wanted to make sure that we got this taken care of before we move into the last segment here.

Yeah, so I make time for people who have read my books on my calendar every week. It's one of the techniques that I talk about in indistractable is about making office hours. So if, you know, I get a lot of calls from people who have read one of my books and said, hey, I really want to talk to you about this thing in your book, or I want to pitch you my business, or I need some advice. And as much as I would love to meet with everybody, I just can't. I wouldn't have time for anything else. And so what I did was make these office hours. And I say, look, every week I will speak to whoever wants to talk to me. You can book time right on my calendar. It's totally free in 15 minute increments, four sessions in one hour. And you know, if someone needs to talk to me urgently if it's a business that needs a consulting question, okay, they can pay for that and they can kind of skip the line or it's totally free. If you, if you book the time there, you can book time with me and anybody can talk to me at no cost and ask whatever question they like. And so I do about 200 calls a year, right? For a week. I do about, you know, 200 of these calls a year. And that's my deal flow. Not intentionally, but you know, about two or three companies a year. So a little over 1% of the people I talk to have really great ideas. And I say, wow, this is really cool, you know, are you looking to raise some money? And that's how I've invested in the companies I have so far, which is an education company that just went public a few months ago. They're now valued at over a billion dollars. That's how it happened, right? Johan called me, the founder called me five years ago and said, we read your book, we used your hook model. Here's our company. We have a couple questions. And by the end of the call, I said, this is amazing. How can I participate? And so that's really where I find these businesses and my investment thesis. I don't invest in things I don't understand. So I don't know much about crypto. I don't know much about pharmaceuticals. Those just aren't my industries. What I understand is habit forming products. I understand how to build products that are designed for user engagement. So I invest in companies that use my hook model.

Love it, man. Kind of a selfish question there for me, but I'm glad I asked it. Let's go ahead and move into the last segment here. Something that's called the random round. Just quick, random questions, quick, random answers.

Ready? Okay, I'm scared. Let's do it.

What profession other than your own do you think that'd be fun to attempt?

Pilot. I always wanted to be an Air Force pilot, but I got glasses and couldn't do it.

If you could sit on a park bench with someone past or present and chat for an hour, who would it be?

Richard Feynman.

How do you like to consume content? Books, audiobooks, blogs, podcasts or videos?

I like to. So this is another hack in my book. I have a rule. I never read articles on the web. I save them to an app called Pocket, and then I have another app called Voice Dream that reads the articles to me. So I have a rule. I never read articles on the web. I only listen to articles while I'M exercising, so when I'm in the gym or running, I'll listen to these articles. So I use this app called Voice Dream to read the articles to me.

Give us a glimpse of your morning routine.

Oh, my morning routine is very similar. Every single day I get up at 7, I have breakfast with my family from 7 to 8. From 8 to 10 I check email. From 10 to noon I write, I have my writing time. Then I eat lunch typically with my family. And then in the afternoons I have meetings, consulting engagements, filming, things like that. And then one day a week on Wednesdays, I have time in the afternoon with my daughter. And that's pretty much my days.

What is your go to Pump Up Song?

I have the Tiger.

Yeah, that's a good one. That's a timeless one. What is something that you are just not very good at?

Oh my God, where do I start? I am still not very coordinated or athletic and I never have been because I think I never got started as a kid. So like, you know, I can lift weights, but that doesn't actually require much skill. It just requires.

Fair point. And I can run, but, you know, nothing that actually requires like hitting a ball or making a basket or anything like that. I'm very, very bad at that stuff.

And as we get everything wrapped up here, Nir, what is one place online where our listeners can go to connect with you the most?

Sure. So my blog is called near and far.com near is spelled like my first name, so that's n I r and far.com and my latest book is called how to Control youl Attention and choose youe Life. And it's available wherever books are sold.

Nearandfar.com that's near as in his first name, N I R and far.com head over there to learn more about Nir. Find out some of the things that he's putting out there. Also, please go pick up a copy of his book Indistractable. If you're familiar with the Netflix documentary that's trending right now called Social Dilemma, this will be one of those books that will help pull you out of that matrix and set you on a path to controlling your own destiny again. So that's indistractable. Go pick up a copy of it before you forget. Nir, thank you so much for coming on the show. I had a blast. Chatting with you is a lot of fun.

My pleasure. Thank you so much.