Hooked Author: The Real Reason You Can’t Put Your Phone Down | Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal

Dara, do you know the first rule of drug dealing?

Dara Ladjevardian

I do not. And I'm curious why certain products stick while others, even ones that people love, like Clubhouse, don't stick.

Nir Eyal

All products, whether it's this water, whether it's AI, whether it's the cotton gin, what they're fundamentally doing is changing a feeling.

Dara Ladjevardian

How would you advise maybe someone who is addicted to gambling or addicted to smoking pot or addicted to technology?

Nir Eyal

We love thinking. It's Zuckerberg. It's not my fault, it's them. But let's think about this for a second. Let's back up.

Dara Ladjevardian

There's a big push around staying away from your phones, like being in the real world.

Nir Eyal

Why is social media so much worse than watching golf on TV?

Dara Ladjevardian

All right, everyone, super excited to have Nir Eyal here. He's the author of Hooked, Indistractable, Beyond Beliefs, where he's written about how to make habit-forming products, how to save your attention from such habit-forming products, and how beliefs can drive the behaviors that you have every single day. It's so amazing to talk to you here in my home city of Houston, Texas.

Nir Eyal

My pleasure. Honored to be here. Thank you.

Dara Ladjevardian

So your book Hooked actually has had a big role in how I think about product. It's about how products can become habits. And I'm curious why, in your own words, why certain products stick while others, even ones that people love, like Clubhouse, don't stick.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, yeah. So, I used the tool for 2 reasons. So the Hooked Model, we can talk about what the Hooked Model is, but essentially where it's helpful is in the very early stages of a business. So in the napkin sketch idea, when you say, I think I have an idea for a product, it needs to be habit-forming. Not that every product needs to be habit-forming, it's that every product that needs a habit needs a hook.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yep.

Nir Eyal

So the idea is that you take it out in the beginning stage before you put a lot of the money into engineering and design and, you know, all the company infrastructure, If the business model needs a habit, does it have a hook? And so you can answer that question in 5— that inquiry with just 5 questions, which we can talk about. Or as a diagnostic device, if you have a product that's up and running, and it isn't bringing people back, then you can use it as a tool to figure out why. So one of the things that— I started 2 companies, and one of the things that was always super challenging was we had a wall of different requests, right? A wall of different things we'd like to do, but prioritizing was always the hard part, right? That's always the challenging part. There's so much you could do, and who do you listen to? Do you listen to your customers? Do you listen to the VCs? That's always a bad idea. Do you listen to, you know, the team? Do you listen to, like, your loudest customer? Which customer? It's so difficult to understand what to prioritize. So I wanted to create a tool that we could look at together and say, ah, okay, I see what's going on. The investment phase is weak, or the variable reward isn't good, or we haven't picked the right internal trigger. By asking these questions, you can figure out why isn't the product engaging enough.

Dara Ladjevardian

And what kind of businesses need a habit? You said if the business needs a habit.

Nir Eyal

Right. So this is not magic pixie dust that poof, every business becomes super successful. And by the way, a great product doesn't necessarily mean a great business. So the first-order question is what makes for a great product? And I like to use this framework called the GEM framework, which I think Reid Hoffman developed, which is every business needs to be a GEM. So growth, engagement, and monetization. Right, so growth is how do you profitably acquire customers?

Dara Ladjevardian

Right.

Nir Eyal

Engagement is how do you keep them coming back? And then monetization is how do you sustain that by having a cost of acquisition that is less than the customer lifetime value? So what I specialize in is just engagement, which I actually think is the most important piece, because you can always buy growth.

Dara Ladjevardian

The score can take care of itself once you get engagement.

Nir Eyal

Right, exactly, exactly. And that's what you should raise money for. The reason you should go get venture capital is you say, look, we've got engagement, we have a plan for monetization, we need growth. Well, you can always go to Zuckerberg and give him a bunch of money, and he's gonna drive Facebook ads, or you can buy billboards, or you can throw parties, or whatever. You can always buy growth.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

You cannot buy engagement. You cannot buy engagement. Engagement must be designed into the product, or you can't keep people coming back. And so what I've seen in my career now for over 20 years, is companies that raise a bunch of money over investment excitement, and they end up being what's called a leaky bucket, where, you know, they have some initial traction, a few people are using their product, and, oh my God, this could be so huge. So they pour a bunch of money into growth before they've really nailed that customer habit, and we have what's called a leaky bucket. Yeah. Right? Lots of customers come in, and a lot of them leak out. And so I think the first step of those 3— growth, engagement, monetization— should be, can you keep your customers? Now, you asked what type of businesses need habits.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

There's lots of business models that don't require habits, right? So if you, for example, if you sell car insurance, okay, you don't use car insurance unless something awful happened, right? If you got in an accident, God forbid, then you need to go call your insurance company. But it's not a habit. You buy it and you kind of forgive it, forget it. It's a sales-driven process versus a product-led Sure. So, the products that need people to come back, and the cutoff, from what I've seen in my career, is a week's time or less. Larry Page calls it the toothbrush test, that he said he doesn't wanna work on any product that isn't used with the frequency of a toothbrush, so twice a day, that's kinda the minimum bar. I've seen it's not quite that frequent, that you can still build a habit where it's at least once a week. So if the behavior you want the user to do doesn't occur within a week's time or less, very difficult to change a consumer habit. There are some exceptions, but they don't make the rule. It needs to be a product whose business model needs the customer to come back at least once a week, or they forget you exist. So it used to be my focus, and a lot of what I write about is more consumer web products, because that's what people know and understand, so I can talk about them. But the same rules apply for the enterprise, right?

Dara Ladjevardian

If you're not the only company using it.

Nir Eyal

Exactly, if you don't use the product, you're eventually gonna churn out and stop Paying for it.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So it's not necessarily that the line of demarcation is enterprise or consumer web. The line is frequent or infrequent. If the product is not used frequently, I actually wouldn't suggest building a habit at all.

Dara Ladjevardian

You've probably seen enough people implement the Hooked framework that I'm curious if you've seen a difference in success between the people who plan out the Hooked model before building and plan out while building, as like the leaky bucket. Yeah. Filling in the holes.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, well, I've seen both work. It does give you, I think, a better filter, you know, because what tends to happen is we prematurely optimize. We have an idea, we think it's great, and so we start putting in place all the systems to make that experience more efficient, and that leads us to a local maximum, even when there might be a much bigger opportunity somewhere else.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So I think it's much better as early as possible to look at the idea through the hook model so that you have a good sense of all the possible ways you can solve the customer's problem. Because look, at the end of the day, what do products do? What are products for? All products, whether it's this water, whether it's AI, whether it's the cotton gin, it doesn't matter. All products, what they're fundamentally doing is changing a feeling. That's not something we think about. We think about all the functional needs, and, oh, the product needs to do this and that and the other, and we think about the technical requirements. But it's an emotion. At the end of the day, exactly. It's changing an emotional state. It's manipulating a feeling that the user seeks to get out of. I mean, that's the seed of all human motivation. So if you want to change consumer behavior, enterprise, consumer web, doesn't matter, you have to focus on what's called that internal trigger. The internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape. I'm thirsty, then I need water, right? Whether it's I need to do some kind of task, what am I going to turn to? Figuring out the emotional need first and foremost, when you start with that internal trigger, that's the first step of the hook model, then you open your aperture, right? You don't bind yourself into, oh, I have this solution, now let me go find a problem. That's what most entrepreneurs do. There's some cool technology—

Dara Ladjevardian

They're searching for the nail, a lot of that in the AI era.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, today it's AI, last week it was crypto, the week before that it was social media. It's constantly changing, but people look for, okay, here's the new tech, how do I find the problem that that tech could address? And sometimes you get lucky. I think a much better place to start is, what's that need I'm looking for? And then out of the universe of different technology, how can I pick and choose what will solve the consumer's problem better?

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah. Does the Hooked model in your mind change at all when you compare single-player consumer tools to destinations? like Product Hunt, Twitter, where it's really about the network. So I'm curious, like, how the hook model evolves when you're trying to build a new destination versus just a tool.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, so maybe it's a good point to kind of walk through what the hook model is. So the hook model has 4 steps. We have a trigger, an action, a reward, and an investment. And it's through successive cycles through these hooks that customer preferences are shaped, that our tastes are formed, and that our habits take hold. So the first step, is the trigger, and there are 2 kinds of triggers. The most recognizable is what's called an external trigger. An external trigger is anything in our outside environment that tells us what to do next. A ping, a ding, a ring, anything with some kind of information that says, here's what you should do next. That's an external trigger. Sure. We'll talk about the internal triggers in a second.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

The next step is the action phase. The simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. And I mean simple, simple, simple, simple. So scrolling a feed, opening a dashboard, hitting a play button, getting to a chat interface, the simplest thing done in anticipation of a reward. And that is a huge— we can talk about where technological advancement comes from, but that's really where you have the most leverage, is figuring out how do you shorten that distance between the recognition of the need and the payoff. Yeah. And the satisfaction of that need. Then comes the variable reward. The variable reward is kind of the engine of the hook model. And for a habit-forming product, it's not good enough just to give people what they want. You have to have an element of variability. Why? This comes from the work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner was a psychologist back in the 1950s and '40s, and he did these famous experiments where he took pigeons and he put them in a little box. Today we call it a Skinner box. And he gave these pigeons a little disc to peck at. And every time they pecked at the disc, they would receive a reward, a little food pellet. So very quickly, Skinner could train his pigeons. This is called operant conditioning. If the pigeon was hungry, okay, peck at the disc, get a reward. Great. This is how we train our pets, our children, our husbands, right? Right. This is how we train behavior, operant conditioning. Then one day Skinner walks into his lab and he checks his pockets and he doesn't have enough of these food pellets. He's run out of these food pellets. So what does he do? He doesn't give the pigeon a reward every time. He only can afford to give the pellet once in a while. So sometimes the pigeons peck at the disc, nothing happens, nothing comes out. The next time the pigeon does receive the reward, and what Skinner observes is that the rate of response, the number of times a pigeon pecked at the disc increases when the reward is given on a variable schedule of reinforcement. Interesting. So that is why we see all sorts of products that are habit-forming, from social media to AI chat responses to video games to sports. It's what draws us to the news. The first 3 letters of news, N-E-W, it's what's new. Nobody wants yesterday's news. They want to know what they don't know today. It's variability. Yeah. Why do we obsess about sports? We are crazy about sports because there's uncertainty about where this stupid ball is going to go, on a pitch or a net. Who cares? It's just a ball. There's uncertainty about it. It engages us because we don't know what's going to happen. The stock market, day trading is a wonderful way to lose money. Crypto trading, we don't know where it's going to go, and we love trying to bring control to something that is uncontrollable. So that element of variability and surprise is at the core of the Hooked model. And to answer your question, there are 3 kinds of variable rewards. Rewards of the tribe, so for example, a platform like Product Hunt or X or any kind of social media platform, tribe. We have hunt, which is about the search for information or material rewards. And then rewards of the self, which is about mastery, completion, and competency. So there's 3 kinds of variable rewards. We can get into more depth if you like, but just to finish the 4 steps. The last step is the investment phase. The investment phase is the most important phase of the Hooked model in the age of AI. So when I wrote Hooked back in 2014, I predicted that this would happen, that I didn't call it, you know, chat, I called it conversational UI.

Dara Ladjevardian

Sure.

Nir Eyal

So I could see that in the future, as computational power would increase, the most logical interface that would encapsulate the Hooked model would be some kind of chat interface. I couldn't do it back then. I was investing in companies that, that failed because they didn't have the technology.

Dara Ladjevardian

The chatbot era, yeah. That was quite the time.

Nir Eyal

If you're early, you're still wrong.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, I've learned that.

Nir Eyal

But this is the most important phase today, I think. It's the most neglected because most people think, when I build a product, build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. So just give people what they want. It's not good enough. Habit-forming products do something very special. Unlike this chair, my clothing, your car, These things depreciate. They lose value with wear and tear. Habit-forming products, because of this investment phase, need to appreciate. They need to get better and better the more you use them.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So some of the best examples that we saw when I first wrote Hooked was social media, right? Because of the social media legendary algorithm. Yeah, network effects. This was a new concept when I wrote about it in 2014. Now everybody knows about it.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

Is that it gets better and better, not just because of the network effects, but because the algorithm learns from you. And then we'll serve you content based on your interests. Well, now the AI companies are all doing this in spades, and it's wonderful. It's amazing. Yeah, it's great. It makes the product— the more you use it, the more there's lock-in to use that product because it knows all about you because of the data you've given it.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So the investment phase is the most important. And I think this is where there's the most opportunity for startups today is to look at how you can revolutionize industries by using that investment phase so that just to finish the hook, Through successive cycles, trigger, action, reward, investment, the way you know you actually have a customer habit is that you don't need the external triggers. You don't need the spammy messages. You don't need the notifications, because the customer is triggering themselves from an internal trigger. Yeah. So if the customer constantly needs to be reminded to use the product, you do not have a habit. It's only when the product is associated with boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, and emotion, That you become the first solution for, the first-to-mind solution, now you've built a habit.

Dara Ladjevardian

Sure. Enjoying the conversation and got a question? You can ask Nir's Digital Mind. Just check the link in the comments or description. Yeah, I mean, I feel like now because everyone has access to AI agents, very few people are even checking their emails anymore. So are there any other parts of the Hooked model that are evolving with AI? Like, I imagine external triggers becomes a lot harder because I don't know about you, but I get 50 emails a day from people using AI tools. It's like, Dara, founder of Delphi, you're from Houston, Texas. We should hang. I'm like, no, I'm not doing that.

Nir Eyal

Yeah. Yeah. So I think the investment phase is where I see the most opportunity. Now it's kind of in this infantile stage where we're just taking publicly available information about people and making it look like it's something that's personalized. I think what we're going to see in a few years is that every product is going to personalize the experience for every customer. So it's almost like what we saw during the Industrial Revolution when Henry Ford famously said, you can have any color of Model T as long as it's black. Right? It was kind of a joke, right? That you could have any color Model T as long as it's black, because that's all he made. He only made black cars because it was really hard back then to make cars of different color. Yeah. Well, today we've got cars in all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors because we've been able to mass customize. That's going— there's a next level that's coming. Because I think what will happen in the future is that if you don't customize your product experience, when it comes to digital products, for your customer, right? The rudimentary version is going to be customizing your website, but that's on the way out. It's going to be that there needs to be some kind of customized experience that feels more like a friend, that feels more like a conversation, tailored to what the customer actually wants when they want it. And so every customer will expect to have almost private service. If you don't do that, for a while we were concerned, oh, consumers are— they don't want to share private information. It's just so compelling that I can't see a future where people will not provide that information. In fact, if you don't use that information, they'll think your company sucks. They'll think your service is terrible because it's not customized.

Dara Ladjevardian

We've seen that. The expectation of what people expect has just gotten so high.

Nir Eyal

How so? Have you seen it?

Dara Ladjevardian

Immediately, if someone signs up for your product and you can't immediately find everything about them online, Like deep research them, they're like, but this is like a 2020 company.

Nir Eyal

Right.

Dara Ladjevardian

So they expect to land and for things to just work.

Nir Eyal

Right.

Dara Ladjevardian

No effort needed.

Nir Eyal

Right, exactly. That's what they're going to expect. And now we can do it. We can actually deliver it. And if you don't do it, your competition is going to do it.

Dara Ladjevardian

Definitely. So habit-forming products make sense because if you want to build a business, a lot of, I guess, pre-AI businesses were built on attention farming. You know, you get more users, you can run ads, you can run all these things. I'm curious if you think, is there another way? And is there a new kind of business model where maybe habit-forming is no longer the North Star? Mm-hmm. There's a big push around staying away from your phones, like being in the real world. I'm curious how you think about what the next evolution of software products might look like, given that there's definitely a push against addiction and staying on your phones and maybe building software that maybe promotes your goals and your well-being?

Nir Eyal

Yeah, well, I think in Hooked, back in 2014 when that was published, I had what was called the manipulation matrix, 'cause I saw where this was going. And I advised startup entrepreneurs to use the book and to use these methodologies responsibly. And the guide I gave people, which I still give people today, it hasn't changed, is this 2-part test that just because you can use behavioral design doesn't mean you always should, right? First of all, you know, let's just set the stage properly. The problem that most companies have is not that people are getting addicted to their products, right? Should you be so lucky, you know how hard it is to get people to use your freaking product. Yeah, yeah. You know, let's talk if your product is addicting people, okay? That's almost nobody's problem. The video game companies, the gambling companies, I think actually that we should focus much more attention not so much on how we waste time, but how we waste money. I mean, what really gets my goat is that we freak out about social media as being such a time waster. I don't understand why is social media so much worse than watching golf on TV? Wouldn't you rather interact with people in some way, or at least let's call them neutral? than, you know, staring at the boob tube watching some game on TV? What's the difference? But we love to pass these moral judgments. We're talking about for adults. There's a whole other conversation about kids. But we kind of see video games and social media, that's wrong. But staring at the boob tube, that's old. That's a hot take.

Dara Ladjevardian

I like it.

Nir Eyal

Right? Whereas I think what's much more scary and why I've never worked with these companies, there's certain industries I will not touch. I think what we've done in this country with legalized gambling, is a disaster, and nobody talks about it, right? Where are the films? Where's the outrage about all the money that is being thrown down the drain because of legalized gambling?

Dara Ladjevardian

Sure.

Nir Eyal

I mean, and it has real consequences, right? If you wasted your time on watching too many, you know, TikTok videos, okay, you probably would've wasted your time, you know, watching sports on TV or something, or soap operas in the day, right? Like, if you just took away social media, people wouldn't start reading Chaucer and Shakespeare in their spare time. They probably would have wasted time some other way.

Dara Ladjevardian

Sure.

Nir Eyal

But money you can't get back.

Dara Ladjevardian

Cannot get back.

Nir Eyal

Right? You are not— you are being put into debt, and that is going to have a severe impact on your entire life because you can't get that money back. And we just legalized gambling without anybody looking. I think also pot, you know, we legalized cannabis, and I was for it, and I was wrong. I did not understand You know, the amount of people who are actually addicted to social media, it's single-digit percentages. When you look at the actual definition of addiction, a compulsive dependency that harms the behavior, that harms the user, that's single-digit percentages when it comes to media. Cannabis, did you know 15% of people who smoke cannabis have a cannabis use disorder?

Dara Ladjevardian

No.

Nir Eyal

15%! That's huge. People's lives are being ruined. And maybe we should legalize it, but the way we've legalized it is completely stupid.

Dara Ladjevardian

All the news is on the lawsuits against Meta on—

Nir Eyal

Exactly.

Dara Ladjevardian

Making people addicted, specifically kids, which I guess is a bit different.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, kids I think is a separate category. We can talk about that. But talk about like where we should turn our public attention. And the reason we don't do that is because the governments are making tons of money on cannabis and gambling. They're not making any money on social media. So they want their pound of flesh. That's a much more pertinent, I think, public health issue. But to answer your question, sorry, I got a little derailed there. No, it was great. I love that. Do you really addict people? Very few companies, at least startups, are actually addicting people versus, if you're lucky, you've built a habit. And I think starting from that business model is the place to go. And then if you want the ethical test, the ethical test I've always given people is 2 parts. So one is, does this materially improve people's lives? Can you look in the mirror and say to yourself, yes, what I'm working on materially improves people's lives? That's the first question. Sure. Most people stop there. I think there's another question that's even more important, which is I want you to ask a question that gets you to break the first rule of drug dealing. Dara, do you know the first rule of drug dealing?

Dara Ladjevardian

I do not.

Nir Eyal

You don't know the first rule of drug dealing? No, tell me. That's probably a good thing. The first rule of drug dealing is never get high on your own supply.

Speaker C

Okay.

Nir Eyal

Okay, never get high on your own supply. So the second question is, am I the user? Okay, so there's a 2-part test if you want to use this stuff ethically. Does it materially improve people's lives, and am I the user? If you can answer in the affirmative to those 2 questions, you're what I call a facilitator. You can use this stuff, go for it. Now, might there be negative consequences to your products? Of course, but I don't think that when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his dorm room, he was thinking about all the implications, you know, decades later.

Dara Ladjevardian

And that's what I think is the— right now there's a new wave of consumer founders. Like, everyone wants to be a consumer founder, and And the kind of North Star is, oh, let's just get as much engagement as possible because then we can run ads. So we need to make this as engaging as possible. Yeah. And we've had to face the same question. I don't want to build an addicting product. I use Delphi. I think it's like net positive. But like ultimately, consumer, the business model, you get more money the more people use your product. So there's definitely people trying to recreate what Mark did, but doing it in a way that he definitely did not do it. Does that make sense?

Nir Eyal

In a negative way?

Dara Ladjevardian

In like, they know how Mark achieved success, where you were saying Mark did not think he was trying to get people addicted, where people are now trying to get people addicted because they know that's the cleanest path to a consumer business model.

Nir Eyal

For a consumer product. I don't necessarily think it's the only path. I think what we're seeing is that if you provide real value, that's fantastic. I mean, I'm thinking about In the second edition of the book, in the first edition, I didn't have companies that were built with the hook model in mind. With the second edition, I had lots of examples. Yeah, yeah. And one of them, I wrote an article years and years ago that was titled, Your Fitness App Is Making You Fat, because I was so frustrated back in the day with all these workout and exercise apps that were all awful. They were terrible. I think they were actively harmful. And so somebody, one of my buddies, sent me an app and said, hey, you know, I read your article, but have you seen FitBot? I said, no, I haven't seen it. I installed it, and I looked at it, and I was like, holy crap, they've done it. This is the Hook Model in an app. And I went to the settings, and they had a little email there, you know, for customer support, and I emailed them, and I said, hey, just curious, have you by chance read my book? And within 30 seconds, the CEO writes me back and says, yes, we designed the product with the Hook Model in mind.

Dara Ladjevardian

Oh, that's amazing.

Nir Eyal

And they're killing it. Like today, I can't go to the gym. I credit them with getting me back in shape because I can't go to the gym today without using FitBot.

Dara Ladjevardian

So this is all FitBot?

Nir Eyal

This is all FitBot. Thank you, FitBot. I wish I was an investor. I couldn't invest because of ethical reasons, but they're doing great, right? They've managed to hook people onto— now it's not— there's a lot of interesting things they did. One of the things they did that was so smart, and I think this is a very wise insight, They didn't try and get unfit people to be fit, okay? Because that's not gonna be a habit.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

Right? That's not gonna be a habit.

Dara Ladjevardian

No.

Nir Eyal

It's very, very— what's the definition of a habit? A habit is a behavior that is done with little or no conscious thought, okay? So getting people who don't exercise to go to the gym consistently— A lot of energy.

Dara Ladjevardian

A lot of energy. A lot of activation energy, yeah.

Nir Eyal

What they focused on is on the person who's already going to the gym, who doesn't wanna pay for an expensive personal trainer, But when they get to the gym, they don't know what to do. That's the habit. So what was the internal trigger?

Dara Ladjevardian

The energy's already there.

Nir Eyal

The hard part's over. Exactly, they're already in the gym. The internal trigger was uncertainty. It wasn't, I need to get fit. It was uncertainty. What am I supposed to do right now? That's the internal trigger. The action is to open the app. The variable reward is, what is the app gonna tell me to do? And the investment is every time I do a set, I'm logging my weight, reps, et cetera, in the app so that the next time I use the product, it already preloads a workout based on my last workout. So if today I did arms, the next day it's gonna say, okay, now do back, or whatever.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, very similar. The kind of users we're going after are people who already read books, they already listen to podcasts, they're already looking for advice in some way. We're not going after the people who like— Everybody. Video games, and they don't care about learning or advice or anything.

Nir Eyal

Probably the most common mistake I see. If you try and please everyone, then you satisfy no one.

Dara Ladjevardian

For sure. I think your point on gambling and weed is a good segue to your next book, Indistractable. You talk a lot about agency. I actually really like your kind of contrarian take that it's not the algorithm. Like, you have agency over the algorithm. And how would you advise maybe someone who is addicted to gambling or addicted to smoking pot, or addicted to technology, which isn't as a problem as others, to reclaim agency so that, you know, their power is in their hands.

Nir Eyal

Yeah. So it's important to separate an addiction. So an addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user. Sure. And that's 1 to 5% of the population. So not every product that is addictive addicts everyone.

Dara Ladjevardian

Sure.

Nir Eyal

A lot of us have a glass of wine with dinner. We're not all alcoholics. We enjoy sex. We're not sex addicts, right? So it's ridiculous to think that, oh my God, everyone is getting addicted to social media. It's kind of a cop-out, frankly. Yeah. Because even the word addiction comes from the Latin addictio, which means slave. Yeah. We love thinking it's Zuckerberg, right? We love thinking it's Facebook.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, it's the classic victim mindset.

Nir Eyal

Oh my God, it's so convenient, right? It's the best. It's not my fault. It's them. Yeah. But let's think about this for a second. Let's back up. Do we seriously think that our biggest complaint right now is that the products and services that we use are too good. What exactly do you want? Netflix and Facebook and Apple and what are— hey Netflix, your shows, they're too good. Stop making them interesting. YouTube, stop serving me good content that I enjoy. It's stupid, it's ridiculous.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, when you don't go to the gym, you feel bad, you blame Netflix.

Nir Eyal

Exactly, exactly. It's the easiest thing in the world. And people have always been doing this, right? We know that all the way back to Socrates and Plato, people were talking about how distracted people are these days. This is nothing new. And I remember saying, like when The Social Dilemma movie came out, Terrible film. When it came out, I remember telling people, just wait, just wait, this is going to fade over. And now the exact same people who were Chicken Little calling the skies falling about social media, same exact people are saying it about AI. Mm-hmm. This always happens. Like literally every new technology we freak out about. Not that it doesn't have harms, right? For sure. Paul Virilio, the philosopher, said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Of course, technology is going to have new problems. People fundamentally misunderstand what technology does. Technology does not solve problems, okay? Technology does not solve problems. That is too big of an ask. Technology gives us better problems. That's the role of technology.

Dara Ladjevardian

I mean, he's just fire.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, it gives us better problems for us to solve. So, you know, a few generations ago, I remember when I grew up, my parents would tell me, you have to eat all your food because there are children starving in China, right? That sounds ridiculous today. Like, children in China are doing great. Same, same. Right? Why? Because this technology has gone from what we used to have for 200,000 years of human history. There was never a time without mass starvation somewhere on the planet. This is the first generation in history where there isn't starvation that is caused by true scarcity. Today there is hunger, but it's caused because of political reasons. Human conflicts, yeah. Yeah, conflicts. It's not caused because of scarcity. First time in human history. But now the cost of all that abundance is we have obesity, we have heart disease, we have smoking, we have all these problems of excess. of affluence. So technology doesn't solve problems, it gives us better problems. So the price of progress, the price of living in an age where you have all the information at your fingertips is that, yeah, it's pretty entertaining, right? Can you imagine if our great-grandparents were listening to us? Like, really? This is your big problem?

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, get slapped in the face.

Nir Eyal

Right, exactly. So I think that's a good perspective to back up and understand how fortunate we are to even have this problem in our set. Now I think kids is a whole nother debate. We can talk about regulations for kids. But I think for the average person, if you're not actually pathologically addicted, which 1 to 5% of the population is, so 95% chance that's not you.

Dara Ladjevardian

Which is defined by actually getting harmed.

Nir Eyal

Right, right. It's persistent, it's compulsive, and it has to harm you. So if you like to watch YouTube videos a lot, But you can take a break and have dinner with your family and have a conversation, like, you're probably not actually addicted. You're just distracted.

Dara Ladjevardian

If using TikTok before bed hurts my sleep quality, does that make me an addict?

Nir Eyal

Okay, well, let's do a test. Let's do a test. If I asked you, if I said, hey, uh, for the next week, uh, for every night that you don't check TikTok before bed, right, for every night that you put your phone outside the room and charge it, Outside the bedroom, I'm gonna give you $500. What do you do?

Dara Ladjevardian

Take the $500, 100%.

Nir Eyal

Okay, so we've settled on the fact you can.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

You're not addicted.

Dara Ladjevardian

Not addicted, okay.

Nir Eyal

Okay, we've settled on the fact you can. Now we're negotiating the price. Sure. Okay, would you take $400? Would you take $200? Would you take $300? I'd take $200. Right, so now we're just negotiating on the price, and now it's a matter of how much you want it, right? So this is the thing we need to get our heads out of our ass and realize we can do this. The problem is we don't want to do it. That's the thing. So I'm not talking to those people. If you want to blame the tech companies all day long and that makes you feel good, go for it. Waste your life away. Because as you're complaining about the tech companies, this is what you're doing.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yep.

Nir Eyal

Versus what I'm saying is there's nothing wrong with this stuff. Again, asterisk, kids are a different question. We can talk about that. consenting adults, none of this stuff is bad for you if you use it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's, certainly not the tech companies. Sure. Right? 'Cause all media, what kills me is, you know, you'll see these stories on CNN or the New York Times or Fox News or Netflix complaining about big bad social media. Meanwhile, what the frick do you think the business model of all media is? Yeah. All media monetizes your eyeballs. It's the same. It's the same business. I mean, the irony of irony, right, that Netflix, is telling me to stop my social media habit. I mean, come on! It's the same psychological manipulation. And it's fine. For yourselves. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. It's up to us as consumers to realize, like, does anybody not know that the New York Times doesn't have your best interests at heart? Like, is anybody still questioning that they're gonna give you what really happened today? Right, is that, really? You think they're gonna tell you about all the flights that landed safely, about all the people who were pulled out of poverty today? No, they're gonna tell you the sensational stuff, the stuff that's gonna get you angry, They're gonna keep you reading, and they're never gonna tell you to stop. The New York Times, right? I'm not talking about Facebook. Same thing, and people say, oh, but Facebook has algorithms. Do you think the New York Times doesn't have algorithms?

Dara Ladjevardian

They got algorithms.

Nir Eyal

Of course they do. They're watching every day how much you're reading, and they're gonna feed you more and more and more to keep you coming back.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, yeah. So it seems like the solution to kind of reclaiming your agency over this is, based on what you said, recognizing that it's not bad, discipline, and intentionality behind how you use it.

Nir Eyal

I would asterisk the word discipline in that discipline works over the short term. It doesn't work over the long term. So rather than discipline, you need a system, okay?

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, let's put it in practice. Let's say I don't, I know that anytime I scroll Twitter, use TikTok, I end up like more exhausted, more anxious. I wanna stop.

Nir Eyal

Right.

Dara Ladjevardian

So.

Nir Eyal

What do you do?

Dara Ladjevardian

What's the plan?

Nir Eyal

Okay, so step 1 is master internal triggers. Now remember how we said how all products are about manipulating your emotions? Yeah. That's, you wanna go from a state of uncertainty, fear, boredom, loneliness into some state that doesn't feel that. So recognizing that fact that all products do that, Yeah. we have to recognize, what am I trying to escape? Okay, what's that feeling that I'm not really good at dealing with other than using my device? And this is not easy sometimes, because frankly, you know, if you sit down with your kid, and you can't take out your phone, you can't help but take out your phone every 30 seconds, it's not the phone. This is autobiographical. This is why I wrote the book, because I was doing that. I was with my daughter one day, and I found myself constantly checking my phone as opposed to being fully present with her, and I hated that.

Dara Ladjevardian

I hate it.

Nir Eyal

I have to tell you, at first I thought it was the device. That's what the conventional advice tells you, that just get rid of your phone, get rid of internet connection. That's what I did. I actually went and I bought myself a word processor from the 1990s. And I got myself a flip phone with no internet connection. And I still got distracted, right? I would still sit down at my desk and say, oh, you know what, I've been meaning to do some research in that book, or let me take out the trash, let me clean up my desk.

Dara Ladjevardian

So avoidance is a Band-Aid problem, it seems.

Nir Eyal

That's right. That if you don't deal with the deeper reason, you're always gonna find something, whether it's too much booze, too much news, too much football, too much Facebook, you're always gonna find a way around it. So you have to have strategies in place to deal with that discomfort, okay? So which means you have to do a little introspection. What is going on? Like, why can't I sit with that feeling, and how can I find better tools? And so there's about a dozen different techniques you can use, I can tell you some, to deal with that most important first step, master internal triggers. The second step is to make time for traction. If you find that you're overdoing it on something, one of the best things you can do is to schedule time for it, right? Because what is a distraction? Okay, the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction. Traction and distraction, they're opposites. Hmm. They both end in the same word, action, which reminds us that these things are, are not happening to us. They are actions we take. So a distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

Traction is any action that pulls you towards what you did plan to do. So when I talk to people and I say, you know, tell me what you got distracted from, they say, oh, you know, I wanted to do this, I wanted to go to bed, I wanted to do my work, I wanted to be with my spouse, I wanted to do this, that, that. I said, that's your aspirations. Show me on your schedule what it was you got distracted from. And they show me their calendar, 9 times out of 10, it's blank.

Dara Ladjevardian

It's not there.

Nir Eyal

There's nothing on there, right? There's like dentist appointment or meeting. If you don't plan your day, somebody else is gonna plan it for you.

Dara Ladjevardian

So I should plan, schedule reading 30 minutes every night before bed instead of social media?

Nir Eyal

And the social media time in a different part of your day. So in my day, 7 o'clock every night, that's my social media time.

Dara Ladjevardian

Nice.

Nir Eyal

I go online for an hour, and there's nothing wrong with it. I enjoy it. But it's in my schedule. It's done with intent, so I turn the distraction into traction. And in fact, if I do anything else, that would be distraction. So it's in my schedule. So you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. Okay, super important lesson. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. Because if you didn't say what you wanted to do, everything's a distraction. Yeah. So you need to do it with intent. So put it in your schedule. Social media time. I'm gonna do it for an hour, and then I'm gonna do something else. So that's step 2, and there's a step to do that. There's a few steps for figuring out your values and turning your values into time. The 3rd step is to hack back the external triggers. So external triggers are all those pings, dings, and rings. It's kindergarten stuff, right? Anybody can do it. If you just sit down for maybe 30 minutes, I can show you how to make your phone indestructible. I can show you how to make your computer indestructible. I

Dara Ladjevardian

just got Brick. It's great.

Nir Eyal

Okay, those are some techniques.

Dara Ladjevardian

So good.

Nir Eyal

It's still avoidance, but. That's actually step 4, which is about preventing distraction with packs. We can talk about that. But this is actually on your device, how do you make sure that when you're using it, you're not constantly getting all these pings and dings? That's the easy stuff. The harder stuff is the stuff that feels like productivity but isn't, okay? That notification of email. Well, I'm supposed to be checking email, right? I'm a professional. Yeah. People need me to respond. But if that's not what you plan to do, it's just as much of a distraction as checking TikTok.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, creating strategy docs.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, exactly. The most wasteful thing you can do is do things that didn't need to be done. So going to stupid meetings that you didn't need to go to. You know, our kids, our kids are wonderful. We love our kids, but they can be also a source of distraction. So we can go through each one of these. We can hack back all these external triggers. I show you how to do that step by step. And then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with pacts. So pacts are when we decide in advance this firewall against distraction, right? Yeah. So the brick device, right? In my house, we have kind of a simple version. We have an outlet timer, okay? $5. I went to the hardware store and I put this outlet timer into my wall, and whatever's plugged into it will turn off. Right, automatically. So what's plugged into it? My internet router and my screens, okay? So I could find a way around it, right? But now I have to unplug, replug, right? I have to do all this mess. Put in a little work. Yeah, put in a little work. So it gives me that bit of friction to think about, wait a minute, what is it that I really wanna do right now? Okay, but that's the last step, and there's all kinds of PACs you can use. We can talk about that. That's the last line of defense. If you start with the Brick Phone, or if you start with the PACs, It won't work.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, there's shortcuts, but you need to do the internal work first.

Nir Eyal

You have to do the first 3 steps.

Dara Ladjevardian

Part of doing the internal work, I feel, is teaching people to be okay feeling a little uncomfortable.

Nir Eyal

Right.

Dara Ladjevardian

Which is very hard. And maybe this is my pushback on short-form content provides so much dopamine that we stray farther and farther away from being able to Maybe feel the— I don't know what the opposite of dopamine is, but a little uncomfortable.

Nir Eyal

So this is why I wrote Beyond Belief. And boy, do I wish that we'd stop using the word dopamine.

Dara Ladjevardian

Tell me more. Say more.

Nir Eyal

Because, you know, there's a joke in neuroscience that what's the role of dopamine in the brain? To confuse neuroscientists. Because— and it's even more confusing. We say it all the time, the dopamine squirts, as if dopamine is cocaine in the brain. It is not cocaine in the brain. You get dopamine when we shook hands. You get dopamine when you play the piano, when you play tennis, when you give someone a hug. You get dopamine all day long. Dopamine just reinforces something that the brain wants you to pay attention to. The problem with that kind of language is that it reinforces a belief that we are helpless. Well, it's not my fault the dopamine squirts. You know, the TikTok with the dopamine, what am I gonna do with the dopamine?

Dara Ladjevardian

It's my chemical imbalance.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, exactly. far removed from what is actually happening and what is actually useful that it's so meaningless. It's a term that we use because it feels right, it feels true, and it's not. So, and why is it not true? Why is it harmful? Because, and this is why I wrote Beyond Belief, is that when we have what's called a limiting belief, a limiting belief is a belief that decreases motivation, and increases our suffering. So what I propose in Beyond Belief is that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. Because even if, yes, it's true, TikTok releases dopamine, as does everything, but okay, fine, it's true. How am I likely to behave when I believe there's nothing to be done? Hmm. Right, until those geniuses in Washington Figure out how to regulate this, well, what can I do? What is that likely to make me do?

Dara Ladjevardian

Act like a slave.

Nir Eyal

Exactly, right? So even if it's not true, it's good to believe that you have more agency. By the way, it is true, but let's just say for the sake of argument, let's just say you're not sure. Oh, but I heard that this other author and this other scientist said that it's impossible to stop using social media. Okay, I will give you an entire book. I spent 6 years writing Beyond Belief about all the amazing ways that changing our beliefs literally changes our biology. Hmm. And it's— the documented cases go on and on and on and on about how important it is to pick and choose our beliefs. Because most of us, you know, we adopt the beliefs that we have from the media, from our parents, from our upbringing. We adopt these beliefs and we never stop to ask ourselves, wait, is that belief— is that something I truly believe? Is that a fact, or is it something that somebody put in my head that I've said to myself so many times that it feels true?

Dara Ladjevardian

So this is like the internal work for Indistractable, where in order to change your belief, the first step is to ask yourself—

Nir Eyal

Is it serving you, or is it hurting you?

Dara Ladjevardian

From your research, what has been the most maybe like mind-boggling story of how a belief has substantially changed someone's life, despite maybe the evidence of that belief? Oh my gosh.

Nir Eyal

Where do we start? Okay, so just for the sake of this latest discussion, so a lot of people know about the placebo effect.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yes, I love the placebo effect.

Nir Eyal

Placebo effect is fascinating, fascinating, unbelievable. There's some nuance around what placebos can and can't do. For example, placebos don't cure sickness, they cure illness. Sickness and illness are not the same thing. Sickness is in your body, okay? Placebos do nothing for a broken bone. Placebos will not cure cancer, but they will help you with illness. Illness is in the mind. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the mind. The symptoms of that sickness, placebos are amazing at. And did you know that 80% of our healthcare spending in America, 80%, goes to treating illness, not sickness?

Dara Ladjevardian

And does that 80% go into placebos?

Nir Eyal

I wish it did. We should be using a lot more placebos, in fact. And so there's all this amazing new research that actually shows, we used to think that placebos, you had to deceive someone. We had what's called a double-blind controlled study where both the patient and the person administering the placebo would both—

Dara Ladjevardian

Where they don't know it's a placebo.

Nir Eyal

Neither would have to know that it's a placebo. Then Ted Kaptchuk, this psychologist at Harvard, he ran a study for irritable bowel syndrome, which he's found is highly responsive to the placebo effect. But this time, he calls in his patients and he says, okay, This is a placebo. It says right here on the label, okay, this is a placebo. It has been shown to help some people ease the symptoms of IBS. I want you to try it, okay? So he does this study, these people take the placebo, and it turns out that the placebo, it's called an open-label placebo where everyone knows it's a placebo, turned out to be as effective as the leading pain medication for IBS. Furthermore, after the study, people called up Dr. Kaptchuk and said, Dr. Kaptchuk, I know the study is over, but can I get some more of those amazing placebo pills? They were amazing. They were fantastic. And they know they're placebos. They know they're placebos. Wait, it goes further. You can go on Amazon right now, type in placebo pills, and you will see for sale jars of pills that say placebo on the label, and underneath those, you'll see 5-star reviews for fast-acting relief.

Dara Ladjevardian

But if I buy it and I'm like, this is not gonna work, it's kind of a—

Nir Eyal

Well, we don't know. We don't know. If you have a negative perception, we don't know. It turns out that there are things that are happening. Like when a doctor calls you in with a white lab coat and it says MD here, and the pill bottle appears to be what medicine looks like, we're not exactly sure where it's happening because it's all about your perception of the symptoms. So I've actually been much more receptive to using more placebos in my life. So for example, I just flew in from Lisbon, and I'm supposed to have terrible jet lag right now. Right now, it's like 2 in the morning for me. But what do I do? I read somewhere that creatine can have positive effects for cognition. I've read that too. Pretty minor, right? Like the actual facts, eh, shaky. But you know what? When I travel, and I'm trying to get over jet lag, I take some extra creatine, right? ritual, and I know that it might have some positive effects. Lo and behold, something's happening. It feels different because, again, it's about perception. So we know that placebos— Yeah. Are highly effective for depression, anxiety, insomnia, ADHD. There's some incredible research about what they can do. The flip side, I think, is even more interesting. The flip side of the placebo effect is what's called a nocebo effect. Placebo in the Greek means I will help. Nocebo is the opposite, I will harm. And this actually, I think we should really be worried about.

Dara Ladjevardian

Like, I have nocebo for social media and for coffee. I wish I could drink coffee, but I have this thing that's gonna make me anxious, and I don't want it.

Nir Eyal

Really? Yeah. Interesting study done. I don't drink coffee. There was an amazing study conducted where they gave people who had that exact belief, that coffee makes me jittery, they gave them decaf. And they still got jittery. So that's exactly an amazing demonstration of the nocebo effect, because if you— it's called rumination. If you ruminate on, I'm expecting to feel jittery, you're going to create that psychosomatic response and become hypervigilant and observant to, oh, see, there it's starting. I'm starting to feel jittery. My breath, my heart. You start mocking, or you start mimicking those sensations until they become true. Yeah. I'll give you an even better story. Okay. In the psychology literature, there's a study about a guy who's identified as Mr. A. He's anonymized, Mr. A. Now, Mr. A has a terrible breakup with his girlfriend, and he decides he can't do it anymore. He's gonna end his life. So he goes to his medicine cabinet, and he pulls out an entire jar of antidepressants. He takes off the pill jar, takes every single pill, and as he swallows the last one, he changes his mind. He decides he wants to live after all. He rushes over to his neighbor's house. He demands they take him to the emergency room. He gets to the hospital. He collapses on the floor. He has the bottle of antidepressants in his hand, and he tells the nurse, I took all my pills. Help me. I took all my pills. They rush him into the operating room. They're about to pump his stomach, and they're trying to figure out what did he take. They look at this bottle of the antidepressants, and it doesn't say the name of the medicine. It has a phone number. They call this mysterious phone number, and the person on the other line tells them that Mr. A did not take any antidepressants because he was in a clinical trial, and he was in the placebo group. He had swallowed an entire bottle of placebos. But meanwhile, his blood pressure was plummeting, his heart rate was dangerously low. Wow. And he was slipping in and out of consciousness. So he was displaying physiological symptoms. Like, you can't— how do you fake low blood pressure and low heart rate? You can't fake that. Wow. And that's what was happening to his body. They tell Mr. A this, okay? They tell him, hey, you know, that was from that control study, that medical study you were in. You didn't take any antidepressants. You took an entire bottle of placebos. Within 15 minutes, his heart rate stabilizes, his blood pressure returns to normal, and he walks out of the hospital totally fine. Maybe a little embarrassed, okay? So here's what we should think about. If someone can get such an extreme physiological response, or a response that mimics overdosing on medication, how sure can we be that what we're experiencing is 100% accurate for the reasons we think? For example, I have ADHD, okay? I've been diagnosed with ADHD. And at first, it was amazing. It explained so much about my struggles. Then what started happening, this was several years ago, then what started happening, every time I would get distracted, I would start down this rumination loop of, okay, there's my ADHD again.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, you're blaming it.

Nir Eyal

What's that?

Dara Ladjevardian

You're blaming it.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, there's my ADHD. It's a chronic brain disease. I'm never gonna get over this, and what if I don't meet my deadline, and why do I have to suffer from this and other people don't? I would start ruminating to the point where the diagnosis became the distraction. It became true. Now, I believe ADHD is real. I believe it's also way overdiagnosed.

Dara Ladjevardian

For sure.

Nir Eyal

Anybody can get a diagnosis, virtually anyone, because it's a Likert scale. There's no blood test, there's no x-ray. And so what I started to notice is that I couldn't quite be sure how much of my physiological reaction, it felt true, it felt like I was crazy distracted, How much of that was really my ADHD? Could I be 100% sure it's 100% my ADHD, or could it be 99% ADHD, 1% psychosomatic, like Mr. A with the placebos? Well, if it could be 1%, could it be 20%? Could it be 50%? I can't really be sure. So if I can't be sure, why would I tell myself something stupid like it's a chronic brain disease? You know, 30% of people who have ADHD, with practice, overcome their symptoms. Overcome their symptoms.

Dara Ladjevardian

What percentage are you at now?

Nir Eyal

What do you mean?

Dara Ladjevardian

What percentage is ADHD and what percentage is—

Nir Eyal

Okay, so now I don't tell myself it's a chronic brain disease. I tell myself I'm learning a new skill. I'm learning a new skill. Because again, there's— if it's a Likert scale, so when they ask you, do you have ADHD, right? They do this assessment and they say, how often do you get distracted? Right? Sometimes, never, always, frequent, whatever. If I learn skills that make me get distracted less, I functionally don't have it anymore. Yeah. Right? Now, again, there are extreme, extreme cases, okay? The vast majority of people, I don't think, are struggling with those kind of cases. People like me, where there's no check and balance in the psychiatry industry, right? If you go to get an ADHD diagnosis, you can do it now through an app.

Dara Ladjevardian

You can get it, yeah.

Nir Eyal

You're going to get one. I know. Right? Weed, right? Like, oh, I'm struggling with anxiety. Okay, here, you get it too. You can get the doctor's note. And I think that's potentially very dangerous. Why? Because just like how we saw with Mr. A, your labels become your limits.

Speaker C

Yep.

Nir Eyal

Your labels become your limits. I'm not a morning person. I don't tolerate coffee. I'm a Sagittarius. I am someone who struggles with ADHD. I am overdosing. We can create these symptoms where it's not just what actually happens, it's our beliefs that are creating those symptoms.

Dara Ladjevardian

If you have an organization and you want to educate a group of people to overcome a limiting belief, and I see this a lot in startups, a lot of people are driven by fear, and fear is very effective, but fear at a certain point becomes, Self-sabotage.

Nir Eyal

Yeah.

Dara Ladjevardian

How would you advise a leader to not just change his own beliefs, but the beliefs of an organization?

Nir Eyal

Yeah, I'll give you a few examples. So one, remember the big message of my book is that beliefs are tools, not truths. So one example of how you can use this in a corporate context is an example from Amazon. At Amazon, they have these 16 leadership principles. And they're really serious about these principles. Everybody knows these 16 leadership principles. They will say it in email. In meeting discussions, they'll pull out, oh, well, that disobeys this one or that one. One of those leadership principles is, at Amazon, it's always day one. It's one of the originals that Jeff Bezos authored. It's always day one. Doesn't it strike you as odd that that is a bold-faced lie? Like, that is clearly not true. It's not true. No. It's a $2.5 trillion company. It's a mindset. Yeah. It has not been day one for a very long time. Okay? But beliefs are tools, not truths. It doesn't have to be true. If we act as if it is day one, we will find savings and pass along those savings to our customers. So at Amazon, it's day one. We are going to act as if it's day one. We're going to believe it is. And so I think having some of those fundamental leadership principles, of this is what we believe here. And by the way, it's a mistake to just copy wholesale what someone else does, okay? Every industry needs to think of what are those beliefs that we are going to do no matter what, right? This is why we see oftentimes that founders are so much better, that first-generation founder is so much better at running companies than the private equity firms or their kids that run it later, because those people tend to dissolve those principles of why a company was built in the first place. So having those beliefs, the things that we just believe are true, whether or not they are, right? Customer first. That's a belief. In some industries, it's not good to be customer first. Yeah. Okay? Some industries, you wanna be regulation first, right? So having those leadership principles that you are going to run the company by, whether or not it's true, this is what we're gonna do because we believe that's going to benefit us at the end of the day. Yeah. That's one. And then 2, from a leadership perspective, I think a wonderful example of this is what happened to Serena Williams a few years ago. I don't know if you're a tennis fan, but Serena Williams was competing in Wimbledon. And she was not doing well. And the reason she wasn't doing well is that she wasn't rushing the net. And at that level of the game, if you hesitate, you're gonna lose.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So her coach, Patrick Montague, saw what she was doing. He called her over. He says, Serena, come here, come here. I wanna show you something. You know, I've been looking at the stats, and it turns out that 80% of the time that you rush the net, you score a point. She said, what? I thought I was terrible at the net. He said, well, look, statistics don't lie. And it's true, statistics don't lie, but he did. She was not scoring anywhere near 80% of the points at the net, not even close. But when he told her this lie, it became reality. She started making 80% of the points at the net. She ends up winning the match and takes Wimbledon that year. Now, am I telling you to lie to people? Am I telling you to be delusional to people? Well, Remember, what's the definition of a belief? It's a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. He knew what she was capable of. It was true that in a bigger context, he had seen her before be great at the net. But she wasn't great at the net right then. She was limiting herself. She was telling herself, I'm no good at the net. And that false belief became reality. So the job of a leader is to unlock what's already there. That is the job of a leader, is to unlock the potential of what your people can do, but currently aren't doing. That's the big idea. Now, you say, but didn't he lie to her? Didn't he— wasn't he delusional? Well, do you ever notice, by the way, the word belief? What's in the middle of the word belief?

Dara Ladjevardian

Lie.

Nir Eyal

There's a lie in the middle of every belief. You can't spell belief without a lie. Now, is that anything metaphysical? No, it's just a reminder. that we're already lying to ourselves.

Dara Ladjevardian

Might as well choose the narrative that supports—

Nir Eyal

Exactly.

Dara Ladjevardian

Well, what's your optimization function for getting conviction in a belief? Because, you know, there's a million beliefs that you could adopt at any point in time. And in the startup sphere, there's like 10 schools of thought on how to approach startups. I believe that we're always gonna care what other humans have to say. That's kind of a core belief of Delphi. Many people in Silicon Valley think, oh, humans aren't gonna matter. AI is everything. I believe I gotta work hard now so that in the future I can have a more happy life. Other people in New York or Miami are like, you gotta enjoy life right now. So I'm curious, what gives you conviction on the beliefs that you decide to choose?

Nir Eyal

Yeah, so one, I think it's important to have those— are you talking about in terms of those company beliefs, like those leadership principles?

Dara Ladjevardian

Company or individual. You got to pick a belief and you got to commit. You can't change your belief every week. You got to commit to one.

Nir Eyal

So when it comes at the company level, you want to make them broad enough to be adaptable. So if you said, we are going to build an AI that is based on humans only, you're going to be restricted to that, right? You're not going to be able to have much variance. But if you stuck to something like what Amazon does, where it's always day one at Amazon, or one of the companies that I helped found, one of our leadership principles was give crazy a chance. That in discussions we should— we just believe it's a good thing. In the military, you don't want to give crazy a chance, right? So it needs to be adapted based on your specific situation. So you want them broad enough to be adaptable, but not too adaptable that the company breaks, right? And then I think then what we do— so that's at the company level. At the individual level, when it comes to these convictions that we have, we need to be able to provide evidence. That's the key. How do you gain greater conviction in a belief? you look for evidence. And so that's the key. So we run some— and this is what we should do on an individual level. Yeah. Is we look at our current beliefs. We say, okay, when I believe this, what does that do to my motivation? What does that do to my suffering? And if it makes me less likely to persist, well, then I can question that belief. And one of my favorite ways to do that is to ask myself, could the opposite be true? Right? Is that belief, I think it can only be done this way, Could the opposite be true? Rory Sutherland says the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Hmm. That sometimes flipping things around and you come up with what I call a portfolio of perspectives. How could the opposite also be true? And say, okay, let me adopt that belief as an experiment. I'm gonna adopt that belief for a week. I'm no good at public speaking. Actually, I am good at public speaking when I'm properly prepared, or I'm not good at public speaking Yet. I don't have time, versus I have time for what's really important. This is hard and that's bad, versus this is what it feels like to get better. Okay? This sucks, that person is annoying me, versus this is an opportunity to practice patience, or this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me.

Speaker C

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So adopting this constant script of liberating beliefs and experimenting with them, right? Seeing what do I see, what do I feel, and what do I do when I choose to believe this opposite belief? And then collecting that evidence, and then if it works, keep it. If it doesn't work, you can always adopt a different belief.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah, at what point do you quit? At what point is quitting versus, you know, sometimes winning is just surviving.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, great question.

Dara Ladjevardian

I really wanted to play, I played football in Texas, but at a certain point I'm like, I am not the left guard that they want me to be. I should quit.

Nir Eyal

Okay, yeah, so terrific question. So I'm not against quitting. I'm against quitting too soon. That's when quitting hurts. When you quit and it was a good decision to quit, you say, oh, I'm so glad I got out. When you quit and somebody else who didn't quit succeeds, it sucks.

Dara Ladjevardian

It's so painful.

Nir Eyal

It's the worst.

Dara Ladjevardian

I'm seeing this right now with Instinct. You know Instinct?

Nir Eyal

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dara Ladjevardian

My first startup was this, like 5 years ago.

Nir Eyal

Oh, really?

Dara Ladjevardian

And I sold it too early. I'm like, oh my God, now it's blowing up.

Nir Eyal

Okay, so by the way, this happened to me as well. I can tell you a story about what— at AdNectar, our second idea was a company that also— HoneyBook, that blew up, and then— So painful. So painful. So painful. So it's not that quitting too soon, it's not that quitting is bad, it's quitting too soon. That's when you destroy human potential and capital. So there's a 3-part test that I give for when is it time to quit. The first, and this can be about a personal goal, it can be about a business endeavor. The first criteria is, have I met my mile marker? So what you wanna do is to set some kind of mile marker. Say, I'm going to try this experiment, whatever it might be, with this new belief, this product idea, for X number of days. It could be a week, a month, 5 years, it doesn't matter. You set some kind of stake. It says, I am not going to evaluate or even consider quitting until that mile marker. Why? Because if you say, well, I'm gonna just keep doing it until it no longer feels right, well, you're gonna quit. And you're gonna quit for the wrong reasons. You're gonna quit because it's hard, which it invariably will. It's always gonna be hard. Behavior change is hard. So number one is, have you met your mile marker? Okay, don't even consider quitting until then. Number 2 criteria is, am I still learning? Okay, am I still learning? So if you are gaining some kind of knowledge, even if you're failing, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So if, for example, if I told you that I know for a fact I have a time machine and I've traveled into the future, and I know for sure that if you do 5 more product iterations, okay? 5 more product failures. You're gonna iterate 5 times, but then the 6th one, you're gonna hit it big. You're gonna reach amazing product-market fit. It's gonna be incredible. You have to fail 5 more times so that you can get to the 6th.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yep.

Nir Eyal

What does that do to your relationship with failure? Now you're gonna say, okay, great, let's go. I wanna keep going. I wanna fail, right? Like, if it's 5 more dates until you meet the love of your life, you know, 5 more workouts until you find your thing, whatever the case might be, if you know that failure is part of the process because you're still learning what works and what doesn't, Fantastic. Keep

Dara Ladjevardian

going, yeah.

Nir Eyal

Sometimes, however, you're not learning anymore, okay? You're out of experiments, you're out of ideas, you're not learning anymore. Okay, that's the second criteria. The third criteria is, does persistence make a difference? Sometimes persistence makes a huge difference.

Dara Ladjevardian

It's a compounding—

Nir Eyal

Yeah, so I used to be clinically obese, okay? Not just overweight, but actually clinically obese.

Dara Ladjevardian

Until Fit Thought came along?

Nir Eyal

Until— a little bit before then. First, I had to manage my diet. But when it came to my diet, then I started exercising much later. With my diet, I would lose weight, and then I would kind of plateau. Even though I was still on this diet, I would plateau for a while and nothing would happen, okay? But if I just kept going, eventually I would start losing weight again, okay? And that was very critical. So if I had quit saying, oh, it's not working, diets don't work, that's stupid, then I would have never gotten past that plateau. Yeah. Because persistence does make a difference for certain kind of things. Writing a book, right? You just gotta put in the time and effort. So that's an occasion where persistence makes a difference. On the other hand, I used to work at a company with terrible company culture, okay? Every Sunday night, I was dreading Monday morning having to go to work. The company culture just sucked. Nobody was motivated. It was just soul-crushing. Yeah. Sticking around there wouldn't have made a difference. I'm not gonna change the entire company culture, okay? That's not something that's gonna change just because I persisted, right? So that would be an occasion where I'd say, look, persistence is not gonna pay off here. So those are the 3 criteria. Have you met your mile marker? Are you still learning? And does persistence make a difference? Then if you've met those 3 criteria, cool, now it's time to quit.

Dara Ladjevardian

So I'm glad I quit football. Makes sense. So not everyone is going to have the privilege of having a one-on-one conversation with you. I have definitely learned a lot, and I have a lot to think about after this. But they will be able to talk to your Delphi. What is one conversation that you wish people would have with your Delphi?

Nir Eyal

Oh, that's great. I wish that people would use my Delphi to test their limiting beliefs because limiting beliefs are kind of like your face. Okay, we all have a face, but we can't see our own face. Like if I said, Dara, please look at your own face. Go ahead, do it. You can look at your hands, you can look at your phone. Get my phone out. Yeah. In order to see your own face, you have to reflect. You have to take out your phone, take out a mirror. You need something outside outside of yourself to see your own face. Interestingly, we can see everybody else's face, right? We can see everybody else's limiting beliefs. Can't see your own limiting beliefs.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

So I think one of the promises of, of a tool like Delphi is that you can see the things that you can't see yourself. You need something outside of yourself to reflect, to see who you really are. And once you are able to see those limiting beliefs, like if you talk to my Delphi and ask it, Here's a situation I'm dealing with. Help me do a turnaround on this. Help me spot what limiting beliefs might be decreasing my motivation and increasing my suffering, and what other beliefs could increase my motivation and decrease my suffering. Give me new liberating beliefs. I think that will change your life.

Dara Ladjevardian

I will definitely be having that conversation. I have one follow-up, actually. Yeah. So I was thinking about the times where I've tried to change a belief, and the times I've been successful versus unsuccessful. The unsuccessful times deal with emotion, where you feel, where you say, I want to believe this new thing, but your emotions are stuck in this older version of you. And so I'm curious how you not just change the idea and the mental framework, but the emotion associated with the belief. Oh,

Nir Eyal

it's so good. Such a great question. So remember how we said earlier how illness and sickness are 2 separate things? Pain and suffering are also 2 separate things. And emotions and feelings are 2 separate things. Pain is information. Emotions are involuntary. When you feel an emotional sensation, it is a physiological response. Right. Feelings are a psychological response. Feelings are the interpretation of emotion. It is the judgment of emotion, right? You feel a certain way, and then you will create a story on whether that feeling— sorry, that emotion is good or bad. That becomes the feeling, okay? Just like pain is information, suffering is the interpretation of that information. That's what turns it into suffering. So the best thing we can do is to recognize that, okay, this sensation that I'm feeling right now, It's involuntary. Now it's my job to figure out what is the belief, what is the story that I will tell myself that will help me rather than hurt me?

Dara Ladjevardian

Yep.

Nir Eyal

For example, I'll give you a great example. I used to hate public speaking, like terrible stage fright. Same. Terrible, okay, yeah, this is a very, very common fear. Yeah. Hated being on stage. But I really was passionate about what I was writing and working on, and I wanted to share with others. And the reason I would get such terrible stage fright is that right before I would go on stage, I would get the cotton mouth and the shortness of breath and the sweaty armpits and my heart would start racing and I would start telling myself this story of, you see, I have stage fright and I probably have some kind of anxiety disorder and I really probably should take some medicine for this and how can I be a public speaker and nobody's gonna listen to me and I'm probably gonna mess up on stage. There we go. Now this rumination loop based on my interpretation of information. I was interpreting the fast heartbeat as something wrong with me. Bad, bad, bad, bad. I don't have that anymore. Why? I still get the same exact physiological feelings. You just interpret it differently. Right now, I'm getting these sweaty armpits. I have the cottonmouth. That's why I keep drinking. I have the heart palpitations. Nothing has changed physiologically.

Dara Ladjevardian

That's not a bad thing.

Nir Eyal

Exactly. I changed the belief. Now, my belief is, Okay, when my heart beats quickly, it's because my brain needs more oxygen so I can deliver my best possible presentation. Do I know that's a fact? No. But beliefs are tools, not truths.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

I choose to believe that because I do better. So why can't I? Why not? Yeah, exactly. So I think that's how we manage emotions. We stop thinking that emotions are bad.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

Who said feeling bad is bad? Like, for example, let's say right now Your heart starts racing, you start sweating, and you're short of breath. Those are physiological sensations. If that happened right now, we'd have to rush you to the hospital. Something terrible would happen. But if those exact same sensations happened in the gym, well, bravo, you're getting a good workout.

Dara Ladjevardian

It's a good thing.

Nir Eyal

It's just the story.

Dara Ladjevardian

Yeah.

Nir Eyal

The problem with saying, well, what do I do with my emotions, is that you think emotions are bad.

Dara Ladjevardian

It's how you interpret them.

Nir Eyal

Exactly. It's the feelings that you're choosing. Feelings are based on your beliefs.

Dara Ladjevardian

Well, I'm gonna change my feelings about coffee and hopefully be more energetic. I

Nir Eyal

can't wait to try it. Can we go out for a flat white? Like, I really wanna try this.

Dara Ladjevardian

Thank you so much, Nir.

Nir Eyal

All right, my pleasure.

Dara Ladjevardian

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode and want personalized advice from Nir, head to the link in the comments or description to ask his digital mind on Delphi.