The Pill That Works Even When You Know It's Fake

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Pill That Works Even When You Know It's Fake"
Plain English with Derek Thompson – March 13, 2026
Guest: Nir Eyal, author of Beyond Belief
Host: Derek Thompson

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the power of beliefs—how they shape our perceptions, alleviate suffering, and even help us perform better, regardless of whether those beliefs are "factually" true. Host Derek Thompson interviews Nir Eyal about his latest book, Beyond Belief, which explores how beliefs (religious, secular, or otherwise) act as practical tools for well-being, motivation, and resilience. They discuss placebos, prayer, self-confidence, and the boundaries between fact, faith, and belief, all through an engaging mix of storytelling, research, and personal reflection.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Meaning and Impact of Belief

• Defining Placebo & Belief
  • Derek opens with a story to illustrate the placebo/nocebo effects ([00:00]–[03:00]), underscoring that pain or relief can be created by expectation, even in the absence of physical causes.
  • “We do not live in the world as it is. We live in the world as we expect it to be." — Derek ([01:50])
  • Nir distinguishes facts, beliefs, and faith:
    • Fact: Objective, true regardless of belief
    • Faith: Conviction with no evidence needed
    • Belief: Conviction open to change with new evidence; a tool, not a truth ([12:20])

2. Ritual, Religion, and Secular Prayer

• Power and Utility of Prayer

  • Nir recounts his secular upbringing and his return to prayer during a difficult period ([06:42]–[10:20]).
  • Study: Even non-religious people taught a secular prayer protocol experienced improved pain tolerance ([08:00]).
  • Psychological benefits of ritual and prayer exist regardless of supernatural belief ([09:00]):
    • Longer lives
    • More friends
    • Greater contributions to community

• Field Trip Across Religions

  • Nir visits leaders of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Catholicism, and Buddhism in Singapore to inquire about "praying with doubt" ([15:33]–[21:40]):

    • Judaism: “First we do, then we will hear.” (Action precedes comprehension.) ([16:40])
    • Islam: Simple daily rituals/affirmations help recentre values; hospitality and community highlighted.
    • Hinduism: Prayer = reflection and self-inquiry, not cosmic vending machine.
    • Catholicism: Community as the vessel for answered prayers.
    • Buddhism: Distinction between pain and suffering; practices to separate the two.

  • Key realization:
    Ancient practices persist because they are “Darwinianly true”—well-fitted to human psychology, not necessarily because of supernatural claims ([22:44]).

3. Beliefs as Productivity "Hacks"—or Something Deeper?

• Tension Between Utility and Faithfulness
  • Derek asks if treating religion merely as a “productivity hack” is disrespectful ([24:30]).
  • Nir: “They welcomed me with open arms…My limiting belief was that I’m not welcome unless I can just declare utter faith in everything.” ([24:30])
  • Most faith leaders embrace “constructive interpretation”—you don’t need blind faith to benefit from religious community and ritual.

4. The Psychology of Perception and Reality

• Beliefs shape reality because humans can only consciously process a sliver of information ([28:58]):
  • “Conscious attention can only process 50 bits of information out of 11 million per second…We all live in a simulation inside our own minds.” — Nir ([29:00])
• Derek: This underpins the need for “epistemic humility” and patience with others, since each of us only sees a fragment of “reality” ([31:59–34:18]).

5. Changing and Examining Limiting Beliefs

• Nir explains "turnaround"—a cognitive tool to reframe limiting beliefs using his own story about a fraught phone call with his mother ([35:02]–[42:25]):
  • Four questions for inquiry-based stress reduction:
    • Is your belief true?
    • Is it absolutely true?
    • Who are you when you hold onto that belief?
    • Who would you be without that belief?
  • “None of these are facts, they’re all beliefs because they’re happening up here, they’re not laws of physics.” ([41:34])

6. Placebo Effects—Even When You Know It’s Fake

• Open-Label Placebos: Placebos work for things like IBS, even when patients know they’re placebos ([47:42]):
  • “The phrasing is important…‘This is a placebo, it has no active ingredients, but it has been shown to help…’” ([48:00])
  • Placebos are effective for illnesses shaped by mind/body interaction (pain, insomnia, anxiety), not structural/physiological problems ([52:55]).
  • The anticipation of relief is powerful; thus, beliefs really can change physical experience in certain domains.

7. Building Self-Confidence and Persistence

• Motivation and self-confidence are forms of belief in the self—persistence is key for success ([56:10]):
  • Kurt Richter’s rat study ([57:23]–[61:21]):
    • Rats rescued from drowning swam 60 hours (vs. 15 minutes previously) after learning rescue is possible—a metaphor for the potential unlocked by belief.

8. Contagion of Beliefs and Social Influence

• Negative and positive beliefs can be contagious at group/cultural level ([62:21]):
  • Stories of mass hysteria and tall poppy syndrome versus the “fail fast” ethos of Silicon Valley.
  • Societal beliefs shape (or constrain) individual potential—thus, actively curating one's belief environment is vital.

9. Agency, Helplessness, and Locus of Control

• The myth of “learned helplessness” has been overturned; helplessness is in fact our default ([66:31]):
  • “Our default state is helplessness. A baby doesn’t learn helpless, it is helpless…. It has to learn agency.” ([67:34])
  • Internal locus of control correlates with better social and economic outcomes, even among the disadvantaged.

10. Practical Takeaway: Action Creates Confidence

• Derek and Nir close by urging listeners to experiment with “play-acting” confident or productive versions of themselves—a strategy rooted in ancient religious wisdom and confirmed by psychological research ([69:44–72:37]):
  • “If you want to be a self-confident person, act as if you are…action precedes comprehension.” — Derek ([72:18])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Beliefs are tools, not truths.” — Nir Eyal ([12:30])
• “First we do, then we will hear.” — The Israelites at Sinai, as explained by Nir ([16:44])
• “We do not see reality clearly. We do not see people clearly. We see people as we are.” — Nir ([31:35])
• “All pain is real, and all pain is in the brain…your brain’s interpretation of that data is what creates suffering.” — Nir ([50:00])
• “Successful people are losers…They lose more…Persistence is the key factor.” — Nir ([56:35])
• “Reality is War and Peace, experience is a sentence.” — Derek ([31:59])
• “If you want to be a self-confident person, act as if you are.” — Derek ([72:18])

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Important Timestamps

• ([06:42]) – Nir’s background, personal story on prayer/prayer study
• ([15:33]) – Nir's “field trip” to different religious leaders and key lessons across faiths
• ([24:30]) – Discussion of using religion as a tool vs. a faith
• ([28:58]) – Distinction and influence of belief/fact/faith; how perception works
• ([35:02]) – Turnaround technique for changing limiting beliefs with personal example
• ([47:42]) – Placebos and open-label placebo effects
• ([56:10]) – Self-confidence and motivation; Richter rat study
• ([62:21]) – Contagion of belief and cultural influences
• ([66:31]) – Helplessness as a default, learning agency, locus of control
• ([69:44]) – Play-acting self-confidence/action precedes understanding; final takeaways

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Tone & Style

• The episode is inquisitive, reflective, and accessible, blending scientific research, ancient wisdom, and personal anecdotes in a conversational manner.
• Derek and Nir are open about their own doubts and growth, modeling "epistemic humility."
• Both host and guest are hopeful about the potential for individuals to shape their own beliefs and outcomes, advocating practical exercises and cognitive tools.

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Final Takeaways

• Beliefs can be powerful tools for change, resilience, and well-being—even when we know they aren't strictly “true.”
• Ancient rituals and prayer yield psychological benefits, accessible even without supernatural faith.
• We can rewrite limiting beliefs by examining, reframing, and ‘trying on’ alternative interpretations, granting ourselves new agency.
• Persistence and self-confidence, more than talent or resources, are determinants of success—and both can be built through practice and belief, not just innate ability.
• Action, not perfect cognition or confidence, is often what brings about understanding and growth.

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For anyone interested in applying neuroscience, psychology, and ancient wisdom to real-world problems (from pain to everyday motivation), this episode delivers clear, actionable insights—and the encouragement to become, as Nir says, a “free thinker.”

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

This episode is brought to you by Lincoln. Whether it's bonding digitally or exploring the world Together, the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid is built for connection with lots of smart tech that helps bring worlds together both on and off the screen. So help turn everydrive into an opportunity for discovery with the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid. Learn more at lincoln.com available connectivity, features and functionality vary by model. Package pricing, trials and term lengths vary by model. Video streaming and games are only available While parked in 1995, a 29 year old construction worker arrived at an English hospital with a six inch nail through his boot. He was screaming in pain. Every attempt to extract the nail just made the screams louder. Finally, the team sedated him and removed the boot. They looked at the nail. No blood. They looked at the foot. No wound. The nail had pierced nothing but the empty space between his toes. The physical injury wasn't real. Only the pain was. You've probably heard of the placebo effect. You take a sugar pill and your insomnia goes away.

[A]

Take.

[B]

But the effect can also work in the opposite direction. A nocebo effect, the expectation of relief or pain, can create its own relief or pain. This principle does not apply for everything. If you have a torn ACL or Achilles, sugar pills will do absolutely nothing for you. But if you're suffering from an illness with a psychological layer, pain, insomnia, depression, anxiety, expectation itself can be its own medicine. The Science podcaster Shankar Vedantam wrote this in the Washington Post several decades ago. Quote after thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions, and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression. 1 antidepressants like Prozac work and 2 so do sugar pills. Placebo effects fascinate me because they seem to touch on some really profound truths about life. We do not live in the world as it is. We live in the world as we expect it to be. We often see the world just as we expect it to look. The psychologist William James once wrote that faith in effect can help create the fact in medicine. Faith in recovery can create the fact of recovery. This is exactly what we call a placebo effect. But we see this all the time in ordinary life too. Confident people are sometimes more successful, and it's not because confidence increases their iq, but rather because it increases something else. Motivation. The ability to weather failure, the number of opportunities undertaken. Self confidence creates the conditions for success. And on the flip side, socially anxious people are sometimes the most alone. Their self doubt creates the conditions for their self isolation. The point here isn't as simple as just like, believe in yourself and great things will inevitably follow. I think that would be pablum nonsense. What I really mean here is something more like we are always living in a world partly created by our beliefs, even when we don't recognize exactly what those beliefs are. And a part of seeing reality clearly and living life well is actually stopping to think hard about what assumptions have I made about the world that shapes the way I see it? Today's guest is Nir Eyal, the bestselling author of a new book, Beyond Belief, on the research behind how our beliefs shape our life. We talk about placebos, nocebos, self confidence, doubt. But we start with belief in the realm of religion by discussing an idea that I first read in Nir's work. In keeping with the power of belief, there's all sorts of evidence that prayer has psychological benefits even in the absence of deep religious faith. And so we begin our discussion of this enormous subject with a very specific can you believe in prayer without believing in God? I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. This episode of Plain English is presented by Audi. We all know that feeling a change of plans, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes with the all new Audi Q3? The answer is easy. It's made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. Learn more at audiusa.com Nir Eyal, welcome to the show.

[A]

Great to be here, Derek. Thank you so much.

[B]

You and I have known each other for a while. Do you remember how we met?

[A]

No, I don't.

[B]

Do you? So, no, I don't remember. You just sort of like appeared in my life and I don't really recall exactly how. I feel like we initially started corresponding when I was writing about smartphones and compulsion and addiction and then got really interested in your work on those subjects. We've just like stayed in touch and remained writer friends for the longest time. I loved this book. I mean, you've written about technology, you've written about how companies hook us, you've written about how to resist the temptation of digital compulsion. This new book was a really interesting departure from some of those themes. It's a book about the power of belief in life and I would love to start with religion. Tell me about your personal history with Judaism.

[A]

Well, I grew up in A pretty secular family. And the last time I prayed before I embarked on this line of research that I'd been in steeped in the past six years. The only time before that that I ever prayed was when I was six years old. And I remember my family had been in the country for only three years and in very short order they got scammed out of basically every penny they had by some, some scam artist American who took advantage of a new immigrant family that barely spoke the language. And my family was in a really tough situation. And I remember going outside before anyone else woke up in the morning and I would lay on my driveway and, and I would look up at the sky and I would have a conversation with this voice that I called God. And it was very comforting at the time, I distinctly remember that. But then as I got older, I thought, well, if I can't prove that I'm talking to anybody, if nobody's listening, what's the point? Why am I doing this? And I didn't pray again for decades until I started this line of research which became my book Beyond Belief. And I kept coming across the power of prayer. How people who pray live longer. They have more friends, they make more money, they contribute more to their community. All these great things happen to people who pray. But I thought that was kind of inaccessible to me because I didn't have a particular faith, I didn't have a conviction in the supernatural. And so I just thought that was off limits to me until I read a study that changed everything, which was this study where they had three different groups and they asked them to do all the same tasks. The task was to, it's a pain tolerance test where they asked people to put their hands in very, very col water and the test is to see how long they can last in that cold water. And so in these three groups, one they said, just don't do anything, just let's let us see your pain tolerance by seeing how long you can last in this ice cold water. The second group were people who prayed with some kind of faith tradition. So they were identified as Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or whatever the case might be. They had a prayer practice. The third group was the most interesting to me. These were people who did not have any particular faith, but they were taught how to pray. They had a particular protocol on how to pray. And they said, if you don't want to say the word God, you can substitute something else, something meaningful to you. It can be the universe, it can be mother nature, it can be sum of all forces. It doesn't really matter. You can substitute any secular interpretation that you want. And so that's what they did. And what was interesting, the results of this study, is that not only do the people who prayed from some kind of faith tradition show much greater pain tolerance, they could last much longer in this pain tolerance experiment than the people who didn't have any kind of faith background and weren't taught to pray. But even the people who didn't have a particular faith but learned how to pray also enjoyed those pain tolerance benefits. So it turns out that prayer works. Even without faith, you can still get a lot of the benefits. And so that kind of opened my mind to explore this further, to see, well, what have I been missing out on? It turns out I'm not alone, that the largest religious group in America today are the nones, not the Catholic nuns, the N o N E. The people who have no religious connection in terms of any particular faith. And it turns out that those people have problems associated with that lifestyle. That in fact, people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, which is millions and millions of Americans today, turns out that they suffer more from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do have a particular faith. But for someone like me who didn't connect with any particular faith, I wanted to see could I find those benefits. And that's exactly the mission I went on.

[B]

And the reason this story really resonated with me is that I grew up Reform Jewish. I had a bar mitzvah, I read the haftara and a Torah portion and loved it and found something really beautiful and mystical and beyond the veil of knowing about Judaism. That really appealed to me when I was younger. And today I would say that my relationship with Judaism sometimes feels like a relationship of last resort. Like when I'm afraid that something bad might happen or very desperate for something good to happen, I find myself almost automatically saying the Shema, which, for folks who aren't Jewish listening, is just a very basic, very ancient prayer of a call to God. And the Shema. It'll just, like, materialize my lips is what I think I wrote in the essay that I published on my substack, introducing some ideas from your book. And for years I've wanted this deeper relationship with faith without being able to really put that yearning in context. And your book really succeeded in putting that yearning in context. I would love for you to go just a little bit deeper on this concept of faith as pain tolerance. Why is that an important idea?

[A]

From what the research shows us is that prayer gives us a sense of agency. It's exactly what you said. That when I feel that I really want something to happen that is partially or completely out of my control, that's when I would turn to these rituals because it gives me that sense of agency over something that I may not have direct control over. And that's very psychologically comforting. Now, the part that I struggled with about this was reconciling. Is that true? Is it a fact? And this took me a long time to get over that if I couldn't prove, if I didn't know definitively that someone was listening to my prayers, that it wouldn't be worth doing. And so I completely disconnected from the practice. And it turns out that, that I think in retrospect was a foolish decision because I was holding my beliefs to the standard of facts. Facts are not beliefs. A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether or not you believe it. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. So sorry, flat earthers, that's just the way it is. On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So God rewards the righteous. No evidence is required for a matter of faith like that. Beliefs are something different. Beliefs sit in between fact and faith. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. And what makes beliefs so special is that they can change. You can put down the ones that don't serve you and you can adopt the ones that do serve you. So beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truth. But I was holding my beliefs to the standard of fact. If it's not a fact, I'm not going to do it. And so I would disconnect from all religious tradition. And it doesn't have to be like that. There is another option. So when I came to Singapore, I lived in Singapore for the past six years. There was a form on the immigration documents that they wanted to know your religious background. And so there were all the usual biggest religions. And one of the categories, it didn't say atheist or agnostic, it said free thinker, free thinker. And I want to know what the heck is a free thinker. It turns out that a free thinker can be from other faith traditions. You can be a free thinking Christian or a free thinking Muslim or a free thinking Jew. You can a free thinking Buddhist, you can be a free thinker, anything. It's someone who doesn't hold that their convictions are necessary. Their beliefs have that standard of fact or faith that you're simply practicing as a tool. And I think that really expanded the opportunities that I've had to participate in ritual in a way that has greatly benefited me because I no longer am debating people on the existence of God anymore. Like, I don't need to debate that anymore. I stopped caring whether I'm going to prove any particular faith correct or whether there is something supernatural at all. I've stopped caring. Rather, the standard is, does this improve my life? Does it give me peace? Does it make me a better person? That's what I'm looking for.

[B]

This idea that believes are tools, not truths is one that I'm personally split on. And what I want to do is first ask a question that leans into this thesis and then maybe ask a question pushes against it. First leaning into it, Armed with this idea that you are a free thinker and that the great world religions might offer a kind of tool set for you to pick and choose. Like the wrench over here and the screw over there, you went on this kind of like, anthropological field trip across major world religions. You talked to religious figures in Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism, and you asked spiritual leaders, what's the best way to pray to God? If I'm not sure he or she is real. I would love you to just reflect a little bit on what lessons you got from this field trip that most served you. Because 7 billion people had the opportunity to go on that field trip. And they might get a whole host of different tools from this exercise, but which tools from the major world religions most fit with your life and your identity?

[A]

Yeah, you call it an anthropological journey. I call it a setup to a joke. In fact, if you think about it, a rabbi. Yeah, a rabbi, a priest and a mom, a monk and a swami all walk into a bar. And so that's what I did. And I don't know anybody else who's ever done this before, but I had the opportunity to do it in a place that I don't think I could do it anywhere else on earth, which is in Singapore, where literally on one street you will find a church and a mosque and a synagogue and a Buddhist temple. And really that's the of kind. Kind of ethnic diversity they have there. And so I walked in and I asked the same question of every single one of these religious leaders. It wasn't an exhaustive study. It was just five religious leaders. And what was interesting, one kind of passed me on to the next to the next. So the first stop was with the rabbi. And I asked Rabbi Mordechai the same question. How does one Pray when you have doubts about God, can you have doubts about God and still pray? And he sits in his office and he looks at me and says, so there's this omnipotent, all knowing, all being force. And you don't have any doubts, you don't have any questions, you have perfect certainty. Really?

[B]

Really.

[A]

And he made this point that I thought really stuck with me, is that when the Israelites are on Mount Sinai and they're receiving the Ten Commandments, they say to God, which means we will hear and we will. Sorry, we will do. First we do and then we will hear. Which seems to me backwards because the way I had been operating, I think most people operate this way, is give me the evidence, give me the facts, and then I will decide what I do with it, right? If I need to change my behavior, tell me why and then I'll do it. But that's not what the Israelites said. They said, first we will do, then we will hear. And that I think is a tremendous insight that these practices have been around for thousands of years and you don't hear the revelation of why they're special. And we're not talking about anything supernatural or mythical. I haven't actually changed my mind about any of the supernatural parts of these religions. What I've changed my mind about is that there are benefits to these practices that you don't get unless you do them. And I think that was the insight I got from Judaism. Then he referred me to an imam. And when I met with imam, it was interesting. I asked him the same question and he was very gracious. In fact, it's amazing. When I came there, he had a kosher meal for me, even though I don't keep kosher. But he knew my background is Jewish and so he had a kosher meal, even though I don't. He was incredibly hospitable. The entire family was there. It was amazing. And we all ate together. And I asked him the same question of how does one pray if you have uncertainty about God? And I have to admit he didn't exactly get the question. He said, well, you must have been raised improperly that your parents didn't teach you about God properly. I said, no, no, no, but what if you have doubts? And so it didn't register for him. So I kind of moved on. And what I learned from, from the imam was, was also applicable to, to anyone, whether you have a faith in the supernatural or not, is that he said, look, Islam is a simple religion. We say the same prayer five times a day. And he pointed me to a hadith that actually talks about how the religion is designed. It should be a simple religion to adhere to. And that simple practice of five times a day reminding yourself about your principles, about your values, about re centering yourself, that's something I now do. So I have these, these, these phrases, these mantras, these secular prayers that I say throughout the day that remind me how to get through difficult difficulty, how to be more patient, how to be more of the person I want to become. So that's what I took from, from Islam. Then I went to visit the swami, and the swami told me about how we should not think of God as a cosmic slot machine. Giving us things, giving us money, giving us health, giving us things that we want, but rather as using prayer as a way to look inside yourself, as a way to problem solve. And it turns out that there's quite a bit of literature around how the power of prayer is a time for reflection, to solve problems. That in a conversation with God, what we should be doing is reflecting on, not fix this for me and take care of that for me, but rather, how can I rise to the challenge? What skills do I need? What do I need to have happen in myself in order to overcome my obstacles, to think of something bigger than just gimme, gimme, gimme. And then I went to the Catholic priest and the father told me about the power of community. And he said, you know, people come into the parish and they ask for different things. They ask for prayers to be answered. And what they don't oftentimes realize is that it doesn't come in the form of a packaged gift to get your prayers answered. It comes oftentimes in the people around you that if you're looking for love, well, the person in the pew down, you know, down the pew could be that. That person who could connect you with someone who you might fall in love with. If you're looking for, you know, a challenge you're facing in business, well, there might be someone in the community who can help you solve that problem. And so maybe that's how God answers prayers, is through community. Which is something that I think today, many of those nuns, those secular people who don't have any kind of affiliation we are starving for. And so I think that really stuck with me. And then the Buddhist monk taught me about how in Buddhism we disconnect the pain from suffering. And this actually has very deep backing in terms of the neuroscience literature around how those are two separate things. But I think I kind of grew up. I think most People think that pain is also always suffering, that anytime I'm in pain, that means I must suffer. And that's not necessarily the case. That in Buddhism, they in fact have practices to teach them how to overcome that pain, to see the pain as transient so they don't necessarily have to suffer. So those were five lessons I took away. Now, no one religion has a monopoly in any of those principles. You see themes throughout. But I thought, no matter what your religious background or whether you have no religious background, this is how we can start to adopt these practices and have that prayer in our life that gives us all these psychological benefits, whether or not we are holding ourselves to some kind of adherence to a supernatural power.

[B]

I don't think I can give proper summary to that answer. And maybe it's an answer that doesn't deserve to be summarized because the truths are that deep and that complex. But one idea that I hear all of those teachings pushing against is the idea that the way to go through life is. Is as an alone individual who wallows in or sits in their pain. Like all of these ideas are about seeking community. They're about seeking answers, even to potentially unanswerable problems. And they also ask us to enter into a relationship with the unknown and in a way that embiggens us in a way that makes us feel less alone and less in pain. And I think those are all beautiful concepts. One interpretation of what you're ending. Control is really important. The promise of control, even without certainty, that control is achievable. And that's where faith comes in.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

One interpretation of what you're doing here is that it's very practical and very wise. You were saying, or I would recapitulate what you're saying. Recapitulate. What you're saying is that people today are surrounded by all sorts of ideas about how to live. But there's something profoundly, almost Darwinianly true about the success of ancient religions. The fact that they survived this long must be evidence of some extraordinary fit, so to speak, with human psychology and human nature. And in that spirit, I profoundly applaud the exercise. And then there's another creeping sense that I have, and I would just love you to respond to this, that your exercise asks us to use religion as a tool, as almost like a productivity hack. And true faith, true prayer maybe can't be treated as a productivity hack. Possibly. Like, I wonder whether any of these religious leaders bristled at the idea that their profound and even ineffable relationship with the divine was Being harvested, so to speak, to serve as a productivity hack for someone who didn't necessarily share their deep faith. Did you find in these conversations a tension between Mode 1 of using religion as a manual for well being and happiness and productivity, and mode two, which is falling into religion almost as if one falls into a pool, a relationship with something that just surrounds them, even if it doesn't guarantee some kind of increase in hour to hour productivity or well being or happiness. Is there a tension between these two modes of using prayer and religion?

[A]

You know, that's what I expected. I expected to get pushback from these religious leaders. And they would tell me, how dare you, right? How could you possibly not have complete and utter faith in my version of the divine? Derek, that is not what happened. They welcomed me with open arms. And I think what was happening is that I had a belief that in order to participate, I had to have faith that was equal to what is written in their holy texts. I had to have blind faith. But that's not what I felt at all. Every single faith I visited, every religious leader was incredibly welcoming. I had, I had limited myself. I had this limiting belief that I'm not welcome unless I can just declare utter faith in everything. And I think that is causing this crisis in America in particular of people leaving religion despite its myriad benefits. That I think there are two parties here that I think for us, for people who have trouble buying a faith with blind faith, that buying everything, every miracle that we have to really defies logic. But we have to believe without even question questioning. That's too high of a bar. And so what we need is what I call constructive interpretation. That when I hear something, when I go into a religious institution, I hear something that that's really hard for me to square. That that miracle really had to happen exactly as it's written. It's okay. I don't have to have that bar of it being a fact, it just has to be a belief. And the bar for a belief is that it has to be a tool that serves me, that makes me better, that helps me serve others better. Doesn't have to be a fact, because a belief is a tool, not a truth. So I've changed that into this constructive interpretation. I think on the other side is that I think it behooves religious institutions to not have this purity test. Nobody asks the Pope daily, do you really have faith in everything that you're preaching? No, we don't ask. And so I don't think religious institutions should ask either. We don't need this purity test. And if religious institutions want to stop bleeding members, which we know is happening, that churches are closing, that religious institutions are losing members, if they want to welcome more people in, they have to not give that message that you need blind faith in order to participate. And I think actually that's a myth. I think I was wrong about that. That many religions, not all of them, but many institutions do welcome people even if they have doubts. That in fact, I think part of the reason I didn't feel that backlash that you described of how dare you productivity hack this without utter faith is because many of these religious leaders also struggle without having perfect faith. In fact, almost all of them told me that having doubts is part of the religion, that it increases your adherence, it makes you more thankful of the religion because you get all these benefits without having to let go of logic and what makes practical sense. And I think in summary, most of our problems in the world today, whether it's personal problems, interpersonal problems, geopolitical problems, come from the unfortunate coincidence that far too many people take their faith as a fact and they don't understand that what they hold as facts are nothing more than beliefs. And so if we can examine the difference between these three types of convictions, I think we would all be a lot better for it.

[B]

I wanted to get into this book through the personal. But at this point we have some ideas on the table which the power of belief, this beautiful idea coming from that line in the Bible about the Jews in Mount Sinai where action precedes comprehension. One does and then one hears. Lovely idea, very true. I think for athletes, for people with generalized anxiety disorder, that sometimes you don't need perfect self confidence before acting. In fact, sometimes it is the action itself that creates the self confidence.

[A]

Lovely ideas.

[B]

I think this is a good space to broaden the conversation to really get at your thesis. And I want to ask you to give two theses. I did this with a past book by the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. I asked him to tell me what is the explicit on the book jacket thesis of your book. And then tell me what is the subterranean thesis? What is the deeper idea that your book is scratching at even if that scratch isn't put in size 50 font on the back of the book. So how would you describe the above ground thesis of your book and what is the underground sneaky idea that you're trying to get at?

[A]

My God, Derek, you asked the best questions. This is a great question, very nicely asked. I would say the big idea is beliefs are tools, not truths. That's the big idea from practically speaking, I'm helping people do what has brought me so much peace in my life, which is to consider those beliefs that we hold. Ask ourselves, are they limiting or are they liberating? And there's a bit of a process to do that, and then keeping the beliefs that serve us and letting go of the ones that hurt us. That's the big idea. The deeper idea that people are very uncomfortable with when they learn about what the research literature shows us is that we don't see reality clearly. And this is very jarring for people because we all think that we perceive reality as it is, that we see it as it is, that we feel it as it is, that we have a grip on what reality actually looks like. And the truth is that's just not the case, that the brain can't see reality as it is because it's incapable that we don't see reality. We predict reality. Why? Because right now your brain is absorbing 11 million bits of information. Your brain is taking in 11 million bits. That's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. The light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, 11 million bits of information. However, your conscious attention can only process 50 bits of information. That's the equivalent of one sentence per second. So that means that you are only consciously aware of 0.000045% of reality entering your brain. How does the brain filter this out? How does it make sense of reality when there's just too much information to process? Well, it predicts reality. We all live in a simulation inside our own minds. And so we don't see reality as it is. We see reality through this tiny pinhole of attention. And so we don't see it clearly because our reality is filtered based on our beliefs. And we see this study after study after study shows how people can observe the same exact reality and yet see something completely different. There's an illusion called the coffer illusion. I can show you this image, and based on where you were born, you will either see squares or circles. If you're on a diet, you see food as larger. If you are afraid of heights, you see distances as further. We've all experienced watching a football game and the ref makes a call, and people on one side who back one team see the call as absolutely correct. People on the other team see the call as ridiculous, that the ref must be blind. Right? Think about in geopolitics, how no matter what happens, people who are committed, who have A belief that one side is right and one side is wrong. They see every event through that lens. We do not see reality clearly. We do not see people clearly. We see people as we are. We see others as we believe they are.

[B]

That's really beautiful, this idea that reality is manifold and our reality, our lived experience, is single fold. Right. I'll never forget that idea from your book that every moment presents a war in peace. Amount of gigabytes of information for our eyes and our ears and our smell to behold, and every moment we are getting one sentence of the book that's reality. It's a lovely idea that I think, taken seriously, is really a case for extraordinary patience with other people, with our partners, with our friends, with our enemies, maybe most especially with our enemies online, our political enemies. It's not to say that one should be like a nihilist about whether there's right and wrong in the world or liars and truth tellers in the world. But it's to say that to fully capture the scope of reality requires us to process and keep in our heads, typically much more than is available in a simple argument. And so we should practice epistemic humility. We should practice patience with people who come at ideas with different perspectives, because it's very likely that neither of our perspectives, even when they're combined, adds up to even more than a sliver of the full picture. I love that idea. As a subterranean thesis of your book, I want to propose another and get your ideas on it. I feel like the modern world is not lacking for transient and negative beliefs. There's a term by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Baumann, I believe is how you pronounce his name. And the idea is called liquid modernity. And it's this idea that the modern world is characterized by how ephemeral our beliefs are and our identities are when we're unmoored from ancient traditions. And if there were a single word, maybe a single technical word for a brief negative belief, maybe the right terminology is anxiety. Anxiety is a brief negative belief about the future. We've got plenty of that in the modern world. God knows what we're lacking. I think, and this might be directly related to the decline of religion, is durable, positive beliefs about ourselves and our future. Right? How to cultivate not just habits, not just hacks, but durable positive beliefs about ourselves and the world. And I wonder how that concept sits with you as something you were trying to scratch at.

[A]

This is exactly the intellectual habit that changed my life. It turns out that so much of Our suffering is self perpetuated, that we build these intellectual cages of suffering of our own device. And so whether it's personal problems, interpersonal problems, national geopolitical problems, they all have the same source that we are creating our suffering. It doesn't necessarily mean that we need to accept things as they are. It doesn't mean we have to agree with everyone. It's that we want to reduce our suffering. I think that's the idea here. And frankly, increase our motivation to continue to participate. Maybe I can. A lot of this is highfalutin neuroscience and psychology, but maybe it's useful if I tell a quick story of how this changed my life. Would that be all right?

[B]

Sure. Great. Do it.

[A]

Yeah. So this is a very personal story. It's always hard to tell, but I think it's illustrative because a lot of people have similar issues. But this is what happened with my mom a few years ago. So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday, and I wanted to do something very nice for her, so I wanted to buy her some flowers. The problem was that she was in central Florida, where I grew up, and I was in Singapore, where I was living at the time. And I went through a lot of trouble to try and get her those flowers. I had to find the florist with the best reviews in town, and I had to call them up and make sure they would deliver on time, that they wouldn't melt in the Florida heat and it wouldn't spoil. And so I went to bed at night at like one in the morning. And I went to bed and I said, you know what, Nir? You put in some good effort, and she's going to love the flowers and. But you're a good son. Good job. That's not what happened. I called her up the next day and I said, hey, mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers I sent? To which she says, yes, I did. Thank you. But just so you know, the flowers that you sent were half dead, and I wouldn't order from that florist again. To which I blurted out something like, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers. And Derek, that went over just about as well as you'd expect. Not so good. Now, my wife Julie was on the call as well, so she heard this, and she turns to me after the call and she says, nir, do you want to do a turnaround on this? To which I said, no, I do not want to do your touchy feely, hocus pocus mumbo jumbo. I need to vent. That's what we're told to do. That when someone disagrees with us, when someone hurts our feelings, when someone is judging us in a way that we don't appreciate. We need to speak our truth. We need to tell them what we think. We need to get it off our chest. It turns out at that point I knew enough about what the research says about venting, that venting is terrible, that venting does nothing but solidify this effigy of the person. We don't see people, we see our beliefs about people. So venting does nothing but reinforce. She always does that. That's so like her. There she goes again. So I had enough sense not to vent and instead I did what's called a turnaround. Now, a turnaround, this is a technique that comes from what's called inquiry based stress reduction. It's a technique that was developed by Byron Katie, but actually its roots go back 2000 the way back to Aristotle. And what this technique does is that it uses a few questions to help us see things from a different belief perspective. We're not changing our minds because the brain hates changing our minds. It's incredibly uncomfortable. The brain always wants to retreat into what it's done before, into passivity, into what's kept it safe. So it doesn't. It's not trying to change your mind, it's not trying to change your beliefs. It's trying to collect a portfolio of perspectives. And so I'm telling you what happened with my mom. But you can literally do this with any of your limiting beliefs. Whatever is causing you suffering in your life, you can do the same practice. So the first question is to ask yourself, is your belief true? My belief was my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, so question number one sounds absolutely ridiculous. Nobody likes the first question when they first hear it. Yeah, I just told you. Derek, come on. You agree with me, right? My mom was too judgmental and hard to please. Very obvious. Right? What a dumb question. Let's go on to the second question. Is it absolutely true? Now it sounds like the first question, but there's a little twist in it. Is it absolutely true 100% of the time? There are no exceptions. That must be the only possible interpretation. Well, I didn't have perfect certainty. It wasn't a fact, it was a belief. So there maybe, maybe I don't know what the other reason might be, but maybe there's another alternative explanation to how my mom was behaving. Maybe she wasn't being judgmental and Hard to please. Third question. Who am I when I hold onto that belief? So when I believe my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm short tempered. I become this 13 year old version of myself. I'm not really very nice. Okay, fourth question. Who would I be without that belief? If I had a magic wand and I could somehow extinguish that belief, I could, I could. I could make it just disappear. How would I feel? Who would I be? Well, if I didn't believe that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please, I'd be more patient. I'd feel lighter. I'd be more myself. Sounds great. So in just a few questions, I determined that this thing that I thought was a fact was not a fact. It's just a belief that it wasn't really serving me and that I might be way better off without it. So now it's time for the turnaround. Now, how do you do a turnaround? You ask yourself to consider whether the exact opposite of what you believe could also be true. And again, this is very uncomfortable. We don't like doing this. But of course, this is the only way to grow. This is the only way to see things from different perspectives. So what you're doing is collecting this portfolio of perspectives. You already have one. My existing belief was my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. And I was very sure that was a fact. So now I'm going to try. What could other potential beliefs look like? So what's the opposite of my mother's? Too judgmental and hard to please. My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? Well, she did thank me for the flowers. And then she was telling me a statement of fact. She was telling me that the flowers didn't look so great. Okay, does that necessarily mean it's a judgment? Maybe not. Right, so that could also be true. Okay, here's a third perspective. Another belief. Instead of my mother's too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? Well, to be honest, I had rehearsed exactly the script of effusive praise that I was expecting from my mother.

[B]

Oh, my gosh. Thank you. These flowers, they're the greatest thing I've ever seen in my life.

[A]

Yeah, and when I didn't get that, I lost it. So who was judging who? I was judging her response. That's what was really going on. Or at least it could be what was going on. Okay, here's a fourth Option I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. That one wasn't fun to consider at all, but turned out to be the most true. That when I had spent all this time and money on doing something nice and it didn't work out perfectly, I judged myself, I had messed up, I was incompetent, that I couldn't get nice flowers for my mother for her birthday. And so this is called a misattribution of emotion. I felt crummy about myself, and so the first person I could take it out on. You're gonna get it. That's exactly what I did. Now. Now I have four beliefs. I have a portfolio of perspectives. Which one is true?

[B]

Doesn't matter.

[A]

Which one is false? None of them. All of them. It doesn't matter. Exactly. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Which one serves me best? Well, I'll tell you, that first belief that I had that I was sure was a fact that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. There was only one way out. She had to change so I could be happy, so I could decrease my suffering. Now, I don't know if you know my mom, that's not going to happen. It generally does not happen with people that they're going to change so that you can feel better. With the other three beliefs, I could do something with that. And so I had greater agency now that I could change my belief. Now, it wasn't about holding myself to, well, what really happened and what's the fact here? None of these are facts. They're all beliefs because they're happening up here. They're not laws of physics. That my mom is judgmental and hard to please. It is all perception. So instead of a belief that hurt me, I picked a belief that served me.

[B]

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Like reaching bigger goals ahead of schedule, growing careers, and the bottom line? Workday is the next gen erp powered by AI that actually knows your business, anticipating your toughest challenges and how to better solve them, connecting more dots in your organization so your people have more time to connect to what they love. It's a new Workday. There's a broad principle here and a technical principle here that I think are worth retracing. The broad principle is, is that again, reality is war and peace and experience is a sentence. And so many different experiences can be in keeping with reality, not because some people are right or some people are wrong, but because reality is just so unbelievably capacious and enormous and different sentences can fit into that larger tome. On a more technical note, separate from the war and peace effect is I think a lot of people with experience in or history with clinical psychology are going to hear what you just said and feel like it's reminiscent of something called dbt, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is a famous idea from Linehan. And that idea for folks who don't know it or are interested in it, it's particularly useful, I believe, with folks with Borderline Personality Disorder, but it's broadly used in clinical practice is this idea of being comfortable sitting with two interpretations of reality that are in conflict with each other. And so one classic example I remember my wife told me, is you walk into a room, you're the dad. You walk into a room and your wife and daughter look at you and laugh. Your first reaction is they're laughing at me and I feel horrible about it. And I'm always judging this family even though I work so hard, this is incredibly unfair to work so hard for a family that doesn't respect me. And then you can imagine the self talk spiral that can follow from that. Interpretation number one. Interpretation number two. My wife and daughter were watching a movie and they were laughing at the movie as they turned to look at me. I don't need to know which interpretation is reality. Reality is just the set of things that happened. My wife and daughter were looking at a television, turned to me as I walked into a room and smiled and made a laughing sound. The interpretation can be flexible and sometimes, as you said, it's about one's own emotional insecurity that can cause the outlash. I don't need. I need to be emotionally secure enough to live with the fact that these two interpretations are plausible and not have to drill myself into the truth of one versus the other. Many things can be true and that ability to sit with opposite truths I think is really, really important for being able to make one's way through an emotional life. I want to flip the page from DBT because I want to make sure that we have time to talk about placebos, which is something I'm really interested in. And your book goes into in beautiful depth. I'm so fascinated by placebo effects at the medical level. At the philosophical level, I'm particularly interested in the idea that placebos work even when people know they're fake. How is that possible? What does it tell us that placebos work even when the patients have an inclination that the treatment is fake?

[A]

So Ted Kapchuk is a researcher at Harvard and he studies ibs, irritable bowel syndrome and he gave patients, he's been researching placebos for decades. He gave his patients who are suffering from IBS a bottle of pills and he told them this is a placebo. It says placebo on the bottle. In fact, you can buy on Amazon right now if you search placebo pills. You can buy these type of pills right now and you can see five star reviews of people saying how it provided fast acting relief. It's amazing. So Dr. Kaptchuk gives his patients this bottle that says placebos. He tells them the phrasing is important. He says, this is a placebo. It has no active ingredients. However, it has been shown to help some people with the symptoms of ibs. That was a critical statement. And it turns out that in this study those placebos were as Effective as the leading medication at relieving people's suffering. So much so that after the study, some of his patients, some of the people in the study, called Dr. Kaptchuk and said, Dr. Kaptchuk, I really need some more of those placebo pills. They were incredibly ineffective. How can I get some more? And so why is this happening? Well, it comes down to the power of anticipation that based on what the brain believes is going to happen. We talked about earlier how the brain sees reality through this prediction we call this predictive processing. It doesn't see what is. It sees what it expects to happen. And so not only is that with our. With our sense of perception of the outside world, it's. It's just as true based on what's happening inside of us, based on our interpretation of how we feel. So placebos are highly effective at some things, not at others. It's the difference between sickness and illness. Those are two separate things. Sickness is in the body. That's a physiological malady, right? A broken bone, cancer, that would be a sickness. Illness is in the mind. And you can be sick without being ill. For example, if you have cancer but you haven't, you don't have any symptoms, you have a sickness without having an illness. You can also have an illness without having a sickness. You can have the perception, for example, chronic pain. Chronic pain is defined as pain that has no physiological cause that we can find, but persists for more than six months. And what happens here is almost a placebo effect. In reverse, we call it a nocebo effect. That when I focus my attention on that painful signal and I anticipate it to increase and I begin losing agency around my ability to contain that pain, it amplifies and amplifies and amplifies until it becomes debilitating. And so it turns out that we can heal these illnesses, these suffering in the mind, just as much as actually we can create these maladies as well. Not that it's not real. I think some people hear that and say, well, are you saying that my pain is not real? No, no, no. All pain is real. All pain is real. And all pain is in the brain. Pain doesn't happen in your arm or you're in your back. That's not where pain happens. Pain happens based on the interpretation of signal, of data. Just like we talked about earlier. Those 11 million bits of information, that war and peace twice every second, it's just data. It's just information. Now, your brain's interpretation of that data is in fact what creates suffering. So this has massive implications if you think about not only to medical science. We know that about 80% of healthcare spending is not spent on sickness, it's spent on illness. It's spent on curing the symptoms of those maladies. So one is that we way underutilize, I think, the placebo effect today, that we should all be using placebos in one way or the other. And many of us do. I think we should do more of that. And also when it comes to our everyday pain points. Right. This project is too difficult. This relationship is awful. I can't do this. Exercise is hard. I'm too late. There's no time. All of these limiting beliefs, they give us this temporary satisfaction, but create long term suffering and they decrease our motivation to persist long enough to fix the actual problem. And so it all comes back to pain management.

[B]

Yeah. What are the limiting factors on the power of placebo? Because I can imagine those limiting factors working in at least two directions. One is that, and I believe you were just starting to circle this, placebos have been found to be effective when there's an interplay between expectation, especially expectation of pain and physical sensation. But nobody, nobody claims that there's a placebo that can fix a torn ACL or pancreatic cancer or these things that you in your definition call sickness as opposed to illness. I don't know that I would use the same distinction, but I definitely take that there is a distinction. So I'm interested in your understanding from the literature of the limiting factor in terms of where placebo has been found to work versus never work. And then the second thing I'd love you to clarify is obviously there are people with chronic pain who have been given placebos who still have chronic pain. There's people with IBS who have been given placebos or even drugs that pass phase through clinical trials that still have IBS or chronic pain. Do you have a sense of the limiting factor in terms of where placebos work versus don't work and whom they seem to work for versus not for?

[A]

Yeah. So placebos are not effective for healing sickness. They don't cure cancer, they don't fix a broken arm. That's not how placebos work. Placebos do affect the perception of that signal. So placebos are highly effective for insomnia. Placebos are highly effective for adhd, for anxiety disorder, for all kinds of conditions where the what you're dealing with is an illness, not a sickness. It's not a physical break of some kind. It's not some kind of physical damage. It's the perception, it's the signal of that damage. So that's what placebos can and can't do. And anybody tells you that placebos can magically become your biology, that's not necessarily the case at all. And then in terms of who is susceptible to placebo, we're all susceptible to varying degrees. There are some differences between, you know, some people seem to be more. More active. Active. They can, they feel more of a change than others from placebos, but we're not exactly sure why. That's still an open debate in the scientific literature on who responds and who doesn't. The good news is that many of these placebos, they don't actually require any kind of physical intervention. There's all kinds of beliefs that we can adopt that don't even require us to necessarily take a pill or take a shot. Not that we shouldn't. I mean, I become much, you know, my family, my wife is Chinese background and her family has been into herbal Chinese medicine as long as I've known them. And I would always kind of make fun of it. Well, you know, there wasn't a double blind control study. You know, the evidence doesn't show very much. You know, these studies are not well run and I've completely stopped that because beliefs are tools, not truths. And so it's clear to me that there is a huge placebo effect to these treatments. And who am I to say that the placebo effect is not worth using? It's great. Why not? If it's inexpensive, if it doesn't cause any long term negative health effects, sure, why not?

[B]

I want to take the concept of placebo and port it a little bit into the realm of performance. So one could describe, I suppose, anxiety or self doubt as a kind of, using your terminology, illness, an illness of self derogation, an illness of self doubt. And in that same way, a mantra could serve as a kind of placebo, right? There's no biological molecule that lives inside of a mantra that's doing something to our GI system or our neurology. It's almost like a kind of placebo effect that a mantra that produces self confidence can cure, so to speak, the illness of self doubt. Running with that idea that there's this little underground river connecting the ideas of self doubt and placebo effects. How in your research and your studies have you found that self confidence can be learned? Like if there's someone listening to this podcast who has been dealing recently with self doubt, what can you tell them in terms of beginning to claw their way out of that cave into the light of self confidence.

[A]

So I think it's important to realize what motivation is. When we lose confidence, when we lose motivation, what are we talking about? Motivation. I think I misunderstood what motivation really is about. I thought motivation is if I want this thing, then I'll do this behavior, right? So if I want the benefit, I'll do the action. That's kind of the classic economic view of how motivation works. And why is motivation so important? As a side note, because it turns out that's the greatest determinant of success. That it's not intelligence per se, has a factor. It's not everything. It's not necessarily even resources. I mean, of course has an effect, but that's not the defining trait. It's not skills per se, because skills can be learned. It's persistence. That's really what it is, is that successful people are losers. What do I mean by that? They lose more. They lose more often. If you talk to successful people, they'll tell you all the times that they failed. Whereas the unsuccessful people, the people who didn't meet their goals, are the people who said, yeah, I tried it, it didn't work and they never try again. So persistence is the key factor. In order to persist, we need motivation. And so how do we persist? How do we unlock what's in us? Maybe I can share, I think a study that really illustrates the point. The study that Curt Richter did in the 1950s and Curt Richter had a

[B]

very brutal study for folks out there who have a warm spot for little rodents. Maybe fast forward for the next 90 seconds to get beyond their suffering. But yeah, continue with director study.

[A]

But the rats in the study are dead already. So we should just learn from them. So you can't do this kind of study anymore. But it's really worth noting because I think it really reveals something about how the mind works. So 1950s Kurt Richter has a very simple question. How long can a rat swim in water? So he takes a rat, puts him in a cylinder of water, and he stands there with a stopwatch and counts down how long the rat can survive swimming in the cylinder of water. Turns out 15 minutes. At about 15 minutes, the rat doesn't seem exhausted. The rat just kind of gives up and sinks under the water and dies. Now he wants to has another question. Can he increase how long the rat is swimming for? So he takes another group of wild rats. He puts a rat in one of these cylinders. At the 15 minute mark, when the rat is starting to struggle, he reaches in, takes out the rat. Dries it off, lets it catch its breath and then plunk back inside the cylinder it goes. And this time he wants to see how much longer the rat can swim for. And he does this a few times, this intervention. And when I went, you, you read the book already, so you know the end result of the study. But when I asked most people, hey, how much longer do you think the rat could swim for? For they say, oh, maybe double, maybe went from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. Or some people say, no, maybe it went from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, which would be amazing. That would be remarkable. If you had some kind of intervention that could increase your motivation, increase your persistence four times longer. That would be amazing, right? Running a marathon for four times longer or sticking with that project four times longer, that's life changing. But that's not what happened. What happened was that the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. 60 hours of non stop swimming. Now what changed? Their bodies hasn't, hadn't changed. Same rat bodies, the environment hadn't changed. It was the same exact cylinder experiment. What changed? We can't ask the rats, of course, but the only other factor is something changed in their minds. Some switch was flipped and now suddenly, what was only where they were only capable of 15 minutes of persistence became 60 hours. And this is what happens to us all the time. So to your question of, you know, when I lose motivation, when I want to give up, the big lesson for me was that we limit ourselves far too soon. I mean, we have certain limitations. Of course, eventually the rats did were exhausted at 60 hours, but they were quitting at 15 minutes. Why? Because their brain wanted to protect them in a way, ironically, but that led to certain death. And we hear this all the time that I can't do this, it's too late, there's no time, I'm no good at this, this hurts, what's the point? These are all limiting beliefs that our brain is telling us is whispering into our ears so that it's trying to protect us based on what we've experienced in the past. Again, the brain predicts reality, doesn't experience it as it is. So based on what served you in the past, that's what your brain is trying to tell you to do in the future. Which means that this is in your control, that it's just a perception problem, that the problems are caused by your beliefs that the rats always had the 60 hours within them. You currently have capabilities that you're not even aware of. Right. For example, for you, I think about you all the time, Derek. The amount of writing that you're able to do, the amount of your persistence in your profession, of how you can, week after week, come up with banger ideas that illuminate the world. For me, I mean, literally, this isn't false praise. I don't tell this to anybody else. That's amazing. Like, you're such an inspiration that you can do it. And as amazing as you are as an individual, I bet a lot of people could do it, but they don't. I don't because I don't have that persistence yet. I don't believe I could do it. Now. I need to teach myself how to do that, and I want to. Right. But these type of experiments, when we see that the rats had this potential in them, that you have the potential in you, means that we all, to some degree, by adjusting our beliefs, can unlock our hidden potential.

[B]

It's always dangerous to expand a study of animals to a study of humans. My friends in the pharmaceutical industry know all too well that sometimes the trial that works in the mouse doesn't necessarily work in the human. But I want this next question is assuming that the Richter study on rats reveals a mammalian truth that extends to Homo sapiens, I think it's important to say that the rats did not independently choose to take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in swimming harder. Instead, reality experience taught them that if they swim and swim and swim, they might be saved. And I do think there's a profound idea here, which is that our beliefs don't simply arise in us because we choose to change them. Our beliefs, in many cases, are shaped by our experience of the world and by our experience of other people's beliefs.

[A]

Right?

[B]

To be around people who are negative is going to increase one's own feelings of negativity. To be around people who are capitalists or Marxists is very likely to increase one's own faith in the truth of capitalism versus Marxism. I would love you to talk about the degree to which beliefs, and in particular here, negative beliefs, are contagious. That is drawn from the outside world. How, how in your research have you found that beliefs, again, specifically negative beliefs, can become as contagious as a disease.

[A]

So there was a. An amazing incidence in Portugal where there was this one night where thousands of teenage girls started showing up in emergency rooms. All. All one night around the same time, all of them started flooding into emergency rooms, and nobody knew why. They thought maybe there was some kind of contamination at some kind of food facility or some kind of Viral disease. Nobody knew what was going on. Turns out that these girls had watched a teen soap opera where there was a character on the show who came down with some kind of stomach illness. And it was this kind of mass hysteria that occurred. And we see this all the time, that every few years there's some kind of mass hysteria where people become infected with these thoughts that become their biology in some way that it feels physically true. Now if that can happen physiologically, if we can create these symptoms in our bodies that take people to the hospital, it absolutely happens in culture as well. I see this when I travel all over the world that you find that some cultures have what's called a tall poppy syndrome, where they perpetuate this idea that, you know, don't get too big for your britches. I see this a lot that, you know, don't stand out too much, don't try too hard, you're just going to fail, you're going to embarrass us. Whereas in other cultures, I think particularly one thing we do amazingly well in America is that we not only celebrate success, we also celebrate failure. That, you know, when I was lived in Silicon Valley and I had a startup that didn't work, hey, I still had VCs lining up to give me more money because they said, okay, great, you've learned from that experience, that's terrific, you'll do better the next time. That would be an example of how we can have these culture wide beliefs that perpetuate what we're able to try. I think with your work around abundance, by believing what is possible, by imagining a possible future. This is how we get it done. We can't do what we can't see, what we can't imagine. And so having those beliefs that the world could be better, that we could lead to an abundant future, it's not just about self help tricks and tips. It really is about the future of society.

[B]

Last question. There's an interesting tension between what you've just described, right? Mass hysteria or mass movement, which is almost like what maybe Hegel would have called a geist, right? A zeitgeist, a feeling that permeates a culture that doesn't live at the level of the individual, but rather almost dwells at the level of mass, of group of nations. There's an interesting distinction between that idea and the first idea we talked about, which is individual faith. And I wonder as a last word, how you would caution people to not become mere chips off the block of a prevailing wisdom, a prevailing belief, right? Because it seems like an important tool, an important skill that your book is trying to teach is that yes, whether it's negativity or abundance or fear or optimism, there can be pervasive ideas in a culture that we might individually want to resist. And so I wonder how you think about that challenge of resistance, how to retain for ourselves a set of beliefs that fit us even when they don't seem at that moment to fit the larger culture.

[A]

I think it's a terrific question. I think the answer to that is we have to fight the narrative that we don't have agency. I think there's a study done that kind of became gospel in the psychology community. It was called Learned Helplessness. And this was a study done by Seligman and Meyer. Everybody knew the story of learned helplessness. It kind of explained why generational poverty exists, that people kind of learn over time that there's no use in trying. They kind of learn to be helpless. Unfortunately, even though this was kind of widely known and a lot of people outside the psychology community have heard about learned Helplessness, what many people don't know is that that exact research a few years ago was completely overturned. Not only did the researchers find that the results were flawed, but that in fact their conclusion was 180 degrees the opposite of learned helplessness. That helplessness is our default state. If you think about a baby is born completely helpless. A baby doesn't learn helpless. It is helpless when it's first born. It has to learn agency.

[B]

It has to learn. As a father of a three month old, I can definitely test that to the degree to which three months old, they're unbelievably efficient. Helpless.

[A]

Yes, exactly. You got it. And so I think this has profound implications because it tells us that our default state is helplessness. So that whispering voice telling us about our limitations, that culture that perpetuates, do less. It's not going to work. You've got no control. The things are controlling you. This leads us to what we call an external locus of control. An external locus of control is when you believe that events happen to you based on outside circumstances. Finances versus an internal locus of control says that things that happen to me are because I do them. Now here's the kicker. We know that people with an internal locus of control do better in almost every conceivable metric. They make more money, they have more friends, they contribute more to the community. All the good things seem to happen to people with an internal locus of control. Now what's really surprising is that even for the people who have Every right to say that I'm downtrodden, that I'm discriminated against, that I'm at the bottom of the socioeconomic strata. All those things could be true. Even for those people. Believing you have an internal locus of control still helps you do better. That's profound. Knowing that society and your default even more important than what society tells you. Of course, there's lots of interest that want to tell you that you're powerless. The media feeds you fear because fear sells evolutionarily. Nice things are good, bad things can kill you. So we have this negativity bias. The media doesn't tell us what we need to know. The media tells us what we're entertained by, what's enticing, what captures our attention, what scares us. That's why we keep tuning in. So being aware of our own cognitive bias, that we all have these negativity bias, that we all have this penchant for retreat into passivity and actively fighting it wherever we see it to increase our sense of agency, to ask ourselves what is in my control in this situation? What can I handle and what is outside of my control? And I'm not going to worry about the stuff that I can't control. I'm going to focus on what zone of influence can I make a difference in? How can I help my family, my community, my people I see every day versus can I help with some war that's thousands of miles away and I can't do anything about it?

[B]

I want to close by returning to a question that you posed. A question about being comfortable living with multiple things being true about your experience. And that question was something like who would I be if X was true? And this is something, this is a question that when I have a high level of control over my inner weather, I really enjoy asking myself, what would I do today? Who would I be today if I was productive? Who would I be today if I was brave? Who would I be today if I was widely understood to be the greatest father on this block? Maybe if you're an athlete. Who would I be, what would I be if I was the most self confident basketball player at this school? I like this idea of play acting, not because it's false, but in a way because it almost recognizes the deepest truth that you're grasping at that that reality is so big, that our potential is so big and we sometimes are only drawing this, like this little narrow wood in the large forest in terms of our experience. And it's fun sometimes and productive sometimes to ask oneself to play act as what if I were a self confident person? And I guess I just want to leave people with that because I think it's a fun and incredibly simple exercise. And you can just ask yourself when you're feeling enormous amounts of self doubt, when in my personal business, when I feel like I'm getting a ton of criticism for my work or my work isn't catching the audience that I wish it were, or even I'm disappointed at myself on how good my questions were for a certain podcast or how good a certain podcast was. This is not a direct comment on this particular show, of course, but then I think, all right, what would I do if I had perfect self confidence that the next podcast would be perfect? What would I do in the next five minutes? What would I do in the next two days? And I find that that question is useful not because it turns me into somebody else, but just because it leads to action. And that, I think is one of the most profound ideas from your book, is this idea that action precedes comprehension. If we want to understand Judaism, just go to synagogue. If you want to be a self confident person, act as if you are. If you want to be a good person, just imagine what would a good person do? Act as if you have that kind of Aristotelian courage. And so I really appreciate this book. I really appreciate the ideas that it left with me and especially this idea that this beautiful idea that I'm glad to hear was first articulated in Exodus, that comprehension, hearing can follow action, doing. It's a lovely idea and it's a lovely book. So near. Ayal, thank you very, very much for the show.

[A]

My pleasure. Thank you, Derek.