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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations,
- [00:22]
Nir Eyal
from unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena. From comedy gold to relationship fails. Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime. Because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [00:48]
Mike Pesca
It's Tuesday, March 10, 2026. From peach fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. Now to engage in some straight talk. You got Hormuz, got the Dardanelles, Magellan straight to Magellan, Hormuz. A lot of Hormuz straight to Hormuz. Talk in the world on our minds in the Kalshee betting markets. Might have taken some action on that. Don't feel good about that. Just feel insightful. But the straits, the great straits. What are the great straits? Hormuz, Love Hormuz. Gibraltar. Can't talk straights without talking Gibraltar. Underrated straight. Bob El Mandeb. That's the one in Djibouti, right? Between Djibouti and Yemen. Bob El Mande. Babel's your uncle. Little bit, you know. Not everyone knows Bob El Mandeb. Kind of an inside straight. Then you got the Bosphorus. See, a lot of people, they focus on the Dardanelles. It's got the. The in front of it. Makes seem important. The Hague, the Bronx, the Dardanelles. Very narrow point, 75 miles at its narrowest. But you get through the Dardanelles, then you're in the Sea of Marmara. Who doesn't love being there? You got to get through the Bosphorus to get into the Black Sea. So starting from the Mediterranean, let's say you're in Crete, let's say you're in Cyprus. Get over the Dardanelles. A lot of fighting, Gallipoli, World War I, Sea of Marmara, Bosporus. And not. It's not as hard to get into, like I said, a more of a porous strait. The other great straits, the great straits, Malacca. Why doesn't. I mean, I'm glad we're not invading or bombing Malaysia, but if we were, we would have Trump saying Malacca. Other great straits. Robert reed. They thought, Mr. Brady, not the case. All right, there's been straight talk. All the great straits. We got the great straits out there. I hope you've got your bearing. Straight pun. That's straight pun, straight fire, straight talk. Hormuz oil, very high and of course very Malacca. On the show today, Near Ayal. I'm so, you know, I hope he doesn't listen because that was just silliness. Pure silliness. And near is a very smart guy. His new book is called Beyond Belief. The Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. It works. I read the book. There's a lot about is it better to let your emotions out or control them? Control them. The Stoics, they win. A lot of RCT is in there. Random control trials. And he in his own way engages in straight talk. Just not Bosphorus, Hormuz or Malacca. Near Ayal up next. Winter Job sites do not mess around and March is winter and the snow is on the ground here in the Northeast. Freezing mornings, wet conditions. And the wind. Oh, the wind. So that's why I wear True Work whenever I'm out shoveling or doing what I need to do in these terrible conditions. Founded by a trade professional who is done with soaking wet heavy gear slowing them down, True Work set out to make workwear that keeps pros comfortable. And they succeeded. And they keep me a decidedly non pro. But a guy who has to shovel a lot this winter keeps me comfortable too. So you know brands like Carhartt and Dickies. They are cotton based gear that gets heavy when wet, not True Work. Advanced performance fabrics that really work. Moisture Wicking. Oh the wicking. Wind resistant and insulated. Every piece is tested on real job sites. Don't let cheap gear slow you down this winter. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. Get 15% off your first order at True Work with the code. The gist that's T R U E W E-R K.com I am a big user of Claude, the AI tool that goes the extra mile. The next step. I've used Claude to build out a system that suggests funny, quirky, but not just obvious stories. For the Gist list. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. So just a couple of deep research assignments I gave Claude. I wanted it to tell me Gina Gershon's top grossing movies as adjusted for inflation, but also set against the cost of production. Production. So this is not something that the IMDb will get you. This is something that is not maybe that hard but it really could take me an hour and a half to do. It took it 10 seconds. And the answer by the way is face off by far and away $287 million not as non inflation adjusted. Ready to tackle bigger problems. Get started with Claude today at claude.AI/the gist. That's Claude AI/the gist. And check out Claude Pro which includes access to all of the features mentioned in Today's episode. Claude AI/the gist Ed can be really distressful. All these are distressful. It's right there in the word dysfunction. But with the E it's especially so. But I want you to know that ED is more common than you think and simpler to treat than you think. Through hims you can connect online with a licensed provider to access personalized treatment options discreetly and on your terms. It's not a one size fits all care that forgets you in the waiting room. It's your health with real medical providers making sure you get what you need to get results. ED treatment from hims offering options ranging from personalized products to trusted generics that cost 95% less then brand names. To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss and more, visit hims.com the gist that's hims.com the gist for your free online visit hims.com the gist Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details. Restrictions, restrictions and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Nir Eyal is a writer, a researcher, a man with insight. His new book is called Beyond Belief. Change your mind, change your life. The science backed way to stop limiting yourself and achieve extraordinary results. He throws around some knowledge, he throws around some personal anecdotes, and right around the middle of the book he throws some ass. And we'll get to all of it near. Welcome to the gist.
- [07:53]
Nir Eyal
Thanks so much Mike. Great to be here.
- [07:54]
Mike Pesca
Now when one throws ass, is that like throwing pottery? Am I not, Am I not up on all the idioms around the throwing of ass?
- [08:02]
Nir Eyal
Well, you definitely don't want to get in the way when someone is throwing ass, I'll tell you that right now.
- [08:06]
Mike Pesca
That's right. Could you throw your ass out?
- [08:09]
Nir Eyal
You could. Actually, you definitely can. And it turns out with this story that I don't know if you want me to tell the whole story about throwing ass. Let's jump in.
- [08:18]
Mike Pesca
Let's jump in. Let's jump in ass first.
- [08:20]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, you can throw your in and you can throw your ass out.
- [08:23]
Mike Pesca
It's true. So who was the, who is the injured ass person who through throwing ass solved her injury?
- [08:30]
Nir Eyal
Yeah. So this was a woman who is part of a singing duo called Sophie Tucker and they are an award winning duo. Kind of techno beats, they're a lot of fun to listen to. Check them out if you get a chance. Sophie Tucker and the, the, the lead singer of this group had this debilitating back pain and she did everything she could possibly do. She got the injection, she got the mri, she got the X rays, she did all the treatments, all the drugs she could find and medically prescribed medications. I don't know what else she did, but it would not take care of this back pain. And it turned into a chronic issue. And a chronic issue we defined as something that is causing pain six months after finding any kind of actual damage. And it turns out that Sophie discovered this technique called pain reprocessing therapy. Prt. And PRT is kind of the antithesis of what we typically tell people to do when they experience chronic pain. We tell them to ice it and to have a heat pack and to not move it and to isolate and to whatever you do, don't make it hurt again. And what the community, the pain treatment community is moving towards is kind of the exact opposite of what we used to tell people. Now we don't tell people to do those things. If we think it's chronic neuroplastic pain versus actual physical pain, where it's actual damage that we can identify. Turns out that the reason that she was having this chronic pain is the source of what we believe is all chronic pain. It's this fear, pain, fear cycle that the more we fear that we're going to be in pain, the more attention, hyper vigilant the brain becomes towards those signals. And so it ramps up the pain signal to 11. And now we're feeling pain all the time. And so when Sophie learned about this method of pain reprocessing therapy, she decided to follow it by doing what this method professes, which is to first tell yourself you're safe, you can break the pain, fear, pain cycle by realizing, wait a minute, that pain does not necessarily equate to damage, that those things can be separate, you can have pain without actually having damage in the body, that it could be a neuroplastic response. And so she. She comes across this dance move when one of her dancers tells her, hey, throw some ass. Try, let's have some fun. And at first she's very defensive. So, no, I can't do that. I'm going to throw out my back. It's going to be terrible. And then she starts doing the movement. And the more she does the movement, the more she has fun with it, the more she taught her brain that she's safe and she stopped being afraid of it. And this is how she cured her chronic pain in just a few months.
- [11:00]
Mike Pesca
Right. So these are the important things that exemplify so much of what you write about in the book. It's not just about the power of belief. You can't believe your way through everything in the book. After where these doubts started accruing in my head, you had a good chapter about beliefs in accomplishment that you don't try hard for or just sort of misplaced beliefs, unfalsifiable beliefs, beliefs. There is a large category of belief that there is a large category of phenomenon that can't be cured by belief. If Sophie had torn her labrum, if she had done something that shows up in an mri, she's not going to believe her way through it. But there is the pain that maybe we're doing a bit of the work by calling it phantom pain. Probably is always that question, well, is it really phantom pain? Might it be something out there that one more test reveals? But if it is phantom pain, we could attack it with the cycle. But what about that? That must be a debilitating thing for people who haven't heard about this, that if they research hard enough and every. I'm sure one out of a thousand people after the 10th test do pick up what the actual underlying issue is. But what is, what are your recommendations for when and how people say I'm going to regard as phantom pain, even when we're not talking about literal pain, just an obstacle in their life.
- [12:18]
Nir Eyal
Well, if it's neuroplastic pain, which is pain that is very different from physical caused pain because it turns out, you know, all pain is real. So this is the most important thing people can hear. It's not that anybody's saying your pain is not real. All pain is real, all pain is real and all pain is in the brain.
- [12:37]
Mike Pesca
Let me interrupt. Not like real to you, but we. We map your brain and we put you in an MRI machine and your pain sensors are lighting up. So not just subjective, that's actually experience.
- [12:48]
Nir Eyal
Nobody is faking it. Nobody is you know, that's not the issue here. Pain is real. It's just that pain doesn't necessarily mean damage. And we know that when we accentuate fear, it's exactly because of what you said. Well, it might be a physical cause, it might be something that's actually causing physical damage. This is where the brain becomes hypervigilant. It's because the brain is looking for, hey, what caused me that pain before? Let me pay attention to it. Through the power of belief. We become so fixated on it through the first power, which is attention. The second power of belief is anticipation that when we expect it to hurt, it does. And then the third power of belief, agency. And so what is very typical of a way to diagnose neuroplastic pain, as opposed to physical pain, physically caused pain, is that neuroplastic pain is very receptive to, to outside factors. When you're stressed, do you hurt more? Right, if you get a broken arm, if you're having a stress day, that doesn't necessarily mean your arm's going to hurt more, just if you actually have a broken arm. But with neuroplastic pain, when we think about fibromyalgia, when we think about insomnia, when we think about all kinds of other symptoms that come from neuroplastic pain, turns out that these symptoms are highly receptive to, oh, you know what, I'm having a bad day. And therefore there's this cascade that's caused by this fear, pain, fear loop. So it's not that pain isn't real, it's just that there's a big difference between sickness and illness. People think those are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Sickness is in the body. Illness is in the mind. And it turns out that about 80% of our health care expenses today, 80% are spent treating illness. The symptoms of physiological pain, not the actual damage itself.
- [14:33]
Mike Pesca
The book is very much about pain, actual pain, but pain that is an analogy. Pain as obstacles, pain as ruts that you can't get out of. Now, one of the ways that we could you say that we could rewrite rumination, which is basically our enemy, is to prove yourself wrong. Beliefs are opinions that are open to revision in the face of new evidence. One tactic is to deliberately seek evidence that weakens your limiting beliefs. So this is an example was a reality log. This reminds me of something you wrote about in your last book. But tell us about that and then I'll link it to some other things you've studied.
- [15:11]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, so let's let's back up a second. To understand what is the difference between a belief, a fact, and faith? Because we tend to use those terms interchangeably. But there's a big, big difference, and it's very important. So a fact is an objective truth, okay? The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That's true whether you believe it or not. Sorry, flat Earthers. It's just a fact, okay? On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens in the afterlife? God rewards the righteous. These are our elements of faith, right? We don't require evidence for these things to believe in them. Now, a belief is something different. A belief is a strongly held conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. Okay? A strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. So I think most of our problems today, and this is really the big idea of the book, is that most of our problems today, whether it's personal problems, interpersonal problems, societal problems, political problems, stem from the fact that far too many of us think that our faith is a fact and we misinterpret facts as beliefs. Because what makes beliefs so powerful is that they are open to revision. We can choose our beliefs. We should hold them lightly because they are revisible based on new evidence. But far too many of us, like I used to do with, we carry them around just because we've always had them, even when they don't serve us. So the big aha for me, what I realized by taking six years to dive into the research behind the psychology of beliefs is that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. And this affects every facet of our life, from our relationships to our health. We know that people who have positive views on aging live seven and a half years longer than people who have negative views of aging. That's incredible. That's more than the effect of smoking. That's more than the effect of a healthy diet. That's more than the effect of exercising. We talk about those things all the time. We don't talk about the amazing power of beliefs to expand our lifespan. So there's all these things we talked about, pain. It's just phenomenal. All the things that our beliefs can do for us. One of them is our mental health. And we know that. You mentioned ruminating. We know that rumination is one of the most damaging things we can do for our mental health. To constantly chew on these, that we've been facing these things that we messed up on. Why did I say that? Why did she do that to me? Why? You know, why, why, why? Why does this always happen to me? Turns out this is an example. These ruminating thoughts of what we call a limiting belief. There are two kinds of these beliefs. A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation and increases suffering. A liberating belief supplies motivation and decreases suffering. And so when we ruminate on these limiting beliefs and the, the sad fact is they're hidden to us, we don't even realize that they're limiting us. And everybody's got these limiting beliefs. The more we ruminate on these limiting beliefs, the more we see them as reality. Yeah, because the brain doesn't see objective reality. The brain creates reality based on the beliefs we reinforce. And so there's some tactics we can use to get rid of rumination.
- [18:14]
Mike Pesca
Right. So tell me about this one. The rumination log.
- [18:17]
Nir Eyal
Yeah. So one thing we can do so we know. So the first power of belief is the power to change what we see. Not metaphorically, but actually change what we see. And so if you are looking for confirmation that this always happens to me, just my luck. Why does she always do that? That's so like her. Whatever the case might be, you're going to see more of it. So one of the ways we break that is to provide us with counter evidence. So, for example, when I started public speaking, I was super nervous. Now it's my profession, but I was always incredibly nervous. And I would think, oh, you know, I messed up. Why did I say that? I should have said I wasn't thinking about the 99% of the talk that I did well. No, I was thinking about the 1% of my talk that I didn't do well.
- [18:58]
Unidentified Guest or Contributor
Right.
- [18:58]
Nir Eyal
That's what I was ruminating on. And it was becoming, it was making me worse because I was always thinking about how I had screwed up. Well, when you have a rumination log, when you actually sit down and put down, okay, here's the things I did well, now I'm going to count the times I didn't do so well, you start to give yourself these facts that start informing your beliefs because you're gaining new evidence. Another very, very effective technique. And this is going to sound wild, I didn't believe it at first when I first heard. This technique is to schedule time to worry, to actually schedule time in your calendar. This has been shown to be a very effective technique to fight rumination.
- [19:33]
Mike Pesca
Why?
- [19:33]
Nir Eyal
For two reasons. Number one, it tells the brain that you don't have to think about this right now. Part of the reason we ruminate about mistakes is because if I don't think about it right now, when am I gonna think about it?
- [19:43]
Mike Pesca
Right. The meta. Rumination about rumination. Yes, exactly, exactly.
- [19:47]
Nir Eyal
That's exactly right. Whereas if you say to yourself, look, I have time to worry about this, it's literally on my calendar, seven o', clock, I'm going to sit down with a piece of paper, that's when I'm going to start worrying about this problem. So you write down the problem in the moment. You have a time in your calendar, you plan that time to worry when you come back to it. Here's the second magical part. Nine times out of ten, that thing that you thought was so important and you were chewing on, you can't stop thinking about is so worrisome when you make time to worry about it. What was I worried about again? Oh, now it's been crushed under the weight of some other priority and it doesn't even matter.
- [20:18]
Mike Pesca
Right, right. Or it was being motivated by a feeling of anxiety rather than the truth, the fact of anxiety. And this is the reason that I brought it up and said it reminded me of something else you did in your book about unlocking focus and your websites about that you have the distraction tracker. And I think it's very interesting that so many of your tools are just actually get an assessment of what is actually literally going on. Because even though here you are as the belief guru, what is actually literally just believe the power of positive thinking. So much comes down to no. Get an actual factual basis. And that is usually better to go off of than, you know, our beliefs.
- [21:02]
Nir Eyal
Yeah. And I would argue actually that a lot of this positive thinking is more delusional than the negative thinking that I have a big problem with positive thinking. I think there's a real negative side to positive thinking because what we end up doing when we just think positive or blind optimism or manifesting or vision boarding. And this has been backed by wonderful research. Gabrielle Oltigen did a beautiful study where she actually connected people to blood pressure monitors as they were thinking positive thoughts, as they were thinking about their vision boards or manifesting a reality that they wanted to see.
- [21:40]
Unidentified Guest or Contributor
Right.
- [21:41]
Nir Eyal
I envision myself with six pack abs and a Lamborghini and a beautiful relationship, et cetera. Right. Visioning all those things.
- [21:48]
Mike Pesca
I would get it wrong and I'd envision the Lamborghini having the ads abs. It'd be like a weird AI hallucination. But go on, go on.
- [21:56]
Nir Eyal
So what she found was that those people who were visioning their future success Right. This is what people are taught to do. When they manifest, their blood pressure actually lowered. As they were doing this, they became more relaxed. And when she followed up with them, they became less likely to actually do the things that they said they were gonna do. Why?
- [22:17]
Mike Pesca
They were more brain. They were. What's that? They were more blase. They had lost their get up and down.
- [22:22]
Nir Eyal
Exactly. They were less motivated. They didn't have that fire in the belly because the theory is they were teaching their brain that they already got what they wanted. They already got the positive feelings.
- [22:32]
Mike Pesca
What about Stephen Curry? Great athletes who really do visualize making the shots so often that when he's in this situation, he says to himself, I've been there already.
- [22:40]
Nir Eyal
Bingo. You hit it exactly the nail on the head. What does Steph Curry visualize? Does he visualize the trophy? No, what he visualizes is the action is the difficult part. So this is what athletes do. They visualize if I'm on offense and defense is coming at me, what am I going to do? How am I going to feel? How am I going to react? That's not what manifesting is. Manifesting is what do I want? What's the end result? So the right way to do this is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting involves thinking about the barriers in your way and what you will do when you feel uncomfortable. So when I was, you know, I used to be clinically obese. And one of the ways I got into shape, today I'm 48, I'm in the best shape of my life. But for a huge chunk of my life, I was. I wasn't just overweight, I was actually clinically obese. What I started doing was visualizing what am I going to do next time at a dinner party and someone offers me another drink or a piece of chocolate cake, I'm going to feel crappy. It's going to be uncomfortable, but how am I going to deal with that? I'm going to face that discomfort, which turns out to be the unlock for so many of our troubles in life, is dealing with that discomfort.
- [23:47]
Mike Pesca
I'm going to visualize Ozempic or visualize a GLP 1. Visualize pharmacy to get the Ozempic right. Right. Okay, so a moment ago you talked about confirmation bias and how that definitely gets in the way of accomplishment. Yet in another part of your book, there was the anecdote, the extended story about the woman who was a jogger in Philadelphia and she noticed a homeless man and she actually sold a company, an athletic company, for $100 million. And she employed the homeless, maybe we say the unhoused now. And there were. This is what I wanted to get to about that story. There were many parts along the way, many examples of things not working out for her vision of incorporating the homeless into the workforce of her company. They would sometimes steal, they would sometimes not show up. Many of the early iterations of this idea didn't fail. And this is a story of perseverance. How do we know? How should she know that she wasn't engaged in a confirmation bias of I'm not going to taken all the evidence of this guy was stealing from me and this guy didn't have the skills and this guy was late. How should she know that she wasn't giving herself an accurate, falsifiable assessment and not just engaging in some dream world that was marked by confirmation bias?
- [25:10]
Nir Eyal
I know this is what I kept saying to myself as I was writing this book was, am I telling people to gaslight themselves? Like, am I telling people, you know, beliefs are tools, not truths. You better just lie to yourself. Like, what am I telling you to
- [25:21]
Mike Pesca
lie to themselves or one edict in the beginning, Beliefs should be chosen for their usefulness. There is a danger there, right? There's like a whole US Agency head bias headed by a scion of a senator who kind of goes by that route. And I don't know if, if it's. I do know it's not the best for us, but go ahead.
- [25:40]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, yeah. So that's. It's a great, great point. Here's the thing, Mike. Your brain is already lying to you, Damn it. You're already not seeing reality as it is. Why? Because the brain is currently processing 11 million bits information. Right now, your brain is taking in 11 million bits of information. That's the equivalent of reading, reading War and Peace every second. Twice. It's the eyes, the light entering your eyes. It's the sound entering your ears. It's the ambient temperature of the room. 11 million bits of information. But your conscious mind can only process about 50 bits of information. 50 bits versus 11 million bits. So that's 0.000045% of the information you're currently processing are you consciously aware of. So the brain just can't deal with all that information. So what does it do? It has to look through reality, look at reality through a tiny keyhole of attention. That's all we can process. And that keyhole of attention is defined based on our beliefs. So beliefs are incredibly important. If you think about all the major decisions we make in life. The day to day things, you know, should I marry this person, should I take this job, should I buy this product? All of these decisions, they're not based on fact, they're not based on faith, they're based on belief. The problem is that most of us, we carry around these limiting beliefs and we never actually ask ourselves if they're any good because we pick them up from our history. We pick them up from our family, from our culture, from the media. We pick up these beliefs and we never actually ask ourselves, wait a minute, are these beliefs serving me or are they hurting me? And so the assessment, nowhere do I tell anybody what they should believe. That's not the point of the book at all. To tell them that there's good beliefs and bad beliefs, beliefs. That's not what I'm talking about. It's about choosing your beliefs so that you decide for yourself, hey, is this serving me? And turns out for most people, we grossly, grossly underestimate what we are actually capable of.
- [27:33]
Mike Pesca
Back with more of Nir Eyal talking about Beyond Belief. The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [28:05]
Unidentified Guest or Contributor
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- [29:00]
Mike Pesca
Oh, we go beyond belief in the second half of our conversation with Near Eyal. Are you saying since we believe in bullshit anyway, might as well embrace the bullshit that works best for us? Are you saying it's so hard discern fact from beliefs. Just go for it and shape your own reality.
- [29:21]
Nir Eyal
Hold your beliefs lightly and look for evidence. Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. So what we want to do is to take out those limiting beliefs, which again, we have a very difficult time doing that. Most people have no clue. But everybody has these limiting beliefs. It's almost like your face, Mike. If I were to say right now, look at your face, you know, look at your face. You can't do that unless you're, you know, on a zoom call or looking at a mirror. You can't see your face, not the way you can look at your hands or your feet. You can't see your own face. Similarly, you can't see your limiting beliefs because to you, your beliefs feel like facts. So they're unquestioned. So the right thing to do, I think to be psychologically more healthy, to be more physically healthy, to have better relationships, to have better business dealings, is to periodically take out those limited beliefs, force yourself to look at them, especially in the areas of your life where you might be stuck in the muck. Right where you have that area of your life, that relationship that's not being repaired, that continues to annoy you. Those everyday, the things that cause you to suffer in life, Whatever causes you suffering in life, below that suffering is always a limiting belief. That's what's below the surface. And so it's not about changing your mind and saying believe this, not that you can believe whatever you want. Rather it's about asking yourself, what belief is serving me, what belief is causing me suffering versus what belief is allowing me to live to my potential and live a better life.
- [30:41]
Mike Pesca
So during the COVID era, it was a whirling eddy. It was a blender of all the themes you're talking about. And there was, I am going to either take the vaccine or not take the vaccine or give it to my kids based on some people would say facts, some people would say belief, some people would. Would question the other people's assertion of fact. I don't know that by reading this book I'd have a. Or anyone who read this book which has a lot of great insights would have the right answer to that. But my question is, do you think that there was anything about the public messaging? And I'm mostly thinking about what the government said, but may maybe you could also think about what some influencers said that got in the way of having people make the best choice. I'm thinking of things like, in this house, we believe science and the science is real. And talking about science as fact, when there was some of it that was certainly more based on beliefs or the best attainable version of fact. But that is my question. If you, knowing what you know about beliefs, could rewrite some of the script around that period, what would you write?
- [31:49]
Nir Eyal
That's such a great question. And I actually saw Covid from a different perspective. I wasn't in the United States, so I was watching it from overseas. I was watching it in Singapore from
- [31:59]
Mike Pesca
a protected island nation. You were watching it?
- [32:01]
Nir Eyal
I was.
- [32:02]
Mike Pesca
Where everyone follows the rules. That's not bad.
- [32:05]
Nir Eyal
Well, that's kind of a stereotype, because they follow rules because they are excellent communicators. So I saw the minister of health go on tv, now he's the prime minister, go on tv. And one of the first things he would say is not, here's what we're gonna do, everybody, whether you like it or not, here comes the mandate. The first thing he did was to address what the opposite perspective thinks. Like, he would literally say right now, some people believe xyz, and he would steel man their arguments as to why not to.
- [32:38]
Mike Pesca
Not to donk on him for political gain. Even though I guess he got political gain because he wrote that health ministry to the prime ministry. But go ahead.
- [32:45]
Nir Eyal
That's exactly right, because he did such a damn good job of it. Can you imagine if Anthony Fauci were to run for president?
- [32:51]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, that's exactly what this guy was.
- [32:54]
Nir Eyal
Because in America, it was so divisive because people took to their corners and they said, I'm gonna look at everything through my belief lens of I'm a conservative, I'm a liberal, I'm a science backer, I'm a this, that, or the other. They saw reality 100% through their beliefs, and they could not see any other perspectives. One of my rules is before I listen to anybody share a political opinion is before you tell me your opinion, I need to hear how well you can share your opponent's opinion. And if you can't, in good faith steel man your opponent's opinion and convince people on your side of their argument, shut the hell up. You don't deserve to talk. And that's what we should have done during COVID We should have like they did, like Lawrence Wong did in Singapore. He gave the other perspective in a way that the other perspective would say, wow, that was very well done. I feel heard. And now that the other side knew that they were at least heard, their points could be echoed back then. He could get consensus. He could get people to say, look, we're not sure. But with the latest available data, here's what we're going to do. And we may be wrong and we may course correct because again, beliefs are tools, not truths. With new evidence, we may change our perspective. That's something I didn't see in the United States. States.
- [34:08]
Mike Pesca
Two more topics I want to get to. One is I've always been fascinated by placebos. The latest research is that not only do placebos work, they even work if you call them placebos. My question to you is, if they were not called placebos but were called something like fake pills or not meds, would they work as well?
- [34:27]
Nir Eyal
Well, I think that what worked in this study. Let me just give some context so everybody can follow along. So there was a study done by Ted Kapchuk at Harvard and it was a study on irritable bowel syndrome, ibs, which is very influenceable by the placebo effect, as are many maladies, insomnia, adhd, depression, many, many things are highly influenced by the placebo effect. IBS turns out to be one of them. So in this study he calls people in, he says, hey, this is a study of the placebo effect for your ibs. We're going to give you these pills. It says placebo on the pill jar. And in fact you can buy pills on Amazon right now that say placebo on them. Full of 5 star reviews that talk about fast action, facting effectiveness and they, they sing the praise of these books. You can buy them right now. They sing the praise of these.
- [35:14]
Mike Pesca
I worry there's going to be an opioid type placebo epidemic. I want the over prescription of them. Yeah, someone's going to sue. Big placebo.
- [35:23]
Nir Eyal
There already is, by the way. It's called the vitamin industry.
- [35:25]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [35:27]
Nir Eyal
So anyway, but actually I've converted. We'll talk about why I think differently about the, the vitamin industry these days because of these placebo effects. So anyway, so in this IBS study, he gives people these pills, tells them they are placebos. But here's the most important line, Mike. He tells them this is an inert substance. There's nothing medical about this. However, placebos have been found to treat the symptoms of ibs. In the past, that's what was important. He set the expectation there was now an anticipatory response. And what turned out to happen is that in this study, people reported they felt about as good as they would have had they taken prescription pills for iv.
- [36:10]
Mike Pesca
So placebos work. If you tell people, placebos work.
- [36:14]
Nir Eyal
That's right. That's Right. In fact, the placebo works.
- [36:16]
Mike Pesca
We ruminate on that.
- [36:18]
Nir Eyal
So, you know, this is a big problem for pharmaceutical companies because you have to prove for every new drug, you have to prove it's more efficacious than the current, than the placebo. Well, the problem is the placebo effect keeps getting better and better and better. It got miracle drug over time for decades now. Why? Because more and more people are hearing that placebos are effective. So in this study that Ted Kaptchuk ran, people came to him after the study and said, Dr. Kaptchuk, can I please get some more of those amazing placebo pills? They work so well. I need some more.
- [36:47]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, yeah. But I really do think if the name were changed, like you have that chapter where you talk about consulting with firms like Airbnb, and if they just plainly decided describe what they were doing versus aspirationally describe it, it wouldn't work as, I think placebo is a good name, but fake pills aren't.
- [37:05]
Nir Eyal
Well, even if you, you need to have some kind of anticipatory response, that's the key. Right. So it's attention, anticipation and agency. See, feel and do. So even if you said you changed the name to some no nonsense name. Right. Even if it didn't make any sense at all, if the pill was blue and it was prescribed for anxiety, it'd be much more effective than if the pill was red, which is very good as a stimulant placebo effect. So we have these anticipatory response. Colors mean things, words mean things. You know, there was that amazing study around steroids where they gave men, two groups of men, a pill that they told them was a steroid, and the other one, they gave nothing. And it turns out that people who took the pill, that was a quote unquote steroid, even though it was a placebo, actually gained more muscle mass.
- [37:51]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [37:51]
Nir Eyal
They actually built more muscle than the group that didn't take anything, even though it was a placebo. How can placebos put on muscle? It's not biological, it's behavioral. They worked a little bit harder. They thought, well, now I'm taking this awesome new steroid. So they did one more rep per set, they pushed a tiny bit harder, and they put on more muscle. Which is why, actually, I've changed my mind on the vitamin industry. I used to argue with people say, oh, that's silly. There's no medical evidence. That's ridiculous. But it works. And if it works, maybe it's not such a bad thing.
- [38:22]
Mike Pesca
Right. Just like the guy in the gym saying, if I'm getting the effect of steroids, it'd be stupid not to try two extra reps. The guy taking, the woman taking St. John's Wort's like, well, if I'm putting all that stuff in my. Be crazy to smoke, right? It would be crazy to, you know, counteract these effects. It's really interesting. It reminds me of. I forgot what the name brand. But it was one shake for breakfast, one shake for lunch, and then two sensible meals. I'm like, well, you're just describing. You put anything in between two sensible meals and living healthy the rest of the time, and you're doing okay. All right, here's my last question. Every time I read a pop psychology book, as you say, and every time I see a TED Talk, there's always an optical illusion. It's the old lady who looks like the beautiful young girl in yours. It's the checkerboard, which one is. They're both the same color, but one looks darker. And you write, you expect an illusion or two in a pop psychology book. And then you explain why the illusion works. I have a question. You understand psychology is part of why everyone who does these things, puts an illusion is in. Is priming to prime the audience that. To open their minds that what you. What you think you see is not what you see. And it doesn't even matter what the illusion is or the supposed point is. You just want to show things may be different. Don't think about things in such a doctrinal way.
- [39:40]
Nir Eyal
Right. And this is an amazing way to start changing people's minds is to show them at least one tiny 1% chance that they may be incorrect about something. This is actually how you change other people's minds. You don't. You know, this is how they changed virtually overnight in America acceptance of gay marriage. They didn't walk up to people and say, you know, don't you believe in gay marriage? You should believe in gay. No. They gave people scenarios where they say, well, what about this situation? And could it possibly be the case that in one potential out of a hundred situations, that scenario might actually make sense? Could you get behind that? Well, yeah. And so when you crack open your current beliefs and say, look, I don't have to change my beliefs, but I want to collect a portfolio of perspectives. I just want to see what else might be on offer, and then I can choose from that buffet of choices. You see, wait a minute. The old belief is actually not that true. It's not a true vision of reality. This new Belief is much better. What's amazing about this optical illusion that I put in the book is that even when you know the illusion, even when I tell you that these two squares are the same color, they will always look different colors. That, to me is the real takeaway here, is that that even when I tell you the truth, your eyes, in conjunction with your brain, won't stop lying to you.
- [40:54]
Mike Pesca
I want to do a TED Talk where my point is something that you thought was true, that is true. Like if you give people a vaccine for measles, measles will go away. And if you don't, it will, obviously. And I'm going to stop. Yeah. And I'm going to start off with an anecdote or a question like, what are you. Two people built in a floodplain and one built near the river, but one built upstream. Now, you would think the people near the river would do worse, but what do you think happened? And everyone vote no. All the people near the river drowned. What are you idiots? Well, maybe. I wouldn't say that.
- [41:21]
Nir Eyal
You know what's crazy about that, though? Even when you tell people something that seems so obvious, right? Like measles vaccine cures measles, and we have tons and tons of evidence, you need to ask why people don't believe the evidence. Like, even when it's. We try and convince people with evidence, and that's. That's such a huge mistake, is that we think, yeah, well, the facts will just make people believe. And that's often not the case because they have lenses.
- [41:44]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [41:45]
Nir Eyal
Don't let them.
- [41:45]
Mike Pesca
Otherwise, will they articulate a real reason or will they articulate some facade of a reason and the real reason is, I don't know, deeper. Psychological distrust of authority, Something like that. They'll say something like, it's the Marisol. They'll cite an ingredient. But in reality, it's, oh, yeah. And I also don't trust all of the government.
- [42:08]
Nir Eyal
Well, if we wanna change their minds, we have to try and see it from their perspective. We're never gonna change their minds just by seeing it from our point of view. And so that's why it behooves us to take this regular exercise of, wait a minute, can I argue their side? Can I see it from their perspective? You don't have to agree, you don't have to change your beliefs, but you have an amazing tool at your disposal when you can see it from their perspective.
- [42:27]
Mike Pesca
Nir Eyal has done it again. The bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractible is out with beyond belief the science back way to stop limiting yourself and achieve extraordinary results. Thanks so much.
- [42:40]
Nir Eyal
Near thanks, Mike.
- [42:47]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. The Gist was produced by Cory Wara, who had to hear me say Malacca into a microphone a few too many times. And our booking coordinator is Ben Astaire. And Jeff Craig runs our socials. And Kathleen Sykes, she is the doyenne of the Gist list, which can be subscribed to@mike pesca.substack.com thanks again to Michelle Pesca for I'm going to use the verb putting up for putting up with me and my straight up nonsense. And thanks for listening.