Achieving Extraordinary Results in Podcasting | Nir Eyal

Most podcast hosts and guests know what to do in order to succeed, but don’t consistently follow through or stick with it long-term. Motivation fades, habits slip, and progress stalls. Turns out there’s a scientific approach to overcoming these roadblocks! In this Episode, Alex Sanfilippo and Nir Eyal share a 3-step approach to align what you believe with what you want so you follow through when it counts. Get ready to turn your intention into action that will unleash extraordinary results in podcasting and beyond!

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/392

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Extraordinary Podcasting Results
02:47 The Motivation Triangle: Beliefs, Behavior, and Benefits
06:56 Understanding Podfade: The Motivation Dilemma
10:11 The Power of Hope and Persistence
12:57 The Role of Limiting and Liberating Beliefs
13:56 Attention: The Power to See What You Believe
20:43 Anticipation: The Power to Feel What You Believe
26:59 Agency: The Power to Do What You Believe

Takeaways

Motivation is not a straight line; it involves beliefs.
Beliefs shape our reality and influence our actions.
The power of hope can significantly increase persistence.
Limiting beliefs sap motivation, while liberating beliefs enhance it.
Attention allows us to see opportunities that align with our beliefs.
Anticipation affects how we feel about challenges and discomfort.
Agency is crucial for taking action based on our beliefs.
Persistence is a key trait of successful individuals.
Changing your relationship with pain can lead to greater success.
Beliefs are tools that can be changed to support our goals.

MORE FROM THIS EPISODE: HTTPS://PODMATCH.COM/EP/392

🎟️ UPCOMING EVENT: Podcasting Made Simple Live, our virtual event for podcast guests and hosts! See the details: https://podmatch.com/event. Enter code PMLIVE for free VIP access!

Transcript

Hey everyone, Alex Sanfilippo, your host today. I am joined by a good friend and mentor of mine, Nir Eyal. Before I let Nir introduce himself, I just want to mention that today we're going to talk about is this idea of how to achieve extraordinary results in podcasting. And whether you're a guest or host, this is really going to be for you. So it's not just for one side of the microphone, the other, this is going be for both of you. And I'll just say from my own experience after reading this book, I learned so much.

And when I opened the book for the first time, again, Nir is a friend and mentor, so was like, I'm going to read this book because of who he is. I didn't necessarily have the expectation that this was going to be a game changer for me, but it actually was. And like, that's a testament to Nir and how much work he puts in, the research. And so, Nir, I want to say welcome back to the podcast, but the last two times I've had you on, the show was actually called Creating a Brand. It was an audio only show focused specifically on entrepreneurs. Since then we've re-rendered the show. It's the same feed.

But now it's podcasting made simple and it's a video podcast. So welcome or welcome back. I don't know what to say. Well, I appreciate it. It's great to be back, Alex. It's always wonderful to see you. Yeah, man, you too. Again, thank you for just being back. You've had my life personally, Listen, everybody, if you're like, hey, who is this guy? I've never heard like Alex talk about him as like a mentor and stuff like that. I keep my mentors pretty private, but I do encourage you go back and check out the first two episodes we did together. They are audio only, but they're on the same feed. I'll give everyone the URLs real quick. The first one was how to build habit forming products.

If you go to podmatch.com slash EP 134, you can check that one out. And the other one is how to control your attention and choose your life. And that one is podmatch.com slash EP slash 52. I was reading that for a screen, but I don't have those memorized. I'm not that good. But here's the thing. It's kind of funny that the podcast has changed. Again, it was creating a brand, and now it's podcasting made simple. Because I feel like this book is different than what I expected from you, Nir.

Like I didn't expect it and the book is titled Beyond Belief and it's the science backed way to stop limiting yourself and achieve extraordinary results. And again, like when I saw that title, I'm like, okay, this can be a refresher for me, right? But it's different, man, than what I expected and different for you because even when I look at your other book titles or your book covers, they're a different color. So you have a new color and they both have like the mouse cursor on it and this doesn't have that. So it's like, you've kind of changed things. So I just got to start off by asking, man, like why this book?

Yeah, so why this book is because I had reached the limit of just giving advice. Here's what happened, Alex. I do these weekly calls with readers and anyone can call me if they've read one of my books. They get 15 minutes. I do this every single week and they can ask me anything they want. Sometimes it was a bit of a line. So people have to wait sometimes one, two, sometimes three months, depending on the backlog, but anybody can ask me any question they want.

And every once in a while, Alex, I would get this call that sounded a little funny. Here's what it would sound like. Somebody would call me and they'd say, okay, Neera, I read Indistractable. I really liked it, but it didn't work. And I'd say, oh my goodness, tell me more. I'm so curious. And I spent five years writing Indistractable. There's 30 pages of peer-reviewed studies in the book. I changed my life. I would love to know how. Let's start with step number one. How did step number one go? Step number one, they'd say. I read step number one. I just didn't.

do it was a thing. was, okay, no problem. I'd say, you I understand. How about step two? You probably skipped the step two. How'd that go for you? Well, what didn't work for you? Yeah, near, you know what? I've read step two as well. I read that one. I totally read it and I enjoyed it. It made a lot of sense. just didn't actually do that one either.

And I was really frustrated by this, right? Like here I spent five years writing this thing, it changed my life, it solved the problem, everybody says they have. Oh my God, I'm so distracted, technology's melting my brain, I have no time to do anything, I'm so, I wish I could focus. And here's the answer, I've given it you on a silver platter, right? You bought the book, you read the book, and yet, for some reason, people didn't do it. Not everybody, maybe like one in 20 of these calls. At first I thought, what's going on? Are my readers stupid? Like what's going on? And then I realized, wait a minute, no, it's not my readers, it's me. I'm the stupid one, because what I didn't realize,

But then when I started thinking about it, is that I have tons of books on my bookshelf that I haven't put into practice, that I've paid consultants and gurus for answers that I know are right, that somehow I haven't put to good use. What's up? Why is that? We think that motivation is a straight line. And if you know what to do and why you're gonna do it, the behavior and the benefit, it's all you need. That's what classical economics tells us. That's what incentives tell us. If I pay you a salary,

and I tell you what to do so the benefit is a salary, the behavior is your job function, you'll do it. But we all know there's something missing. We're not really sure what, because if it was that easy, everyone would have six pack abs and be multi-millionaires. We have all kinds of things we know what to do. If you don't know what to do, just ask ChatchiePT, Google it, you'll find the steps you need to take to do it. We are drowning in information. We have plenty of information. What's missing are the right beliefs.

that if you don't believe you're gonna get the benefit or you don't believe in yourself to do the behavior, well then guess what? It's not gonna happen. So motivation is not a straight line between behavior and benefit, it's a triangle. We have behavior, we have benefit, and at the base of that triangle is our beliefs. And so once I started exploring this missing link from my own life, like how could I do what I know it is I wanted to do, then everything started falling into place.

the projects that I'd been delaying, the relationships that were frayed, the goals I had that I hadn't finished, it started to make sense, why? And so that's really what Beyond Belief is all about. It's about how our beliefs shape our reality based on what beliefs do to our attention. We call that what we see as our attention, our anticipation, what we feel and what we do. That's our agency. And when you utilize these three powers of belief, this is truly how you master your motivation.

and how you live out your full potential. Man, I'm excited to get into these. And those are the three points we're gonna get into today. Before we do that though, I just wanna tell everybody, Nir is an extremely gracious person. Like you already heard, like call with like readers. I don't know many authors, especially at your level, if any, that do that. But Nir's also gonna do something really nice for us as well. I got a pre-release copy of the book, so I haven't even seen this, but I know that you've got a really cool gift for everybody here. And I'll talk about that at the end a little bit. So stay tuned for that. But for now, bust out your notebooks, start taking some notes, because we're really gonna get into it here.

Before I turn back over to you, Niren, to begin these three points, I did just want to mention that you're right, motivation just, it doesn't cut it on its own, right? Because whenever I talk to podcasters, they start off by saying, I'm passionate, I have a purpose behind this, I am so motivated to just do this forever, right? And then something happens and they podfade, as we call it in podcasting. And this is both sides of microphones. You guessed, I'm the host. You know, call it podfade. It just means they stop prematurely from what they said they were going to do. It's always the same thing. People say, I wish I was motivated to,

to do more and to stick with them. Like, well, wait, three weeks ago you were. And the data, I wrote it down here, but the amount of people that make it to eight episodes as a guest or as a host is under 40%. They imagine they get to 50 episodes is under 10%. And so on and so forth, it keeps on going. like, this is, we're talking just a couple months and under a year, people are, most of them, again, 90 % or more have completely stopped, but they start off saying, I got this, I'm ready, right? And so to me, that's like, that is proof that,

what we're talking about today needs to be discussed because like you said, all the answers are there. So if you're really that motivated, why aren't you sticking with it? Like what's happening? What's changing? So again, I just- This is exactly it. Yeah. This is exactly the problem that the book seeks to solve for folks. This is what I was so interested in is that how do we have so much motivation at one point and then somehow it fades out. And there's a study, if you don't mind me sharing from the book that I really blew my mind. It kind of-

was the genesis for why I really wanted to dig deep into this. There was a study done in the 1950s by a researcher by the name of Kurt Richter. And he took these rats and he put them into a cylinder that was filled halfway with water. And these were wild rats that were a bit stressed because of the whole handling process. He put these rats into a cylinder and he started timing how long they would swim for. Okay, you can't do this kind of study today. It's completely unethical. But back then you could do this as the 1950s. So he stood there with a timer and he watched his stopwatch

to see how long the rat would keep swimming until it gave up and died. Turns out, next time you play trivia, if you need to the answer, the answer is 15 minutes. That's how long a stressed wild rat will swim in water, 15 minutes. Now, here's where the experiment gets interesting. In the next experiment, he took a new group of wild rats, he put them in these same cylinders, and just before they were about to give up, just before they're about to give up, 15 minutes, he reached in,

He scooped out the rat, he dried the rat off, he let them catch their breath and plunk back into the cylinder the rat went. Now, he did this a few times and you've read the books, I'm not gonna ask you, but when I ask audiences, how long do you think the conditioned rat now swam for? Right now that the rat had been rescued a few times and learned that hope was possible, how much longer do they swim for? Twice as long, maybe for 15 minutes or 30 minutes, longer, maybe.

four times as long. Imagine if there was some kind of intervention that could help you persist four times longer, right? That race that you're running, that really hard project, the podcast episode that you give up on, whatever it might be. If I could give you some kind of magic potion that helped you persist for four times longer, that'd be amazing, right? But that's not how long the rats swam for. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They didn't swim for just one hour. They swam for 60 hours.

they were 240 times more persistent from 15 minutes to 60 hours of swimming. What? That's amazing. So what had changed? What was this intervention all about? The experiment hadn't changed. The cylinders were exactly the same. The rats' bodies hadn't changed. Nothing physically about these rats had changed. Something went on in their minds. Now we can't ask the rats.

But we believe that something had happened in terms of the way they saw reality, that they had some kind of hope they didn't have before because they knew that hope was possible, that salvation could occur if they just kept swimming. And so that's what let them persist for so much longer. How many times in our professional journey as a podcaster have we quit at 15 minutes when we're really capable of 60 hours? And what could we accomplish in life?

if we simply persisted. if you look at the research, the research shows that the defining trait of who succeeds in life, okay, it's not intelligence, it's not intelligence, it's not necessarily luck, because good things happen to everybody, bad things happen to everybody, so on average, it's not like lucky people per se. It's two factors. It's adaptability and persistence. It's who keeps trying. You know, I've interviewed billionaires, I've interviewed people who are broke, and it's incredible that people who

think they are losers, the people who don't succeed in life, the people who think that the world is stacked against them, fewer bad things have actually happened to them. It's amazing, when you talk to billionaires, they have more failures, they have racked up more failures, more attempts that didn't work out than people who don't succeed because those billionaires, those super successful people kept trying, they persisted. When you think about podcasting, are the biggest podcasters in the world the smartest people in the world?

No, I've met many of them. They're smart. A lot of them are very smart, good people. They're not smarter than the person who has just a few podcast episodes and can't get off the ground. They're not better. They're not morally superior. They're not smarter. They're not even luckier. They're more persistent. And so that's really what this book is about. How do you use these powers of belief to affect your motivation so that you can persist, so that you can keep going?

Real quick, Nir, am I one of the good podcasters? Yes. Or one of the... But you're also one of the intelligent ones too. This is so good. that we could... I don't want to end right here, but we legitimately could just stop right here because I think that what you just shared, like that's going to help so many of us. And just an example is I was talking to a personal friend of mine outside of podcasting. He is an extremely successful e-commerce founder. I mean, he's now just sitting on the board of his company, like, and he's a young guy.

But when I ask him, like, hey man, you just seemed like always hit it just right. And he always reminds me, he's like, dude, I've been sued, I've had my companies go under. He's like, I've had everything bad happen. And he goes, still this day, he goes, I get like 100 bad things happen to every one win. He's like, but to your point, he just doesn't stop. He's like, no, but I have conviction. Like I know where I'm going with this. so. Now it's important, I do want to jump in real quick because I'm not saying that quitting is always bad. That's not what I'm saying.

I'm not saying positive thoughts, in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that positive thinking and affirmations and manifesting that that stuff actually can backfire. We can talk about that if that's interesting. But I'm not saying never quit. I've quit all kinds of things. I've quit relationships, I've quit businesses, I've certainly quit book projects, I've quit all kinds of things. Sometimes quitting is the right answer. But quitting prematurely, quitting when persistence would have made a difference, that's...

wasting human potential. That's a shame. And so that's what I'm trying to help people prevent. Yeah, well said, man. All right, I want to get into these three powers we talked about here. So we'll just jump into number one. We'll kind of just cover a couple of points on each of them here. Again, I'll talk about the book at the end here where everyone can get that because there's so much packed in that there's no way for us to unpack here, right? But the first power is attention. This is the power to see what you believe. Can you talk about this a little bit? Sure. So one of the things that blew my mind is that the opposite, so we hear this phrase all the time, I'll believe it when I see it.

Right, that we need, I need evidence. I wanna see reality in order to believe something. And it turns out that the exact opposite is also true. That believing is seeing. And this manifests itself all the time. I mean, we know that there's been studies that find that people who are on a diet see food as larger. That people who are afraid of heights see distances as further.

If you've ever met somebody, a beautiful person across the bar that maybe when you were dating and you go up to them, you think they're so attractive and they open their mouth and they start talking and then somehow they become physically ugly because the words coming out of their mouth make them not attractive anymore. Our beliefs shape our reality. It could work the opposite way too, right? Sometimes somebody who's mediocre and then all of sudden you see what an amazing personality they have and you think they're gorgeous.

our beliefs really do affect what we see and not just in a figurative sense, in a literal sense. I mean, there are experiments where we can show people the exact same image, the exact same image, and they'll see completely different things. One group will see squares, one group will see circles based on their priors, what we call their past experiences. So these examples go on and on and on. I think where it's important for entrepreneurs and podcasters is to realize that your beliefs

determine what opportunities you see. Like you physically see these different opportunities. One experiment that I think is super interesting, they took a group of people who were self-identified optimists and another group of people who were self-identified pessimists and they gave them the same task. The task was to count the number of advertisements in a newspaper. They had to flip through the newspaper how many ads are in this newspaper. And if they finished the task, they'd get $250. Now, the pessimists went,

through a circled one at a time, every single ad until they finished the entire task and then they could report the numbers. The optimists were much more likely to see that one of those ads said, if you're reading this, the experiment is over, tell the moderator that there are 100 ads in this paper or whatever it was, collect your reward. That's what it said. Go collect your reward. That's the number of ads, go get your money.

The optimists were far more likely to see that ad than the pessimists. Why? Because they saw reality differently. mean, think about how crazy it is. You want to be a successful podcaster, right? That's what you want to be. You think that you have the audacity to see a subject matter in a topic that no one's ever done before that you think is just going to be successful. You got to be a little bit crazy, right? Well, that's what all entrepreneurs face, right? That anybody who's creating something new has to see the world not as it is, but

how it could be. It's called, in fact, in psychology, entrepreneurial alertness. That you see these opportunities differently. And so that's, think, a very powerful skill that, in fact, we can all develop. That we can have these different, we can harness our attention differently in order to see those opportunities that other people don't see and therefore make ourselves more successful. Man, I've got a real life example of this from literally just yesterday. I got two emails yesterday. Two different people. One of the subjects was I want to cancel my PodMatch account.

The other one was, thank you for PodMatch. so I went with reading the negative one first, I think because it came in first. But I always ask, I'm like, hey, like, sorry to see you go, like, we'll refund you, cancel your account. Like, we're very gracious with that. But I always just do ask, like, hey, if you don't mind me asking, like, what made you want to leave? And they said there's no big podcasters on there. They're all beginners. They're all small. am I missing something? And I just told them, no, you're right. That's who's on PodMatch.

And then I let it go. was like, sorry for the trouble. Like, let you go. The next person said, who said thank you for pod match. You're like, hey, I don't know how you brought together so many great gifted podcasters that are doing really well. And I just said, that's the type of people that we attract. So I gave two different answers, right? Because I already know what they believe, what they see is their reality. If they already decided everyone on here is small, I'm not going to convince them otherwise. They've made that decision for themselves. Somebody else literally two emails back to back. The other person's like, this is amazing. How do have this many good podcasters in one place?

And I'm like, well, that's just who we attract, right? And so that for me was like a real life example of this in action. That is so good. That is so true. We know that, for example, luck is not something that some people have more of than others. You we tend to think, some people, know, the successful people are just lucky. The good things happen to them all the time. Luck is evenly spread. Then in fact, you make your own luck based on exactly this, based on what you see. I mean, look, same product.

and two different people saw it completely differently. We see this all the time, you if you think about it when you watch a football game or something or basketball game and one side will say, my God, the ref made a terrible call, what an idiot, he needs glasses, he's, you know, the ref is crooked. The other side will say, very good call, that was exactly right, that's exactly what should have happened, based on their affiliation, based on their beliefs, based on how they view the world. Because what's interesting here is that the brain doesn't see reality. We think, this is a huge myth that I wanna shatter.

Everyone thinks that I see reality as it is. That is not true. You do not experience reality. In fact, right now into your brain, you're taking in 11 million bits of information. 11 million bits. That's about the equivalent of reading War and Peace twice every second. Okay, it's a lot of information. The light entering your eyeballs, the sound of my voice entering your ears, the temperature of the room. All this data is being taken into your brain.

but your conscious attention is only processing about 50 bits of information. Okay, 50 bits, that's the equivalent of one sentence per second. So you're actually processing and consciously aware of .000045 % of the information that's available to you. It's impossible for your brain to see reality, it just can't do it. So what does it have to do? It has to focus its attention through this little keyhole, because that's all it can process. And to do that, it has to make predictions. It's called predictive processing.

And in order to do that, it has this filter, it has these beliefs that it puts over your eyes, literally over your eyes when your eyes send sensory information to your brain. In order to process that information, it will selectively choose what it chooses to see based on your priors, your prior beliefs. We're all thinking right now, I'm just gonna say it. You know your stuff, Like, I'm like, is he reading this? where are you, like.

Just the fact that you have no doubt top of your head. I know you live this. I'm not saying you were. Well, when you sit with a topic for six years of research, you start to learn it pretty well. You start to remember it. Thank you for sharing that. That's really powerful stuff. I want to move on to that second power, which is anticipation. And this is the power to feel what you believe. I do want to quickly share my own experience with this. When I was reading the pre-copy ahead of your book, I wasn't feeling well. And at that point, everything was uncomfortable. So I'll just quickly share what happened here. There's a segment I work that I've just

never really enjoyed by, I know like it needs to happen, right? And so what I learned from this section of your book is I needed to stop trying to eliminate the pain and the discomfort of it. I needed to just change my relationship with it. And this is something you actually wrote in the book, but like I stopped viewing the fact of like, I do this work as like a chore or something like that to making it known that like it's hard, it's uncomfortable because it's really important, meaningful work. And I'll tell you what, man, that was...

especially when I wasn't feeling well, I was doing this, that was a game changer for me. Just that perspective shift, I'm like, you know what? It's not that don't want to do this, it's I know that it's required attention, it is meaningful, important work. And now I find myself getting excited to actually do it, because I know it produces a result. It's important, it's hard work. And I think that some of us in podcasting, as guests and hosts, sometimes like, I don't want to do this part of podcasting, right? Whatever it might be. But the reality is, if that's what leads to the result, it's important, it's meaningful. We got to change how we feel about it, right?

Yeah, I love these anecdotes that it brought out in you. It's interesting because I feel like these limiting beliefs that we have with us, that a limiting belief is something that saps your motivation, a liberating belief is something that supplies motivation, and our limiting beliefs that we all carry around with us, it doesn't matter who you are, everybody has these limiting beliefs in one area of their life or another. I also have these limiting beliefs, which is why I constantly have to remind myself of the practices that I wrote about myself. But these limiting beliefs are almost like,

your face in a way that like we all have a face. We carry it around with us all day long, but you can't see your face, right? In order to see your face, you have to have a mirror. And so the work that I put together here is supposed to be this mirror. And so it's, can't tell you how satisfying it is to hear you reflect on, you know, when I read it, that was that limiting belief I didn't even realize that I was carrying around with me. That's amazing. That's gold. And the part of the book that...

blew my mind when I was doing the research, the research around the power of the mind to change our feelings of pain. So the power of attention is about things happening outside of you, right? You can see things differently. Beliefs have the power to change what you see. Beliefs also have the power to change what you feel because we tend to think, well, okay, maybe I don't perceive reality accurately. Okay, I'll buy that. But certainly what I feel is real, right? I mean, it's my feelings. What's happening inside my body, that's real. Also not true. Also a myth.

In fact, I had the squeamish pleasure of watching a video of a person I interviewed for this book by the name of Daniel Gissler. And Daniel was a commodities trader who very successful. He, you know, very numbers guy, like the exact opposite of anything woo woo and, you know, anything supernatural, super analytical, you know, numbers guy. And one day he breaks his fibia and his tibia and he has to get a metal rod.

in his bones. And then a few years later, it's time to remove those rods. And he comes across this technique called hypnosedation. And hypnosedation uses the power of the mind, not through like stage hypnosis, that's completely different. It uses the power of the mind to anticipate something different about how you feel. And he trains himself to be able to undergo a full surgery procedure of 55 minutes where doctors are

cutting into his skin, wrenching metal screws from bone with no general anesthesia, no local anesthesia, and no backup plan. And he comes out of this completely unscathed. In fact, I've seen the video, his vital signs don't spike. Like, you know, when someone feels intense pain, you can see it in their heart rate and their blood pressure. Nope, doesn't experience any of that. And so why do I say this story? It's not for people to suddenly say, okay, I'm gonna go under surgery without anesthesia. That's not what I'm advocating for.

What I want people to realize is that you have far more power than you think. That if everything worth having in life is on the other side of pain, right? You want a great relationship with someone, you wanna have a beautiful marriage, you wanna raise great kids, you know that's gonna take work. There's gonna be pain involved. You wanna start an amazing podcast, you wanna have a great business. It's hard work Alex, right? You know, tell them. It's a lot of pain along the way. But.

If someone can use the power of the mind to turn off the pain of surgery without anesthesia, think about that for a moment. What else are we capable of? this is hard? Okay, well, it's just pain. It's not necessarily suffering. It's just signal. It's just information going into your brain, that 11 million bits of information. So we can actually learn through various practices of how to turn off

that those signals, we still might experience the discomfort, but how we interpret it will make it into suffering or not. And so there's all kinds of practices. I'll just share one is that I've adopted these prayers, these almost mantras throughout my day to remind me of this. So one I use all the time, at first I was like, I'm gonna convince myself it's not painful, it's easy when it comes to like a hard work task or something or exercise or whatever. And that didn't really work for me because

My brain didn't believe it. It was still hard. So I found a different mantra. And my mantra now that I repeat to myself several times per day is this. It doesn't get easier, you get stronger. It doesn't get easier, you get stronger. The pain is the point. It's supposed to be difficult. If it was easy, everybody would have an amazing podcast. Everybody would have a great business. Everybody would be in shape. That's the point. Like you want something that most people can't do.

So that's what getting better is supposed to feel like. And so having those practices where we remind ourselves to reframe, to pay attention and anticipate something different can have profound effect on our daily performance. And that's so good. Again, that first power is attention. Second power, anticipation. And the third one I want to get into now is agency, which is the power to do what you believe. Can you talk about us actually doing what we're saying we believe? Yeah. So agency is where it all comes together.

So how we can sustain that motivation to persist. And so we see all kinds of interesting psychological phenomenons around how when we believe we have agency, it directly affects our outcomes. My favorite example, and this is brand new research that really blew my mind. A lot of the book I talk about placebo effects. Well, placebo effects can be through a pill or some kind of cream or medication. Those are incredible. It's unbelievable what placebo effects can do. Not so much to...

the actual underlying sickness, but to the illness. You sickness and illness are two different things. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the brain. So illness is the perception of those symptoms. Pain, for example, pain doesn't happen in your arm or your leg or your back. Pain doesn't happen in those places. Pain, all pain happens in your brain. It doesn't mean it's fake. All pain is real, but suffering, some suffering is optional. And so the placebo research is super interesting, but there's also placebos that are almost like mind placebos, attitudes, the beliefs that we have about

And so some of the most interesting research about agency and the power of agency comes around longevity. As you know, that people who have positive views about aging, those who believe that growth is possible at any age, if you agree with that, growth is possible at any age versus people who believe aging is about inevitable decline. Just that simple turn of phrase, age is about inevitable decline.

versus growth is possible at any age, people who have those positive views of aging live seven and a half years longer. That is more than changing your diet, than exercising or stopping smoking. I mean, how often have you heard about, you have to change your diet, you to exercise, you have to do all these things, stop drinking, stop smoking, who tells you change your views about aging? Now, an astute observer will note that it's not that easy.

It's not magical thinking. It's not that, if I just believe this and I manifest, well then like cells in my body will heal. No, that is not how it works. It doesn't work through anything magical. It works because people who believe that growth is possible at any age have more agency. Somebody who says to themselves, aging is about inevitable decline, what happens when one of their friends says, hey, let's go bowling. Let's go on a walk.

let's go do something active, you know, in their 60s and 70s. Well, my knee hurts, my hip hurts, my this hurts, I'm not gonna get winded, and they don't do it. Whereas somebody who believes growth is possible at any age, they are more likely to get out there, to be members of the community, to garden more, to lawn ball, to golf, to do active stuff because growth is possible at any age. So why would I not go out and do those things? So it's not anything magical. It's that behaviors can become biology.

through our behaviors. But to get there, beliefs have to change. I want to ask about this idea of labels in general. Maybe labels isn't even the right word. might be. think that's what you used in the book. But basically wrong thinking. Like, I'm this way because this. Or I do this because I have X, Y, Z. Or I am that way because of my parents, my upbringing. And I find that I meet podcasts, guests, and hosts. I'm grateful. We're nearing 100,000 people that have come through PodMatch.

So the community is pretty large. I've heard a lot of different things. And one of the biggest things I see when people are leaving, if they're willing to talk about it, it's typically they have some sort of label that doesn't matter what I do. It could have been something that not even in podcasting, the label is going to be what holds them back because they have decided that this is me. So I can't do X or I have to do Y or I am Z. Does this make sense? And this idea of agency, because it's the lack of agency that I'm talking about, right?

Totally, totally. So this is called the nocebo effect. So you know, placebo's, it comes from the Latin, I shall heal. Then there's the opposite, nocebo's, I shall hurt. And nocebo's, we see this all the time, you know, like there's, it's called voodoo medicine, that when someone thinks they have a curse on themselves, they actually act accordingly. But it's even more profound and interesting. There's a...

a beautiful case in the literature where this guy who's named, he's anonymized, so his name is Mr. A. Mr. A is in his 20s. He barges into an emergency room hospital and he has a bottle of pills and he collapses to the floor. The pills fall from his hand and he tells the staff, I took all my pills, I took all of my pills and he passes out. They put him on a gurney, they connect him to all the medical equipment. He has a critically low heartbeat and his blood pressure is very, very low.

They're trying to figure out what happened. Did he overdose on what's going on? They revive him and he says that his girlfriend was gonna break up with him and so he decided to commit suicide but then he changed his mind the last minute and his friend drove him to the hospital as quickly as they could. Please save my life. And again, this guy, all the physical conditions of an overdose are symptomatic, right? So they take these bottle of pills. They look at, okay, what did this guy take? What's this drug that he's overdosed on? But the label says, call this number. It turns out,

that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for antidepressants. And when they called this number to figure out what was this medication so that they know what to do about it, turns out Mr. A had not actually ingested the antidepressant medication. He was in the placebo group. He had ingested a bottle full of completely inert substances, right? Like nothing, probably sugar pills. Within 15 minutes, Mr. A's heart rate and

Blood pressure are completely normal. He's completely revived. He's lucid. He walks home. All through the power of his mind. He had created these symptoms because he thought that he had taken something terrible that was gonna kill him. We do this to ourselves all the time. Don't we? I'm too fat. I'm too thin. I'm too old. I'm too young. I'm too poor. I'm too rich. I'm too old. It's too late.

We hear this all the time. Mostly it's too late. all the podcasts have already been done. How many times have you heard that, right? Nobody can do it. It's too late, it's over, right? You're laughing because you've heard this, right? Every day, every day I hear that Every day. Now, are these beliefs potentially true? Maybe, maybe it is too late. Does anybody know? So this is what's so important to understand. Beliefs are not facts. Okay, facts are objective truths. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat.

doesn't care what you think. That's an objective truth, okay? Then there's faith on the other end of the spectrum. A faith is a conviction that is strongly held that does not require evidence. Okay, what happens in the afterlife? We're not gonna know, you just have faith, okay? In the middle is a belief. A belief is defined as a strongly held conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. So what I discovered was that I don't have to have everything be

True, I don't have to have the facts about everything. That most of life's decisions, who should I marry? Where should I live? What business should I start? Should I start this podcast or not? You're never gonna have facts, folks. You're never gonna have facts. It's not objective truths that we have to decide upon. We have to decide upon beliefs. So, the big aha of the past six years was that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So guess what? You can pick the right tools.

Do we hold up a hammer and say, hammers are the one and only true tool? No, sometimes we use a hammer, sometimes we use a saw, sometimes we use a screwdriver, we have to figure out the right tool for the job. So just because you've been carrying a belief for a long time, sometimes you can put it down and you can just like a tool and you can pick up a different tool. I'm too late, all the good podcasts have already been made. Okay, that's a belief, maybe it's true, I don't know, you don't know either. So you could choose a different belief. I choose to believe.

that the best podcasts are yet to come and I'm gonna make it. Okay, is that true? Nobody knows, but beliefs are tools, not truths. Which one sustains your motivation? Which one sustains your motivation? If you say to yourself, it's over, I know exactly what's gonna happen to your motivation. That's a limiting belief, it saps motivation. Whereas if I choose to believe, there's tons of great opportunities, right? There's gold all over the streets. I'm just gonna go pick it up. I'm gonna start the next great podcast. Why not? That's a liberating belief that will serve you much better.

Man, Nier, thank you so much. That was a great way to tie all this together. I told you that I'd have like call to action here for you all, like something that you can do. Nier, thank you for making this available once again. But to get the book Beyond Belief, and also it comes with this belief transformational journal as well, which what we talked about today, this takes work. Like anyone who's heard this, I hope you took notes and stuff like that. But it's not like tomorrow you wake up a changed person, right?

You're going have to do some work. I love that you are offering this workbook. And thank you for making that available. So if you're interested and you're like, hey, I got to go deeper into this, it's nearandfar.com slash beyond dash belief. And that's near, like near our friend here, so N-I-R. So it's N-I-R-A-N-D-F-A-R.com slash beyond dash belief. And that's where you can grab the book. And you can also get this transformation journal, which I'm personally really excited about, So near.

Thank you again for being here today. Before I end our time together though, do you have any final thought or word of wisdom? Not that you've already not given us enough, but I just wanna make sure, man, we got that final thought out of you today. Sure, yeah, I'll keep it simple. I think the final thought that I wanna leave folks with is that you have way more potential than you think. That you're just scratching the surface, right? Are you stopping at that 15 minute mark, like those rats who gave up and drowned? Or are you just scratching the surface of your capacity to persevere 240 times longer, that 60 hour mark?

So good. Nir, again, thank you for being here. Thank you for being a friend and mentor. Really appreciate your time today. Anytime. Thanks so much, Alex.