Beyond belief with Nir Eyal

Note: this is the original English recording of the interview. You can also listen to the Spanish version, dubbed with artificial intelligence. A year ago on this podcast, Nir Eyal told us the superpower he wanted most was to become indistractable. He’d spent five years and thirty pages of citations proving that our worst behavior comes from an urge to escape discomfort, not from bad willpower. Then, almost as an aside, answering a question about what still surprised him about human nature, he said something that sounded like a footnote: he was starting to research a new book, about how our beliefs quietly shape what we see, what we feel, and what we do. That footnote is now called Beyond Belief, co-written with Julie Li, just published in Spanish as Cree lo increíble, logra lo imposible, and it just became an instant New York Times bestseller. Nir Eyal taught at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, advised some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and wrote Hooked, the book that explained how products are designed to capture our attention, before spending five years learning to escape that same trap in Indistractable. Now he has done something almost nobody expected from him: he interviewed a rabbi, an imam, a swami, a monk and a priest in Singapore to understand how to pray without even being certain God exists, and he has started praying himself. Show notes The show notes are available at https://kenso.es/episodio/428-nir-eyal-cree-lo-increible Explore this episode: •(00:07) The power of belief: limits and possibilities •(04:50) Beliefs are tools, not truths •(06:58) Pain, suffering and how to spot a limiting belief •(10:21) Spirituality for sceptics: praying with or without faith •(14:31) The motivation triangle and the beliefs that hold us back •(22:43) A portfolio of perspectives: the art of changing a belief •(34:37) Hunger, emotions and handling discomfort •(43:28) Love, emotional tools and the benefit of the doubt •(51:00) The KENSO questionnaire •(54:50) Goodbyes and recap Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.