In this episode of Boldin Your Money, host Steve Chen sits down with bestselling author, behavioral expert, and former Stanford lecturer Nir Eyal to explore the psychology behind human behavior, decision-making, and the beliefs that shape our lives.
Nir shares insights from his bestselling books Hooked, Indistractable, and his latest book, Beyond Belief, explaining why people often fail to follow through on the things they know they should do. From financial habits and productivity to technology, AI, and entrepreneurship, this conversation dives into the hidden beliefs that influence how we think, act, and ultimately build better lives.
Steve and Nir also discuss the future of artificial intelligence, entrepreneurial thinking, why society fears new technologies, the importance of challenging limiting beliefs, and how changing the stories we tell ourselves can unlock lasting personal growth.
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Transcription
Steve Chen (00:00)
Hi folks. Steve Chen, founder of Boldin. I’m here with Nir Eyal, and we’re going to chat a little bit about his books, behavior, and the psychology of money.
Nir is a bestselling author, former Stanford lecturer, and one of the leading thinkers on psychology, technology, and behavior. His first book, Hooked, was a playbook on how products capture our attention. We’re going to chat about the pros and cons of that, and how it’s sometimes used against people as well.
His follow-up, Indistractable, teaches people how to take their attention back, and how very often people are trying to escape bad feelings. So it’s not necessarily technology that’s the core issue here, but our own emotions.
And then we’re going to get into his new book, Beyond Belief. So with that, Nir, welcome to our show. Appreciate you making the time to join us.
Nir Eyal (00:55)
Thanks, Steve. Great to be with you.
Steve Chen (00:57)
Yeah, so you were just saying in the preamble that you’re joining us from London right now. That’s awesome. How’s the book tour going?
Nir Eyal (01:02)
That’s right. I’m on book tour for Beyond Belief.
Great. It’s done really well. We hit the New York Times, and the reviews have been fantastic. I wrote the book for me to solve my problems, but it’s really great to see that it’s helping other people as well.
Steve Chen (01:17)
Yeah, well, I think that’s how great stuff is created. Many entrepreneurs and creators are solving problems they experience firsthand.
Nir Eyal (01:26)
Yeah. Was this your experience as well? Was that why you created your product?
Steve Chen (01:31)
Yeah, really. The story is, my brother and I saw this in our own lives. My mom had some money challenges and came to us to ask for help. We tried to find a really good financial advisor or a way to help her solve her problems, and the reality was she just wasn’t rich enough.
So we ended up doing it on spreadsheets, and then we were like, “God, why does everybody worry about money, and how come this isn’t easy to solve when everyone’s worried about it?” It’s kind of been a long-running problem.
That became the product, the platform, the community, and everything else.
Nir Eyal (02:07)
Very cool. Excellent. Tell me about the name, by the way. I was wondering about the name. How’d you come up with that?
Steve Chen (02:14)
Boldin? Or NewRetirement? Yeah, we were originally called NewRetirement.
The reason for NewRetirement was that my mom was in advertising, and I remember her telling me as I grew up that the one word that sells more than anything else is the word “new.” So I was like, we’re solving your retirement problem.
And this is the most common question we get, by the way. A lot of people are thrown off by our name. The whole idea was that we wanted to expand the market to think more comprehensively about life and money.
Nir Eyal (02:28)
Yeah. No, that product makes sense. I understand that name. What’s Boldin?
Steve Chen (02:43)
The idea is to help people build financial confidence so they can be bold in life. It’s about helping people have more agency and feel more confidence in their lives. That was the idea, to evoke something.
And it’s also shorter. Not necessarily easier to spell, though. We get people spelling it wrong, but we got the URL as well.
Nir Eyal (02:58)
Yeah. And you got the URL, so that’s helpful. Makes sense.
Steve Chen (03:08)
But yeah, in the age of AI, everything’s changing. Will people even be going to these websites, or are they going to just chat with their agents and everything gets solved for them? We’ll see.
But I wanted to get from you, on your side, your books have been informed, it sounds like, by your life experience. How did you become interested in these topics of psychology and behavior, and how they affect how we use our resources, especially time?
Nir Eyal (03:16)
Yeah, I think if you understand human psychology, then you can predict other people’s behavior and your behavior better. That’s really why I was always fascinated by it.
I used to be clinically obese, and I remember at one point feeling like food controlled me. I used to love to blame the food companies, McDonald’s, the food industrial complex, and blah, blah, blah. It wasn’t until I really sat with why I was overeating.
If you talk to people who are obese and struggling with their weight, what they’ll tell you is that we eat our feelings. I think all of us do. You don’t have to be obese to feel that. We eat when we’re bored, when we’re lonely, when we’re ashamed about how much we had just eaten. At least that’s the cycle I was on.
It wasn’t until I understood a few things. One, your behavior is at least partially manipulated by outside factors, because that’s what products are supposed to do. We say manipulation is a bad thing, but I kind of want to eat a Krispy Kreme donut, and I want it to be delicious because that’s what I paid for. That’s why I bought the Krispy Kreme donut. I’m not going to complain to Krispy Kreme for making donuts too delicious. That’s stupid.
So what I wanted to understand was that yes, those things can influence us, and in fact do influence us, but it’s not something that’s necessarily outside of our control. It’s only outside our control when we believe we don’t have control. I kind of worked through this conclusion backwards because my latest book is all about beliefs.
We only give up control when we believe we don’t have control. When we believe there’s nothing we can do, what do we do? Nothing.
Steve Chen (05:04)
Yep. Right.
Nir Eyal (05:05)
And we see that in every domain. We see that with the food we eat. We see that with how much we scroll online. We see that with all kinds of things where people say, “There’s nothing I can do. I’m addicted.”
Some people are addicted. Very, very few. But not every product that’s addictive addicts everyone. Lots of people have a glass of wine with dinner. We’re not all alcoholics. We have sex. We’re not all sex addicts, are we? Not everything that’s potentially addictive addicts everyone.
So when we talk about bad tech habits, bad money habits, all these things that are difficult, they’re not necessarily a walk in the park, or else everyone would master them, but they are definitely under our control.
I think my life experience informed this pendulum swinging back and forth in my life between, “It’s all corporations’ fault. They’re doing it to me,” to, “No, it’s all my fault. I’m doing it to me,” back to, “No, now there’s this new thing that’s doing it to me.” But eventually, “No, I think I can do something about this.”
The truth is that there are two parties here. There’s nuance. It’s not that simple. When you better understand the psychological mechanisms that influence your behavior, you can also mount a defense to make sure that you live without regret.
Steve Chen (06:09)
That’s really interesting, and it’s interesting to hear your own personal story. I’m curious, in your own life, at what period of time were you clinically obese, and how did you come to these conclusions? Were you studying this stuff already, or what drove all of this?
Nir Eyal (06:27)
Yeah, I didn’t really get into the psychology side of it until my second company.
At my first company, I started a solar energy business, and that kind of got us on our feet financially. We sold that successfully. Then I went to business school. My last company was at the intersection of gaming and advertising, and I had this front-row seat.
This was back in 2007, so the iPhone App Store wasn’t even available yet. This was the year the iPhone came out. At that last company, I saw so many businesses, clients, colleagues, and people in Silicon Valley come and go. I went to Stanford, so I was in the middle of Silicon Valley.
The defining trait of who succeeded in this age of the smartphone and this small screen we were now adopting was habits. If you could get people to come back, there was always a chance to monetize. Whereas if you couldn’t get people to change their behavior and keep coming back, then you were sunk. They would forget you.
So I wanted to figure out how you do that. How do you keep people coming back so we can help them change their lives? I didn’t want to join a social media company. I didn’t want to work for a video game company. I wanted to figure out how we get people as hooked to saving money, like you do, or to exercising, or to learning a new language.
Why is it only the gambling companies, social media companies, and video game companies that get to have all these secrets? So what did I do? I studied the psychology behind what makes those kinds of products so sticky. I stole their secrets and put them in a book that I sold to consumers. That’s what Hooked is all about.
That also turned into a class that I ended up teaching for quite a while at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and later at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. The whole idea was to democratize those techniques. It’s not just the social media companies and gaming companies. Companies like you can get people hooked to saving money. Fitbod gets people hooked to exercise. Duolingo gets people hooked to learning a new language.
That was really the motivation behind writing Hooked. Then Indistractable was the other side. If Hooked is about how you build good habits with technology, Indistractable is about how you break bad habits. Not to the same products. It’s not Hooked and Unhooked. It’s Hooked and Indistractable because we want to get hooked to Boldin, right? We want to get hooked to new money habits. And we also want to stop the bad habits that lead us to regret in our lives.
Different products. Exactly.
Steve Chen (08:40)
Yeah. Different orientation.
I remember reading Hooked, and it was awesome. Do you feel like it’s been net positive? I hear what you’re doing, which is, I agree with you, gambling, prediction markets, all these things have these random, unpredictable rewards, and you kind of codified that.
Do you think more good companies and individuals are using this? Or do you think it made it possible for companies like Robinhood and social media companies to take these lessons and really productize this like crazy?
Nir Eyal (09:32)
Yeah. Is it net positive? Yeah, I think it’s net positive because if you look at what you can do with your technologies these days, I would much rather live in the world we live in today, where we have information at our fingertips and endless entertainment. These are all good things.
What I’m still struggling with is how much personal freedom we should allow people. With social media, there are all kinds of things we can improve. I’m not an apologist for the tech industry. Regulation around how kids use it, echo chambers, if that even exists, there are all these things.
It’s debatable, because echo bubbles or echo chambers existed long before. If you look at the stats, Fox News, CNN, and Al Jazeera have a much higher impact on political polarization than Instagram and Facebook do. But nobody talks about that because that’s old technology.
So I’m not as concerned with social media because, look, what would people do if social media suddenly didn’t exist? They would go back to watching soap operas, sports, and all kinds of other mumbo jumbo that we use to spend our time. So who am I to say that social media and video games are bad, but watching golf on TV and cable news is good? Why? What’s the difference?
Now, what I am concerned about, and this is an industry that I think doesn’t get anywhere near enough scrutiny and that I refuse to work for, is gambling. I don’t work with gambling. I don’t work with pornography. I don’t work with alcohol. I don’t work with tobacco.
I think gambling has gone off the cliff. I think we have made a major mistake with gambling and cannabis. I used to be for legalization of both of those things, and I think it has been a tragic mistake. I think legalized gambling is decaying our country.
Remember, when you use these tactics to get people hooked to how they spend their time, people spend their time on all kinds of frivolity. But when it comes to money, you can’t get that back. You are destroying people’s livelihoods.
I think we’ve destroyed sports because of all this sports betting. It is rotting us to the core, from young men starting in high school who are getting on these sites, and it is bleeding them dry.
And you know what? We don’t talk about it. We talk about social media and video games being bad for you and AI being bad for you. Right under our nose, the government has become addicted to legalized gambling. The governments don’t talk about it. The politicians don’t talk about it because they know it bankrolls their state budgets. I think that is a much, much more dangerous problem that nobody is talking about.
Steve Chen (12:14)
Yeah, it feels like we’re always behind. If you ask the average American, “What’s Polymarket? What’s Kalshi?” they’re probably like, “I don’t know.” But if you ask a 20-year-old male, they’re probably going to know what’s going on.
A lot of people don’t know how much time is being spent. I think now we’re realizing and taking action with social media. Let’s not give kids smartphones. Let’s keep them off social media until they’re 16 or whatever, which I think is generally a good idea. But they’re onto other things.
Gaming is a big thing, and around that, these prediction markets and stuff like that. I will say prediction markets are interesting as a source of information because they do predict things. People have insights, and they share them because they’re incentivized to make money.
Nir Eyal (12:44)
Yeah. But the pure gambling stuff, like the coin toss on an athletic event, I think that stuff is not games of skill. A lot of this is total chance, and it’s nothing more than straight-up gambling.
Steve Chen (13:16)
One thing I’ve observed over the course of my career is that, in general, we have more free time. We’re becoming a more productive society, and it creates space. Why do we spend all this time on social media and these games? How can people afford to do it? Clearly, they’re surviving somehow.
In the age of AI, you start feeling like, is more work going to be highly automated, and what does that mean for society in the future?
Actually, before we go there, I would love your take on this: do you see a world where agents know us and can watch what we’re doing? An analogy I use is getting fit. I’m going to do way more push-ups if I’m sitting there with a trainer or in a class than if I’m watching a show at night trying to knock out push-ups.
Is there a world where AI is watching our behavior and saying, “Hey, Nir, you’ve been scrolling Instagram for an hour. Maybe that’s not what you want to do”?
Nir Eyal (14:15)
Yeah, I spoke about this years and years ago. I called this a Jiminy Cricket. Did you ever see the movie Pinocchio when you were a kid? Jiminy Cricket was Pinocchio’s conscience, and he would tell him, “Is this what you want to do? Are you sure that’s the way you want to do things?”
I can’t wait. I want a Jiminy Cricket AI with me at all times that says, “Hey, before you eat those fries, just so you know, if you’re trying to be in a caloric deficit, those fries are going to push you over. Or if you eat half the fries, you’ll still be within range.”
Or even better, your Jiminy Cricket AI hears what you just said to your wife and says, “You may want to take a minute and reconsider how you said that.” I would love that personal coach on my shoulder.
As long as privacy is kept and we don’t have data breaches, I think it’s possible, and I can’t wait. I think it’s going to be great.
Of course, that gives the providers of those tools immense powers, but this is nothing new. As Sophocles said, nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.
Is the internet good? Yeah. Is the internet bad? Hell yeah. Is social media good? Yeah. Is AI good? Yeah. Is AI bad? Yeah. It’s both, so it’s going to be about how we use it.
I think what we always do with this kind of stuff is we stumble through. We figure out the bads as we go along. What doesn’t work is this preemptive principle of, “It’s really scary, and we don’t know what’s going to happen, so let’s shut it down.” That tends not to work well.
One of the psychological quirks we have is that we think about sins of commission versus omission. We think about the things that you do. If a technology kills somebody, that’s terrible. But if the technology was never invented to save someone’s life, nobody notices. Same life, same life, but we can’t quantify the lives that were never saved.
Steve Chen (16:13)
Yep. Right.
It does feel a little inevitable right now. I don’t know if you’ve read the AI 2027 stuff, but we’re getting into this race condition where we’ve got the frontier models. We’ve seen these technological waves, and this one feels different and faster. It definitely feels like stuff is faster, and in some ways inevitable.
We are building things much more quickly, and the future you just described, I could totally see it. You’ve got an Oura Ring on. You’ve got your phone or whatever glasses. It’s seeing, hearing, and sensing your body.
“Steve, you’re getting elevated. Maybe you should pause and take a deep breath before whatever you’re going to say next comes out of your mouth.” All the behavioral coaching stuff that we describe now feels like science fiction, but it’s happening.
Nir Eyal (17:09)
Yeah, it’s happening. Look at us right now. If you would have told me as a kid, I don’t know, how old are you, Steve?
Steve Chen (17:18)
I’m older than you are. I’m in my mid-50s.
Nir Eyal (17:28)
Mid-50s. Not that much older. I’m 48.
I remember going to Epcot Center and seeing, “This is what the future is going to look like. You’re going to have video phones.” And look, we’re doing it right now. We’re literally living in the future.
What is that saying? Pessimists sound smart, and optimists get rich. Pessimists always sound smart: “But it could do this, and it could do this, and look at the children, think about the women.” Literally every technology. It’s always “save the women and children.”
Sometimes it’s justified. I’m not saying it’s not justified. Sometimes we do need to look at the consequences. But it’s never about the stuff we think about.
The stuff that’s terrifying is the fact that millions of people still die in car accidents because of human error. That’s what we should be worrying about. Super boring.
How about the fact that people in the year of our Lord 2026 still smoke? Steve, what the actual hell? We’re worrying about AI when millions of people every year die of preventable smoking-related deaths. Are you kidding me? What’s wrong with us?
That’s what we should be putting our eye on. But of course it’s boring. It’s much sexier to think about an AI apocalypse than it is about the actual apocalypse happening right now to people who are smoking when they don’t have to.
Steve Chen (18:38)
Right. This goes to your work. It’s like data versus beliefs.
There’s data that a Waymo is ten times safer than a human-driven car, but still we’re like, “Wow, these robot cars seem super dangerous to me, and maybe we shouldn’t have that.”
The same thing with data centers. Data centers do have a cost, and it looks like AI could be solving huge problems, finding medical advances, and discovering all kinds of stuff that would take us forever. The net positive benefit to society could be massive, but we’re like, “We’ve got to slow-roll this.”
Nir Eyal (19:28)
Yeah. The water. Think about the water, Steve. What about the water?
I think the problem is that people are really bad at understanding what the job of technology is. People think technology is about solving problems, and if it creates problems, that’s bad. Shut it all down.
But technology doesn’t solve problems. As Thomas Sowell says, it gives us better problems. That’s what technology does. Of course we’re going to have new problems. Every technology creates problems. And what do we do? We create even better solutions to fix the last generation of problems, and it goes on and on.
What we need to do is encourage more people to enter technology, not be afraid of it.
This is why beliefs are so powerful. Beliefs literally help a society flourish or destroy itself. If you believe in a positive future, we see this all the time now, where some people say, “How could you bring a kid into the world?” because they’re so concerned about the future. They think the future is so dangerous that they choose not to have children because of how terrible the world is going to become. And yet they’re living in that very world right now and having a modestly good time of it.
Our beliefs are super impactful in terms of what we’re able to do with our lives. We need to be very careful about assessing those beliefs because they have an amazing power to feel like facts. But beliefs are not facts.
Steve Chen (20:43)
Yeah. Right.
Nir Eyal (20:46)
A fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether or not you believe it. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. That’s a big, big difference there.
Steve Chen (20:59)
I was going to make a comment on this, which is related. I interviewed Annie Duke, one of the top female poker players, and one of my favorite quotes from her is “strong beliefs, loosely held,” which I think is great.
Just like you were saying, “I thought legalizing cannabis was good, I thought gambling was good, and now maybe that’s less good,” and your beliefs have changed.
Nir Eyal (21:10)
Held loosely. Yeah, that’s right.
I categorize it as the difference between faith, fact, and belief.
Faith is a conviction that is not open to revision based on evidence, so it does not require evidence. “God rewards the righteous.” What evidence could I possibly present to somebody who believes God rewards the righteous if that’s something they believe? That is a matter of faith. You’re not looking for evidence, and that’s fine. Nor should you. It’s a matter of faith.
A fact is something that is true whether or not you believe in it. It’s objectively true. But beliefs are something that we can and should change.
Unfortunately, in our culture, when someone disagrees with you, even think of that statement right there. We don’t say, “Someone disagrees with my idea.” We say someone disagrees with me. It’s personal. We can’t help it. If I disagree with you, it feels like a personal attack.
That’s the big problem. Changing my beliefs is my love language. I love it. There’s nothing better than when someone helps me see reality more clearly.
Steve Chen (22:23)
Feels like you’re in the one percent of that. Most people are probably like…
Nir Eyal (22:25)
Well, it’s changed. I’ll tell you what, it’s changed since writing this book because I didn’t realize how bad we all are at seeing reality.
Your brain currently is absorbing 11 million bits of information per second. That is the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. Imagine 2,000 pages of text every single second. It’s a tremendous amount of information.
The light entering your eyes, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, your brain is absorbing all that information. But your conscious awareness can only process 50 bits. Fifty bits is one sentence per second.
So 2,000 pages of text versus just one sentence. What your brain is absorbing, what you call the real world, is not the real world. It’s a simulation projected through your beliefs.
You don’t see things as they are. You see them as you believe them to be. We’ve all heard seeing is believing. Actually, believing is seeing.
What you believe is literally what you are able to see. This isn’t a metaphor. For example, people who are on a diet see food as larger. People who are afraid of heights see distances as farther away. Entrepreneurial people literally see things the rest of us can’t see. It’s called entrepreneurial alertness.
Knowing that your beliefs dictate what you are able to see should give us all pause. We don’t see reality clearly, so we should put a lot less weight in what we think is a fact.
Steve Chen (24:04)
Yeah, so much of this is so interesting in this conversation. I feel like society is learning some of these higher-EQ ideas and understanding more about how we think, but it’s not evenly distributed at all.
Some people have high self-awareness and much more open minds, and they’re willing to have their beliefs changed. And then I think you’re also seeing a whole bunch of people where there’s a lot of faith in how things are. There’s not a lot of willingness to rethink. It’s interesting. In some ways, I think a lot of people feel safer that way. It’s like, “This is true, so I can believe in this,” especially in a world where a lot of things are changing.
Nir Eyal (24:34)
Yeah, that’s right. We hear it all the time. Oftentimes, it’s the people who consider themselves the most tolerant and open-minded who think other people are very closed-minded: “They won’t change their minds, but me? No, no, no. I see reality.”
The way we need to think about limiting beliefs is that they’re like our face. We all have a face, but if I asked you, “Steve, look at your face,” you can’t look at your face the way you can look at your hands or your feet. You can’t see your own face, just like you can’t see your own limiting beliefs.
Interestingly, we can see everyone else’s limiting beliefs. You can see your kids’, your colleagues’, your boss’s, your neighbors’. You can see all their limiting beliefs. But you can’t see your own, just like you can’t see your own face.
In order to see our limiting beliefs, in order to see our face, we have to reflect. We need a mirror. We need something outside of us to systematically show us our own limiting beliefs.
Steve Chen (25:47)
Given your perspective on this, do you see the world changing for the better in these areas? Do you think self-awareness, and the understanding of faith versus beliefs versus facts, is getting better in the world? Are we as a society making better choices?
I’m sure this varies wildly by country and other factors, but are we generally doing better? Are we on a good path? Or do you feel like we’re going to see a K-shaped world, where some people are killing it and some people are not doing that great?
Nir Eyal (26:25)
Yes. It’s complicated. There’s always nuance.
At a societal level, I think long term we will do what we always have. Past returns are no predictor of future returns, but if you look at the long arc of history, as Obama told us, it bends toward justice. We seem to see that through all the bumps, tribulations, and trials of humanity, we tend to come out pretty well.
There are some big problems we haven’t figured out. I’m not worried about the problems we know how to fix. For example, believe it or not, we actually know how to fix climate change. There are lots of ways to fix climate change, so that’s not as existential as I think people believe.
Nobody has any idea how to fix population collapse. We can have a pristine environment, and we will have a pristine environment, with almost nobody to enjoy it.
If I told you that by the end of this century, the nation of Japan will have 40 million fewer people, you would ask, “What happened? Was there a thermonuclear war?” There must have been some terrible disaster.
No. It’s just math. Those people won’t exist because they won’t be born. They’re not replacing themselves. They’re not having enough babies, and nobody has any clue what to do. Those are the kinds of problems that actually keep me up at night.
Nir Eyal (27:37)
You would say, “What happened? Was there a thermonuclear war? What happened?” There must have been some terrible disaster.
No. It’s just math. Those people won’t exist because they won’t be born. They’re not replacing themselves. They’re not having enough babies, and nobody has any clue what to do.
Those are the kinds of problems that actually keep me up at night. Most other problems, it turns out, the world is becoming more educated, more tolerant, more democratic. There are greater rights for women, better education, and better healthcare.
Nir Eyal (28:06)
There’s a wonderful book everyone should read called Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It’s one of my favorite books. Why are you laughing?
Steve Chen (28:14)
Because I tell people about this book all the time. I love this book. Things are getting better, and people are always like, “No, they’re not getting better.” I’m like, “They’re getting better. Poverty’s tanking.”
Nir Eyal (28:16)
You do? Okay, awesome. I knew I liked you.
Nobody believes you. Again, this is one of those matters of faith. “No, you don’t understand. There’s a guy on my corner who is homeless, and therefore the world is getting worse. There’s crime, and I knew somebody who took drugs.”
It’s all anecdote. But when you actually look at the statistics, and this is exactly what Hans Rosling did, he gave an exam to the most educated people on earth: college professors. He asked them this standard exam about the state of the world: healthcare, education, female empowerment, democracy, all these things people care about.
It turns out the professors scored worse than monkeys. Literally worse than monkeys. Worse than chance. That’s what blows people’s minds: the world is actually getting better, but slowly and bumpily.
Steve Chen (29:00)
Right. Our own bias.
Nir Eyal (29:11)
Over the long term, most of these things get better. Those kinds of problems I know we can fix. We will fix. We are fixing them. But I don’t know how we replace ourselves. That’s a much bigger challenge.
Steve Chen (29:18)
Right. It’s super interesting listening to you, because literally I knew you were going to say Factfulness right before you said it. We think about a lot of the same things.
I talk about Japan all the time. I think Japan has roughly 130 million people, and it’s on its way to something like 80 million people. When you think about the reality of that, I tell my kids or other people, “Imagine you’re in Northern California, where I live, and a third of the people are gone. What happens to housing? What happens to businesses? What does traffic look like?”
Nir Eyal (29:54)
What happens to Social Security? Everything. We’ve never recovered from that type of loss. There’s no model for that.
Steve Chen (30:01)
Yeah. If you look at the really long-term trends of population, it went like this. We’re all familiar, at least in Silicon Valley land, with exponential growth. Exponential is great, but it goes the other way. If you stop replacing people, and then there are two fewer people to have more people, it can come down very fast.
Nir Eyal (30:07)
It crashes fast. Do you have any ideas, by the way? You seem to have read a lot about this. Any ideas that seem plausible?
One is the Japan model. You go to Japan, and even though their population continues to decline, millions fewer babies are born, and yet they have this kind of managed-decline system. They have a ton of debt, of course, but I don’t know. Do you have any ideas how we get through it?
Steve Chen (30:42)
I do not, but I’m well aware of the birth rate problems. I’m curious what you think about why this is.
I’m with you. I’m in the abundant future camp. Solar or renewable energy, endless energy. If we get boundless energy, guess what? We can solve water because we can desalinate the ocean and things like that. We’re on this path of getting rid of fossil fuels because of the economics.
The world will get better, but why are people having fewer children? Why are we on the decline, potentially as a species? That’s what I’m curious about.
Nir Eyal (31:11)
Why? I think it’s a collapse of beliefs.
There used to be, I think, a faith, and I think there still is. Look at what countries and civilizations today have birth rates above replacement. It turns out where it’s highest is in countries where your children are your Social Security system.
Steve Chen (31:47)
Yeah, their replacement rate or whatever it is.
Nir Eyal (31:57)
Right. They are your safety net. The more kids you have, the more each one of them will send you a few bucks every month, and that’s going to sustain you in your old age. That becomes your retirement account.
When the government guaranteed us Social Security, we didn’t need to have a bunch of kids in order to survive old age. As Peter Zeihan says, kids became economically useless and emotionally priceless. That’s what happened.
I’ve seen estimates that it costs over a million dollars to raise a child from zero to 18 to college, and then you’ve got to pay for college. It became very expensive because they’re emotionally priceless and yet economically worthless.
That didn’t used to be the case. It used to be that you had a bunch of kids because they were economically useful to you. “Be fruitful and multiply.” The fruitful part gets forgotten. That’s how you assured your retirement. The more kids you had, the more boys could protect your village and the more women would produce your heirs.
That was how society sustained itself. That’s just not the case anymore. Children aren’t necessary. They’re a lot of work, so what do people do? They get dogs instead of having kids.
Steve Chen (33:02)
Do you think younger people feel this? I definitely see this. There are a lot of young men, I forget what Scott Galloway calls them, but they’re not employed, educated, or being trained. They’re basically playing video games, they’re on Polymarket, and they’re not fully engaged in society.
I wonder if it’s because they’re not necessary. It’s kind of daunting. It is getting harder for younger people to find work right now, that’s for sure. Or at least that’s a belief that’s true.
Nir Eyal (33:38)
That’s a belief. Yeah.
I think this is what we need to replace. The closest I’ve ever come to some kind of solution is this, and I’ll back up. Part of the problem is that it sounds cold, because we think children are emotionally priceless and economically useless.
So we don’t value having children enough. We think just having kids is its own reward. I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s a lot of work, and it’s not recognized work.
I think there should be something like a baby bond or something. I’m just tossing this out here. What do I know? I’m not a political scientist. I’m certainly not someone who writes legislation.
But we should bring back what works. The only system that gets people to have more kids is when you think your kids are for your future retirement. What if we had some kind of scheme, like let’s call it a baby IRA? In a baby IRA, for every child you have, you get a portion of their future income, which should be a taxable projection. We should say every additional worker is going to give the government X number of dollars, and without that person being born, that money is not being generated. We generate income tax based on income, based on work.
We should have, instead of, or in addition to, the traditional Social Security system, something that says the more people you bring into the world who pay taxes, you should make part of that money. Now, caveats, caveats, asterisks everywhere. I know it’s not a perfect system, but it’s a lot better than inevitable decline.
Steve Chen (35:10)
Yeah. Well, we kind of have that in Social Security for what it’s worth. People are paying into it, and then we take it out as we get older.
Nir Eyal (35:18)
But on a macro level. It’s not one for one.
Frankly, women bear the brunt of this. They’re the ones who make less money over their lifetimes because they exit the workforce to have babies. Biologically, I wish I could, but I can’t. A woman has to exit the workforce, and she’s not properly compensated, I think, for the value she’s created for society.
Steve Chen (35:29)
One hundred percent. And women live longer.
The other challenging thing that’s happening here is if AI starts to replace human labor, which there’s a hypothesis is starting to happen, our tax code creates an interesting thought experiment.
Our GDP is driven mostly by people. More people means they do more work and produce goods. In a world where that’s done by AI and not people, you’re going to have to start taxing the labor of AI to capture that value. Otherwise, you could get into this downward spiral, the doomerism thing, where AI is producing stuff and we’re getting more stuff, but people have fewer jobs, so they have less income and can’t afford to buy it.
Nir Eyal (36:40)
Yeah, I get it. I don’t understand practically how that’s done because it’s software. I can understand how you could tax the value generated by that software, but AI is just software.
We have a bunch of robots, but a robot doesn’t have a Social Security number that we can send a tax return to. I don’t exactly understand how you would do that. What I do understand is that you need a lot of people to want to buy stuff from the companies producing the software, and then that creates net income, which can be taxed. That I understand.
I want to live in a world with lots of AI and lots of people to enjoy it.
Steve Chen (37:13)
A hundred percent.
One of my suggestions for the future is that we need to get really good at creating new things. We need to get everyone thinking like an entrepreneur.
As a father of kids who are entering the workforce, and seeing their friends have difficulty, they’re all going to good schools, NYU, USC, and they come out saying, “Man, it is not simple to get a job out here.”
You need to get good at thinking, “I might need to start a company. What does that look like?” and thinking pretty expansively. That will be good for society because it will hopefully lead to a Cambrian explosion of new businesses. But it’s going to be incentive-driven.
Nir Eyal (37:55)
Totally. I think that’s very much belief-driven. We know there’s this trait called entrepreneurial alertness, where people who have this trait see hundred-dollar bills all over the place that the rest of us can’t see.
I think that’s a big part of it. The more entrepreneurs you have, that’s what makes Silicon Valley such a special place. You see everybody working on stuff, and that helps change your belief set of what you think is possible.
I’ve been in a lot of other countries where there’s much more of a tall poppy syndrome. “Who the heck do you think you are? You think you’re just going to start a business and make money? What are the rest of us, idiots? We don’t see your business idea and do it already? Who do you think you are?”
Those beliefs, those cultural beliefs, and what is culture but codified beliefs, can be very, very impactful.
I think that’s part of what makes America so exceptional. It’s why I’m a very proud American who is an American by choice. I naturalized.
It is the one place, I think more than any other, where the real entrepreneurial spirit lives. If you want to come make it for yourself, America still, for all its faults and all its warts, is the place you’ve got to come.
Steve Chen (38:50)
It’s interesting. I came to Silicon Valley, and I didn’t know anything about it. But when I got here, I was like, “This is where I belong.” I continue to see this.
It is hard. I see all these places around America and even Japan, like we were talking about. I’m going to Tokyo on Thursday, and we actually have Japanese investors. Nippon Global invested in the fund that invested in us, and part of it is that they set up an outpost in Silicon Valley to study what the heck is happening here.
All these places want to recreate this for their own economies, and it is hard to recreate because there’s a critical mass. It’s a whole ecosystem. It’s a whole culture. People here know and persist.
You come here, you start a company, and you think, “Okay, there’s something here.” Everyone tries. Most people fail, but that’s part of the culture. The ones that succeed reinvest in it. Then you’ve got these founders who have money and have done it, and they’re like, “Okay, I just made $100 million. I’m putting $10 million in venture capital.” Bang, it starts all over again.
Nir Eyal (40:13)
That’s so unique to Silicon Valley. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it. You could be fresh out of college, 22 years old, and people will give you millions of dollars. You could run off to the Bahamas, and they never see you again, but that almost never happens.
People take those millions of dollars and think they can turn them into billions of dollars. It happens, and it keeps happening. There’s nowhere else in the world that you could do that.
Steve Chen (40:39)
I also think, back to your tall poppy comment, it’s very merit-driven. I’ll be at meetups and meet someone who’s 20 years old who just came from Norway, and they’re like, “Yeah, I left it all. I’m here. I’ve got this idea, and I’m going for it.”
I take these people dead seriously because that’s who wins. In other places, they’re not as welcome. Here, it’s like, “Hey, great.”
By the way, that’s where I started. I came here in my early 20s. I knew nothing, but people were nice and supportive, and I remember those conversations.
This has been an awesome conversation. We’re talking about everything.
For our audience, the problem we’re trying to solve is that people worry about these problems, especially retirement and the future. They’re like, “I know I should be doing more. I could live a long time, and there’s all this uncertainty with the markets, inflation, health, and everything else.” And yet most people don’t do anything.
I would love your take on helping people understand why they don’t do these things. We’ve talked about beliefs and all that. What can they do to get started?
Outcomes are like your story. “I’m clinically obese.” But you don’t get fit just by understanding it. You had to make these changes. You had to realize it, get educated, and take action. What are some practices people can put into place to make positive change in their lives?
Nir Eyal (42:24)
I think it starts from understanding these scripts we have picked up in our lives that we didn’t choose: our family, upbringing, culture, past experience, or something someone said to us.
These limiting beliefs are not your fault, but they are your responsibility. We keep carrying around these limiting beliefs that are not making our life better.
“Money is hard to make.”
“People like me don’t get rich.”
“Wanting money makes me greedy.”
“I’m bad with money.”
We carry these limiting beliefs forward with us. What do they do? What’s the definition of a limiting belief? A limiting belief is a belief that decreases your motivation and increases your suffering.
What does a person do when they believe, “I’m bad with money,” or “Getting rich means you’re greedy”? What does your motivation look like to save, to invest, to learn, to balance your checkbook?
You’re literally self-sabotaging. When you believe those things, your motivation decreases and your suffering increases.
I think that’s such a fundamental place to look. My frustration, having researched and written three books over 16 or 17 years, is that even when I tell people exactly what to do, like with Indistractable, here’s a 250-page book. It tells you exactly what to do. You could read the entire book in maybe three or four hours, and I’m telling you, you would become indistractable.
Not everybody, and I mean, the books have done great, so no complaints. They’ve sold over half a million copies. But some people, even though the solution is right there, would prefer to complain and wait for the government to fix the problem.
“Please, Facebook, stop making the product so good.”
“Netflix, stop making your movies so interesting.”
They’d rather complain and think they’re powerless when they’re not, because it’s so much easier. The biggest thing to realize is that you have far more control than you know. The only time you don’t have power is when you believe you don’t.
Understanding those limiting beliefs, putting them out there, figuring out what it is that you believe, will empower you to actually put the information to use.
Frankly, Steve, I find the problem is not that people don’t know. If you want to be rich, you save money for a very long time. That’s it. We can talk about investing and how you invest, but that’s detail.
Big picture, the big problem is not that people don’t know what to do. It’s that people don’t follow through on the things they know they should do. That’s the problem. It’s not information. It’s beliefs.
Steve Chen (45:12)
It’s so interesting. Back to culture, where you live, and how you came up.
One of my son’s friends was visiting, and he’s going to school in Kentucky. He grew up in Northern California, and he was saying, “My friends are getting married and having kids at 21.” It’s a totally different world.
We grow up in families, and those families teach us beliefs we have about ourselves. If you grow up less wealthy, one of the really huge reasons I’m so into this work is that I know us getting more financially secure and being entrepreneurs affected our family. My oldest son is an entrepreneur probably because he watched his parents do this stuff and thought, “This is possible. I shouldn’t be afraid to try this.”
Conversely, if you grow up thinking, “We’re poor, and we’ve been poor for generations, so I’m probably going to be poor,” right?
Nir Eyal (46:11)
Yeah. “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”
These are limiting beliefs we tell ourselves all the time, and we think we’re doing ourselves a favor. A belief like “money doesn’t grow on trees,” what are you saying? You’re saying, “Don’t take risks. Don’t try.”
There are all these reinforcing beliefs that we tell ourselves, and we don’t even realize whether they’re serving us or hurting us.
Steve Chen (46:32)
I’m a big believer in community and groups as a way of changing behavior. But if you’re living somewhere and you have these beliefs, I guess you have to realize you have limiting beliefs. That’s job number one, which is not necessarily simple. Then you have to have a mechanism for changing those limiting beliefs.
How do you see that come to life in people who make it work?
Nir Eyal (46:47)
That’s what Beyond Belief is about.
I love how, with five minutes left to go, we finally get here. This is awesome. It’s actually the sign of a great conversation. Typically, people say, “Okay, what’s your book about?” and I talk about my book for an hour. But this is great. I love that we’ve had such a great conversation.
This is exactly what the book is about. It’s how you look at yourself in that proverbial mirror to find your limiting beliefs when you think they are facts, and when you think those beliefs have served you, because they have.
Why do we have limiting beliefs? Why would we have software in our brains that limits us, decreases motivation, and increases suffering?
It’s because your brain is just doing its primary job. Your brain’s primary job is not for you to get rich. It’s not for you to meet your potential. It’s not for you to be happy. Your brain’s primary job is to keep you safe. It’s to keep you alive. That’s it. That’s all the brain really cares about.
Whatever you’ve been doing, whatever you’ve been thinking, whatever you’ve been believing got you here, didn’t it? So the best bet your brain can make is to keep you doing whatever you have done and whatever you’ve believed before. Your brain is doing its job.
Step number one is realizing that your brain is constantly pulling you toward passivity. Your brain is going to give you every excuse, tooth and nail, to say, “No, no, no. You don’t need to change. Just keep doing what you’re doing. That’s safe. People like you can’t get rich. Wanting money totally makes you greedy. Money is hard to make.”
Your brain is going to keep telling you these lies because that’s what got you this far.
Step one is knowing your brain doesn’t see reality clearly and that your brain is pulling you toward passivity. Then we have a process to follow to take out these limiting beliefs, where we say to ourselves, “Where is this suffering in my life? What is an area of my life where I’m struggling?”
Maybe it’s my personal finances. Maybe it’s a relationship. Maybe it’s my career. Whatever it might be.
Then we walk through a process called inquiry-based stress reduction. I didn’t make it up. It’s been scientifically validated in several studies. I walk people through exactly how to make that very easy to follow.
At the end of that process, what you walk out with are new liberating beliefs. Liberating beliefs are the opposite of limiting beliefs. A liberating belief is a belief that increases your motivation and decreases your suffering.
The idea is that once you recognize those limiting beliefs and discover those liberating beliefs, you reinforce them again and again until they crowd out the limiting beliefs. That’s how we process long-term behavior and belief change.
Steve Chen (49:32)
That’s awesome.
Do you use Strava? Do you know Strava?
Nir Eyal (49:36)
I know Strava, yeah.
Steve Chen (49:32)
I use Strava. It’s activity tracking and things like that. You build a community, and you do these good things, like, “Okay, I went for a hike. I went for a bike ride.”
I’ve always wondered if there could be a Strava for doing good in the world, or maybe for something like this: “How do I change my beliefs? How do I reorient myself and share that with other people, see other people doing that, and be inspired by it?”
I feel like a lot of this work is so important, and for many people it’s done either by themselves or maybe with small groups.
Nir Eyal (50:12)
Book clubs I highly encourage. If you can get a few people together, maybe a couple of family members, three or four people, to read a book like this together, it can make a world of difference.
Steve Chen (50:23)
Yeah, it’s awesome.
All right. Well, Nir, this has been awesome. It’s great to get your perspective, and I have so many additional questions, but maybe we’ll have to have a second follow-up one.
For folks listening, definitely check out Nir’s new book, Beyond Belief. You can find it online at geni.us/beyondbelief. Also go to NirAndFar.com.
I saw you’re on YouTube, so that’s pretty cool. Hopefully that’s going well.
All reviews are welcome. All feedback is welcome, as both Nir and I are working on building our respective platforms.
So with that, thank you very much. Nir, thanks again for joining us.
Nir Eyal (50:59)
My pleasure, Steve. Thanks for having me.
Steve Chen (51:15)
Yeah, I appreciate it.
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