Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief - Why We Don’t Do What We Know We Should

**Steve Chen** (0:00)
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 and behavior and the psychology of money a little bit. So Nir is a bestselling author, former Stanford lecturer, and one of the leading thinkers on psychology, technology, and behavior. And so 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 used, sometimes against people as well.
And his follow-up, Indistractable, was kind of teaching people how to take attention back and how very often it's really, people are trying to escape essentially bad feelings. And so it's not necessarily technology that's the core issue here, but kind of 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** (0:55)
Thanks, Steve. Great to be with you.

**Steve Chen** (0:57)
Yeah. So you're just saying in the preamble that you're joining us from London right now.

**Nir Eyal** (1:02)
That's right. Yeah. I'm on a book tour for Beyond Belief.

**Steve Chen** (1:06)
Oh, cool. How's the book tour going?

**Nir Eyal** (1:07)
Great. Yeah, it's done really well. We hit the New York Times and the reviews have been fantastic. So 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** (1:17)
Yeah. Well, that's how I think great stuff is created. I think most entrepreneurs are kind of like solving, and creators are solving problems they experienced firsthand.

**Nir Eyal** (1:27)
Was this your experience as well? Was that why you created your product?

**Steve Chen** (1:31)
Yeah. Really, the story is, my brother and I, we saw this in our own lives, like my mom kind of had some money challenges and came to us to ask for help, and we tried to find a really good financial advisor and way to help her solve her problems. The reality was, she just wasn't rich enough, so we ended up doing it on spreadsheets, and then we're like, God, this is a...
Why does everybody worry about money, and how come this isn't easy to solve when everyone's worried about it? And even though it's kind of been a long running problem, and so that became the product and the platform and the community and everything else.

**Nir Eyal** (2:08)
Very cool. Yeah. Excellent.
Tell us the name, by the way. I was wondering about the name. How did you come up with that?

**Steve Chen** (2:14)
Boldin or NewRet? Well, so yeah, we were originally called NewRetirement. So the name, the reason for NewRetirement was that my mom was in advertising, and she's like, I remember her telling me as I grew up, the one word that sells more than anything else is the word new. And so I was like, we're charging her.

**Nir Eyal** (2:30)
That product makes sense. I understand that name. What's Boldin?

**Steve Chen** (2:34)
And this is the most common question we get about it. A lot of people are throwing up our name. So the whole idea was we wanted to expand the market to think more comprehensively about life and money. And so the idea is to help people build financial confidence so they can be bold in life. So it's like to move towards this more... People are more agency and feel more confidence in their lives. So that was the idea to evolve something.
And it's also shorter. It's not really easier to spell that.

**Nir Eyal** (3:03)
And you got the URL, so that's helpful.

**Steve Chen** (3:05)
We got the URL as well. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, in the age of AI, everything is changing. So we'll even... People will be going to these websites, so they're going to just chat with their agents and everything is going to get solved for them. So we'll see. Yeah, but I just wanted to get from you. On your side, your books have been informed, it sounds like, by your life experience. And how did you come to be interested in these topics of psychology and behavior and how it affects how we use our resources, especially time?

**Nir Eyal** (3:35)
Yeah, I think if you understand human psychology, then you can predict other people's behavior and your behavior better. And so that's really why I was always fascinated by it. I used to be clinically obese. And I remember at one point, I remember feeling like food controlled me. And I used to love to blame the food companies and McDonald's and the food industrial complex and blah, blah, blah.