Person
Every book Nir Eyal recommended on podcasts
Key facts
- Nir Eyal has recommended or discussed 10 books on podcasts, as of March 21, 2026.
- Nir Eyal has talked about books on 4 podcasts, as of March 21, 2026.
- Those books came up in 4 episodes, as of March 21, 2026.
- The 3 books Nir Eyal has mentioned in the most episodes, not counting Nir Eyal's own, as of March 21, 2026: Factfulness, The War of Art and Bowling Alone.
- The latest episode with a book mention from Nir Eyal aired on March 21, 2026.
Updated
Across 4 podcasts. Every show Nir Eyal appears on, in one place — not just one.
Nir Eyal’s most mentioned books
- Factfulness by Hans Rosling
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
- Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam
- How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
- Mindset by Carol S. Dweck
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
- The Mindbody Prescription by John E. Sarno
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Nir Eyal has appeared on prominent podcasts such as Modern Wisdom and The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett, where he discusses habit formation, productivity, and human behavior. Throughout these conversations, Eyal has recommended and referenced various books to support his insights. On Modern Wisdom, he recommended Hans Rosling's book Factfulness to illustrate how people maintain a negativity bias concerning the state of the world, noting that university professors performed poorly on the book's global knowledge exam. While speaking on The Diary Of A CEO, Eyal referenced Steven Pressfield's book The War of Art to emphasize the necessity of consistency and effort even during mundane tasks. In addition to direct recommendations, Eyal discussed several other influential works during his interviews. He used Leo Tolstoy's massive novel War and Peace as a comparative scale to explain the volume of information processed by the human brain every second. He mentioned Markus Zusak's novel The Book Thief while explaining the origins of a screen sign concept. Eyal also referenced John E. Sarno's The Mindbody Prescription, Carol S. Dweck's Mindset, Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone, and Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind to explore topics ranging from physical pain and psychological studies to social decline and the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
Books Nir Eyal recommended or discussed
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Hooked
Discussed“So the idea behind my work with Hooked, I didn't write this book for the social media companies. I stole their secrets so that the idea was to democratize these techniques”
Where to get it
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Factfulness
Recommended“Well, that's not true. And if you don't believe me, read this wonderful book by Hans Rosling, Factfulness, where he interviewed university professors and he gave them an exam about the state of the world... These professors on this exam did worse than if monkeys would have taken this test.”
Where to get it
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The War of Art
Recommended“Steven Pressfield talks about this in the the The War of Art.”
Where to get it
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Bowling Alone
Discussed“I mean, we Robert Putnam was talking about this in the 1990s in his book Bowling Alone.”
Where to get it
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How to Change Your Mind
Discussed“This is why we see Mike and Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, where why psychedelics are so interesting for for treatment of depression, anxiety, and various conditions.”
Where to get it
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Indistractable
Discussed“Whereas indistractable, if Hooked is about building good habits, then indistractable is about how do we break those bad habits and keep the technology, right?”
Where to get it
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Mindset
Discussed“And Carol Dweck, who you might know from she's probably been on your show, from her book Mindset, she decided to replicate these studies.”
Where to get it
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The Book Thief
Discussed“So that's where I got the idea of that screen sign that comes in every copy of the book.”
Where to get it
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The Mindbody Prescription
Discussed“I don’t know if you’ve read 'The Mind-Body Prescription.'”
Where to get it
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War and Peace
Discussed“To put that in perspective, that's like reading War and Peace twice every second. Okay?”
Where to get it
Books Nir Eyal wrote
Appearances
Other mentions (13: passing, ad reads, own books)
“You know, that that is a great point because uh there is a lot of out there. And so, part of what I wanted to do with this uh research that I've done over the past 6 years for Beyond Belief was to really separate what works and what doesn't.”
“If you understand these four fundamental steps—and this is what took me five years writing this book, namely because I kept getting distracted; I was very distracted with myself, and I wrote the book for me as I mentioned earlier—it was when I boiled down the hundreds of studies and research, and you can see there's thirty-five pages of citations”
“You know, many parents there's a whole section in the book Indistractable on how to raise indistractable kids.”
“Yeah, so every copy of the book comes with -- oh, did you tear it out already?”
“In my line of work, you know, I'm fairly controversial because I wrote 'Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products' and then I wrote 'Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.'”
“In my line of work, you know, I'm fairly controversial because I wrote 'Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products' and then I wrote 'Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.'”
“so, in in my line of work, you know, I I'm fairly controversial because I wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and then I wrote Indistractable about how to control your attention and choose your life.”
“so, in in my line of work, you know, I I'm fairly controversial because I wrote Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and then I wrote Indistractable about how to control your attention and choose your life.”
“Absolutely. I wrote a whole book about how to become indistractable because I think distraction is a big problem.”
“I sat down with him for three hours and wanted to give them a path out of, hey, look, you know, look, I spent five years writing this book on how to become indistractable.”
“That's why I wrote indistractable is because I was very frustrated with the tech critic perspective of, you know, just stop using the technology.”
“And so it starts by, by looking at, uh, these, these four key strategies that I spent five years researching into why we get distracted.”
“And then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with pacts where we make some kind of pre-commitment as a firewall against distraction. So it's really about these four techniques that anyone can use to become indistractable.”