Nir Eyal – Indistractable

0:00[Music] you are listening to action design your monthly insight into the field of behavioral economics and its applications to the world around us we bring you leading practitioners from all industries to discuss cutting-edge behavioral research and how to practically apply those concepts to the development of consumer products and public policy

0:33well hello everybody thanks again for joining us for another episode of action design radio we are very excited for this up so it's been a long time in the making before introduce our guests introduce my co-host as always is Iraq on hello Jacques are you in st. Louis are you elsewhere today I this time yeah we kind of stopped doing where in the world is Iraq but a little less mobile than he used to be so yeah over the next couple months feel like I'll be the Nomad so I'm currently in West Michigan right now which is exotic and exciting location so but yeah so it's Rock and I

1:10are very excited to have our guests on today we have near a all joining us a very good friend of the action design communities so near thank you so much for joining us hey my pleasure guys great to be here thanks for having me yeah we're very excited so you have a new book coming out which we were very fortunate we're recording this in August and the book is coming out in a few weeks here we were very fortunate to get the VIP experience and kind of get an early copy of it for this podcast so so how could I have been diving in the book

1:38and we have a bunch of questions for talk about that but I figured we kind of start with you know a quick introduction to you and your work and the past and currently especially for those who might not be already familiar with what you've done so just give us a little bit of an introduction yourself what you do what your background is and what you've been working on lately absolutely yeah so let's see so I would call myself a behavioral designer meaning that I use consumer psychology to shape behavior through products as well as helping people shape their own behavior using some of these same principles I started

2:12out let's see my first experience in the industry was I helped start two tech companies the last one was at the intersection of gaming and advertising and I had this kind of front-row seat during the the rise of Facebook and saw many of these companies kind of come and go over the years and I had this question in my mind at that point of what makes a habit-forming product and I had this hypothesis that habits would become increasingly important in the future as the interface shrinks so as we went from desktop to laptops to mobile devices to wearable device now to auditory devices like the Amazon

2:47Alexa the interface has shrunk and disappeared when it comes to a visual interface at least and so habits become increasingly important because you have to rely upon the user remembering to use your product or you might as well not even exist so if you're not on the first page of a consumers phone if you're not something that they ask Alexa for top-of-mind then you know you're just your product is not gonna be used and you're not gonna succeed so whether it comes to all sorts of industries many people need to know how to bring consumers back how to keep consumers engaged and I in particular you know thought my next company would

3:26be something that had to do with with habits but I I didn't find a book that taught how to build a habit forming products so I did research on the topic and that research turned into a class at Stanford that I taught for many years the Graduate School of Business and then later at the Hasso Plattner Institute of design and then hooked came out in 2014 and the book knock on wood I self-published it at first and then it kind of got picked up and it's been doing great thankfully we just passed 250,000 copies so I'm thrilled and it's had a great impact you know I hear

4:02stories daily from from folks who have read the book and applied it to health care and you know apps to help people save money Kahoot is a company that used the hook model to help create education products actually the largest education software in the world they they use the hook model to make classroom learning more engaging for kids pantry labs is another company that brings changes people's eating habits with these pantries these internet connected pantries that change people's eating habits again they use the hook model so all of these companies use the hook model to build healthy habits in people's lives and then so that was the hook was published about

4:43five years ago and soon after hooked was published I noticed that I was getting maybe unhealthful II hooked to some products and services and so the turning point for me was when I was with my daughter we had this afternoon together and we had this beautiful afternoon set aside for daddy and daughter time and we had this book that we we could flip through and you know kind of prompted us with different activities that daddies and daughters could do together and one of the activities I remember the exact wording of this activity it was a question and the question was to ask each other if you could have any superpower what

5:25superpower would you want and I remember asking that question but I don't remember my daughter's answer because when she started answering I was distracted I was using my phone checking something I don't even remember what that seemed important at the time but definitely could have waited and the next thing I knew I looked up for my phone and my daughter had left the room and she'd found something else to do because she got the message that she was less important than whatever was on my phone and if I told you this just happened once I'd be lying it happened more times than I'd like to admit not

5:58only did it happen with people I love like my daughter it also happened at work you know I'd sit down to write and I'd uh just check slack for one minute or let me just check that quick email or let me just go see what's happening the news real quick and I'd constant get distract and I couldn't do the the focused work that I have to do to to succeed in my career it would happen with with health and fitness right and I wouldn't I would say okay I'm definitely gonna eat right I'm definitely gonna go exercise and I wouldn't do it and so that's where I realized that this this

6:28this question is much bigger than just technology this question is really about why do we get distracted and boy wouldn't it be a superpower if we could become indestructible and so the definition of becoming in distractible is becoming the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do right to live with personal integrity and what I mean that's what I wanted right the answer to the way I would answered back then would have been man if I could just do what it is I say I'm going to do wow my life would be completely different I mean I I would be

6:56in better shape I would have better relationships I would I would get more work done if I simply did what I said I'm going to do and so that's why I set on this mission now it's been five years finally completed and publishing this book to become in distractible and so I really wrote the book for the same reason I wrote hooked I was looking for the answer and hopefully other people will find it helpful as well I'm interested in so I mean like that you're kind of like personal journey I think probably mirrors that of a lot of other people I've certainly had those same thoughts

7:25as well what it's been sort of like the you know response that you've gotten from other people are people kind of saying like hey like yeah I've had the exact same thing this is what I'm looking for are they like do you get questions about like hey like you you know your first book is about is about habits and then this one's sort of about breaking unhealthy habits what's been like the response your perception of the response from kind of like the general populace who's been exposed to these ideas so far yeah yeah so I can understand how folks who haven't had a chance to read and distractible might

7:59say this is kind of weird right this guy who wrote hooked is now writing this book about how to get unhooked and in fact that was actually what I thought the title of the book would be at first would be unhooked cuz I go oh my god I opened up this Pandora's box people are gonna use this book for for for ill and not only did that not happen right like neither there are companies that I've heard of that are using the hook model for illa all I've heard is companies using this for good but you know I still stand behind every word in hooked and that I I do believe that we

8:32can use habit-forming technology by and large for good I mean the the problem at most tech companies is not that people are overusing nobody's gonna get addicted to SAS software nobody's getting addicted to you know a small business software nobody's getting addicted to educational software or software that helps you exercise more that's not a problem right the problem out there is that you know these apps they don't suck you in not in the way that no Facebook and Twitter might suck you in they just suck right most products out there are just awful and are still awful even despite five years later this book getting out there and so

9:11my goal has always been to make these products less awful because the vast majority of people out there they want to build products and services that can really improve people's lives if they would just use the product right that is the problem that most companies have when it comes to building their their their devices so there's nothing wrong with building software to help people exercise more adhere to their medication save money these are great things and we should use the the latest advancements in behavioral design and learn from the gaming companies and from the social media companies to use some of these same exact tactics for good you know

9:47it's interesting I can always tell when someone hasn't read the book when I asked them you know did you get to the last chapter do you remember what case study I talked about and they'll kind of stammer and say oh it was that gaming company or it was that social network right it was Facebook or something nope there's only one case study in the entire book one chapter devoted to one case study and that case study is of the Bible or more specifically the Bible app and I chose that app very specifically it's it's interesting one of the stories that Bobby Greenwald the CEO of the

10:20Bible app which by the way is one of the most successful apps in history it has several hundred million users nobody ever thinks about it but it's Bobby Greenwald told me this great story of a user of the Bible app walking into a strip club and all of a sudden they got a ping on their phone what I call an external trigger on their phone from the Bible app and he gets this notification on his phone and he says oh my god the Lord is telling me something and he walks right back out of a it doesn't go in think about the Bible app I'd use

10:58that app very intentionally I didn't make the case study about some social network or some gaming company I made it about the Bible app because what you think about the Bible app can tell me a lot about what you think about this particular context of the use of behavioral design and habit formation techniques if you think that the Bible app is a good thing in the world that it helps people find meaning and purpose and connects them to something bigger than themselves and helps them become better people then you think the use of behavioral design and habit formation techniques is wonderful but if you think that the Bible is divisive and it pulls

11:34people apart through ideologies and it's not a good thing well then you think these techniques are horrible and the same of course can be for all of these other technologies that the answer you know I think if there's one thing that plagues our society these days that is a real problem is our binary thinking everything's got to be black and white good guys versus bad guys and the answers are never that simple the answer to complex problems is always the same answer it depends it depends is social media good it depends is it bad it depends you know if you're using social media to connect to people

12:06because you're you know you have a difficult time finding other people because they live far away from you or you don't have access to them it's a wonderful outlet if you overuse it at the cost of being with your family or other priorities then it can be a bad thing but the real cost of these technologies is not that they're somehow melting our brains are hijacking our brains that's rubbish that's people you know people who say that are in the fear industrial complex they're doing it to to scare you and get to get you to to pay attention to them it ironically it's the same business model as Facebook but

12:37that's just not the reality so what I wanted to do was to have a pro tech Pro human approach because the fact is you know every other book on this topic that I read and I read them all I read every book I could possibly find on this topic when it comes to distraction they all basically say the same thing just stop using the tech the text melting your brain go on a 30-day detox a 30-day program and it doesn't frickin work and the reason it doesn't work is twofold one I can't stop I need these techniques for my livelihood my job depends on connecting people through email and slack and

13:09Facebook these tools are my job second you know they don't work for the same reason that fad diets don't work so so I used to be clinically obese and I no longer am but I've always struggled with with my weight and and you know food has always been a problem for me in many ways and I think it's you know as a kid I was clinically obese and I think that's where this fascination with behavioral design started about how products can change our behavior and I always used to do these fad diets right 30 days no junk food for 30 days and of course you know what happened on day 31

13:43right I'd come back with a vengeance and I need more because I'd starve myself and so abstinence study after study have shown that abstinence doesn't work what works is understanding why we do things against our better interest and learning techniques to cope with these these urges in a healthier fashion and so that's where I think in distractible is different I than what I call the proximal causes right the proximal causa is the tool it's the thing we love to blame it's the big bad tech companies doing it to us I go deeper than the proximate causes to get to the root cause of why we do things against our

14:24better interests I think that comes through and a lot of the examples I use and in fact as we were kind of preparing for this conversation today we shared with our producer Zack Simon that we were gonna be chatting with you and he's a huge fan of yours and he actually was an advanced reader for your book and so I think he was making you know edits and suggestions and that sort of thing and so he was intimately familiar with the material already he's like oh you have to ask him this question and so he pointed out that the fact that you had been making that you used these examples

14:53from history and in some case from thousands of years ago to highlight the fact that you know these have been challenges for a long time so his question and that big thing kind of ties in with what you're saying is were you doing this or intentionally to show that these these sort of deeper psychological phenomena have been with us for for a long time are you kind of like priming the reader to be thinking in that way or were they just sort of like Handy examples to to use you know it's a it's a it's a terrific point I'm so glad he noticed that because I thought it was

15:25really important to provide a historical perspective I mean Socrates and Plato talked about the nature of Akasha this tendency that we have to do things against our better interest 2,500 years ago no joke 2500 years ago people were talking about boy isn't the world of distracting place these days so this is not a new phenomenon I mean do we seriously think let's say tomorrow Zuckerberg says you know what you all win I'm shutting down Facebook it's terrible I'm shutting it down I'm blacking it out do we really think people are going to suddenly not be distracted anymore no of course not - doing all the things we used to do

16:00gossiping watching sports reading the National Enquirer soap operas traction has been around for a very very long time if you want to get distracted you have always found ways to do that however that being said I do think it's important to have a historical perspective to know that this is not a new problem and if it's not a new problem well then how do we explain so many people in history doing so many great things right how does that happen well I think it happens because these people who have accomplished great things in history have done so through the power of focus they've focused on one thing that was important to them and

16:35that was their contribution to society the other reason I thought it was very important was to transition that into an application for modern mediums so yeah the tools are different the problem is not different but maybe we haven't adapted to these tools quick enough to allow us to put these technologies in their place so I will say that even though distraction is a very very old problem if you are susceptible to distraction if you do not know these techniques if you are not armed to become in distractible they're gonna get you it's easier than ever because technology is so persuasive and pervasive that if you are not prepared

17:20it's very hard I will acknowledge that that if you don't know these techniques the good news is that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought right that if if you're trying to lose weight but the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth you've lost too late okay if you're sleeping next to your cell phone and you're surprised you check it every morning this first thing when you get up it's too late right you've already lost the battle and so there is nothing that we there's no impulsiveness that we can't prevent with forethought something that our species does better than any other animal on the

17:58face of the earth is that we have this gift this ability to see the future with greater fidelity than any other animal on earth which means that we can plan ahead it turns out it's not that hard and for all the complaining and moaning about the world being so distracted most of us myself included up until I started writing this book did nothing we didn't take steps to make sure that we do what it is we want to do and so that's what I want to help with are these techniques that all of us can use to become indestructible yeah I just like somebody know if in the last like a

18:31little bit here but like well they jumps out and thinking about historical is like we know is kind of behavioural people in the behavioral design and behavioral science field that like a lot of like our psychology doesn't really change that much like the things that drive us to take action drive us not like human nature is pretty fixed in a lot of ways but our environments change a lot so the same tactics that distracted us when TV came out and it was a big thing when newspapers were considered distracting like when you know like the ancient philosophers that you're right about in there you know it's the same aspects of human

19:04nature that were they can distracted or not distracted and focus but the environments obviously changed around us so it's always important I think especially in that behavioral field to think about you know we know these things about you know how people think how they make decisions how they decide to get distracted versus not get distracted for what they work on but the environments continually change so I think to your point like maybe we just need a new guide there's by two points that from one we seem to remind ourselves that you know yeah we do all of this new technology but the reasons that we get engaged that technology are

19:38because we're you know the same humans are always been like technology hasn't created a new thing a new part of our brains that didn't exist but it is kind of you know a different environment for want to say manipulating or just engaging with those types of decision process like it reminds me of when uh you know the last like 10 years there's been all these articles about Millennials are ruining acts like Millennials or this and you can look at like every decade and say Gen X did this like the baby boomers did this and it's always the same complaints over and over and so it's just funny to think about

20:10that that like you know human nature is so fixed but you know we continually think that these are new problems every time we come around yeah yeah that's right and I think what's so ironic with the the current tech clash and by the way I don't want to come off as a tech apologist I don't make any money from Facebook or Google they you know I don't own any shares I have no vested interest in promoting these companies I'm not promoting these companies I want people you'll see you know you saw already in the book there are many things I tell people to do to cut off these

20:37technologies if they're not serving them but I I think it's just so funny that we're not realizing that the real distraction is not the tools the real distraction is thinking it's the tools because that office Kate's the root cause of the problem particularly when it comes to kids you know I was reading the transcripts recently of the Senate hearings around comic books in the 1950s and it is literally verbatim what people are saying to senators today about social media III it is word for word the same increase in suicide increase in anxiety and depression literally word for word what they're not telling people is that there's a root cause here

21:26there's deeper issues going on that if you talk if you actually go out there and talk to health care practitioners who are treating children who have overuse disorders or addictions what they told me as they'll tell anyone is that 100% of the time 100% of time there's a comorbidity there's something else going on and this was the big reveal with these comic book hearings in from the Senate the 1950s you know these these doctors would you have people who ran medicate addiction centers that profited from this fear-mongering basically what was revealed years later that every one of the kids they profiled had an abusive household had some kind

22:05of major trauma in their life they had some kind of comorbidity with obsessive-compulsive disorder or some other comorbidity that wasn't disclosed but of course it was all blamed on the comic books and that's exactly what we're doing today which prompts this question what's the deeper issue why are kids overusing not only why are they overusing why are we overusing and so if we just stick with the surface level analysis we come to these quick conclusions yep it's the technology that's what's doing it to us that's the the source of all our problems is we always do we always scapegoat like this but we never fix the real problem and so

22:36nothing ever changes yeah it's like an interesting point too like we're saying the comic book example it's like you can almost think of it from the perspective of why we keep having this problem why is every decade there a new technology or something that comes out that is this problem so obviously we keep removing things and to your point to you know I think it goes kind of both ways like we definitely need more and obviously this is a big topic within behavioral science in general ethics and how do we as people who are driving behavior in a lot of ways there's a lot of responsibility

23:08with that and a lot of it there's a lot of responsibility on people building technology products and especially people building kind of mass social products and things like that and there's no doubt that there are things that those companies should be doing better and probably haven't done well in the past in that regard at the same time like to your point there's come this underlying psychology that causes it but it can also solve it in a way and that you know we need to empower individual people to be able to take control of their own time rather than either try to get rid of technology or hope that

23:41technology solves the problem for us okay so in that sense I think that shifts like kind of when I think is my next question is that sort of a bigger theme that stood out to me in the book was really preparing people for the shortcomings in their psychology that really prevent them from be able to do what they want to do so I want to dive into that and think you know what are some examples of those limitations that people have and how should they understand them how can they understand how they work and how can they either work around them or you know make them

24:12work for that in some ways yeah absolutely so I think the first place we start is to stop believing this myth perpetuated by the self-help and personal productivity industry that tells us that if we're not happy if we're not satisfied we're not normal that is not true that in fact the human-animal our steady state is dissatisfaction we are not built to be happy I mean think about it from an evolutionary basis if there was ever a branch of Homo Sapien that was satisfied that was hunky-dory that was happy that tribe was likely killed and eaten by our ancestors okay because there's no evolutionary benefit to satisfaction we want

25:00species to constantly crave more to be dissatisfied why because that's what helps us you know create new inventions a life-saving medication you know traveling to the stars all of these things happen because we want more and that's something we should channel but we should be aware of and there is a confluence of these cognitive biases that conspire to to make us perpetually perturbed and so some of these include negativity bias right that we have this tendency to see the bad first and you know I don't need to give you examples just you know look at the media this is what keeps them than the news running

25:40it's not about you know when you open the newspaper or you know Fox News or having up MSNBC or you know choose your publication they're not giving you what you need to know they're giving you what will keep you watching and you know we talk about Facebook being in this business model this is the exact same business model the media has been in forever they are all attention merchants and we love it because we are looking for negativity bias we're looking for threats served us on the Savannah doesn't so much serve us today next you have hedonic adaptation that even when we get something we strive for

26:12something that's supposed to make us happier it turns up out that we very quickly adjust a baseline and we're no happier than when we typically started off and then so then we have boredom is another cognitive quirk that we are constantly looking for stimulation there's a Timothy Wilson study I cite in the book you may be familiar with where they put people in a room with a band around their arm nothing to do in this room but to press this button and administer an electrical shock that's all they could do in this room and they asked them to sit in this room for 15 minutes and do nothing and it was

26:46something like half of the participants shock themselves even though they knew it would be painful so it was showing us that we would rather feel something than to feel nothing that we hate boredom and we constantly seek to escape it and then finally rumination rumination is this tendency to turn over problem situations in our head ad nauseam and this is the source of a lot of problems if you take a look at like pain if you look at insomnia it turns out not that most insomnia is not for most people there are exceptions but for most people sleeplessness is actually not caused by something broken in your brain it's actually the number

27:28one cause of insomnia is worried about insomnia that is the leading cause of sleeplessness and so this rumination experience on that it's like man all supposed to be asleep 30 minutes ago sucks like exactly exactly so recognizing that these things are normal I think that's something that needs to be repeated and that we need to live by and so instead of somehow you know you can sell a lot of books by telling people here's how to fix this bad feeling forever the problem is it just ain't true that if you are not feeling dissatisfaction you're high alright you're taking something you're part of the human condition is wanting more and

28:09it's fine as long as we channel it in a healthful manner as opposed to a hurtful manner so as you were thinking through like the tips and sort of like the summaries that you have at the end of each chapter which I thought were great because they just provide this really concrete actions and steps that people can do were you sort of thinking like about balancing basically people's need for this sort of quick-hit things like I can take these actions right now as well as sort of the longer-term things of like you know think about what your goals actually need to be and then plan time accordingly which is kind of a

28:45harder thing to do or a longer-term thing to do so I wrote those summary sections in in the book because it's a book about distraction I figured that people reading it would need to get to the point so I I do this for a few reasons one I do it because it helps me structure the chapters and and more than I think I appreciate that right so the idea is actually that I expect people to go to the end of the chapter read the quick points and then if they want more depth onto how I came to those conclusions they can go back and do that

29:20and read the entire chapter of course they'll get more out of it if they read every word of the chapter but they don't necessarily have to and times you can skip certain chapters for example if you get to the section on how to raise indestructible kids but you don't have any kids well you can skip that section if it doesn't apply to you but I mean that's I really wrote the book that I would want to read and I think you know to be totally honest I hate to be so so negative here on my colleagues and fellow authors but a lot of business books are just full of so

29:50much fluff right like if they actually just set the point of each chapter it'd be like a paragraph right and a lot of authors don't do this they don't put the bullet points in the the back of each chapter but I think because they you know they'd have like one bullet point and then people would say like that's it that's the whole point of these thirty pages is this one bullet point you could just said that and so I really wanted to you know make sure that that I'm giving enough bang for the buck for every page the user read there's enough quality content and and as justified by this

30:21summary of each and every chapter yeah I saw somebody say wants like most books should be blog posts and most blog post should be tweets that's I think a good way of thinking don't make anything any longer than it has to be you know so one thing that jumped out at me and I think we had actually kind of discussed this before is in the book you kind of give an example of ego depletion and how that whole kind of concept is really misunderstood by people and it ended up that misunderstanding almost cause like a crutch where people are like oh my ego is depleted I'm done for the day I'm

30:55just gonna like my video games or whatever but that's not really the case like um so I think we could you could kind of walk through that example and maybe use that example to say for a lot of these kind of concepts I feel like they probably get misunderstood and then obviously also the research is changing constantly and there's a lot of different ways to interpret these things but you may walk through that example and say you know use that as a case of how can we kind of better interpret and share a lot of these kind of social psychology research findings so that people can you know make the best use of

31:24those sure sure so that where this falls into my model is the very first step so the big first step in this model there are four big steps the first big step is to master your internal triggers these are these uncomfortable sensations these these negative valence States as they're called in psychology that we seek to escape from and it's important to realize that actually these are the motivators for all behavior that we used to think that behavior is motivated by the desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain this is Freud's pleasure principle but neurologically speaking that ain't true that in fact neurologically speaking it's pain all

31:59the way down that all human behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort even the pursuit of a pleasurable sensation even the pursuit of pleasure is motivated by the desire the wanting the craving to feel something good there's a reason we say love hurts because it does biologically speaking it does so this is all about the homeostatic response the body gets us to act to make us feel not bad okay and so as we talked about earlier this perpetual disquiet to this constant wanting is what gets us to do everything we do helpful things and harmful things so if we want to use these internal

32:40triggers these uncomfortable emotional states what we have to realize is that if all behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort well that means that time management is pain management okay time management is pain management so how do we manage our pain how do we manage our discomfort there's only two things we can do we can either change the source of the discomfort fix the problem or we learn to cope with the discomfort that we cannot change and so I give several strategies for how do we cope with the discomfort that we can't change the circumstances in our life that we may not be able to actually you

33:15know affect change around and so there are three big strategies here we can reimagine the trigger we can reimagine the task and we can reimagine the our temperament so I'm kind of giving you a tech sauna me it's a little bit of like okay here's the structure of this section but let's dive deep now into one of these three techniques to manage and master internal triggers which is reimagining our temperament so temperament is defined as this trait you know someone's trait that they have something that they that is in a in any in Alien abaut about them as a person and so what we find is that your

33:52self-image of your temperament has a profound impact on your behavior and one of the demonstrations of how this can go awry has to do with this myth of ego depletion ego depletion says this was research done by Roy Baumeister and by Meister said in a book that did very very well when it first came out of several years ago over a decade ago the book was called willpower and in it he claimed that willpower is a finite resource and and you've heard this ad nauseam right we see this reverberate 'add everywhere this has now become a piece of folk psychology that oh you run out of willpower kind of like you run

34:31out of gas and a gas tank and so I felt this in my life every day I'd come home from work after a hard day I felt spent right I'd spent my my my willpower and I was just unable to do anything also what what that you know forced me to do now that I had spent all my willpower was to open the fridge pull out a pint pen and Ben and Jerry's turn on Netflix and chill all by myself with that pint of Ben and Jerry's that was what I did when I was spent and now I didn't know the term ego depletion but I justified my

35:05feeling by saying by using this word I was spent kinda like you spend gas and a gas tank and so Baumeister claim that this is this is the case that you run out of willpower in fact he did these these crazy experiments where he gave people sugar sweetened lemonade and he demonstrated that you could replenish willpower through these sugar sweetened beverages claiming that mochi there must be some kind of interaction and the prefrontal cortex and you know something is going on turns out other psychologists said this is this sounds a little fishy and they tried to replicate these ego depletion studies and it couldn't do it there's a replication

35:44crisis at large in the social sciences right now but this is one of the studies that kind of was one of the first dominoes to fall that you know many studies and and meta studies of those studies found that there is no such thing as ego depletion except for in one group of people that Carol Dweck at Stanford did these studies and found that one group of people do in fact experience ego depletion their willpower does in fact run out and those people were people who believed in ego depletion so what this tells us is that when you believe that you are limited it becomes so and this is why it is so

36:27important to get real about the effect of distraction on our day to day lives when we buy into this nonsense that technology is addicting us and it's hijacking our brains and these products are making us puppets on a string we are making it true it's called learned helplessness we stop trying and this is why you hear people talk about technology as an addiction whenever you hear somebody talk about technology as an addiction your meter should be on 10 because when you use the word addiction and and by the way this is again back to nuance and how it you know there's more here than meets the eye some people really do get

37:09addicted to all sorts of things in fact any analgesic anything that stops pain is potentially addictive to someone but not to everyone right we many of us drink a glass of wine we're not alcoholics not everybody who has sex is a sex addict not everybody who plays poker is a problem gambler some people become addicted but certainly not everyone not even close single digit percentages of people become addicted the problem is when we call these things addicted and we tell everyone that it's addictive and it's hijacking your brain we believe it just as we believe in ego depletion and we become better or we become worse off for it now watch what

37:47happens when I change one word if I start calling technology something that is addictive versus calling it something that we sometimes overuse I just disarmed it of all its power over us and people love calling technology addictive because addiction requires a dealer a pusher somebody who's making you do something a drug that's you know turning you into a zombie but when you call it what it really is overuse wait a minute there's no more pusher anymore now it's just me and that means I might have to do something about it which sucks so back to your question earlier around why do we keep doing this because this is the

38:29path of least resistance the human mind loves paths of least resistance and the path of least resistance is I can save myself a lot of effort if I blame something or someone else but that's not the truth the truth is we have power over this stuff so we have to change our temperament stop telling ourselves these lies these stories that we perpetuate in our own heads you know people tell themselves oh I have a short attention span I have a an addictive personality there's something wrong with me I must be broken and look some people do really have a pathology but that is not the majority

39:03of people not even close you know these pathologies we're talking about you know single digit percentages in the population the vast majority of us there's nothing wrong with us we just need to do these different behaviors change our actions adopt these new these new ways of living our lives in order to become in distractible so it sounds like you you're coming down on kind of one side of this but you wrote hooked because you had notice like this seems like a trend in technology right like as these devices become kind of more part of our lives habits are gonna become really important and then we know within

39:39distractible maybe there's this other trend and you know you use the word like tech flash right which of course we've all seen people making these claims about like it being addictive which almost makes it sound like a like a public health thing right here's why I started to ask to ask this question when I first got into the role that I'm in now I'm one of our like IT directors asked me like oh like what are what are like the trends that you see happening out there like do you think like you know the technology trends in one of the things that I was thinking of was

40:12whenever you go to an old bookstore now you see all these like cookbooks for like microwaves from like the 1950s and 60s and it's like how to cook everything in the microwave and 50 ways to make meatloaf in the microwave Mordor and part of it is that that was sort of like look where technology was at the time but then people kind of moved on and now sort of like the bigger trends are things like you know farm-to-table and local and organic and all that and so when he and I were chatting about this I remember thinking this might be kind of like a trend for folks where you know you're

40:45moving away from technology and doesn't necessarily address this sort of like deeper psychological motivators that that are kind of prompting this distraction but I wasn't sure if you also kind of we're seeing this sort of like trend towards towards this where you know people are going to be trying to eschew these technologies and you know try to to to disconnect in some way if that's kind of what was like prompting your your thinking about this in addition to like your personal experience yeah I think that you know not using these technologies is great I want people to question their relationship in their use of technology I don't think we need to vilify them we

41:25don't need to believe that it's hijacking our brains which is not to moderate our use the idea here is to ask ourselves whether these tools are serving us or whether we are serving them and and so we can think of it I think of it as this dichotomy that perhaps deserves explanation you know when we use this term distraction I should have defined it earlier you know what do we exactly mean by distraction distraction the opposite of distraction is not focus the opposite of distraction is traction they both come from the same Latin root trehala which means to pull and they both end in the same for an AC

42:07tion action so traction is any action that pulls you towards what you want things that you do with intent the opposite of traction is distraction anything that pulls you away from what you want to do anything you that you dude did without intent now distraction is always bad by the way distraction is not the same thing as diversion diversion is when you let your attention go somewhere else but it can be done with intent if you want to zone out watching a movie great if you want to meditate great if you want to take a walk and just spaced out wonderful do it but do it with intent similarly if you

42:47want to watch YouTube videos if you want to putz around on Facebook if you want to watch a football game wonderful do it there's nothing wrong with it as long as you do it on your schedule and not because of someone else's schedule like an app maker or a boss or your kids or your spouse do things because you do them with intent and and so if what I want to do is to stop vilifying you know this this this moral hierarchy of Oh candy crush is somehow morally inferior to watching football on TV why they're both paths x there's nothing wrong with them if we

43:22use them on an RS schedule so we have to get away from this idea that they're melting our brains and all this the silliness that that's been perpetuated that's simply not helpful because it gives these products more power and more control because of what we talked about earlier than they deserve so I'm not advocating I don't frankly care what you do with your time as long as it's consistent with your values that's what I want you to do the problem is that so many of us go through our day-to-day lives without turning our values into time we just kind of float around and we think you know we today we blame our

43:56technology but it turns out of my research the source of our distractions goes much much deeper than that right the number-one source of distraction are these internal triggers these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from and so even if you put away the technology as I did right I got a flip phone on Alibaba for $12 and I got this word processor on eBay from the 1990s and I got rid of all my internet connections and I still got distracted why because I got this bookshelf behind me with all these interesting books and my desk was dirty so that needed tidying and let me just take out the trash real

44:28quick I kept looking for distraction because I hadn't figured out these techniques to cope with why I was looking for distraction in the first place and so that's a much more important thing for us to tackle first and foremost but of course that's just step one you know step one is is mastering internal triggers step two is to make time for traction step three is to hack back these external triggers to you know to fight back with all of these techniques that are used to get us to keep checking our devices we have way more power than these technologies ever did we'll again because the antidote to

45:04impulsiveness is forethought we can take steps today to make sure we don't get distracted tomorrow and step four is to prevent distraction with pacts that we can make we can use what's called a pre commitment device to make sure that when we are likely to get distracted we don't get distracted we keep ourselves focused and ironically many of the tools we can use to make these pre commitments impacts our technologies are many free technologies out there which I highlight in the book that can help us stay on task by making sure that we we commit to doing what we say we're going to do yeah I think it's a really good point to keep

45:40like reading and remember is that like any particular thing can be good or bad for us like I really liked the example in the book you gave of the person who got addicted to like the pedometer or like tracking their steps and you know in general that's a good good thing you think like hey just build the products like help people walk more like what could go wrong with that but this person got literally addicted to it and was like staying up late at night like trying to get porn steps in but then these a few give like a lot of it was like there was a lot of things went on

46:09their lives and that was just kind of an escape from it and so I think it's like again it's like nuance is always a challenge but like I've definitely known people that get I would say you know addictiveness is where the right word but they go to the gym for like two or three hours a day and you know like they're obviously just like escaping at that point it's like you're not really getting in that much better shape there's things that can drive bad for us and isn't giving that intention like you know we think about kind of these you know maybe a part of what's challenging

46:36is that we're still in such a new era of having a lot of these products where we're not totally sure how they align with our values all the time like there's no doubt like I think we take for granted how easy it is to stay in touch with people now with Facebook for example but you know I think some of its like we all gotta figure out that personal side of what's valuable for us like Twitter's an example I know for me like Twitter is probably the thing I get addicted to the most I would say again not to use addicted but I definitely probably waste over and over naturally

47:07waste the most time over you and you know it can get very it's really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day controversies and things like that so I actually like took time and this is before I read the book I'm proud of myself that I thought about this a little bit ahead of time but like I took the time like freeing my feet and like make a bunch of lists of people a list that could access where I can get away from like the algorithm and like it maybe giving me stuff that will just distract me and how do I just get because I do find a lot of valuable

47:37information on there like I follow researchers that share really interesting stuff like entrepreneurs that are very like inspiring there's a lot of like interesting information on there but I said to curate my feed better so that when I got on there I was getting that and not going down a rabbit hole of people having some sort of controversy or like memes or whatever that is I think it's just like a points worth reiterating like all these things have their good and bad sides and we have to kind of figure out which things are good for us and which are bad and sort of be intentional about how we use those

48:06absolutely absolutely and there's nothing wrong with using Twitter the the I think where where I messed up before I realize this methodology this four-part process that we can use to become in distractible one I didn't understand my internal triggers I wasn't honest with myself that look the reason I was checking my device when I want to be with my daughter had nothing to do with my device what I was looking for escape right when I was googling something or checking email for a minute when I wanted to work and do my writing which is hard work I was escaping the hard work right it felt bad I was anxious I

48:42was nervous would anybody like it this is hard I'm bored that's why we keep using these devices those are the internal trigger so if we don't learn to master those we'll always get distracted by something and then step 2 is to make time for traction so on my schedule it says time for social media there's literally a block of time every day when I can check Twitter and Facebook and Instagram I can do all that right at a certain time of day not on the app makers schedule on my schedule and if I block out time with f/4 it I turned what used to be a distraction something I

49:15would use to pacify emotions I didn't know how to deal with like boredom anxiety uncertainty fatigue in for that used to be a distraction into traction that's exactly what I want to do with my time at that time in my calendar I want to be on social media that's what I planned to do with my time and there's nothing wrong with it so it's really about doing it with intent on your schedule as opposed to the AppMakr schedule out of curiosity do you block out all the time on your calendar yes so that's that's the crucial step to make time for traction turn your values into time so this is using the time

49:53boxing techniques and so the reason this is so important it is that you cannot call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from so you know III in the book I have this case study of this friend of mine who said oh you wrote hooked now look at me I'm constantly distracted right everything distracts me I can't get anything done my you know my kids want this my boss wants this this is what happened on Twitter Trump said that I can't get anything done I said wow that's that's really tough you know can can I see your schedule can I see what it was that you plan to

50:24do today that you got distracted from and she kind of sheepishly looks at me she looks at her phone she opens it up she takes out her you know she taps on her calendar app it's blank there's nothing on it so you can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from if your calendar is blank if it has open time on it are you surprised you got distracted what did you want to do at that time so you have to plan your day or someone else will that's just the modern world we live in you know we don't have to kill our food anymore we don't have to

50:56plant our own crops we can talk to each other from thousands of miles away for free the cost of the modern world sorry you got to plan your day you got to turn off notifications you got to use these techniques to become in distractible that's the price of progress I loved how many things I saw in the book that we had talked about just over the years and I was like just from our conversations is like oh I've been using that ever since I talked to near about it I also use the timer on my router that's that's saved my sex life you know yeah I

51:32was about to say I know if without revealing any of too much of the content there is a chapter that's called how to be an indestructible lover which i think is reason enough to that's right yeah exactly right I mean we you know we've been married for almost 20 years now and so I'm just I'm just happy I have a sex life after 20 years but we have a fantastic relationship and the the problem was that we kept getting distracted right we wanted to be intimate with each other but every night we found ourselves fondling our iPads and iPhones as opposed to being intimate and so we did exactly what you said we

52:06got this outlet timer this is step four actually step four words about preventing distraction with pacts and we made this pre commitment again the antidote too impulsive this is for thought so we thought ahead and we said okay we want to be in bed at 10 o'clock to have some time together to make sure we get enough sleep 10 o'clock so every night in our household the internet shuts off at 10 o'clock every night and everybody knows it now we actually don't use an internet timer anymore or an outlet timer we actually have an a router called the EO router that has this functionality built in so you can

52:36program it for certain devices to turn off at certain times and it's awesome it's wonderful because everybody knows 10 o'clock you know hurry up get to bed because the internet router is gonna shut off so do everything you need to do and it's it's a wonderful pre-commitment device and you know what that that outlet timer cost us five bucks yeah I like that example just generally like the the chapter on like using this relationships I think um I think it's easy to identify with this stuff when it comes to work like I think all of us are getting emails all the time and like it's easy

53:08to say that but I think sometimes I think we don't then we think about personal lives and especially in our personal relationships there's almost this sort of like stigma with some of these where it's like that should come naturally it's like oh like you know you shouldn't need a plan a in structure around these types of things in a relationship as much because there's just this thought that that shouldn't take as much work and it almost feels I think I feel feel bad thinking of it that way but in a lot of ways you almost have to be even more intentional and more structured with your kind of

53:37personal relationships because a lot of times those the easiest things that go to the wayside that's so true and I think the reason why that's happened it's not a coincidence I think you know first of all we are suffering through a loneliness epidemic in this I mean psychologists tell us that loneliness is more detrimental to our health than smoking and obesity it is a nationwide epidemic of loneliness and it's no coincidence I mean this correlates with the rise of secularism in this country the the largest denomination is country religious affiliation that is is nuns right people who don't have any religious affiliation I'm one of them but the cost of that is

54:13that we don't have the place on our calendars to connect with people in our community to connect with our friends this used to be what people did every Sunday or Saturday depending on your your religion your faith you would regularly meet up with people well as the country's become more secular there are fewer and fewer of these institutions and this is a long time coming there's this book Bowling Alone that was in the 1990s that talked about Robert Putnam I think was the author who talked about this trend and the decline of civil society of you know the Rotary Club and Kiwanis and church groups the

54:48the fall or the the decline of patronage of these groups has also led to this this loneliness epidemic why is because we don't have a time in our calendar set aside for our friends now I'm not saying you need to attend a religious group we can do this in a secular fashion right what do we do well I detail in the book how you get together with your friends on a regular basis you have time on your calendar you know hell or high water we are going to meet same time same place just put it in the book right so like just put in your calendar so you know you will see

55:19the people who are most important to you on a regular basis so again it's about turning your values into time don't just talk about you know if you ask most people what's important to you oh my family my friends my health okay where is that time on your calendar if it's not on your calendar it's not reflecting your values yeah nothing happens just automatically like you crave make things up for yourselves and sighs Rock go ahead no I'm just gonna say I've seen also like there is it's sort of snowballs a little bit in in social groups anyways like I've had so Simon st. Louis last year and I

55:53didn't know anybody when I moved here but you know pretty quickly was meeting people and making friends and because I was very intentional about like I'm going to spend a lot of time meeting Poland making friends and I had ended up with like a relative personable guys around if you don't if you don't follow Xerox Instagram account yet like visit this map there's the best life he is gal evading gallivanting to castles in Croatia to vineyards and got me you know I you know I I ended up first you kind of meet a lot of people and then you kind of sort of ends up sort of

56:36naturally shrinking down to a smaller group that you become closer with and I had a regular Sunday night dinner we call like family dinner with some friends of mine and whenever I talked to you know new friends and I tell them like oh I have this time set aside and like you know we have like family dinner they're like like can i yeah that like can I kind of people do you seem very it's it's interesting like else the disconnect that I've seen it I think there was some research that came up this year about this like the disconnect between people sort of stated preference of like I want this connection and like

57:15this steps that you take to make that connection because I'll sometimes we very Ford in terms of just being like I'll meet someone that I think is really nice or friendly or interesting and instead of kind of being like coy of like oh like let's all friend them on Facebook later or whatever I'll just pretty much directly say like hey this was a lot of fun like do you want to be friends and get together sometime this week and just actually saying it like specifically like hey I think you have a skill here I mean this is this is a practice that I think we all need to

57:50emulate of you know whether it's a Sunday dinner like you do whether it's a Shabbat dinner whether it's beer night you know at a bar somewhere but you know having a time on your schedule to reconnect with important people in your life it is important and it will not happen organically as it doesn't happen with our kids and with our significant others right like my wife and I have date nights on our calendar I have play dates with my daughter because we know work is just gonna fill that time right like if I don't make that time somebody else is gonna plant it for me yeah so now we're getting a little later

58:25our time here someone to ship the last couple questions so kind of going back and thinking about from the behavioral design perspective so a lot of the book is really about like individual empowerment like how do we take our time back take our attention back in an intentional way regardless of what things or tools or technologies are out there distracting us you know as individuals there's kind of timeless things that we can do kind of flip in that a little bit you know a lot of the people that listen to the podcast or in kind this behavioral space and are probably working on products that in

58:58some sort of way are taking people's attention and like the examples we talked about before like with the pedometer example like even good intentions can go awry within a product sometimes so in kind of flipping this and think about this there's kind of one side where we as individuals gotta you know make ourselves in distractible as behavioral designers and those working on products and solutions to like problems that people have in their lives how do we kind of better balance this sort of things that might be let's say in the hook to model for example of how do we you know people come to us with

59:28the problem we have this product that gives them solution you know how can we effectively try to balance that and helping them solve their problem but also not make you know trying to not push people too far and even how do we even track that to make sure that we are getting in to that example and going from there because like I said it's not necessarily technology's fault but we do have responsibilities people building products to try to make that better or to write all right so we want we to accept that we will make unfortunately that the price of progress is unfortunate byproducts that you know Paul Virilio

1:00:02said that when you invent the ship you invent the shipwreck before that Sophocles says nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse and there is of course an unintended consequence to any technological innovation that's on the scale of the internet or the Industrial Revolution or the Green Revolution right these things have unfortunate side effects the the the answer though is to not you know wish we could dial back the hands of time the answer is more technology okay to fix the bad aspects of one generation of technology I mean this is what we've done with the dust revolution with with all sorts of you know every time that

1:00:39there's a just a some kind of technological revolution there's always these side effects that we need to take care of so there's a lot we can do you know one is to take care of vulnerable communities so if we and one thing I've advocated for and I think the some of the legislation I really do support is to help people who are pathologically addicted right that if someone is overusing a product and there's something that they're very easy thing that we can do we could we know how much people are using a particular product so it behooves us to look for these people who are really using a product to an

1:01:13outsize extent we can reach out to them and say hey you're using this product to an extent that may indicate you're struggling with an addiction can we help so this is part of what I call a use and abuse policy again this isn't everyone this is a small part of the population that struggles with an addiction and we can do that and again this isn't a problem that most companies face right no SAS software would have this problem but sure if you're in the gaming industry or a social media company or some kind of entertainment company yeah you might have people who unfortunately overuse your product to an extent where

1:01:43it might be causing them harm and then there's a few other things we can do one thing that I put in hooked way back five years ago is this manipulation matrix that we as individuals need to ask ourselves two questions if we want to use behavioral design ethically and this isn't about you know something that you use to judge other people or that other people use to judge you this is simply a way of asking yourself if what you're working on is worth your human capital and so you have to ask yourself these two questions number one is what I'm working on materially improving people's lives okay and that's a question that

1:02:19only you can answer by looking in the mirror is what I'm working on materially improving people's lives the second question that's not a good enough though the second question is am i the user am i the user why do I want you to ask that question because I want you to break the first rule of drug dealing okay what's the first rule of drug dealing Zurich I know you know the first rule of drug dealing there you go never get high on your own supply I want you to intentionally break that rule why because if there are any deleterious effects to using your product you'll be the first to know

1:02:52about it and so if you qualify in that category of people who are the users of the product and you believe you materially improve people's lives you have the green light go for it I think that's a good cool place to be it's a good ethical imperative it's also a great business imperative right because the hardest part about designing product is knowing what the hell a user wants and so that's an amazing hack if you are yourself the user and so you're what I call a facilitator if you can answer in the affirmative to both those questions so that's one test what I call the manipulation matrix and that's that's

1:03:23been hooked since day one and then a few years ago I developed this new test and this test tried to answer this question of what do we do in groups okay we can understand what we do individually but what happens when you're in a product design meeting and somebody wants to use a dark pattern that you're not comfortable with what do you do and so I looked for some kind of test some kind of ethical guide and I wasn't really satisfied with what was out there I wanted something that a designer could raise their hand and say hey boss I'm not so sure about this and

1:03:56then the boss says why well because it doesn't such and such and such and such so the first thing I found was Google's don't be evil but I don't really like don't be evil I mean I don't even think Google uses don't be evil anymore it used to be their motto I don't think it actually is their motto anymore but don't be evil doesn't work because it's completely subjective right what is evil all right what's evil to you might not be evil to someone else so I'm not a big fan of don't be evil so then I came across what the ethicist told me was the

1:04:22golden rule right so do you want to others you would have them do unto you the prom with the golden rule is that it puts the the judgment call of what should be done to the user in the hands of the maker and who says that the maker should decide so that doesn't work either right the it shouldn't be the golden rule it shouldn't be doing to others as you want them to do unto you it should be do unto others as they want done to them and so then I came across with the lawyers said was the ethical test the lawyers say cover your ass

1:04:50right the lawyers say just put it in the Terms of Service and just disclose tell the users everything right now you see a lot of also in the tech space saying well we'll just disclose this goes as close and that's it like tell them every behavioral design technique we try we might use and that'll be it which is ridiculous because we know nobody reads those Terms of Service right those agreements never get read and so that's not I don't think that's a good faith effort I think it's pretty duplicitous too so just say well stuff it in the terms of service agreement and that's enough that's not enough so what I came

1:05:21up with was the regret test and the regret test says that when there is a questionable behavioral design tactic someone raised their hand in the room and say and says this sounds interesting but I think we should run a regret test and a regret test uses the same methodology that we and the design community have been using forever of doing user testing so user testing involves bringing a user or many users into a room showing them the product experience and testing the usability of that experience we've been doing this forever this time with a regret test instead of you know seeing how usable the experience is instead we come in or

1:06:02we bring people in a representative sample of our future users and we ask them to walk through the user experience but then we ask them knowing everything that you now know right would you do what you did meaning if the user knew everything that you as the designer knows would they still do what they did and we have to disclose to them exactly what happened so if there are any coercive tactics you'll know about it remember there's there's two types of behavioral design there is persuasion and coercion persuasion is helping people do what they want to do coercion is getting people to do things they don't want to

1:06:41do and the difference between persuasion and coercion is one word regret you regret things that you were coerced to do so the test is knowing everything the designer knows would you do what you just did and then we measure that right so how many people say yeah I would totally do that now that's good I'm happy with that I don't regret that at all is that 50% 70% nine out of ten like how many people said that they would do that behavior that they don't regret that behavior and so we just need some I suggest that I attend nine out of ten the good news about this regret test is

1:07:16that most times you don't even need to run one that's simply raising your hand and saying hey boss I think we should run this regret test I'm not so sure about this nine times out of 10 is going to negate the need to even run the test in the first place because it gets people thinking of hmm I wonder if people would regret this because remember nobody wants users to regret their product right Facebook doesn't want you to overuse and burnout right they are dealing with the repercussions of that problem right now there's been data that shows that 30% of users in the UK all of a sudden left Facebook because

1:07:50they regret using the product this is a huge problem for them they don't want that and their believe me I can tell you from the inside they told me what they're doing they are running around like crazy to try and figure out ways to make their products less engaging because they don't want people to burn out none of these tech companies want you to get addicted that's ridiculous because what do people do when they get addicted to something they they eventually burn out that's what most people do right if they don't die from a dangerous drug eventually the number one program for recovery is to age out to simply not

1:08:19need anymore when your life circumstances change and you realize that this product is harming you and so they don't want you to use it for a little while intensely they want you to use the product for the rest of your life in a healthy manner in a sustainable fashion so we constantly contest regret to make sure that our users don't regret using our product and service so that becomes our our test for the ethical use of these products we can run a regret test well before we implement the product to make sure that we're not doing anything potentially that could get us in trouble ethically or from a business standpoint

1:08:48now remember you know we want to know about that now because this day and age if people don't like your product not only did they stop using your product they're gonna tell all their friends to stop using her product so we want to we want to assess regret as soon as possible before the user interacts with our product or service yeah so but do regret testers may resign er but don't assume every product you use is using regret test so become in distraction awesome so I think we're about our time here um so one to say any kind of last thoughts you'd like to share with the audience no that's you

1:09:26guys have covered it you asked some some great questions it was a real pleasure I hope there was some value here for everyone good so before we sign off here just let people know how can they find your work how can they find the book and how can they keep track of your work going forward sure so my blog is at near and far near a spell like my first name NIR so near and far com and for more information about my books my first book is called hooked how to build high-performing products my next book is called indestructible how to control your attention and choose your life and

1:09:59if you go to in distractible comm there are all kinds of free tools and resources that you can get there like a schedule maker that doesn't totally free you don't even have to give an email you can start using that immediately there's an 80 page workbook there are videos all kinds of resources that in distractible calm and that's I n distract a ble so in distractible calm awesome so yeah I highly recommend I really enjoyed reading the book is very timely for me I would say I've definitely been feeling a little more distracted recently myself so I think it's a really really timely book both for me I think for everyone in

1:10:35kind of our new technology age here so thank you for writing and hopefully people check it out and thank you so much for joining us here so it's really fun my pleasure thank you [Music] thank you for listening that concludes this edition of action design radio hosted by Eric Johnson and Ciroc on all podcast episodes are available on Spotify Apple podcasts YouTube and many other platforms where you might typically get your pot on and don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter special thanks to Morgan boards for design and as always we would like to recognize stood wendell founder of the action design network a nonprofit

1:11:19organization dedicated to spreading awareness about the Adriel economics psychology and all things behavioral science in order to help you improve your life your career and your understanding of the world around us and the people I am your producer and audio engineer Zack Simon for more cutting edge behavioral science content visit action - design org once again that that's action - design org there you can sign up for our newsletter and find an in-person event happening near you we have chapters in over a dozen cities in the United States and Canada also on our website you can find additional notes and links regarding the topics discussed in today's episode thank you again for

1:12:03tuning in and we will see you again soon [Music] you