Nir Eyal — The Psychology of Addictive Products (EP.266)
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out. Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started. The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that

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linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis. And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker. With each episode, we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.

Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. You know, I just spent the last half hour talking pre-recording with my guest, returning guest, I should say, Nir Eyal, the bestselling author of Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products, and

Yeah.

That's a great hack, and it's great to be here with you, Jim. Again, I appreciate you bringing me back. It's a huge honor. Oh, well, the honor is mine. The honor is mine. Well, last time we talked about your more recent book, and we thought this time it would be fun to talk about your earlier book, Hooked, which is now more than 10 years old. And let's start out with, it's kind of a book that teaches you how to become very, very persuasive.

As I was rereading it, I was thinking, boy, Cialdini. I see Cialdini kind of lurking from all the corners. For people who don't know who Cialdini is, he's kind of the axe. He wrote the book Influence. And for our viewers who don't know about Hooked, let's start with the four-step cycle that you think really can be very, very helpful in getting people interested in what you want them to be interested in.

Sure. So the book is really, that was my first book. And that came out of a class that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and then later at the Hassett Planner Institute of Design. And the idea behind the book was to steal the secrets of Silicon Valley that makes these products so sticky, so engaging. So Hooked was really, I learned these methods because I had a front row seat at my last company, which we then sold, which was where we had this intersection of customers, we

between gaming and advertising. And I became fascinated by how it was that some companies became so good at bringing customers back and others just flopped. And it seemed like in our digital age where the real estate on our screens continues to shrink, right? As we went from big desktop screens to laptop screens to mobile device screens to now wearable device screens to now screens disappearing altogether when it comes to Amazon Alexa or these voice assistants.

As that screen shrunk, we had to find new ways to engage customers, meaning that the amount of real estate that you can put in front of a customer's eyeball just became smaller and smaller. So if you didn't bring them back from habits, if you didn't bring them back on their own, your product might as well not even exist. And so I really became very, very,

I could see that trend and I kind of became frightened for what I was going to do next. I thought I was going to start another tech company, but I knew that if I couldn't build a customer habit, I would be in danger of irrelevance. And so I wanted to figure out what is it about these products? What is it that makes Facebook and Instagram and Amazon and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat relevant?

Why are these products so sticky? And so I wanted to look into the deeper psychology around how they get customers hooked, not for their benefit. They already know these techniques. I wanted it for the rest of us. I wanted it so that all of us could build products and services that keep people coming back for good.

So my clients have included companies like Duolingo that gets people hooked to language learning. FitBot gets people hooked to exercise. And so really what the book has done over the past 10 years, and we just put out a second edition recently, and the basic model, the basic psychology has not changed at all. But the idea of the book is that you could pick it up and figure out why customers aren't coming back. And so it doesn't really matter the industry. I've had customers in enterprise products, in consumer products, all kinds of products,

The big idea is how do you get people to come back? Because we know that retaining a customer always has a much, much higher ROI than finding a new customer. So how do you build these habits within our customers? Yeah. And I'll make a confession. I was telling you offline about our in-house AI and we actually put it in there and we asked our AI to build workflows based on your. Really? I got to tell you, man.

Some of them were really, really impressive. Really? Tell me more. What did you learn? So, well, we learned that the simple, it's really interesting to me, right? Because I'd also put Cialdini's influence in there and we didn't get as good of results as we got with your book. And I think one of the reasons we got is because you are very clear, like with the four steps, for example, right? It's like, you know, the trigger is the,

whatever, the email, the app, et cetera, it interacts with whatever emotional feeling that somebody is feeling at the time. You then get an action, right? And we also had BFJ Fogg's models as well, which I know that you give credit in your book. But the thing that was cool on the workflows was the variety of variable rewards that it came up with.

And the way to vary the variable rewards is also really, really interesting. I'm so glad to hear that. And so the anticipation, it worked. That's great. It's been interesting.

It's funny because, sorry to interrupt, but just to interject here real quick, the book when I first wrote it, I wanted case studies of products that people knew. So the case studies are, you know, the social media products, the video game products, the stuff that people know, right?

What's been fascinating is I've heard a lot of stories from people in industry who are making products that are enterprise products, because you're exactly right. Like if you need someone to use an enterprise SaaS product, if you need an employee to use this dashboard, to come back to do whatever you need them to do on a daily basis habitually,

The same exact model because human psychology doesn't change. These four basic steps of a trigger, an action, a reward, and finally an investment. And that's becoming even more important in the age of AI. When I wrote the book, I could see what was coming. And I talked about, you know, I didn't call it, you know, chat GPT, but I could see what was coming was this type of interface where the product gets better and better with use.

That's a key concept in this model. I call it stored value. What we find is that products that create these habits, they don't depreciate, not like your clothing or your car or your couch loses value. They actually appreciate with use. The more you interact with them, the more data you give them, the more content you interact with,

the more valuable they become. And so that's really what this hook model does is that it transitions people from needing those external trigger, those annoying messages, those spammy notifications. Eventually you don't need that. You are triggering people based on internal triggers. They're triggering themselves. And that's when you know a habit is really formed. Yeah.

And, you know, one of the discussions that we had that I'd love your opinion on, because we're just using it internally right now, and we'll probably use it for the various verticals, infinite books, infinite media, infinite films, et cetera. But like, you know, we really did kind of think like, is this a dual use technology?

You know, we know that our intentions are good. And certainly we know from knowing you that your intentions are good. But we did worry a little bit about like, you know, Robin Hood is not a meditation app.

And, you know, I'm all for anything that can educate people. Like, for example, in my old field, investing, young people really should start investing early, right? Because they're time billionaires and yet they don't.

And you find ways to get them to do it by gamification. I'm not opposed to that. But then, like Robinhood, I'm a little there because it's not investing. It's really more trading. And I mean, what do you think? Do you think that these things are going to be increasingly used to...

Maybe get people that are maladaptive in their internal feelings, like lonely or sad or whatever. How do we solve that problem? So this is a terrific question. There's actually a chapter from the very first edition of the book, the very first publication, which was titled The Morality of Manipulation.

Where I lay out exactly the fear, which I think has come to fruition, that there is a real bifurcation out there of people who will allow their time and attention to be controlled and manipulated by others.

and people who stand up and say, "No, I will take charge." So the book really had these dual purposes of one, helping product makers design good habits. I think it's wonderful that my daughter learned how to play the guitar on YouTube. I've never paid for a guitar lesson. - That's amazing. - She learned how to play guitar, she learned how to code, she learned so many amazing things through these technologies. My dad has been on a streak on Duolingo for years now. He's learning Hungarian through Duolingo, it's fantastic.

Every day I go to the gym, I use FitBot. I never go, and I'm in the best shape of my life. At 47 years old, I can see my abs because I do these exercises habitually because of this amazing app that has helped me so much called FitBot that uses the hook model. So all these examples that I just described are the application of these habits for good.

Is there a potential downside? Of course, that the price of progress, the price of living in a world with so many good things in it is that guess what? We have to learn new norms, new manners, new ways of being. And that's really what indistractable is all about. It breaks down here as a consumer, how do we make sure that we don't get distracted? But of course, you know, this has always been with us. Plato talked about distraction 2,500 years ago. Distraction will always be a part of us. Now, I do think if you are looking for distraction, you're

It's easier than ever to find. And so I think it behooves us, it behooves us to teach our children how to become indistractable. But as far as Hooked is concerned, you know, Hooked was really written for the product makers. And so I kind of give this framework, which I think is a good way of thinking about manipulation because manipulation, remember, is not in itself a bad thing.

The term has kind of a negative connotation, but I don't think it deserves it. Manipulation, we actually, if you think about it, we pay for the privilege of being manipulated. People want to be manipulated. I'll give you a good example. When we go to the movie theater, we know that that's a flickering screen of light, right? That's not real people up there. And the actors, even the ones we see, they're acting.

acting, right? They're completely faking it. They're totally manipulating us so that we'll tear up and we'll say, wow, what a great movie. So it's not that manipulation per se is bad. It's about the context of how we are manipulating them. So there's two kinds of manipulation. On one hand, we have what's called persuasion. Persuasion is helping people do things that they themselves want to do. The opposite of persuasion is coercion, getting people to do things they did not want to do.

Persuasion, not only is it ethical, we need more of it, right? We need to help people lose weight and exercise and save money and do all these good things. We want more persuasive technology. What we don't want is coercion, not only because it's unethical, it's also bad business, right? That if someone uses your product and says, wait a minute, that was coercive. I didn't want to do that.

not only will they not do business with you anymore, they're gonna tell everyone on social media not to do business with you anymore. So I call this the regret test because the difference between persuasion and coercion is this one word, regret. That if the customer regrets using your product,

You're not only ethically in the wrong, you've got a business problem because they won't come back. So that's really the test we have to ask ourselves in the boardroom is, is this something that the user, if they knew what was being done to them, if they knew this tactic, would it help them or would it hurt them? Is this persuasion or is this coercion? So you don't have to name the company, but has there been a company where you saw them using your techniques or

And you yourself kind of felt, oh, I got some regret that they're using my techniques for persuasion.

So I wish I could say that I came up with all these techniques. I think I distilled them down. I had the raw ingredients. So when I see, so there's certain industries I won't work with. I get calls all the time from them, but I won't work with alcohol. I won't work with tobacco. I won't work with porn. There's lots of industries, gambling. There's lots of industries I won't work with who have known these techniques for quite a while. I think one industry that makes me particularly excited

cringe. It's not the social media companies. I don't care. And by the way, I didn't, you know, Facebook and Instagram, these guys were using these techniques long before I came around. The video game companies, you know, they don't read my book. They know these tactics. And that's not what really bothers me because what people are wasting, so to speak, is their time.

So who am I to say that, oh, spending time on YouTube videos or TikTok or Instagram is somehow morally inferior to watching golf on TV? I don't know what the difference is. And by the way, sports, spectator sports uses the hook model in spades. Oh, totally, totally. And yet nobody's saying, oh my God, we're all getting addicted. It's rotting our brain that we're all watching sports. We're all watching some stupid ball bouncing up and down a court or a pitch. Who cares in the big picture of things?

yeah, a lot of people care because it's fun and there's nothing wrong with it. Sports are wonderful. Just like social media and video games are wonderful. So it's not really for us to judge in terms of how people spend their time. What bothers me, what does make me cringe

Is how people spend their money. So I think that we have gone way too liberal on legalized gambling. I think we are hurting the core of America. We are rotting out the core of America when it comes to how prevalent legalized online gambling has become. I think that was a big mistake. And I don't know how we got so...

distracted by how people spend their time on social media and we totally missed what I think is actually costing people billions of dollars of hard-earned cash which is legalized gambling. I think we should not have regulated, we should not have legalized that the way we have. I don't think we should frankly now that we see the consequences of legalizing drugs. How come we are becoming so liberal when it comes to legalizing drugs?

even though there's tons of data that shows how harmful that can be. And I'm not sure exactly how we regulate it. I can tell you what, when I walk around the streets of New York City and at 8 a.m. I'm taking my daughter to something and I can't help but get these whiffs of,

pot as I'm walking the streets of Manhattan at eight in the morning, I think there's a problem, right? We didn't do it the way that the Europeans did it. You know, you go to Amsterdam, you don't smell pot. It's in the, they have those little coffee shops where people smoke and it's what they do in private behind closed doors. Somehow in America, we just opened the floodgates and to products that actually are addictive, that actually are harmful. And yet, you know, nobody's paying attention to what I think was, was an over-liberalization of potentially addictive and harmful and coercive products. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm still mostly for regulated legalization of drugs, but I'm not for what you just described. So we're in agreement there. Like I'm in New York all the time and I can attest that you are absolutely correct. Gross, right? That you really can't-

Oh my God, they'll kill you. They'll arrest you. You smoke a joint, that's fine. Absolutely true. And we were in Union Square and literally had to leave.

because we were getting high. It's disgusting. Yeah. In front of our kids. Yeah. And it's, you know, we've somehow swept this under the rug. There are some severe consequences to these psychoactive drugs. And I agree. I think I'm totally for legalizing pot, but there's a right way and a wrong way. Right. And I think we took our eye off the ball. We were saying, you know, people, everybody knows that social media is bad for your brain. We,

We know that cannabis is super bad for your brain. Somehow we're legalizing that. On social media, I wanted to get your thoughts on the big change that Elon has made at Twitter. Now, one of the big changes was renaming it X. And it seems to have really radically altered user habits, breaking some of them entirely. What do you think's up there? And do you think smart or dumb?

Which changed? What do you think? Oh, like the bot explosion. One of the things that he said he was going to do was get rid of all the bots, right? And now one of my normal daily activities is when I look at my notifications, blocking all of the bots who are targeted. In my case, they all are for bots.

They're slinging, you know, crypto or, you know, this broker that I met has been fantastic and they all have zero followers and follow zero people. But the way that that has kind of interrupted, the other one that really, frankly, kind of enrages me is the de-prioritizing any tweet with a link in it.

And that was my stock in trade, right? Like if I wanted to recommend your book, I would put the link to Amazon or wherever in the tweet saying it's a great book and that people should read it. So just curious as to if you are watching what's going on over there.

Yeah, I think he knows what he's doing, or at least he has to do it. He knows what he's doing. And I think the rationale is that, you know, of course, he wants to keep people on the platform. He wants you to stay on Twitter. And Twitter has a very specific audience type. I think we forget

that Twitter is not the real world. I think Twitter is the least real world out of all the social media platforms. I think LinkedIn is pretty real world, like real normal people are on LinkedIn. Instagram, a little bit less so. Twitter is like way over there. The people who use Twitter are nerds and journalists.

And when I say nerds, I mean people who are obsessed with the topic. They just can't get enough of that topic. And in terms of the hook model, I mean he's nailed it. Trigger, action, reward, investment. He's killing it. And so what he's trying to do by removing deep prioritizing links is that he doesn't want you to leave. He wants you to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and commenting and flaming people and enraging people. That works. And so I think that's what he's prioritizing. Now the risk is, and I think we've seen this,

is that a lot of people

Don't like it. A lot of people that I would not say that Twitter is a mainstream product. It's journalists and nerds. And so for most people, it doesn't have the kind of feeling that an Instagram has or that a LinkedIn has. It's not a safe space. It's it's a dangerous place. It's a dumpster fire. Now, some people like that type of rage, right? They get, you know, people can get addicted to feeling that sensation. But for a lot of people, I think that's a that's a that's not

a mass market. It's a certain type of audience. Now, that's totally fine. You know, the riches are in the niches. I understand who he's going for. But I think it does have a real risk of...

disenfranchising certain people who just don't see it as helpful. Like, I don't see it as helpful for my information diet. I'm rarely on Twitter these days, other than very specific people that I'm looking to hear what they think. But, you know, I think he's prioritizing a certain type of audience that, frankly, he is a part of. Like, I don't know if you've ever seen that graph where they took, I think it was in the New York Times, I can't remember where I saw it, where

They showed this heat map of when Elon tweets. And it's – I don't understand it. I just don't – because he's tweeting –

All day and all night. Like he's getting like three hours of sleep in between all his tweets. I don't get it. But there's a certain type of person who does that, and that is certainly not the majority of people. Yeah. My guess is that those are – most of those tweets are scheduled and that a lot of them also are not Elon himself tweets.

posting that. I schedule a lot of tweets. And so it looks like I'm there a lot more than I am, especially. But just the sheer volume. I mean, don't worry about the time, but like who's, I'm guessing he had to come up with most of them. I mean, that's his whole thing, right? Is how it's an authentic connection to him. Yeah. I think I personally think, and maybe it's because I am a nerd, but I thought even in the pre Elon days, I always thought that Twitter did have a shot at

With a certain segment of the population, like journalists, as you mentioned, opinion leaders, founders, entrepreneurs, et cetera, that Twitter could emerge as a really, really effective connection system, almost global intelligence, if you will. And I found a lot of people who ended up coming to work for me at OSV on Twitter. But it's like an introduction is the way I look at it.

And like, if I see somebody that I like very much, I'll follow them. I won't interact with them. I'll just follow them and I'll see what they're putting out. If they're putting out mostly signal and not noise, which is a minority of people, then, and I really like what they're doing, then I'll privately message them and say, hey, I'd love to chat with you. And

And then of course the platform is fairly irrelevant, but it is not bad in, in that regard for my specific thing. I'd never thought about it as kind of the, the niche. And then it makes me think like the other reason that I thought that he was buying Twitter was what a gold mine for data training AI models. So XAI now has, yeah,

the keys to a lot of very interesting data but if you're right you might not want to train on things where everyone is like i hate this this and this and well yeah the ai is definitely going to learn what pushes our buttons and i didn't mean to disparage the platform i think it's doing great obviously i didn't take it it serves its audience yeah no no no yeah i agree

What do you think about, can you scale this kind of thing? And by that, I mean, could we have cities? Could we have industries? Could we have institutions where you could, uh,

use all of these techniques to make everyone and the cities a little crazy, but let's make it an institution. Like I actually thought, wow, I, maybe I'm going to try this at O'Shaughnessy ventures. Maybe I'm going to try to use all these tricks to get everybody kind of aligned and, and doing that sort of thing. Myself included, by the way, is that possible? Or is this really a one to many or in the terms of your other book, just for your own habits? Yeah.

No, I think it's coming. In fact, I presented at an AI conference a few weeks ago where I kind of presented this vision for what AI could look like if it had a behavioral design lens. And the metaphor I like to give, when people think of AI, we know we're racing towards her, right? We're going to have Scarlett Johansson in our ear telling us what we want to hear, whispering sweet nothings. But I think that there's also a future

where it's not Scarlett Johansson, it's Jiminy Cricket. So you remember the movie Pinocchio? Sure, of course. And Jiminy Cricket represented our conscious. Yeah. And so I think there's a potential to train an AI when we have these babblefish in our ear, or I met with a company the other day who has these glasses that can tell you in real, you know, it sees everything you see. So imagine a future where this

block that has always existed for behavioral designers like myself, which is this behavior intention gap. That I intend to do one thing, but I don't do that behavior. And the reason this happens is because even if I know what to do,

In that moment, it's too late. So if I'm on a diet and I see this plate of French fries, I know I shouldn't eat it, but I'm going to anyway. And so what AI could do someday, if it can hear everything you can hear, if it can see everything you can see,

I envision a future where Jiminy Cricket says, oh, wait a minute, before you eat those fries, just so you know, if you eat that plate of fries, I estimate it's going to be about 600 calories, which means you're going to be over your calorie surplus for the day. So there could be a future where

Where this AI helps between that. So in Hooked, I talk about the internal trigger, that emotional need. That every product you use, you use for one reason, and that is to escape discomfort. It's a big misunderstanding. People think that we look for pleasure and avoid pain. That's not true. Everything we do is about the appeasement of discomfort, is escaping discomfort. So if you can...

Have an AI that's fast enough to know, okay, I know that you feel this way, and I know you're going to get relief by doing this, by doing this action. I'm going to interrupt that before it happens with a choice, right? By making you aware of a different option in that moment.

Now, that doesn't mean we always want to take that option, but at least we become aware of it. At least we have kind of another voice. Maybe it's even our voice. I could envision literally being trained on our own voice so that voice in your head is supported by your own voice in your ear that says, hey, there's a better decision here. You're having an argument with your wife. And as opposed to saying the wrong thing, the AI coach is saying, hey, you know what? Here's what would be a better course of action here to diffuse the situation.

So there could be lots and lots of questions here. There's lots of doubts. I hear you, right? Privacy concerns and data manipulation. There's all kinds of concerns.

But there also could be, if you did have a proprietary AI model that only you had access to that helped you be your better self and was designed with your intentions to persuade you, not coerce you, but to persuade you to do the things that you want to do, it could be a behavioral design superpower. You are incredibly simpatico with our thinking.

And in fact, one of our, it's not even, it's just drawing board right now. But as I mentioned, we do have a full stack in-house of AI. And that is one of the things that we are experimenting with.

Can we use the AI for that modification? And you noticed me, and for those of you who are listening and not watching, I did smile quite broadly when he said it could almost be your own voice because that was the first of our ideas was that it was your own voice.

And it was saying, Jim, you know, your line between in the battle between the dieter and the brownie, the brownie always wins, probably helped you sell your book, How to Retire Rich. But that kind of got me thinking, like, why does the brownie always win? And you've just articulated what that is. If you could have that, and it's all about latency, right? It's got to be there in time.

And so you're going to need some way for the AI to see those french fries, et cetera. But the other thing that I'm noticing is I think that AI is going to also, and this is a real contrary view, people think it might make a lot of people dumber. I actually think the opposite. I think that the more people, and just my own use, like I'll give you an example.

Last night, my wife and I were watching a show on TV and there was a red barn. And I looked at my wife and I said, why are barns red? And she goes, I have no idea. And I really don't care. You're weird. So I grabbed my phone and I put it into the AI. Why are barns red? And now I know. But it got me thinking, how many people are out there

don't ask questions because they don't want to appear dumb. They don't want to appear like ill-informed or you don't know that, you know, they don't want to deal with any of that human reaction, right? Like, Oh, what a dummy, but they're not going to get that reaction from the AI. It's just going to give you the information.

And by the way, they're red because the early farmers in America used an iron oxide that they mixed in with other things that turned red, but it also had a purpose. It helped the wood not be invaded by mites, by termites, all of that, and sealed it against the weather. And then also in the earliest days,

a red barn stood out against the white snow, against the green trees, et cetera. Now, of course, it's just Chesterton's fence. We do it because we've always done it. The wood of today doesn't need any of that stuff, but we've always been doing red barns and now it's tradition. But there was a real reason for it back in the day.

I love those. Me too. But the more I talk to people, the more I see that a lot of people are in fact using AI this way. They're asking it a bunch of questions that they never would ask before.

And equally, because we're going to get to psychiatry and some of your critiques, which I share your view, so we're not going to probably have too much disagreement, but I think AI is going to be a sleeper case is in therapy because people...

might not want to tell that psychiatrist or psychologist or whomever is sitting across from them. They're, they're the thing that they feel like really horribly awkward about. And they're not going to probably have that problem with an AI. Now,

Clearly, as you mentioned, lots of footnotes here. It's going to have to be a private AI that you know can't be hackable, etc. But I think that there's a lot of potential there as well. Absolutely. Yeah, I think, by the way, I love those little trivia facts. I go through a couple of those every day with my daughter. Like, why is this? Why is that? And it's, I totally agree with you. I think there will be

There already is, I think, a bifurcation. Again, I love this Paul Virilio quote where he said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. There will be lots of shipwrecks. And I think we're still waiting. We know that the Hindenburg moment for AI is coming. In the next few years, there will be a disaster. I promise you it's coming. Where we say, how are we asleep at the wheel? Something terrible will happen. There's always that Hindenburg moment with every new technology. Yep.

But of course, there's going to be vastly good things that come out of it as well. I think the risk is, and I don't know how to mitigate this on a societal level. I can only think how to do it on a personal level. There will be a lot of people left behind because we've already seen it. I think television did this. I think television created a culture of lonely, sad, overweight couch potatoes that normalized

unnatural behaviors. What do I mean by that? I think the natural human condition

is to be around a fire with our kin, telling stories, sharing our lives, working together, struggling together. Now, thank God we don't have to do that. We can sit in the warmth of our homes where we have food and we have safety. We have a lot of technological benefits that have made the standard of living better than ever in all of human history. But I think what we lost was that we don't sit around that fire. We sit around the TV, at least we used to. Now we don't sit around the TV. We sit around our phones.

But that is a choice. I think people who are gloom and doom, chicken little type people,

Make it sound like this is being done to you. And I think that's a very intellectually lazy position. It's very easy to say, oh, this is you're being manipulated. This is happening to you. There's nothing you can do about it. It's hijacking your brain. One of these tech critics likes to use the word hijacking. And look, hijacking is what those bastards did to us on 9-11. Hijacking is not playing Candy Crush. It is not scrolling Facebook. That is not hijacking.

We have a choice if we believe we do. And so the real battle that I really am fighting, especially with my next book called Beyond Belief, which is forthcoming, is really about how do we instill this belief in our own agency? We have to believe that there's something you can do about it because when you believe you are powerless, it's instantly true.

Whether the technology is doing it to you or not, instantly it's the truth because you don't try. What's the point? It's a foregone conclusion. They're predicting me. They're hijacking my brain. I have no agency here. And that is incredibly toxic. And I think that the people, unfortunately, I think it might be the majority of people

default into that belief system. And so no surprise, they are manipulated and controlled by this technology. Whereas the few who say, no, no, no, this is a tool that I will use to my advantage, those people are going to become wildly successful. Yeah, and again, we are perfectly aligned. I'm reading right now a book about William James. It's called Six Souls, Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. And I've always been interested in James because he's

you know, the father of American pragmatism and everything. What I did not know much about the man himself. I'd read all of his books, his formal, you know, books on psychology and everything like that. But I hadn't read a lot about his personal history. And literally, he came up with much of pragmatism to save himself.

Because he looked at himself as kind of a sick soul. During his 20s, it was a kind of a disaster. And he came from an extremely wealthy and highly literate and educated family in Boston. And I had no idea that when he was in his 20s, he truly contemplated suicide.

And that it was him because at the time determinism was the rage, right? And, you know, you genetics were big departments at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et cetera. And like, everything was like, you have no free will. You can't do anything. And he was like,

That's horrible to believe that. But then he dug in and he said, okay, let me see if I can prove any of this stuff. Right. And he talks extensively about the power of beliefs. And what you said is exactly right. If you believe you can't do it, you can't do it. Just period.

And so the whole idea of it being much easier for people to slip into that learned helplessness, I'm delighted. I'd love to get a pre-copy of the book because it sounds like it's right up my alley. But I'm fascinated too because of what you do, you also have a really deep domain knowledge in psychology, psychiatry,

And one of the things really caught my eye that you were talking about, which was this turning diagnoses into identities. And that is something that has been one of my growing irritations over maybe the last 10 years. Because what happens, and I want your opinion on this, but the way I see it is you turn a diagnosis into an identity,

And then diagnosis bias starts in, right? Oh, you're a blank, fill in the blank. It's a label. So it discourages thinking or thinking, hey, maybe Jim isn't this, this, and this. Maybe that was just something else. But when they look, oh, he's depressed or he's a manic or whatever label you want to put on it, it just leads to...

In my opinion, it just limits us so much. And we're taking normal behaviors and we're making them pathological. Am I too extreme in this kind of irritation? You know, the tricky thing is that

This line of thinking wins you no friends. And a lot of enemies, a lot of enemies. You know, I've been speaking. So something I, I, I, I've much recently, I've gone much deeper into psychiatry in general, but I know a lot about, about ADHD and through, you know, through researching and distractible and,

And there's a lot of fishy business going on with ADHD. The fact that 27% of American boys have an ADHD diagnosis. Insane. How can that be? How could that possibly be? I mean, and I think what, so I started talking about this.

And I was on a few prominent podcasts. And I wasn't even making, I wasn't pointing fingers. I was asking the question of something's fishy here. I haven't figured it out. At that point, I didn't figure it out. And I just raised the concern

And the amount of vitriol, the amount of hatred from how dare you? My son is this and my kid is that. And, you know, you don't know what you're talking about. And I didn't even say anything. I just said, that seems crazy. Especially when we know that this isn't a worldwide phenomenon. This is an American problem, right? 10% of US kids, 1% of European kids. Yep. What's going on? There's something happening. And I think the reason is because people do exactly as you said,

They make their diagnosis into their identity. They become that label. That is who I am because it's incredibly comforting, right? To have, and I understand it. And there is a time and a place for it. When you are struggling with something, to have that label, to say, this is why, right?

gives you some relief, right? Because now you have a path to say why things are not your fault, so to speak. And I don't think it's your fault. Whatever struggle you have, look, even when you really mess up, is it your fault?

Who knows? We don't even know free will is a real thing. That's a whole nother discussion. Let's say it's not your fault. Even if it's not, you have a diagnosis, you have a condition, you have this, you have that. It's not your fault, but it is your responsibility because who else's responsibility is it going to be? And so my big contention is that pills don't teach skills.

that we have become so reliant on whatever the pharmaceutical industry shoves in our face, that we take a child, you know, sometimes under 10 years old, six, seven, eight years old, and the child is behaving like a child. I mean, I have a diet. I have ADHD, apparently. You know, I took, I took a, I met with a psychiatrist. I took the evaluation. I did all the tests and

I have ADHD. And let me tell you, I definitely had ADHD as a kid. Now, I don't really believe I have anything wrong with me. Let me be very clear. Right. I'm just saying it's so easy to get a diagnosis because people think, oh, ADHD, it's a blood test. It's a it's a fMRI scan. You can see in your. No, you check a few boxes. Does this person exhibit X amount of these symptoms out of this list? If so, boom, you have a diagnosis.

So when I tell people, look, I can cure your ADHD. No, impossible. It's a lifelong condition because that's what we've been shoved down our throats. This is just who I am. It's incurable. No, if I have these list of factors and six out of 10 makes you ADHD, and then I, you take the test again, and now you don't exhibit six out of those 10, voila.

So why would we not want to start with non-pharmaceutical interventions? We know every pill has a side effect, right? There's always some kind of side effect, let alone if we are taking methamphetamines and we are stuffing them into our children's faces. Of course.

Of course they're gonna have side effects, not only physiological, but also psychological. If a kid learns, oh, for me to perform, I have to pop a pill, you think that doesn't have psychological consequences? Of course it does. - Huge, yeah, huge. - And not that there, there is definitely a place. I'm not saying don't take medication. I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving you medical advice. There is definitely a place for medication, but it can't be at these levels. It doesn't make any sense for when you go for a diagnosis, the doctor says,

After the first visit here, here's a pill. No, let's try the non-pharmaceutical interventions. Teach your kid how to be indistractable. And then if that doesn't work, if then you've exhausted all other non-pharmaceutical interventions, okay, now let's look at some other, some potential drugs.

But I think we have just become so hair-trigger to easy solutions. Give me a pill. Give me a pill. As opposed to, wait a minute, there's some old-fashioned solutions. Scheduling your time. Planning out what you're going to do with your day. Turning off notifications. This isn't rocket science stuff. And there's a way to do this that avoids all these negative consequences. So that's my big-picture analysis.

Yeah. And I also like your clarification of that, you know, the person feels better too often. You know, I finally figured out what's wrong with me and then not my fault. I think you're absolutely right in that too. I tend to be a little more hardcore in that regard. I kind of, at a young age, I just decided, you know what? If I'm going to found the company, I'm going to run the company. Everything is my fault.

Because like I hired that guy who screwed up, you know, yeah, he screwed up and it wasn't me who screwed up, but ultimately, you know, Harry Truman, the buck stops here. And it certainly has, has helped me in the companies that I've run, um,

And so you mentioned free will. That was a huge part of James, right? He believed deeply that he had free will. And so he said, it's not enough for me to believe it, though. I've got to show it through my action. I've got to show that I have free will. And so he came up with all these things to show that you want to see my free will. I'll show it to you. Right. Right.

And in a way it's like, it seems to me to be a debate. It's a bit like the medieval theologians who wanted to spend all of their time arguing how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Like to understand if we have free will, like,

I'm all for data, right? And yet we don't even have a good working definition of consciousness quite yet. We don't know why anesthesia works really. And so rather than stew about it and come to my own conclusion, I've just come to the idea that, well, the outcomes of my believing in free will are really good.

But most of the time, most of the time, right? Sometimes they suck. Like when I do something really stupid and I've got to say, well, nope, that was me. I did do that of my own free will. But on balance, they are very, very helpful, right? Because they lead to agency. They lead to,

you know, honoring your work, they lead to a lot of good outcomes. Right? Right. Right. Yeah. That's, I totally agree with you. And I hear this debate a lot and I've kind of like gotten tired of it, of the free will debate. And there is, you know, there's a nerdy, like you look at the details of, oh my gosh, the brain is making a judgment before you do. There's, there's lots of interesting little data points, but it's kind of, it's a little bit of intellectual masturbation because whether or not we have free will doesn't change the fact that we have free choice.

And that's what I'm more interested in. We definitely have free choice because it depends how you define will. You can make free will become anything you want it to become. There's no good definition of that. We definitely have free choice. And so we have to – and by the way, this is actually what I've discovered with my new book.

is that even if you do have things that make your life difficult, systematic oppression, poverty, gender issues, inequality, there's all these issues. What we find is across the board is that people who have an internal locus of control

Even when they don't deserve to have that. So there's this concept in psychology, internal versus external locus of control. I'm sure you understand it. And it turns out that those people who have an internal locus of control, even when they have every good reason to say, I'm disadvantaged because of my brain, because of this, because of that, even when they deserve to say it's not my fault.

Those people who have an internal locus of control do better in every imaginable metric. They have more friends. They're more wealthy. They're healthier. They live longer. Everything is better for those people when they believe that they have personal agency. So that's it, right? Like at the end of the day, you have to believe that you have a lot of personal agency and act like it because the alternative sucks. It just makes you feel good. It's just this temporary thing.

sedative that lulls you into not having to do very much and go play video games and watch TV. Yeah. And I think that's a great way. I love, I'm stealing the, we all have free choice from you. I love that. Just, just give me a quote. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And, you know, you also see it in like the, you know, everyone clutching their pearls and, you know, setting their hair on fire about, oh, it's social media that's killing our kids. It's phones that are killing our kids. And I think we agree that that's probably not what's doing it. What do you think?

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I just published an article a few weeks ago that was an excerpt from my book from Indistractable and then kind of elaborated on it. How I do think – and this is why – where social sciences are very hard to put the pieces together because I do think that there are effects to using social media, especially for children. However, we –

don't quite understand the causal effects. There's for sure all kinds of correlation. We know that when kids use any form of media to excess, there is correlation with bad outcomes, right? But I would argue that happens with every form of media. If you're watching four hours of television, if you're reading Harry Potter, my daughter used to be super into Harry Potter. You know what? As were both of mine, yep. Right? That's too much Harry Potter. You need to go out and do something else. And so what we're finding more and more is that

The causal relationship is in reverse, that it's the children who have a difficult home life situation. It's the children who are struggling with other things in their life that they are using social media, technology, video games to access, to escape what is happening in their life. And that's why it's so important to me. The biggest revelation of Hooked, and then I carried it into Indistractable, was this idea of the internal trigger.

That everything you do, you are doing out of the desire to escape discomfort, even the desire to feel good, right? Parents think that, oh, kids are playing video games so much because they like them. No, it's because they are escaping discomfort of some kind, right? Even the craving and wanting and lusting and desiring of wanting to play is itself psychologically destabilizing.

So we have what's called the needs displacement hypothesis. When you have psychological needs that are not met in the real world, you will look for satisfaction of those needs in the virtual world. And what are those psychological needs? This is 50-year-old research. The self-determination theory tells us that every human being on the face of the earth needs autonomy,

competency and relatedness. This is old stuff. Every psychologist knows about self-determination theory. But when you look at children today, they are starved of these three psychological nutrients, starting with autonomy. You know, there's only one place in civilization that you can tell someone

where to go, what to think, what to eat, who to be friends with, and that's prison, and the other place is school. - Cool, yeah. - Just these two places where when you put people in cages, they act like animals. And so is it any surprise that children behave the way they do? In the Western world, we have this myth of the teenage brain. I always hear people saying, "Oh, my teenager has hormones and this and that." In pre-industrialized societies,

There's no such thing as a rebellious teenager. It's a complete invention of the industrialized world. You know why? Because we tell kids what to do all day. And that is not natural. Kids, our DNA, our psychological nutrients require us to have personal autonomy. But when we are told what to do all day long, and you look at the research, look at the work of Peter Gray, for example, we know that children today have more regulations placed on them than an active duty service member.

They have more rules placed on them than someone who's in the army. And so it's no surprise they want autonomy. Well, where do they find that autonomy? Where do they find freedom? We used to hang out in the neighborhood. They don't do that anymore. Now they go to play video games because that's all parents will let them do because we're so scared of stranger danger and you can't let your kid outside even though it's the safest time in American history to be a kid. What other choices do they have?

And so I think that excessive social media use, excessive technology use is downstream of these other consequences. It's exactly, it's a symptom of the greater disease. - Yeah, we were talking about that just the other night, people who are of my generation, like we were truly free range. Like, bye mom, bye dad, I'll be back for dinner. And like the rest of the day was literally ours.

And, you know, there's a great Dylan Thomas poem about that kind of childhood. I can't remember the title of it, but it's under the something tree. And the entire poem is just lovely because it's just this kid out playing, out with his friends, just doing simple things. But the autonomy is what they had, what I had, quite frankly. Yeah.

- And that would use-- - And it's what kids still crave today. It's amazing, people say, "Oh yeah, but kids don't wanna do that anymore." Are you sure? - Yeah. - Look, my kid loves technology just like anyone else. She's 16 years old. But what's amazing is when her friends come over and they have something to do, they always choose to do that. - Yep. - Right? And even actually even playing, no, no, no, but they wanna play video games. But you know what, if kids are playing together,

That's fine, right? There's nothing wrong with that. That's great. Of course, there's a good mix of different activities, but it's amazing. I think it's because we hyper-schedule our kids, because they're test prepping and the Mandarin lessons and the swimming and the ballet, they have no time to do what we did, which is just to hang out and to just be kids. No, we have to constantly observe them and tell them what to do all day. And I think that really backfires. Yeah, I agree. One of the CEOs of one of our portfolio companies said,

was talking about he has young kids. And he had like, we were talking about ADHD earlier. Both of his boys, they're both boys, were diagnosed ADHD. And he was like, you know, maybe I'm just going to let them first thing in the morning go out and play in the yard, do whatever they want. They can do whatever they want, just as long as they're outside in the yard. There's a swing set. There's stuff to do. There's all that. And guess what happened?

Like all of a sudden the ADHD vanished. It was gone because of what you're saying. I totally agree.

There's a big part of that. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I think there is hope. I think we were talking about AI earlier. So we homeschooled my daughter and it bore amazing fruit. I mean, she's really, I'd love for you to meet her someday. She's, she's super well adjusted. She's super mature. She's just, she's my friend. Like she's not even, I don't know what people talk about, like teenage rebelliousness. Like my kids second to my wife, my best friend, she's fantastic. Yeah. And I think part of it was because she had this, this,

education that she led, right? They're talking back to autonomy. It wasn't a teacher saying, hey, guess what? You're going to sit here in my classroom and I'm going to lecture at you and you're going to do what I tell you to do. She knew she wanted to get these rigorous studies under her belt, but it was her direction. It was her pacing. It was her deciding what direction she was going to go. And I think they meant all the difference. So my dream is that someday there, you know, if we have institutionalized education, it's a guidance counselor,

who is administering a room full of screens and kids who are able to communicate with an AI, who can pace at their own pace. They're not being judged by their peers. Oh, you're too smart or you're too stupid or you're a nerd or you're this. You can pace at whatever pace you want in subjects you're interested in to go where you dream of going. And I think that inspires me. I think we're not that far away from such a future, I hope.

I totally agree. It's so funny. We are very simpatico because we think the opportunities in that type of education are enormous. And like one of the, or many, many studies of like, how do you get the best educated students

humans in the world and most of them were through tutorials in other words they had a tutor and they were allowed to kind of no you know what i'd really like to read is this and then the tutor would be great let's read it together and let's go over it and boy that sounds like a great job for ai right totally and and in addition to that the ai trains on the student himself or herself

And so they understand. In much the same way, you know that we all have different communication styles. The majority of people are visual, but a lot of people are auditory. A lot of people are kinesthetic. And so the AI immediately picks that up. And so you don't say to somebody who's a kinesthetic, which is feelings, right? You don't say, can you see the big picture? No, but they know how they feel.

How does that make you feel? Or to an auditory person, you say, can you see the big picture? No, but they can hear the bell ring. And so AI just seamlessly is able to put it in their preferred communication style. It's just, I'm incredibly bullish on it and a lot of these techniques.

And it's interesting how we think that technology is whatever's new and somehow whatever existed when you were around is the way it's always been. That's not true, right? Public education, the way we think of it, a Horace Mann, what is that, like 150 years old? If you look at, like you said, all the greats, Mozart didn't go to public school. Like Newton, they were all tutored. And so if we can bring that, that's actually the origin, right? That's the older way of doing things. That's the way we used to do it.

Not here, sit in this classroom and learn this boring topic that trains you to be a worker in a factory. No, like to work with your mind, it needs to be self-directed. I think that's something that we've, you know, several generations of children, we have wasted these minds because of how painful this stuffing information into your brain just so you could barf it out on an exam and that's supposed to prove that you're educated. No, and I succeeded, right? I went to Stanford. I know how this game works. And

I will tell you, I'll be the first to tell you, that's a stupid system. It's an outdated system. Yeah. And the

designed to keep people placid in a room following instructions for eight hours. Hmm, where else are they going to do that? On a factory floor, right? And so for the objectives, if we were going to be geeky AI people, we would say they maximize the objective function for compliance and willingness to be placid in a room for eight hours. That is not the normal human condition.

And it's certainly not the normal human condition for children.

That's right. And when they don't conform, oh, they're broken. They're broken and bad. No, the system is broken. Exactly. Exactly. Well, this has been so much fun. I always have a great time chatting with you. When does the new book come out? Good question. Early 2026. Early 2026. Fingers crossed. I have to finish it. Almost done. Well, we will certainly have you back on to talk about the new book when that one comes out. Thank you. And...

really really great it was really fun for me to reread both of these and also get the input from my somewhat geeky ai people they're like hmm yes of course we can turn this into a workflow yeah i'd love to see more of that actually now i'm super curious let me know when we get it to a point where where it isn't continually breaking we will definitely give you a show of the tech

Well, if you recall our last time, we do have one final question, which you get another crack at it. You get another bite at the apple. And that is we're going to wave this wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you that magical microphone that's going to feed into the earworm that everyone is now wearing because they're the latest thing.

And you can incept two things in the world's population. They're going to wake up the next morning, whenever their morning is, and they're going to say, I've just had two of the best ideas. And unlike all the other times, I'm actually going to act on these two ideas. What two things are you going to incept in the world to make it a better place for all of us?

Yeah, so I think the first, because I've been working on this for many months now, many years actually, five years in the making, is to believe in your own agency. And the most important part there is the belief that I think we way, way underestimate how important beliefs are to our well-being, to our physical health, to our contribution to the community.

choosing your beliefs to serve you is incredibly important. I don't think we assess that enough because we kind of get our beliefs handed to us, right? We believe whatever our parents believe. We are the nationality of whatever country we just happen to be born into and our belief systems are shaped on that. So I think incepting the idea that you have the power to choose your beliefs, that beliefs are not facts, they're not faith. Beliefs are something that you have a choice over. So that's number one. And the second one would be,

that this is kind of comes out of my work with Indistractable, that the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That when we look at so many of the things that keep ourselves down, almost all of them are impulse control issues, right? When it comes to distraction, when it comes to saying something we shouldn't have said, procrastination, whatever, all these things that we later look back with regret,

they're almost always impulse control issues, right? We knew what to do, but we didn't exactly do the right thing in the moment. We said the wrong thing. We did the wrong thing. We ate the wrong thing. That tends to be what we look back and regret. And so the antidote to impulsiveness, the reason we do all these things is just impulsiveness, right? In the moment, we made the wrong choice.

The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. That if you leave it to the last minute, right? If you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork on the way to your mouth, you're going to eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, you're going to smoke it. If you sleep next to your cell phone, it's the first thing you wake up and pick up in the morning before you even say hello to your loved one. It's too late. They got you. You lost. But if you plan ahead, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. If you use forethought, if you plan ahead,

There's no distraction you can't overcome tomorrow as long as you plan for it today. I absolutely endorse and love both of those. I could not actually more wholeheartedly agree. Thank you. It's been absolutely a delight to chat with you, as always. And I look forward to the new book and our next chat. Thanks so much, Jim. It was a pleasure as always. All right. Cheers. Thanks.