Controlling Your Attention to Apps

and angel investor. He has studied our companies such as Facebook now of course, Meta and Twitter encourage users to spend time on their platforms. He's also author of a book, It was out in Hooked, how to build habit forming products. His website is Near and Far and dot com and he joins us in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. Welcome, Thanks, great to be here, great background. I feel like I have a million questions, so you're just gonna have to

stay for the next sixtew minutes, Like cancel the next show. UM, tell us a little bit about like we were talking about the or ring, which you have on um all of this information and all of this information gadgets are gathering, gadgets that we're wearing. Is it a good thing for us? And Mike talked about, you know, he's on his phone all the time. Is this good for society? It's a great question. Is it good? Is it bad? The answers yes, it's both. Pauvarlio has a wonderful quote. He said, when

we invented the ship, we invented the shipwreck. So of course every new technology, especially one on such a massive scale as the Internet, is going to have goods and beds about how we manage those. You know, you're I'm wondering about sort of the chemicals that are at play, like the brain chemicals. You know you always hear about, Well, if you get a notifications on your is that a real thing? You know? Do is there dopamine or whatever?

You know, happiness chemicals at work when you when you get addicted to an app and you're and you're you know, I love to see those notifications and stuff like that. Yes and no, I hate to give a wishy washy answer, but typically if you hear somebody talk about dopamine s where it's just discount everything, they say, because it's so overused. It's so overplayed. Everything releases dopamine. When you hug somebody, you get dopamine. When you learn to play the piano

or play tennis, you get a squared of dopamine. Dopamine is not cocaine in the brain. It's like a different scale than using an app. So the whole idea of getting addicted to an app or hijacking your brain is so overplayed if you actually look at the research and you talk to the people who study this stuff. Some people get addicted, of course, just like some people get addicted to alcohol. Right, alcohol is highly addictive, but not everybody who has a glass of wine with dinner is

an alcoholic. Right, About three to five of population is addicted, but it's not. It's certainly not everyone. Addiction is a pathology, and just because some people get addicted doesn't mean everyone will. So these little dopamine hits that we get aren't. It's something pretty natural that we'd probably be getting something. And we remember, we want products to get better products. Being engaging is not a problem, it's progress. We're gonna say, hey, Apple,

your phones are really easy to use. Stop that Netflix your shows. I want to watch them all the time. Can you please make boring shows? It's ridiculous. It's a wonderful thing that the world is becoming more engaging, but the cost of this is that we have to learn some new manner, some new norms and new ways of being in the world so that we can get the best of these products without letting them Because I can't imagine.

You know how many times you walk into like a subway train and like just people are just involved, you know, so engaged either in their phone or something, and you feel kind of rude, kind of moving around. And I do feel like we need to kind of rethink how we interact and engage in society as a whole. Um. So I think about things like healthcare. Uh. And it's funny. I had a t MJ or do you have a t MJ issue? Um? And I actually have an app

that reminds me to relax my jaw. And it sounds so stupid and silly, and I kind of laughed when my doctor said, I want you to download this app. It's a very simple app, but it works. How do you think about how we could get so much more in the healthcare and wellness space. When it comes to apps and you know whether it's workable technology, how do you see it? How do you see that it should play at is playing? So we were talking about before we went on air, about how I get a gadget.

Almost every week somebody sends me something to try out. Because I'm in this health change space. Healthcare is specifically taking off. I mean, I think one thing I'm super excited about our continuous glucost monitors. Have you seen those around for? It used to be something that only diabetics war and it's it's a game change, my mother in law,

and you start seeing them on people's arms. What you start seeing now is that people who don't have diabetes are now tracking their gluecost because it's so easy to do that. Now you can track it throughout the day. And and there's several companies I work with a few that will tell you before you eat, right before you get a snack, check your glucose. Why because it will tell you whether you are psychologically hungry or physically hungry. And sometimes it's hard for us to tell the difference.

So by looking at this, happen saying, actually, my blood glucose is fine, I really don't need a snack. Let me wait fifteen minutes that can delay snacking. So that's just one small example. But I think we're gonna see an explosion of these new behavior change apps. All right, So what are some of your favorite you know, either apps are products that are out there, let's say for

working out, because there's so many. Yeah, So one of the apps I talked about in my book Hooked is uh an app called fit bod f I T B O D. And I love this app because I actually put out a blog post. I was so frustrated with how bad most fitness apps were. I put out a blog post that the title was why your fitness app is making you fat? Because they were so bad. All of them were so terrible. And then somebody told me about fit bod so bad? Was it just because they

didn't form a habit? Okay, got it? And so I I downloaded fit bond and I started using it, and I said, oh my goodness, this is actually really great and it looks like it's following the hook model. Hook models what I based my book on my class at Stanford on and so I just went to the customer support email thing and I sent them to you have you by chance read my book? Within thirty seconds? The founder wrote me back and said, yes, we actually built the hook model into the app. And it's I use

fit bod every time I work out. I mean, I'm forty four years old, best shape of my life because of this app. It's fantastic. Well, near cuts to the chase here, How can Carol and I make this show more habit forming? That's what we need? What we need huge? We have a huge Do we need a bitually listening? What do we what do we do? Well? You're you're you're doing great so far that's fantastic. So the ho model has has another segment. Let's say, okay, how do

we analyze twenty seconds? That's the most important part. The fuel that we see is the backbone of every habit forming product is a variable reward, right, some kind of intermittent reinforcement. Of course you have it in that you product. By the news, the first three letters of news. Any

w new It's all about variability. So that's what makes sports engaging, what makes slot machines so so intoxicating, what makes social media fun, It's all about the new, new new, The variability so you've got that as your backbones, not personality. Of course, I'm crushed. Maybe you won't come back now, I'm just kidding. Good look, we're going to come back, and you're in just a moment, So I want to get back to a guest. We're still talking with Near I l he is the habit sky as our Bloomberg's

Missy Gafa Poolo had written about. But he was a former lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He has studied how companies, as we mentioned like Meta and Twitter encourage users to spend time on the platforms. Check out his book Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products. And he's also got a blog website near and Ford dot com and he's still with us in our studio. So we were talking about wellness and health apps in particular

for some of our audience. UM Peloton right somewhere addicted. There's something that really rode a high no pun intended, and then obviously has has come undone a bunch. What do you think about that? Yeah, it's it's a super interesting story because I think it's a great example of why variability is so important for habit formation, that if something is not variable. If it's predictable, it's boring, right.

I think about game games, right, everybody wants to gamify everything, put points, advatagine and leaders, but most games people burn out on. Right, think about member Farmville. Farmville was like the biggest thing ever back in what two thousand and twelve. Who's playing Farmville anymore? Nobody? Why? Because after Farmville it was Chefville and uh whatever, frontier Ville was like the same. Yeah, you're telling nobody's gonna be playing Wortle in a few years.

You may be surprised, Okay, as long as that. You know, what's great about word is that it's social, Yeah, as opposed to solitary expanses like Peloton. So Peloton during the pandemic, when you couldn't go to the gym, you couldn't do the things that used to do. It was very novel. It's this this screen on your on your bike. It is so interesting, so in with people. But then you do it three or four times and you kind of got the idea. Right, It's say, it's the same routines,

it's not variable enough. Let alone the fact that it's hard work, right, You're you're really pushing yourself. So it's Uh that I think was what what what went wrong was that they didn't maintain the sense of variability. Yeah, you know, you're talk to us a little bit about some of the companies you've invested in over the year and how this notion of habit forming it had sort of played into your thesis of whether or not a

company's worth investing in. And if you give us some examples of where where it worked, well, yeah, it's it's been amazing. So the book came out in Hooked How to Build Habitforming Products, and uh, it's been used in every conceivable industry. Education is one I'm super proud of whenever I see a company using the hook model. A few years ago, I got a call from these young entrepreneurs uh in Norway building this little app. They showed me the Hook model. I was so impressed. I immediately said,

please take my money. I want to, I want to, I want in because they showed me how they really applied the book. And today that company's cahoot, it's the most widely used educational software in the world. Uh. And uh, I've got the last time I checked that a multibillion dollar valuation. And what are they doing. They're getting kids hooked onto online learning. So how are they doing that? What are some of the techniques? Yeah, so they have this really innovative it's like a it's uh, you you

get the so the hook model. I'm trying to summarize, uh, three page book and and don't do any seconds. But essentially what they're doing is, uh, they're getting kids to invest in making these quizzes on their own to share with their peers. And so that investment phase this is really special. That that's great. Yeah, the investment phase where you put effort into something to make it better. So when you are the person making the quiz, right, as opposed to saying that when we were in school was

a pop quiz Today that sucks right, horrible. Here the kids are making it for their peers and then in the class they're playing these quizzes. So anybody body with kids, you know, under probably fourteen, I bet you your kids have know all about cahoot. And that's a wonderful example. You only we only hear about the bad cases. We only hear about Facebook and Snapchat melting kids brains. I think that story is overblown. But we also need to talk about the good examples of how we can actually

use habit for me, technology for good. Well, you know, and here we are. You know, we're not out of the pandemic, because we often say, you know, on the other side of the pandemic, we're not quite there. But it's certainly very different than it was in the you know, height of it. But we're trying to figure out, you know what, what trends, what habits that we formed during the pandemic stay with us or do you think they just all go away? Because that was just such a

different world. It's hard to say what it's better or worse. It's definitely different, right, So the things that changed that we talk a lot of in the habit formation about internal triggers. Internal triggers are uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape. So every product you use, every product you use for one reason, and that is to feel something different, to modulate your mood. Because all human behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort. All human behavior,

even the desire to feel good, is psychologically destabilizing. So when we went into the pandemic and now we have all these internal triggers of fear, uncertainty, doubt all of these things that are causing us more internal triggers. What changed While people were glued to the news, they were scrolling their devices all day long. They were constantly looking for an escape from this crazy world that we had

back then. And so as the world calms down, now we're we're or at least in the world never is not crazy, but at least this phase is over. Uh, we're we're looking for other ways to deal with that discomfort, to deal with whatever we're we're handling. Like the same goes with workplace distractions, right, So people are not getting distracted at home from their from their kids, or from their pets. Now that they're going back into the office.

What we're hearing from employees that they're getting distracted by their colleagues, by their bosses. So the distractions didn't go away, they just changed. They just shifted around. But you know, near you did sort of flick at the idea of there can be a backlash to two products that are too habit forming, whether it be a parent saying as you said, the social media is melting my kid brain. So how do you sort of assess that risk when

you're trying to decide in a company to invest. You know, is that risk still there for say the big social media for the robin Hoods? You know, how how important is that risk do you think to these companies going forward? It's a great question. I spent a lot of time working on ethics. There's actually a chapter in my book called the Morality of Manipulation where I talk about all this,

but I propose what I call the regret tests. And the regret test comes out of my search for how do you make sure that you're ethical when you use these behavioral design techniques? Because as we talked about, they can be used for good. You can help people exercise more and uh, save money and form all these great habits. But how do you make sure you do it ethically? So the regret test sets you don't do it with draft Kings or or one of the gambling apps. That's

that's a that's a great example. Robin hood also potentially a great example. So the regret test says that the he asks would the user do what we have designed for them to do, knowing everything we know summarized as would they regret using our product? Because people aren't dumb, right,

people aren't dumb? That if they regret doing business with you, guess what, not only are they not going to do business with you, they're going to tell all their friends on social media not to do business with you, right, And so that's why it's so important when we use these behavioral design tactics to do what I insist we do, which is usability testing, which we've been doing for decades, to bring people in and see if they regret that experience. Do we wish we had like an hour here, um

thirty seconds left tears? There's some thoughts on the metaverse from your perspective, like does that become part of our habits or something that we're going to enjoy going forward. I think it's way too early to tell. We don't even know what the metaverse is. We don't have it even a deaf finition of whatever. I think it's kind of like AI. It's like one of these things that captures the imagination we've been thinking about for so long. Way too early to to really start putting down roots.

I think, all right, can I leave it there? Come back absolutely within your travels, we would love to have you. Have you back neary' all. He's author and investor check out his blog Near and Far dot com. Joining us here in our interactive Booker Studio