Whenever we are faced with the negative repercussions of a technology, which there are many, right? Paul Villillo said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So what did we do? Do we stop sailing ships? How come we don't hear about shipwrecks today? What do we do? We made ships better. And so that's exactly what we always do.
We adapt our behaviors, but the solution is to fix these problem with more people getting into our more people improving the problems with the last generation of technology. Everyone, this is James Currier. And today, we've got near a y'all with us. He is an author of 2 Beller selling books. 1 is called Hooked, how to build habit forming products, which came out 2013 and also indestractable, how to control your attention in use your life, which came out in 2019. It's out right now.
He's a former instructor at the Stanford GS B, and I've known him for a bunch of years and near. It's great to have you on the show. Thank you so much, James. Great to be here. Keep in mind that we have a very smart audience of early stage startup founders. Right?
There's a lot to dig in here with how they can take your lessons and a product that apply it to their product thinking, how they need to update that thinking to be sure that things are going well for the long term how you can apply your methods for focusing to reach peak productivity for their startup. So you talk about habit forming for people. You can talk about hooks and products. It's interesting.
At NFX, for instance, we believe that speed is a startup's number one advantage, and so that's something that we would love people to have as a habit. Is to get hooked on speed. It's a habit they can build about doing the thing that's faster, doing the thing that gets some more information more quickly. How could you model something like that.
So instead of thinking about how do we model a web based product or a mobile based product, how do we create a habit for people to do something positive for themselves, like go fast? Yeah. So this is where definitions really matter. So if you'll indulge me for a minute, let's talk about what is a habit because I think the term is widely misunderstood and misused a habit by definition is an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thoughts.
So if a behavior is not some thing that you can do with little or no conscious thought. It will never become a habit. I think there's a lot of misinformation out there. I think, you know, we kind of reach peak habits, so to speak. There's been a lot of books recently about habits, particularly in the personal self help, personal development space and it's become kind of the shorthand for I need to do something that kinda sucks, but I don't want it to suck. So can you just make it into a habit?
I really need to exercise. That's very important. I know, but I hate exercise. I'm gonna turn Flint a habit. I wanna write that novel that I've been procrastinating on for years I really don't like writing. So can I just build a writing habit? No. You can't because by definition, a habit is a behavior done with little or no conscious It's like saying I'm gonna go to the gym, and I wanna get stronger, but I don't want to stress myself.
I don't want to have any difficulty lifting that weight Beller, deliberate practice, you know, this whole idea of the 10000 hour rule and all that deliberate practice requires the opposite of a habit. It requires a ton of conscious thought. And so that's why I'm a little bit wary of making business processes that require thought that require deliberation Flint habits because by definition, they can't become habits unless they're done with little or no conscious thought.
What they can become they Pete it. That is something that you can scrutinize. You can make into a system, which not necessarily isn't really a habit. You say, okay. Well, big deal in the air, whatever. Just one term or the other. It doesn't matter. Actually, I think it does matter because when people think they are starting a habit and that behavior is by definition never going to become a habit. They read something on the internet that's 21 days to form a habit or 60 days to form a habit.
Some kinda, you know, none of that stuff actually based by any good research, but whatever. They do it for those number of days. Then the behavior is still hard. Right? It hasn't met that bar of being somehow effortless and easy that they expected. And so what do they do? Do they blame the guru's book they read about habits? No. They James themselves. And they say, oh, there must be something wrong with me because it's not easy. So I must be broken somehow.
So when you're getting going as a startup company, in order to get anyone to pay attention to a Catholic world, you have to develop ways to get and keep people's attention to even have a business, to have a product, to make any impact on any people. Is that right? That's a big part of my second book in distractible. Is being not every product has to be habit forming, but every product that needs a habit needs a hook.
So lots of products that, you know, I talk about this in the book and as an angel investor I disqualify many companies that will never form a habit and the criteria for a product that will not form a habit, 1, it has to actually satisfy a user need. This is not mind you can't get people to do something that they themselves don't wanna do. It doesn't work that way. These techniques are good. They're not that good. Right? You can't make people something they don't wanna do.
So it has to provide real lasting value because people aren't idiots. If a product is not serving them, they'll look for alternatives or they'll stop using your product altogether. Second criteria is sufficient frequency. And this is a big one.
This is probably the number one reason that I will not invest in a company or telecompany that I'm consulting with that their product doesn't have a hope of forming a habit is if the behavior does not occur with sufficient frequency that the cutoff seems to be a week's time or less. That if your product is not used within a week's time or less, it's very difficult to change a consumer habit. There's exception. There are exceptions, but by and large, it's a week's time or less.
So again, if you're Beller, let's say you're selling car insurance. Well, you don't use car insurance once a week. Right? You only use car insurance if god forbid you get an accident. So it's not that every product needs to be habit forming. What I do recommend, though, is that a habit is one competitive moat. It is one form of competitive advantage. Now there are many, many different types of forms of competitive advantage. As, you know, you know better than anyone. Right?
There's network effect. As you write about, there's intellectual property, there's economies of scale. Habit is one of those competitive advantages. Right? You don't need any more evidence than, you know, thinking about Google. When I present in front of an audience, I'll ask people how many of you search with Google in the past 24 hours out of a hundred people 99 hands will go up. And then when you say, okay, how many of you have searched with the number 2 search engine?
How many of you search with Bing in the past 24 hours? Maybe the hand of 1 or 2 Pete, typically former Microsoft employees, their hands go up. Why is that? Is Google just so much Beller. No. In 3rd party studies, when we compare the Google search results to Bing search results and you strip out the branding so people don't know which is which, It's a fiftyfifty preference split. People can't tell the difference. And yet we reflexively go use Google. We Google it.
We even made it into a verb with out even considering whether the competition's product is any better. And so this is why habits are such a huge competitive advantage because when you form habit in a consumer's mind. I call this the monopoly of the mind. They don't even consider whether the competition is making a better product, and that's why it's such a huge competitive what's the thesis of indestract? Well, that came out just last year, less than a year ago.
Yeah. So if hoped was about how do we build good habits in people's law primarily through technology. Indestractable is about how do we break the bad habits. Okay. So being an industry insider, I know all the tips and tricks that they use to get you hooked. And so I can tell you from an insider's perspective, how do we make sure that these technologies are something that serve us as opposed to us serving them?
And as much as people hear about how these technologies are hijacking your brain and addicting you and, you know, manipulating us, this is high verbally. The solution, the antidote to this stuff, is actually not that tough that we really can put these distractions in their place if we know how. And so I really I wrote this book just like I wrote Hook for myself. And when I was looking for this book, I couldn't find. I found that I was struggling with distraction.
I've never been someone who has a lot of willpower, a lot of self control. In fact, I used to be clinically obese. So even saying the word willpower gives me, you know, it gives me hives because I never had much of willpower growing up. And so the same thing happened with technology that I would find that I would say I was going to do one thing. I would sit down on my desk, and I was gonna work on that big project or write that new blog post and yet somehow I would do something else.
And so you've developed a model for managing distraction. Can you walk me through that? Sure. Yeah. So in fact, it's up where Hook left off. So it's another 4 step model. I'm partial of 4 step models. And in this case, where we have to start is by understanding what is distraction What do we mean by that word? So the best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. So what is the opposite of distraction.
Most people say the opposite of distraction is focus, but it's not. The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction, if you look at the origin of the word, is traction. Both words come from the same Latin root, Trahare, which means to pull, and they both end in the same Beller, Pete win that spells action. So traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you say you're going to do.
Things pull you towards your values, help you become the kind of person you wanna become. That's traction. The opposite of traction is diss traction. Disraction is any that pulls you away from what you intended to do away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you wanna become. So why is this important? Because I would argue that any act can be traction or distraction.
So, for example, when I would sit down on my desk before I spent 5 years writing this book, my normal routine was I would sit down on my desk And I would say, okay. Today, I'm not gonna procrastinate. I'm gonna work on that big project I've been putting off. Nothing's gonna get in my way. Here I go. I'm gonna get started right now. But first, let me just check some email. Right? Yeah. First, Pete me just scroll those Slack channels real quick, or let me do the to dos on my to do list.
So those easy tasks, those fun things that I really kinda like like doing that I enjoy doing. And what I didn't realize is that that is the most pernicious form of distraction. The extraction that tricks you into prioritizing the urgent rather than the important. That is the most pernicious form of distraction because I would say to myself, Beller, because you're Morgan So you're deceiving yourself because you're inaction. Exactly. Email is something I have to do. Right?
Isn't that part of my job? Yeah. I guess it is. But I would use those things that I gonna wanted to do or didn't hate as much doing as opposed to doing the things I said I had to do, like work on that difficult proposal or whatever the case might be that I kept procrastinating on. So any action can become a distraction if it's not what you plan to do with your time. And conversely, any action can be traction if that's what you plan to do.
So unlike these chicken little tech critics telling us that technology is hijacking our brain that it's addicting everyone rubbish It's BS. There's nothing wrong with going on Facebook. It's not mind control people. It's not addicting everyone. Some people are addict. But certainly doesn't addict everyone, not even close, the same way that, you know, alcohol is highly addictive, but not everyone who has a glass of wine with dinners and alcoholic. That's preposterous.
So the same with social media. If you plan time in your day to go on YouTube, to go on Facebook, to go on Instagram, great. Enjoy it, but do it on your schedule, not the tech company's schedule. So now, James, we have traction, and we have distraction. Okay? Well, you can, like, a number line pointing to the right and to the left. Now what prompts us to take these actions? Well, back to what I talked about and hooked, we have those same external and internal triggers.
So external triggers, the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outside environment that leads us towards traction or distraction can serve us if they are helping us do what we said we were going to do. So I got a alarm on my phone that said, hey. It's time to talk to James. We're gonna have this conversation. Great. That's what I plan to do. That external trigger was serving me.
But when I was with my daughter a few years ago and I would constantly check my phone, despite the fact that I said I was going to spend quality with someone I love very much. Well, now that was a distraction. That was leading me away from what I plan to do. So it's about is the external trigger serving you or are you serving the external trigger? But as bad as those external triggers think the external triggers are the source of the problem.
One of my big revelations with this book in the 5 years of research is that what I discovered was that the external triggers are not the leading cause of distraction. Okay? Those are not the leading cause. The number one cause of distraction is not what is happening outside of us, but rather, distraction begins from within. So it's all about those internal triggers. That is the source of the vast majority of our distraction, boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, loneliness, anxiety, stress.
We seek escape from that discomfort. And so that is the first step to becoming indestractable is doing what I call mastering the internal triggers, having a system in place so that you don't need to expend a lot of willpower. You don't need a lot of self control. You have a methodology for dealing with those uncomfortable states so that you can you can put them in their place. So that's step number 1 is mastering the internal triggers. Now we're just going to go around those 4 steps.
Step number 2 is make time for traction. You know, if the vast majority Pete people don't keep any sort of a calendar, maybe they keep a to do list, which by the way, we can talk about why to do Flint are probably the worst thing you can do for your productivity. So we have to make time for traction in our day. The 3rd step is to hack back the external triggers, right, if we know that these technologies are hacking our attention. Clearly, they are. So is, you know, all media hacks our attention.
Why can't we hack back? Of course, we can hack back. And so I show you how to do that with technology with meetings? Oh my god. How distracting are meetings these days? Right? How do we make sure that meetings aren't distracting? Or, for example, our kids Right? You're trying to work from home. What about if it's your kids that are the source of distraction, not your phone? I tell you exactly how to hack back those distractions.
And then finally, the last step is to prevent distraction with pacts. And so this is where we have a firewall against distraction. The last line of defense is we can make what we call a pre commitment device use one of these pre commitment devices to help us stay on track when we say we will. And so it's really about using these four steps in concert master internal triggers, make time for traction, hack back external triggers, and prevent distraction with packs.
That's how we become indestractable. You've said that our does a claim we don't have enough time in the day to get everything we want done, but that's not really true. Is indestractability the same as time management, or how is it different? So I like to say that time management is pain management. This is why I wrote this book. When I have a problem in my life, I think through it. And, usually, I can figure it out. And then if I can't, then I'll talk to some friends about it.
And then usually, we can figure out point. And then if I we still can't figure out the problem, then I'll go read every book on the topic. And that's what I did with this problem of distraction. I read all the books that tell you to go on a digital detox and throw away your phone and time manage this and time manage Matt. And none of them dealt with the deeper psychology around why we don't do what we said we're going to do. And by the way, James, this is not a new problem.
Plato, okay, the Greek philosopher 25 100 years ago talked about Krasia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. This is not something that the iPhone and Facebook created in our lives. We have always been easily distracted. And so we have to go back to the root causes of why we get distracted.
So the benefit of this methodology is that you will live your life according to what you say is important to you, right, that whatever your values are and whatever you wanna do with your time, if you want to play video games, wonderful. If you want to do crossword puzzles. No problem. I'm not one of these people who says, oh, you know, video games are morally inferior to watching football or Fox News on TV. No. Anything you wanna do with your time is fine.
What I wanna help people do is to live their life and spend their time with intent according to their values. And so you're saying that time management is pain management.
And so a lot of this stuff is just hooey because it's not dealing with the underlying a need procrastinate need to do things that you haven't intended to do and that it's actually your communication with yourself and you're packed with yourself, if you will, that is gotta be the guiding light and these techniques help you to do that. And then the time management becomes a lot easier because you're on the things that you've already agreed you wanna do. Right. So that's where we have start.
So clearly, you know, there are lots of techniques and tips and tricks and life hacks that are effective, but the reason that, you know, most of them fail is because you're not looking at the root cause of the problem. And so I think that a good metaphor here is with food. You know, so I used to be clinically obese today at 42. I'm in the best shape of my life. And what changed in my life is that, you know, I stopped blaming and shaming and stopped blame.
This is people do this with technology distraction all the time. Right? The blamers, they say, oh, it the internet doing it to me. It's the modern world doing it to me. It's all this bad stuff outside of me that's at fault. So the blamers, that's futile because you're not gonna travel into some, you know, time machine and go back to an age before distraction. There was never such an age. And these technologies and distractions are not going away.
So being a James is futile, the other side of the spectrum is the James. And this is what I used to do. I would James myself. Right? I would say, oh, you see, I'm getting distracted that I'm such a distractable person. I have an addictive personality. I must have a short attention span. There must be something wrong with me. I need to go get a diagnosis, and I would shame myself into thinking that somehow I was broken.
And, of course, that's not helpful either because, you know, procrastination and distraction is not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you. Simply that you don't have the skills to deal with these distractions in a healthier manner. And so we don't wanna be blamers. We don't wanna be shamers. We wanna be what's called claimers. Claimers claim responsibility, not for how they feel. This is a very popular misconception. You cannot control how you feel. You cannot control these urges.
All you can control is how you respond to those urges, to those sensations, to those internal triggers. Hence, the term, responsibility. So for example, when you feel the urge to sneeze, right, you don't control that urge to sneeze, just like you don't control the urge to go check your phone. What you can control is what you will do with that discomfort. Do you sneeze a look for everyone and get them or do you take out a tissue and cover your face? Because that's the responsible thing to do.
So what we have to do when it comes to time management is to learn how to deal with discomfort just like I had to learn that the reason I was overeating and I was clinically obese wasn't because food was delicious. Food is made to be delicious. Technology is designed to be engaging. Would we want it any other way? Should we tell McDonald's, hey, your food is too good? Can you please make it less tasty? Hey, Netflix. Your movies and shows are way too entertaining. Please make them boring.
No. That's never gonna happen. So what we have to do instead is to learn that the reason we are looking for escape, the reason we are overdoing these things is because we are looking for that emotional relief. And so the way I lost weight was to really think about why was I overeating? Well, it was because I was eating when I was bored. It was eating when I was lonely. It was eating because I felt ashamed about how much I had eaten. So this is why I'm so anti this tech is bad. Stop using tech.
It does nothing but shame people just like we shame people for overeating without understanding the deeper reasons why we we go in excess. Mhmm. I get it. And, you know, for startup founders, they're sort of required to be supreme multitaskers. Right? The joke is that you go from being CEO to being the janitor in 5 minutes. Do you think that kind of multitasking prevents them from focusing or hitting traction? Or Yeah. So I've been a founder twice now. And it's not a fun job. I have to tell you.
It's a very, very difficult job. And what I always tell folks that I consider investing in their and I just, you know, speaking with different startup founders, I say that the CEO's only job. You only have one job, and that job is to prioritize. That's really all you do. You just are a professional proprietizer. Everything else is detailed. The problem is that the vast majority of people who want to be startup founders They make no time in their day for their key responsibility.
They are so busy doing what we call reactive work. There are 2 types of We have reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to the emails, reacting to the Slack notifications, reacting to the phone calls, And many requires, you know, the brain is a cognitive miser. We don't like to spend energy thinking. So many people don't do it if you want a huge competitive advantage. In the startup ecosystem. Here's the trick. Here's the magic formula.
Make time to think in your day because you cannot do the planning, the strategic thinking, the prioritizing if you are constantly distracted. So this goes back to step 2 of how to become indestractable, making time for traction in your day. Even if it's 30 minutes, 45 minutes an hour, if you can book that time in your day to spend time thinking, you will be doing something that almost nobody else in your industry is doing. I guarantee it. Nobody is thinking in your industry with odds are.
They're not making that time to think. That's right. I mean, most founders are very tightly scheduled. Right, down to the 15 minute mark. Mhmm. Mhmm. And that rigor you're saying isn't necessarily helping them with focus because it's not getting them to the right priorities. Time boxing technique, I think, can be very, very helpful.
In fact, in my interviews with folks that, the people who were indestractable that I learned from, they all use this time boxing technique rather than the to do list technique. The to do list technique is horrible for many reasons, but we can go into that. But the time boxing technique has been shown in literally thousands of peer reviewed studies to be very, very effective, but it's about how we schedule that time.
Are you constantly going from one meeting to the next to the next and not actually doing work? Right, doing the hard thinking. I know many of your listeners are engineers. You know, engineers, your entire day almost needs to be spend doing reflective work that the number one cause of bugs in a program are interruptions, right, distractions that take you out of that that concentration mode.
So when engineers spending the vast majority of their day with that reflective work time that you can only do without distraction. So it's really about how you spend that time. This time boxing thing, how does that work? Yeah. So time boxing uses a technique that psychologists call making an implementation intention, which is a fancy way of saying planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. Right? So that's planning out to your entire day according to your values.
And so this is what I call turning your values into time. So I walk people through how to make sure that you can live out your values by first understanding, well, what are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. And so what we have to ask ourselves is how would the person I want to spend their time. Right? Many of us talk a good game. We say, oh, what are your values? Oh, I value my health. I value my relationships. I value my family.
But do you have that time in your schedule, or is it something that you give the scraps and leftovers of your time to those things that you say you profess that you value? So it's really about being intentional here's how I went to spend my time, including the fun stuff. Right? If you wanna spend time playing video games I mentioned, great. But put that time in your schedule so that you know it's coming. So that's what time boxing is all about.
Now the beauty of it, well, you know, that technique's been around for a very, very long time. I didn't invent it. What I tried push this field forward around is this idea of doing a schedule sync. And I think this is something that the founders listening will really appreciate One of the big problems that people have is that employees and managers have very little understanding about how they are spending their time.
And this causes a lot of problems because when we use this to do list methodology of, well, here's my list of things. Here's my backlog. Here's all the things I'm gonna do, whether it's a to do list or on a can band or whatever. And we just throw it over the wall and say, hey. Do all this stuff. We have no conception of how long that stuff takes. And so this is part of why the the to do list is so horrible. And it's not that keeping a list of the things you have to get done is a bad thing.
It's running your life on a to do list. Right? If you wake up in the morning and look at your to do list rather than your schedule, you're doing it wrong. Because what you will do when you look at the to do list is you'll do the easy stuff. You'll do the fun stuff. You won't do the important hard stuff. And so what I recommend doing is when you make a timebox calendar. And I give you the tools on exactly how to do that. I can give you a link for the show notes.
I built a tool that anyone can use to do this for free. Basically, what you're gonna do is you're going to make time for all the things that are important to you in your day, take care of yourself, taking care of your relationships, and, of course, taking care of your work. And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna sit down with your manager. You're gonna sit down with your boss. And you're gonna show your boss. Here's how I'm going to spend my work day. Okay? And you do this once a week.
On Monday mornings, it takes 10 to 15 minutes. Takes almost no time, and it will change your life. Because what you're going to do, you're gonna show that schedule to your manager. Right? You're gonna show them how you're gonna spend that time, and this prevents you from taking what I think is some of the worst advice in personal development and self help when it comes to productivity.
We've all heard this terrible trope that if you want to get more done, if you don't wanna be distracted, then you need to learn how to say no. Right? What kind of stupid advice is it to say no to the person who pays your Beller. Right? The person who pays your month check to tell your boss no, you're gonna get fired. That's horrible advice. Instead, you shouldn't be the one who says no. Your manager should be the one who says no. So when you have a timebox calendar, you have a physical artifact.
You have something that you can show them, and you can say, look. Here's how I'm spending my time this week. Now you see this other piece of paper over here. You see this other list These are all the things that I didn't know where to put into my schedule. Can you help me reprioritize those things? And invariably, every time you sit down and do this schedule sync, you will find that there is some misappropriation of time. And so what you can do is to say, oh, you know what?
That task that's on your calendar or that meeting, actually, that's much less important than that thing you didn't put in your calendar, let's flip flop those around. And the reason managers love this is that now they have exposure into, hey. How are you spending your time exactly? And employees love it because they know they're working on the right stuff as opposed to getting a surprise later on that, hey.
All that time you spent working on that task was actually much less important than this other test. So that's what schedule syncing is all about. Got it. And can you hire for this skill of indestractability? I mean, are there are there some tells when you're interviewing people Morgan anyone can learn Anyone can learn this. This is a very quick read. It's available on Audible. You can get it anywhere. It's a methodology that I made for people who are easily distracted.
I mean, I I really did write the book in short little chapters that anyone can can read and implement right away. As an expert in this whole area, I mean, you've written one book called Hooked, one called indestractable. Is there some product building methodology that you might put forward these days for tech founders that bring both of those lessons together?
I think the biggest lesson that we have to remember is that we ultimately do have to create value that I think that there's this narrative that gone almost too far. You know, when I started teaching behavioral design, I had to convince people that this stuff works, right, because people would say, well, we'll just build it the best product And that's enough. Right? If you build a better mousetrap, then the world will, beat a path to your Morgan. And I don't think that's true.
I've never thought that's true because the best product doesn't necessarily win. I mean, you've been in the valley for a very long time. You've seen probably all kinds of products that were the best technology that didn't capture the it because they didn't create user habits. Creating the best product is table stakes. It's really about capturing the monopoly of the mind. That's what a product needs to have to keep users coming back.
So I think that, you know, it used to be I had to convince people that that was something important. Today, I don't really have to convince people of that anymore. Now I have to kind of convince people the other that I think the pendulum has swung too far now that people think, oh my gosh, if I put in gamification and variable rewards, then my app will be incredibly addictive. Well, is it okay if I Pete, look, you're not gonna addict people. Right? Like, I work with enterprise products.
I work with Beller care products. I work with education products, fitness products. None of them are gonna addict anyone. Right? That's ridiculous. Nobody's going to get addicted to an enterprise software product. And so sometimes have to talk people down a little bit and be like, look, these techniques are good, but fundamentally, you have to cater to a user need here.
It's about helping people do things they themselves want to do, but for lack of good product design, they haven't done in the past. So recently, there's been this big Netflix documentary called the social dilemma that's gotten a lot of play. People are talking about it. You know, you're right in the middle of all that. What were your thoughts watching that documentary? Very conflicting emotions about that movie. So I was interviewed for that documentary back in 2018 August of 2018.
So more than 2 years ago, and I wasn't included in the film because I think that my narrative did not fit their narrative. You know, on one hand, I am fully in support of people being more aware about how they are spending their time, and there is no doubt that these technologies, specifically social media, is designed to capture as much of your attention and time as you will give them.
The big problem with the movie, they don't talk about anything that the user can do until literally the credits. Right? While the credits are rolling, do they talk about anything that the user can do. And so my key point here, I think this is really the missed opportunity is that you mentioned earlier in the interview about this battle of attention between the user and the company, we win. The users always win.
We are much, much more powerful than these technologies And I'll prove it to you after 90 minutes of them telling us how technology is addicting you and they use that term completely incorrectly. That is not what is, totally misconstrued what it means to actually be addicted. But they talk about how it's manipulating your brain, how there's nothing you can do about it, how we're just puppets.
I mean, they literally use these very manipulative moviemaking tactics to show how you're this voodoo doll. It's completely it's amazing how hypocritical this film is and that they use all the manipulative tactics that they say not to use on social media, principally being that they talk about how social media is a big filter bubble and and how terrible it is that they don't let you see any other people's opinions.
And then they commit this sin itself in not letting people like me give any other perspective in the film, or how about any other social scientists or researchers that show the other perspective? And so the biggest problem with the movie is that they don't of telling you how terrible and how there's no way you can get out of it. The only solution is to regulate and legislate. Do they mention, you know what? You should probably turn off notifications. Really?
And and they're partially right because, of course, of course, you know, 2 thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Really? Can we complain that technology is addicting us as hijacking our brain when you haven't even taken 5 minutes to turn off those stupid notifications that you're constantly getting from these apps. Of course, we're more powerful. There's nothing Zuckerberg can do to reach back in your phone and turn on notifications? Of course not.
So that's what I think was the biggest missed opportunity and why they didn't include me in the film because when you tell people the truth, that, look, are there things we can do legislatively? Probably. Yeah. Are there changes that can be made with these companies? Of course. But the film was made 2 years ago. They don't talk about all the things the tech company have done, like, hired over 35,000 content moderators, banned political advertising on Twitter. They don't talk about that.
That would have not been a very fun narrative to hear that, oh, wait a minute. We can actually do something about this in an afternoon. The good news is that our species always does the same thing. Whenever we are faced with the negative repercussions of a technology, which there are many. Right? Paul Villio said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So what did we do? Do we stop sailing ships? How come we don't hear about shipwrecks today? What do we do? We made ships better.
And so that's exactly what we always do. We adapt and we adapt. We adapt our behaviors, right, and this is what indestractable is all about is asking ourselves, why would we wait? Why would we wait for the geniuses in Washington to do something about the problem? Why would we wait for Facebook and Google fix this force, why would we not get started right now to see what we can do ourselves?
And the second thing we can do, and this is why I'm so happy to be on the show, is we can adopt new technologies to fix the last generation of technologies. We can make the shifts better so to speak so that there are less shipwrecks This is exactly what we need. We need more people to get into this field. We need more technologists because I think what scares me, James, is that know, when I moved to Silicon Valley back in 2006, skepticism was a Silicon Valley value. Right?
That was a good thing to be skeptical. Now it's cynicism. Now there's nothing that technology can do right. It's all evil. It's all mind manipulation. It's all, you know, election meddling, and there clearly problems that we need to fix, but the solution is to fix these problem with more people getting into our field, more people improving the problems with the last generation of technology. The first book you published called Hooked. What was the main thesis of Hooked?
So the idea behind Hooked is that, you know, you can buy growth for a company. You can always buy growth, right, back up the truck and buy ads on Google or Facebook or television spots or radio spots. You can always buy growth for your company. What you can't buy is engagement. That has to be designed into the product. And so back in 2012, when my last company was acquired.
I was looking for what to do next, and I had this thesis that the products of the future that would really make a difference in the world had to have habits embedded in them is because what I saw was that the interface was shrinking. So as we went from desktop to laptops, to mobile screens, to now wearable devices, and now even more recently with Amazon Alexa, the visual interface has all the disappeared. And so what that means is that there is less space for what we call an external trigger.
There's less room for the visual stimulus to get the user to do what you've designed for them to do, which means that in the absence of the real estate that habits become increasingly important.
And so this is something that I saw back in 2012 and thought, you know, if I'm going to start another business, I have got to figure out how to make that business into a habit because, you know, if you're on the 3rd screen on someone's phone or, you know, if you take the auditory interface like Amazon Alexa, if you don't remember to ask for that specific skill, you don't exist. Right? Your company might as well not exist if your customer doesn't remember to use the product.
So how would you create those habits? So I looked and looked and looked, and I couldn't find any book on how to build habit forming products. So I decided to write about it, and I didn't intend to write a book. I started blogging about it at my blog near infar.com. And then I got an email from a professor of mine at Stanford, and he said, I really like your framework. What do you think about teaching a together. And so he invited me to, he kinda James me carte blanche to design this class.
And then I moved over to the Hassel Plater and student design at Stanford and start reaching there. And then that became my first book hooked, how to build habit forming products. And it was really meant for me. Right? I was looking to figure out what are the design adherence behind a product that becomes a habit. And thankfully, at that time, I had a lot of friends in Silicon Valley who were at many of these companies who are really the masters of consumer behavior and behavioral designs.
So I have friends at Twitter and Facebook and WhatsApp and slack and, you know, all these companies who were so good at designing behavior. So not only did I get the academic aspect from spending a lot of time reading consumer psychology journals at the Stanford Stacks then I also got the real world application. Many of our friends and colleagues in Silicon Valley, kind of revealing the secrets of how do you bring consumer back. And so that's really what went into my first book, Hook.
Now that being said, I never wrote Hooked for the big tech companies. I didn't write for Google or Facebook or the gaming companies. They'd known these techniques for years, and I've never worked for any of those companies, by the way. The reason I wrote the book was not for their benefit. They'd known do you do this for quite a while? I wrote the book for the rest of us.
I wrote the book so that everybody out there building the kind of products that require consumer engagement can build those kind of products to build healthy habits in users' lives. So since the book was published, people in every conceivable industry, the book over 350,000 copies, and I get emails constantly from industries I never expected to use the book are using the methodology. And I've based my angel investment strategy looking for people who are applying the Hooked model for good.
So I'll give you a a couple examples. Most top of mind for me is a company by the name of Kahoot. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it. They went public last year. I think now they're valued at, what, like, $1,300,000,000. And 5 years ago, I got a call. I do these office hours every week still do them where, anyone who's read my books can call and if they have a question, we just talk for free, you know, whatever they wanna ask. And about 5 years ago, this guy, Yohan calls me and says, hey.
I think gonna use your hook model to build this educational product. What do you think? And I loved it. And so about twice a year, I'd happen to stumble across company that's using my Hook model in a way to build healthy habits, Kahoot is a great example of that. They're using the Hook model to get kids hooked onto online learning and in classroom learning. And so that's a wonderful application of using habits for good. Got it.
And so a lot of these learnings are really applicable for early stage startup companies, not necessarily the BMS. Right. There's really two places where the hook model is useful. 1 in the very, very early stages, right, when it's still a napkin sketch idea. You can stop and before you spend a lot of money on the design of the product and coding the product and all that answer these 5 fundamental questions to make sure that your product matches the archetype for a habit forming product.
That's gonna save you a lot of time, money, and heartache to make sure that if product needs a habit that it fits these criteria. The other place that it's really, really helpful is in the latter stages. So this is where people call me the plumber because I stop up the user leaks So where I get a lot of phone calls is from people who are at a company that has poor customer retention. Right? People aren't using the product like they expected, and they don't know why.
So in that case, you can use the hook model as a diagnostic tool to figure out, wait a minute. What's deficient here? What experiments can we go out and test? To see how we can fix the product to make it more sticky, more habit forming. Got it. And so what are those 5 tenants? There's four steps of the hook model and 5 fundamental questions you have to So the 4 steps of the hook model start with a trigger phase. The trigger, there are 2 types of triggers.
We have external trigger and we have internal triggers. I'll get back to the internal triggers in a minute, but let's talk about the external triggers. The external triggers Beller designer is familiar with. These are the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in your outside environment that prompts you to action. Right? So on Facebook or LinkedIn or TikTok, it's a notification Right? It's an email. It's something that tells you, hey.
Do this action, which brings us to the next step of the hook, the action phase, and the action phase is defined as the simplest behavior done in anticipation of a reward. 1 of the backbone tenets of consumer psychology, this is called Lewin's equation, is that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it. So if we can make that key behavior, the key habit as easy as possible to do that intended behavior, more likely people will do that behavior.
And so there's all kinds of things we can do to make that behavior as easy as possible. And, of course, I'm giving you the 30,000 foot view here. There's a lot more detail in the book. The 3rd step is really the engine of the hook model. This is called the variable reward The variable reward, it's worth spending just a minute on because this is very important. So the variable reward comes out of the work of B. F. Skinner.
And Skinner is known as the father of operant conditioning, and he did these sparements back in the 19 fifties sixties where he took a pigeon, put the pigeon in a box. Today, we call it a Skinner, and he gave this pigeon a reward, a little food pellet every time it pecked at the disc. And so very quickly, Skinner could train the pigeon to peck at the disc if and only if the pigeon was hungry, that's part of the experiment a lot of people forget.
The experiment did not work if the pigeon wasn't hungry, just like we can't make a user do something they don't wanna do. There has to be an inherent need. If the pigeon was hungry, if they had that need, then they would Pete at the disc. He could train them to consistently Pete at the disc whenever they had that need, that hunger. Now one day, Skinner ran out of these food pellets. He didn't have enough when he walked into the lab.
And so he couldn't afford to give the pigeon a food pellet every time. He could only afford to give it to them once in a while. And to his amazement, what he found was that the rate of response increased when there was what we call an intermittent reinforcement. So sometimes when the pigeon pecked at the disc, there would be no food pellet, no reward. The next time the pigeon pecked at the disc, they would receive a reward.
And what skinner observed was that the pigeon pecked more off in when there was some type of variability around that reward, the schedule of reinforcement. And we see this same phenomenon in all sorts of product services. Online, the best example is the feed. Have you noticed how everything today has a Pete? Right? Why is that? Well, on LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook that feed mechanic is a variable reward structure.
It's using that same psychology of searching and searching for that next variable reward. Sometimes you'll get something great, but often you won't Right. And you'll be looking, looking, nothing, nothing, nothing, no food. And then suddenly you'll get this really great payoff. You get your dopamine And that's a variable reward. Right. And we see this. It's not just something that is new to technology. It's what makes television interesting. We wanna know what's gonna happen next.
It's what makes the news interesting. Right? The first three letters of news is NEW, right, and we wanna know what's new in the world, not what happened yesterday, what's new and different Sports is probably the best example. Why do we love watching a ball bounce around a court or a pitch? There's uncertainty about what's going to happen now. Romance. What makes romance romantic is the uncertainty. That's what gives you the butterflies in the stomach. It's all about variability.
So anywhere there's mystery, uncertainty, that's where we engage, we focus, and it's highly habit forming. So you'll find that variability in all sorts of experiences offline and online. Got it. So the third thing is this variable reward structure. And then the 4th and final step and probably the most ignored is or overlooked. I should say is what we call the investment phase.
And the investment phase is where the user Pete something into the product to increase the likelihood of the next pass through the hook. Now the way this works is in two ways. Number 1, users can load the next trigger. Loading the next trigger is when the user does something them sells to bring themselves back. Okay? So, for example, when I send someone a message on WhatsApp, there's no immediate reward. Right? There's no Flint. There's no badges.
Nothing really happens when I send someone a message. What I'm doing is I am loading the next trigger because I am likely to get a reply. And that reply comes coupled in the form of an external trigger, which prompts me through the hook once again. Okay? So not some piece of spammy marketing, not some expensive ad, but rather something the user did to bring themselves back. That's called loading the next trigger.
The second part, the the second way that investment increase the likelihood of the next pass, which is even more important, is what I call stored value. Stored value is really a revolutionary concept in the history of manufacturing because you know, before to change a product was very expensive. Right? Henry Ford is quoted as saying you can have any color of model t as long as it's black. Why? Because it was really difficult for him to retool his shop and make different color cars back then.
Well, today, when it comes to these interactive products, we are changing them on the fly for each and every user. It's a product of 1 because of this concept of stored value. So the more data, the more content, the more followers, the more reputation you accrue on a platform, the stickier it becomes, the more invest the more you invest in it, the more value is stored in that product.
And so unlike things made out of James in the real world that depreciate with use that lose value with wear and tear, habit forming products, appreciate with use. They get better and better the more we use them because of the investment the user is putting into the product. So that through successive cycles through the hook, eventually, the product does not even require that external trigger at all.
Eventually, I remember I I said this in the very beginning when I started walking through the model, we start to rely on what's called the internal trigger, the internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state that we seek to escape from. So with all of the products we use, everything we use online, Flint, the only reason we use any product. In fact, the only reason we do anything in life the seat of motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort.
This is called the homeostatic response. So when a product's use can attach to an uncomfortable sensation, whatever that might be. You're feeling lonely. Check Instagram or Facebook. You're feeling uncertain. Google it. You're bored. Lots of solutions for boredom. Right? Check the news, stock price of sports scores, Pinterest, Reddit. When a product attaches to that feeling, that's where the habit is cemented. Because now don't even need that ping or ding anymore.
The user is checking the product on their own out of habit. You know, it's interesting. I think this is why the revolution with podcasting has happened over the past several years. You know, podcasting was not a thing for years after the iPad came out. You know, nobody was really podcasting. And then suddenly over the past few it's become a thing.
I think part of the reason is that the habit of getting into the car and reflexively turning on the radio has been substituted now the reflexes plug in your phone. Got it. When you look at tech companies, what are they getting wrong? Yeah. I will say that A few years ago, the biggest myth was that these tech companies, the tech behemoths, they somehow got lucky, right, that Zuckerberg, he just got lucky.
That's used to be the mentality when I would work with companies that somehow they just stumbled onto it. And, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Everybody knows that Zuckerberg dropped Harvard and he was a computer science major. What people don't realize also, he was also a psychology major. When you look at Kevin Systrom, right? He was a symbolic systems major. At Stanford, which is the Intersection of Psychology And Technology.
You know, these folks understand what makes you click and what makes you tick better than you understand yourself. And so I think that used to be the biggest myth that there wasn't this deeper psychology even present. I think that's really changed now. I think people realize that understanding consumer psychology and behavioral design is an essential skill these days. You're working with startups now. And so what do you help them with? So there's 2 categories. One is my consulting work.
You know, I've been doing for years now where a company will call me. Typically, it's a company that has VC funding already, and they don't know how to improve retention and engagement. And so I'll work with them on improving some aspect of their hook model, and then they go and test it, then we discuss those tests, those changes, and see how we can continue to improve engagement retention, inform those habits.
And then once in a while, I'll find a very early stage company that I think promising and as the opportunity to use the hook model for good, and that's where I'll I'll personally invest. Well, near, this has been great to chat with you, man. I always love hearing your thoughts. And, congratulations on both your books and, where you are right now. I appreciate it. Thank you for giving me the forms to talk about it. You've been listening to the NFX podcast.
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