Episode 61: Getting Your Users Hooked with Nir Eyal
Melissa Perri welcomes Nir Eyal to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. He is an author, lecturer, and investor best known for his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir joins Melissa to talk about the Hook model, product ethics, serving “chocolate-covered broccoli'' to your users, Wordle, internal vs. external triggers, and what inspired his newest book, Indistractable.
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Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Nir talk about:
Nir talks about his introduction to the world of product management, and what led him to write his book. [2:12]
A product has to be used with frequency. If it's not used often enough, it's almost impossible to change customer habits. If a product is intended to be used with sufficient frequency, ideally within a week's time or less, it's a good candidate for the Hook model. "It's not that every product has to be habit-forming…It's that every product that is habit-forming needs to have a hook," Nir tells Melissa. [6:00]
Look at what competitors are doing in order to improve your products, but also look at who is doing the best out of everyone in the market. To build a product that sticks, model the companies that are the masters of changing habits. Make a product that people will love, and will want to use. [8:10]
As long as a product is used with sufficient frequency, and provides utility, it doesn't matter if its consumers are online or offline. [11:25]
The Hook model is useful as a diagnostic tool to help product leaders understand when their products aren't satisfying their customers. It helps them create a guide on how to build new products and refine the problems that are in their existing ones. [13:08]
Internal triggers are states of discomfort that cause people to use products. It's the job of the product designer to understand what that trigger is, and how their product satisfies it better than the alternatives. [15:28]
To create engagement with products, a lot of companies tend to do gamification. The problem with gamification, however, is that it falls flat. Nir says that product leaders end up making “chocolate-covered broccoli”. "Before we understand the problem, we really have to understand the psychological need, [and the] core level human stressors that our product is going to address," he tells Melissa. [16:29]
"Anytime you can find a customer need with a question mark at the end, that's a variable reward," Nir remarks. [17:43]
If companies want long-term engagement, they have to look for instances that are not game-like, unless those games involve other people. Nir stresses that it's the connections with people that keep individuals engaged. [20:04]
There are two categories of triggers: internal and external. External triggers are the 'pings and dings' that occur outside of ourselves that make us use products. The ultimate goal of product development is for customers to use the product on their own without the use of external triggers. If this hasn't happened, then the external trigger hasn't been properly timed. When sending external triggers, they have to be contextually relevant for internal triggers. [22:34]
Melissa asks about the possibility of products becoming addictive, and customers developing bad habits when it comes to using them. "For the vast majority of people listening, the problem is not that people are overusing the product...the problem is people won't use the product," he remarks. However, he agrees that some form of legislation needs to be put in place by companies in their use and abuse policies. [27:11]
Nir talks about the principles product leaders can implement into their company culture to limit distraction. He also talks about the importance of schedule sinking and time boxing. [35:13]
Resources
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast. Today. I am joined by the author of hooked Nir Eyal welcome Nir.
Nir:
Thanks Melissa. Great to be here.
Melissa:
Yeah, I'm excited to have you. So I, uh, uh, met near a long time ago on the mind, the product, uh, boat trip that we took after that in San Francisco. And I hadn't written escaping the build trap yet. So I was like, oh, tell me about, you know, writing this book and your book has made such an impact on product managers. Uh, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, how did you get involved in the world of product and what led you to writing the book?
Nir:
Sure. So let's see. So I had started a couple companies. Uh, the first one had a successful exit. The second one was, uh, you know, an Aqua hire type of exit. So it was, it was good, but not, not that great. And, uh, I was onto my next company. I wanted to start another, uh, another business and I started to look around owned and, uh, put together some hypotheses of like, you know, what kind of products would be useful, uh, to work on. And I had this, this hypothesis that, that the future of product design would depend upon habits, uh, principally, because this was 2012. So the iPhone was only four years old. And I could tell that as screen means, we're shrinking as we went from desktops to laptops, to mobile devices, to wearable devices. And now we have, you know, products like the Amazon Alexa, that there is no interface at all, right?
No, no visual interface. At least I, I realized that habits would become increasingly important because there's less screen real estate to trigger people with what we call external triggers. So external triggers are, you know, all the, the visual stuff that tells you what to do, click here by now play this whatever. So as the screens shrink, that meant habits would be increasingly important. Why? Because if you're not in someone's visual field, right. If you're not on the home screen of their iPhone, all you have is habits, right. If you're not on the home screen of their, of their phone, and they're not, you're not a habit, your toast, right. You might as well not even exist cuz the customer won't remember to use you. So I said, okay, well, whatever it is that I do next, I have to figure out how to make it into a habit, uh, so that it can positively improve people's lives.
And so I looked around and said, okay, where is the book on how to build habit forming products? And I couldn't find the book. So I started researching and writing and um, originally just blogging about the topic. Um, I had many friends, uh, who were my former colleagues and clients. I had many of these customer, many of these companies now, you know, companies like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and WhatsApp and slack and Snapchat. Like I, I knew many of the people at these companies. And so I kind of started poking them to figure out, you know, how do they do what they do? How, how are these companies so good at changing user behavior and, and forming habits. And I spent a lot of time at the Stanford library, um, uh, and speaking with researchers in the field. And I, I coalesced what I learned in two, you know, over two years of, of blogging it out.
Um, I coalesce this topic into what is called the hook model, which is these four basic steps that we see repeated time and time again, in all sorts of habit, forming products, enterprise, consumer, web, online, offline, you see the same hooks again and again and again. And so the idea was, you know, what, if we could steal the secrets from these big tech companies so that we could these methods so that we can make all sorts of products, habit forming in a good way, right? What if we could get people hooked to, uh, exercise, well fit bot does that they get people hooked to exercise? Uh, what if we could get people hooked to education? Well, company that, that use the hook model Kahoot, uh, does just that, uh, uh, companies in every conceivable industry, have you use the hook model, uh, as intended to, to help people form healthy habits in their lives?
So that's kind of been my journey, uh, along the way I taught at Stanford at the graduate school of business and later at the has platter Institute of design, uh, as well for many years. And then Mo most recently I, uh, published a book called indistractable. So hooked is about how to build good habits. Uh, intractable is about how do we break bad habits? It's not a negation of hooked. Uh, it's not at all that. I think we can actually have our cake and eat it too. We can have habit forming technology that makes our lives better, but we should also know how to break the bad habits that don't serve us.
Melissa:
Yeah. I'm curious about, uh, you mentioned used in enterprise companies in some of these larger companies. We have a lot of listeners who are, you know, working at banks or working at, um, other large companies. A lot of them are doing internal tools. Have you seen this model applied to anything like that? Like workflow related tools or those types of things?
Nir:
Absolutely. So the line of demarcation is not enterprise versus consumer. The line of demarcation is frequent to are infrequent. So if a product is not used with sufficient frequency, it's almost impossible to change a consumer habit. And that, that, that frequency, uh, really is about a week's time or less. There are some exceptions, but by and large, if the user does not interact with a product, if not, if they don't do the key habit within a week's time or less, it's almost impossible to change that habit. So if it's a type of product, uh, that, that is intended to be used with sufficient frequency, meaning at least a week, uh, within a week's time or less, then it's a good candidate for the hook model. Now, what kind of products are not good candidates for, for habit formation? Uh, the ones that are, you know, one and done type products, uh, sales driven type, uh, think about, you know, uh, cyber security software, right?
So many types of cyber security software, you install it's on some server farm and nobody uses it until something terrible happens, insurance, you know. Good, good. Another good example. Nobody habitually uses car insurance. That's a bad example. Do people habitually use, you know, to your point a bank account. Yeah. Right. Do they check their balances? How habitually? Yeah. Uh, lots of opportunity there. I've worked with many financial services company, uh, SaaS products, you know, things that are, are, are used inside the enterprise for a software as a service product. If it's not used your toast, right? The customer's gonna churn. They're gonna stop paying. They have to use it or you're in big trouble. So it's not that every product has to be habit forming. It's that every product that has to be habit forming needs a hook.
Melissa:
That's really good to know. I know, um, a lot of times when I work with product managers, especially when they work in a larger enterprise, they kind look at it, all the models or the tools out there, and they go, well, it was built for like consumer products or it was built for B2C. We can't use it in B2B, but it's so nice to hear you talk about that because I, I do see it in every, you know, in all these other types of models that we teach too, you can usually take some of the stuff that we may use in B2C that Twitter uses Facebook uses whatever, and just kind of refine it for your own use. And that usually makes better products. So that's really nice to hear that hooked. Absolutely definitely can be applied there.
It's it's a gold mine, right? Like, because we, we, you know, what, what tends to happen is people, uh, tend to look to their sides, right? They looked like, like when we were in school taking a test and you wanted to cheat on your test, you would look at your neighbors to see if they knew the answer. Well you know, not only is that unethical, but they don't know the answer anymore than you do. Right. So we really shouldn't, uh, only look at our competitors and see what they're doing, because they're just as cool as what we really wanna do is the best to breed. We wanna look at who's doing it better than anyone. Uh, and so when you want to build a product that is engaging something, that's sticky, something that people use because they want to not, cuz they have to, I think we should look at the best in the business. We should look at the companies that are, are really good. Our masters of changing habits.
Melissa:
Yeah. I love that too, because, uh, sometimes when you work, especially like on internal tools, what I'll hear from product managers is, oh, it doesn't really matter. They have to use it. Or like that person has to use that workflow. It's their only option. It's what they're doing. Um, and I actually thought it was funny. I was teaching a workshop in Australia and I usually have people like line up, uh, from one side of the room to the other, based on the success of their last product release. And somebody went all the way to failure, which usually doesn't happen. Usually people were around the middle cuz they don't know if it was successful or not. And I said, what happened? And she said, well, uh, the company made a implement this tool, internal tool for developers. Uh, they said, Nope, we're just gonna use a third party.
They have to use it. Everybody in the company has to use it. We're not gonna do any good product management on it. And then every single developer got up and resigned after using it for a month. Wow. Yep. Wow. And it forced them to reconsider it. So like, you know, I, I like what you're saying. If we, if we look at only if we trap ourselves into this mindset of Nope, your internal tools, people must use it. Right. Instead of we want people to use it or you know, let's just look at what our competitors are doing and copying it. It doesn't really make great products. So
Nir:
That is separate, great point. Especially in this age where, you know, there's such a talent, uh, shortage these days that if you make people's lives miserable, that's on you. Right? Like talk about, you know, many times I get asked about the ethical implications of, you know, is it okay to hook people? Is it okay to use their psychology, to, to make them use your products? Uh, not that you're making them use their products. It's the exact opposite. You have to make them want to use your product. Uh, that, that, and, and so to me, the real problem is not that a few companies have made products that are sticky, right? It's not, not, not that the, the, you know, if we think about how products like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, how they make products that suck you in, that's not the real problem for most companies.
Real problem is that their products suck, right? That's, what's unethical. What's unethical is that we are making products that make people miserable, right. That make people so miserable. They wanna quit. So if you're taking the lazy route and not figuring out how do you make a product that people love that people want to use, then that's, that's on you. I think that is unethical. And there's so opportunity out there. I mean, there's so much low hanging fruit, especially when it comes to these products that other people aren't thinking like in consumer web, you know, you're fighting with, you know, tooth and nail with, with people in the app store. But with enterprise products, gosh, there's so much opportunity out there for simple things that people can do to make their products stickier. Uh, you know, that, that there's, there's just wide open space there.
Melissa:
That's great. Is there anything in like the hook model that you think, uh, enterprise, uh, you know, product managers should have to refine anything different than typical B2C, uh, consumers?
Nir:
Um, you know, uh, the most important is that they meet the frequency test. You know, sometimes I do many times actually I meet companies, uh, where the product is just not used with efficient frequency. So, uh, uh, for example, in the travel industry, you know, like people don't go on vacation every week. It's not something they're gonna use habitually. Uh, so we have to find other way, like, is, is, is there a habit you can bolt on? And there are some things you can do when the product is not used frequently to bolt on a frequently occurring habit. But no, there, I don't, as long as the product is used with sufficient frequency and does provide some utility, you can't make people do something they don't wanna do. It has to be useful. It has to provide utility then. Yeah. It doesn't matter if it's consumer enterprise, uh, online, offline, uh, as long as it meets that test of sufficient frequency and some utility, you can build a habit.
Melissa:
So you've got the, the four different pieces of the hook model too. You've got the two action, variable reward and investment. Um, when you start to kind of work with teams to plan these out or product managers to plan these out at what phase of product development are, you usually plugging the hooked model, how do you go back and actually monitor it and make sure you're on track?
Nir:
Yeah, that's a great question. So typically I'm involved in two, in two parts, or my work is involved in, in two parts that people read the book or talk to me, it doesn't matter. So the, the, the, the first place that's useful is very, very early. So if you can, you know, before you plan a feature before you, uh, start your business, if you're an entrepreneur, if you can sit down with a pen and paper and just plot out these four parts of the hook model, right? If you can think that through before you commit any code before you design any interfaces, just think about those four phases of the hook model, uh, as a pencil sketch, that's where it's very, very useful. The other place that it's useful is as a diagnostic tool. So this is where I work more with bigger companies, right?
They call me the plumber because I come in and fix the leaks, right? Why are users leaking out of the leaky bucket? Right. They'll be really good at customer acquisition, right? They think, because I think there there's this myth that, you know, growth at all costs. Well, you know, you can buy growth, right? So I see many companies or many times a, a VC will call me up and say, oh, we just put all this money into user acquisition. We, we acquired all these users. We ran all these ads and look at all the users we have, but our retention stinks. Nobody continues to use the product, right? So this is what we call a leaky bucket, lots of users in, and everybody leaks out. So the other place that the hook model is really useful is as a diagnostic tool to figure out why, right.
There was some initial promise, right? If people installed your app, if people started with your service, if lined up, there was something they wanted, but they're not getting, they're not sticking around for. And so that's where you can take out, you know, as opposed to saying, well, I don't know, let's go talk to the customer. Right. Which is a good thing we should talk to the customer. Right? Customer development is very important. The problem is that there are many things that customers cannot articulate to you. I mean, we've all been here, right? Where we, where a customer will tell you, I want, so if you make this, oh, I totally use it every day. And then you build that and they don't do it right. Because they don't know. Right. There's many things that, that are, are in articulatable needs. The customer has that we don't know, uh, uh, just by asking them, they're not able to tell us.
So instead of asking them, you know, to, to, to design the product for them, uh, or worse, even worse than that is asking the hippo, uh, what they want. Right. Everybody knows the hippo, the highest paid person's opinion. Right. Who knows that? Why, why do we suddenly think that the, the CEO, just because they make more money than us is gonna have the answer to our problem? Certainly not the VCs never ask the investors. They have no clue. What we have to do is to look to some consumer psychology, right? We have to look, these everything in hooked is 50, 60 year old research. I've just applied it to a new, a new framework, a new lens, uh, for the product development industry, specifically around tech. Um, but the research in it is, is decades old, very good research. So I think that should be our model. That should be our guide to figure out what do we build next? How do we refine? Where is the problem? How do we stop up the leaks? We look at these four steps of the hook model, and that's where we can diagnose the problem to hopefully fix it.
Melissa:
So, one, one of the pieces I was, was curious about, uh, full reward. Uh, I can completely understand that, like in gaming, by the way, do you play Wordle? I've been wanting to ask you this.
Nir:
I, I know about it. I haven't played it yet. My daughter, uh, apparently is coding it in Python. So, She said it was pretty simple. I, I haven't played it myself though.
Melissa:
That's so cool. Uh, yeah, I'm obsessed with it. My friends and I are all obsessed with it. We were hanging out like a couple nights ago, hit midnight and somebody went, oh, the new world's out. Let's all stand in a circle and do it. So
Nir:
Wow.
Melissa:
Completely hooked, but I'm, I'm obsessed. Um, but like for something like Wordle or a game or anything like that, the variable reward makes total sense. Right. Sometimes you fail, sometimes you don't get it. Uh, how does that translate into things like enterprise apps or anything that you would using frequently for things like work or even just like monitoring your bank account?
Nir:
Sure, sure. So anytime there's, anytime there's something that's changing, there's some kind of, uh, variability, some kind of uncertainty. That's what the variable reward is all about, but to understand what the variable reward needs to look like, we have to actually back up a couple steps. The first step in the hook model is the internal trigger phase. The internal triggers some kind of uncomfortable emotional state. So this is why you can't make people use your product. You have to figure out what they want, right. And, and not just on a functional level, but also on a psychological level. So the reason we use every product or service, every product or service online, offline, anything we use for one reason. And one reason only I don't care if it's, it doesn't matter what the product is. We use every product that we use to modulate our mood, to feel something different.
So your job in product design is to figure out what is that internal trigger and how does your product satisfy it better than the alternatives. But we have to start with that. But what many companies do is they say, we want people to use our product. Therefore we're gonna make it, you know, we're gonna gamify it. I'm not anti gamification, but it, it goes to show you where it's misapplied, typically gamification falls flat, and it's fllse flat because people first look at the tools, right? Let's look at games, games are engaging. Let's, let's do more game like things well points and badges and leaderboards. Let's put that in our game. And what tends to happen is we have, what, what we have end up doing is we serve chocolate covered broccoli, chocolate covered broccoli is when we take, you know, something that we want people to eat, you eat your broccoli.
It's super healthy. It's good for you. And we take something. We think they want chocolate. We put it on top. And then we serve an unholy mess. Nobody likes chocolate covered broccoli, right? So, and, and this is what tends to happen. When we look at the solutions before we understand problem, we really have to understand the psychological need, right? Uncertainty, boredom, fearfulness, stress, anxiety, core level, human, uh, stressors that our product is going to address. So in the enterprise, uh, environment, you know, when you think, think about uncertainty, that's a frequently occurring itch. That's something that people feel every day. They sit down at work, there's uncertainty around what to do next. Uh, am I going in the right direction? What's going to happen? All kinds of uncertainty. So when you look at, you know, marketing dashboards, for example, sounds boring.
That's full of uncertainty. When you think about how, how is my, how are my, uh, a performing how's my marketing spend going? That's fluctuates. There's uncertainty there. There's variability. So a dashboard that you check into every single day to show, Hey, what's working, what's not working. That's a variable reward. Uh, when you think about communication software, like, uh, slack, uh, you know, that that's variable. There's, it's what we call rewards of the tribe, right? What do people need? What's what are we working on? What's going on? What's the latest that's full of uncertainty. Uh, when you think about, uh, project management software, right? Where, how are things progressing? What's anytime you, you, you, you, uh, can find a customer need with a question mark at the end, that's the variable reward. So the variable reward satisfies that itch. It either brings more variability in cases where the user wants that.
So, for example, if the internal trigger is boredom, so let's go back to the gaming, uh, uh, um, space. If the internal trigger is boredom, gamification works really well, right? Because the antidote to boredom is entertainment and games entertain. But this is why it's so important to get the right internal trigger. If you give somebody points and badges on leaderboards, when the internal trigger is workplace uncertainty or anxiety, I don't want your stupid gamification get outta my face. Right. Doesn't solve the problem. It doesn't scratch the itch. So don't do it. If the internal trigger is uncertainty, give them assurance. Right. Uh, if it, so it's always about connecting the internal trigger with the variable reward.
Melissa:
A lot more sense now. Um, and I like that I've seen so many put like badges on stuff that does not need to have badges. It's
Nir:
Terrible. And it's not, and it's, it's hard, you know, there's nuance here. Sometimes gamification is great, but in a corporate setting, it's almost always awful.
Melissa:
Yeah. And I think everybody listening to that needs to remember that. So dont try to gamify things, right. It's kinda
Nir:
A lazy, a lazy approach. And if you think about it actually for a minute, you know, I often hear about like, well, you know, aren't, aren't you advocating just gamifications no, I'm not, that's not what I'm saying at all. It's so much deeper than that. Uh, and even if you think, take a step back and you think about, you know, games, aren't that sticky, right. Games are, are, are engaging for a little while. Right? Okay. Today we're all playing Wordle. Like what a week and a half ago everybody was playing, um, among us, before that it was angry birds or whatever. Like these things are very fatty. Why? Because what happens is a while what was variable becomes predictable. Right? I guarantee you Wordle. I, I, I, maybe I shouldn't judge wordle. Okay. Let's say among us, right. We played among us. Oh my God.
Nir:
Everybody's addicted to among us. And then, you know, a hot minute later, it became pretty predictable the same game again. And again, and again, it wasn't that exciting because it wasn't variable anymore. So we need to look for, for the, for instances, if we want long term engagement, we have to look for instances that are in fact, not very game, like most games, unless they involve other people. This is really important. If you think about like world of Warcraft people play world of Warcraft for decades, why it's not the game, it's the people, it's your Guild, right? It's about the connection you have, have with others. So rewards of the tribe are much more engaging. Other people keep us engaged over the long term, much more than what we call rewards of the hunt, where it's just about, you know, the material or points or badges, what, you know, those type of rewards.
Melissa:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I think that's probably also why I like Wordle, cuz it's my, all my friends are doing it. You see people on Twitter are doing it, but you know, if I, there hasn't been a day, I haven't gotten it yet. So it's not very variable, but I do enjoy that. So that makes a lot of sense with that. Um, so you've got the different types of rewards you were talking about like rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt rewards of the self. Um, when you're thinking about enterprise, you're pretty much, what types of rewards are we usually going for?
Nir:
Oh you can, you, you see all three. So every habit forming product needs to have at least one, uh, the most sticky habit forming products have all three. So, you know, email is, is, uh, probably the mother of habit, forming technology. It's a technology that, uh, has been around for, for very, very long time. And we, we, we keep using it. Why, because variable rewards, the tribe is that, you know, you don't know who the message is going to be from, uh, rewards, the hunt what's in the message. Is it good news, it bad news, uh, there's variability there. And then finally rewards the self. There's a sense of mastery complet, an incompetency that comes from checking those unread messages. Right? There's that, that, that almost like a, like a leveling up of a, okay, can I get to that mythical place called inbox zero. Uh, and so it utilizes all three rewards. So we see the same going, you know, with slack. I think part of the reason that slack or any, you know, group messaging service is so sticky in the enterprises because it utilizes all three type variable rewards. Uh, but in the enterprise, you know, with any habit forming product, that is, you need at least one, uh, but the more, the better,
Melissa:
And then, uh, you know, on the same different types of triggers that you're talking about too, kind of up the funnel, um, I was curious about this. You say like own triggers are some of the best triggers that you can do. Right. And for who don't know what the own triggers are, they're really when your user gives you permission to, you know, notify them when they need to go in there. Um, what about things like notifications or you turn on notifications, you give it permission. What happens when, and you probably see this in organizations, I'm sure you get called into it, but like what happens when it's like, Hey, I give you permission to do this, but then those trigger stop working. Yeah.
Nir:
Right. Like
Melissa:
What usually breaks down there? How do you diagnose that?
Nir:
Sure, sure. So there's, there's uh, two big categories of triggers, internal triggers. We talked about earlier and then there's external triggers. So external triggers is what will, you know, you're, you'll be very familiar with it's the pings, the dings, the rings, anything in our outset environment that tells us what to do next, uh, as opposed to the internal triggers. This is where the information for what to do next is stored inside the user's memory, right? So an emotion and a response to an emotion, uh, uh, boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety, that's internal trigger versus external triggers. Now among external triggers, uh, we have several types of external triggers owned, paid, earned. There are different types of triggers as well, to answer your question in terms of, you know, what happens if it, if it stops working after a while, typically this is a problem that occurs when there isn't a good connection between the internal and external trigger.
So the ultimate goal where we want to go with a habit forming product is that the user uses the product on their own without to external triggers, right? So it's not necessarily, we have to understand why someone's not responding to that external trigger or sorry, or what's happening with the external trigger. Sometimes they don't use the external trigger because they don't need it anymore. Meaning, you know, we know that most of the time that people check one of these habit, forming products, whether it's email, whether it's slack, whether it's, uh, Twitter, 90% of the time, 90 studies find. It's not the external trigger. It's the internal trigger, 90% of the time. Uh, and that's the ultimate goal of a habit forming product is you don't need to send all those annoying pings and dings. You don't need to spend money on advertising. You don't need to.
And spammy messages, people use the product on their own. That's when the habit is actually formed, but if we're seeing it's not effective, uh, and we haven't started, we haven't created that habit at all. Then typically what the reason this occurs is because we haven't properly timed the external trigger. So the difference between an external trigger that gets a response that is welcomed, that is useful. And one that feels like spam is one word. And that one word that differentiates spam from magic is context, context. So I'll give you a good, uh, story to illustrate the point. So I was on a, a Transcon flight. Uh, this was before COVID. Uh, and I remember I was sitting in the, in the aisle seat and there was a, a guy across the aisle seat from me, uh, who was taking a nap right on the flight.
And he had his, he had the pillow under his neck and he had a blanket up, uh, under his chin and the flight attendant comes down the aisle and she turns to him and she says, sir, and he doesn't wake up HES asleep. Right. So she says it louder. She says, sir, and again, nothing. So she says it a third time. This time really loud, everybody like, you know, within earshot can hear. She says, sir, and he wakes up and he says, whoa, whoa, what is it? What is it? And she says, sir, what would you like to drink? And this is such a great example, right? It's a ridiculous story. We we've seen this happen and it's awful. And we're like, how, how could the flight attendant do that? And we do that to our users all the time. We send them pings, dings and rings on our schedule when it's convenient for us.
Did that poor guy want a drink? Yes. But when he was thirsty, not when he was sleeping. So the idea here is that when you send those external triggers, they have got to be contextually relevant for that internal trigger. The closer together you can couple the, the external trigger with the internal trigger, right? You wanna send that message the minute the person feels that emotional itch, stress, anxiety, uncertainty, whatever that emotional itch is, whatever that internal trigger is. That's the moment in time in place when you wanna send the external trigger. That's when it's most likely to get a response.
Melissa:
Sorry. That was a fantastic analogy. I'm like, I'm gonna use that. I'm gonna tell somebody that story one day. Um, so with the triggers too, you know that, um, we were talking a little bit about product ethics a little bit earlier, and you, you mentioned, you know, it's unethical to build bad products for people, which I totally agree with. I'm curious what your take is. Um, since you've done a lot with habit, forming products, um, things like Instagram, right, where we're talking about now, these internal triggers, I guess, of, you know, loneliness or wanting to see what's going on have become such a habit where people see all these images. Um, a lot of people are getting depressed. A lot of people are not getting the right cues back from it. Um, but they can't stop looking at these lives. Um, you know, this is kind of maybe more towards maybe a bad habit, like you were talking about with indistractable, but, but how do you think about that type of habit and, um, you know, where social media has gone today?
Nir:
Yeah. So, so let's set the stage that for the vast majority of, of companies and for the vast majority of your listeners, this is not a problem, right? Like nobody's getting addicted to enterprise software, right. Nobody's
Melissa:
We wish.
Nir:
Yeah, exactly. We wish they would. Right. But nobody's getting addicted to, you know, educational software, right? Like, I don't know if you've seen the, the stats on a completion rates for educational software they're horrible. Right? Like terrible. So for the vast majority of people listening, uh, their, their problem is not that people are overusing the product. The problem is people won't use the product, right? Like nobody cares. That's the bigger problem, but it's a, it's a good ethical question in terms of, you know, what do we do by these products that are sometimes, uh, overused now? I think we need to distinguish, uh, what's what I think is ethical and what is unethical here. So I think that there's, there are certain classes of people that deserve protection. Okay. Children, for example, we have many laws in society that protect children. My 13 year old daughter, can't walk into a bar and order a Gin and tonic.
She can't go into a casino and start gambling, uh, on the Roulette wheel. There is so certain restrictions around someone who's underage because they're not of sound body and mind. Right. We don't think that they're ready for that. So we pass certain laws to protect them. The other category that we don't currently protect that I think does deserve legal protection are people who are pathologically addicted. So when people say, you know, this term addicted, uh, has, has, uh, is so overused that it's lost its meaning, you know, an addiction is a pathology. An addiction is, is not, Ooh, I like it a lot. Uh, an addiction is a persistent compulsive dependency on a behavior of substance that harms the user. So it's something that despite harm, despite someone trying to stop, they're still compelled to do it right. So very difficult to stop. It. It, it is, it is about, it affects around three to 5% of the population, but clearly not everything that is potentially addictive addicts everyone, right?
Not everyone who has a glass of wine with dinner is an alcoholic. Not everyone who has sex is a sex addict. That's ridiculous. So clearly it's something that affects a very small, all percent of the population that does deserve protection. So I've argued for years and I've met with all the big tech companies about this. And, uh, unfortunately they haven't done anything about it, but I think it's time that we legislate some kind of rule like this that says you need a use and abuse policy, that if you use our product more than X number of hours per week, right? Give me a number we're gonna reach out to you and say, Hey, your using our product to the extent that it might indicate you're struggling with an addiction. Can we help? Okay. Uh, I, I think that's, we, we need some kind of protections for people who are pathologically addicted, but if you're not a child and if you're not pathologically addicted, it's up to you.
It's not your fault, right? It's not your fault that these things are so engaging. You didn't invent Facebook, but it is your responsibility. And the thing is that distraction. And so let let's classify what this is. So if you're not an addict and you're not a child, even though we like saying things are, oh, it's mark Zuckerberg doing it to me. It's the tech companies doing it to me. They're all doing it to me. That feels good, right? Because it absolves us of responsibility. But if we're really honest with ourselves, it's not an addiction for 95% of us, 95% of us, it's a distraction. But when we call it, what it really is, oh, it's a distraction. Now. Now I gotta do something about it. Oh, that sucks. Right. But the fact that it matters, people have been struggling with distraction forever. Literally the, the, the, the Greek philosopher Plato was complaining about distraction 2,500 years before the internet.
So distraction is nothing new, right? In my generation, they called us couch potatoes, right? Because we watched too much TV. And before that, they talked about the radio. And before that the comic book, people will find stuff to distract themselves no matter what, but it's the people who stand up and say, no, I decide how I will control my time and attention. I will become indistractable. Those are the people who really do choose their life. And so that's why I really wanted to write this book indistractable for me, I was personally struggling with distraction quite a bit. And it was taking a toll on my family. It was taking toll on my health. It was taking a toll on my work. And so I wanted to solve this problem for myself. And at first I did what everybody does. Oh, I blame the technology. And then I found, even when I got rid of the technology, right.
I got myself a flip phone from Alibaba for 13 bucks. I got myself a word processor with no internet connection. And I would sit down and I say, okay, now I'm gonna write, or now I'm gonna do what I said, I'm gonna do here. I'm gonna work without distraction. And then I would say, oh, look, there's that book on the bookshelf that I've been meaning to read, or let me clean up my desk real quick, or let me just do the laundry real quick. I kept getting distracted even without the technology. And so that's why I wanted to dive deeper into wait, what was really going on here? Because if I kept finding excuses, I kept finding reasons to get distracted. It can't just be the technology cause I got rid of the technology. So that's why I think we need to take a step back and to ask ourselves really what can we do here?
As opposed to saying, let's, you know, shake our fist at the tech companies because they make such engaging products. Right? Think about how ridiculous this sounds, Netflix, your shows are really entertaining. Can you please stop making them so good to watch, uh, Facebook? You know, your app is so user friendly. I love it. Stop that apple, your products are so great. Can you dumb them down so that I don't have to have to want to use them all the time? It's ridiculous. We want these products to be engaging. That's the purpose. That's the point of these products is to engage us. That's why they're there. So it's up to us, you know, I think the price of product us, the price of all these amazing technologies that we have today is that we need to, we need to read the owner's manual of our own brain, uh, to figure out how to deal with distraction.
Melissa:
Great. Yeah. Uh, so when you think about distraction too, what did you find was really the root causes that caused people to be distracted?
Nir:
Yeah. Yeah. So this, this, that's a really great question, cuz what we tend to blame is the proximal cause right. We tend to blame, uh, the things that are in our direct vicinity. So it's almost like the metaphor of, you know, imagine you're playing pool and you ask yourself, well, what moves the ball? Right? You've got the ball, you've got the stick, right? The goal is to put the ball in the pocket. So what, what is actually the source of movement of the ball? Well, it's a stick, right? The stick hits the ball. Well, not exactly right, isn't it? The player, right? Because if you move the stick, the player can find a way to move the ball. He can pick the ball up and put it in the, in the, uh, in the pocket. So we have to look not just at the proximal cause we have to look at the root cause.
So I argue the root cause is not the technology. Like the technology will take advantage of you. For sure. There are people with incentives to sell your eyeballs to advertisers right there. That that's definitely true. The New York times, uh, the guardian CNN, Fox news, Facebook, all of them make business, make their money the same exact way they sell your attention. Uh, what we need to do is to, we, we know that right. Does anybody not know that we have to figure that, okay, those tools are out there. How can we use them as opposed to them using us? And so we start by understanding root cause is back to what we talked about earlier with, with, uh, how to build habit forming products, the root cause is the internal trigger. So the first place to start is to ask ourselves why we seek distraction in the first place. That distraction is always a desire to escape, discomfort.