3 Takeaways - Inside the Hook Model: Secrets Companies Use to Keep You Scrolling (#263)

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Variable rewards once powered slot machines; now they’re inside your pocket. Behavior-design expert Nir Eyal shows how modern apps turned casino psychology into daily routine. He unpacks the psychological levers hidden in everyday products.Hear the science and the clever design tricks that turn a few minutes into far more time than you intended.If knowledge is power, this episode hands you the switch.

The average American checks their mobile device 159 times a day and spends nearly two and a half hours on social media daily. These numbers are just astonishing. What makes some products so habit-forming? While fans of the TV show Mad Men are familiar with how the ad industry created consumer desire, those days are long gone. So how do we get hooked now by habit-forming products and how do we become indestructible? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Toman, and this is three takeaways. On three takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today I'm excited to be with Near Aal. Near spent a decade researching the hidden psychology that some of the most successful

companies in the world used to make their products captivating. For years, he taught at Stanford's Business School. He also read a New York Times best-selling book, hooked on how successful companies create habit-forming products. We all feel the poll to check our email. visit Facebook or YouTube or Twitter for a few minutes and find ourselves spending much more time on them than we intended. As Neer says, face it, we are hooked. After the huge success of his book hooked on how brands manufacture hooks, Nyer then wrote a book essentially on how to get

unhooked. His new book is titled Indistractable. I'm looking forward to finding out how brands hook us and how we can resist them. Welcome, Neer, and thanks so much for joining three takeaways today. Thanks, Len. Good to be with you. Great to be with you. Habit-forming tech is molding our lives. In many cases, more than we even realize. Can you start with an example of a product that has hooked everyone and explain how the hook works and especially what's made it so powerful? powerful. Let's take email. Email is one of these technologies that we check habitually, whether we get a ping-ding or ring or not. We use it with little or no conscious thought. And email is a wonderful example of this habit-forming technology. I mean, we can do an example

of Instagram. We can do YouTube. We can do Google. We could do Amazon. We could do FitBod. We could do dualingo. I like to do personal examples that people actually use it every day. So every hook starts with an external trigger. That would be some kind of notification and a ping-ding a ring that tells you what to do next. But that's not actually the most important part of the the hook, the most important part of the hook is the internal trigger, which we're going to get back to a minute. But let's start with the external trigger, that notification that tells you what to do next, right? Open this email. Then the action phase, the simplest behavior done anticipation of reward, just open the app on your phone to check your email. Then we get this

cornucopia of what we call a variable reward. Variable rewards are these things that feel good that have an element of variability. And so we know that an intermittent reinforcement from a psychological perspective, causes us to engage, cause us to focus, and it's highly habit-forming. And so I talk about these three types of variable rewards. Rewards of the tribe. Who's the email from? Is it your boss or is it spam? You don't know. You got to check. Rewards of the hunt. Information rewards. So is it good news? The bad news. Is it something important? Is it something trivial? You don't know. You have to check. And then finally, rewards of the self, the search for mastery, consistency, competency, control, which is manifested in this

way that we try to get to this mythical place that we call inbox zero, checking those unread messages so that we can clear them away, that's all about this variable reward of the self. The last step of the hook model is the investment phase, where the user put something into the product to make it better and better with use and load the next trigger. So whenever you send someone an email, there's no immediate gratification, right? There's no points. There's no badges. There's no leaderboard.

Nothing really happens when you send someone a message. but what you're doing is loading the next trigger because you're likely to get a reply. And that reply comes coupled with an external trigger that brings you through the hook model once again. Eventually, the way a habit-forming product forms that habit is by no longer requiring an external trigger. Studies have found that 90% of time that we check our devices, it's not because of an external trigger, it's because of an internal trigger. An internal trigger is an uncomfortable emotional state. uncertainty, anxiety, stress, loneliness, fatigue, these uncomfortable sensations that prompt us to seek relief with these products or services. And it's through successive cycles through these

hooks that these behaviors are shaped and that our tastes are formed. One of the powerful results of hooks is essentially a dopamine surge in the brain that people feel good. Can you talk about that? Well, dopamine doesn't make you feel good. Dopamine makes you pay attention. You release dopamine for all kinds of things. You release dopamine when you hug someone. You release dopamine when you learn tennis. You release dopamine when you play the piano. I'm releasing dopamine right now talking to you and having a nice conversation. All of these things released dopamine. And we know that the amount of dopamine that's released from, you know, social media is about equivalent to all kinds of other things in day-to-day life. All of these things

release dopamine. One of the things that releases dopamine we know is uncertainty. So that variable reward that we talked about earlier, when there is some kind of uncertainty, that releases dopamine. Now, why? Not because it feels good. In fact, we know that uncertainty can feel very uncomfortable, right? When the stock market is tanking, when there is geopolitical uncertainty, that's not good, right? We don't like that. That feels awful. We hate uncertainty. And yet, your brain is releasing dopamine. Why? Because dopamine is released when the brain wants you to pay attention. When something is different than what you expected, it's called a prediction error. This caused you to say, wait, wait, wait. Something happened here that I wasn't expecting. I need to pay attention so that I can learn and therefore predict what's going to happen again in the future. So when you have that variability, you know, the classic example is a slot machine. People love watching slot machines that, you know, after you pull that slot machine, you're going to see what happens because you don't know. There's uncertainty. And that uncertainty is really how many of these digital companies work, whether it's Facebook and likes,

or Instagram and likes or bargain shopping. Are user habits a competitive advantage for companies? Yeah, for sure. So when a user habit is formed, the user doesn't even consider the competition. So when you do something at a little or no conscious thought, when you Google something, you're not considering, oh, who has the best search engine?

You just do it with little or no conscious thought. Now that's actually starting to be disrupted with OpenAI and other LLMs because they are actually so much better at changing consumer behavior than Google was. And so every generation, you'll get this kind of behavioral shift. And we're starting to see that now. But for the longest time, Google was kind of the undisputed king of search because people

didn't try the competition because they had this habit. They searched with little or no conscious thought. They just Googled it. It became a verb. So you see hooks everywhere. What are some examples of the most amazing behaviors you've seen that have been spurred by hooks? You know, my daughter learned guitar, actually first she learned ukulele, and now she learned

guitar. And I've never paid for a guitar lesson because she got hooked to these guitar lessons on YouTube. These free lessons, it's got all the elements, right? She's bored. And so what does she do in her free time? The internal trigger of boredom leads her to take the action of opening up YouTube. The variable reward is what's in the lesson, what video is going to teach her the song that she's trying to learn. The investment is the more she practices, the more she watches these videos, the more it serves up new videos for her based on what she's watched in the past. And so now the YouTube doesn't need to trigger her anymore. She's trigger herself based on her emotions. And I've never had to pay for a lesson.

That's a wonderful example of a positive hook. Can you also give some examples of less positive ones, destructive ones? A key learning for me was that it's not about the behavior itself. I think we love to kind of vilify the behavior, that's foolish. Because who are we to say exactly? When we say, oh, the kids, they're playing too many video games. But meanwhile, the grownups are watching golf on TV. Can someone tell me why golf on TV is somehow morally superior to playing a video game? I would much rather have people interacting with each other. And if you play these games, you'll see that on World of Warcraft, Fortnite, these aren't video games. These are social communities. This is places where people go to interact with other people versus I'm just going to

watch some ball bounce around on my boob tube. Why is one better than the other? There's nothing wrong with either, frankly. I like to quote Dorothy, Dorothy Parker, who said the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if you really enjoy playing video games, do it. If you like watching golf, do it. If you like prayer or meditation or painting or walks, it doesn't matter. That's all fine, as long as you plan to do them on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else, certainly not the media companies. So as long as it's planned for, it's enjoyable. The problem is that when we're doing it, when we didn't intend to do it,

so that's when something becomes a distraction. I plan to be with my kids, but I'm watching TV. I plan to stay focused at work, and now I'm just checking stupid emails. And so that's really the difference is intent. It's that forethought. I love your advice to be aware of your behaviors and emotions as you use everyday products and ask yourself, what triggered me to use these? products. What are some of the best strategies for becoming indestructible? The first step is

understanding what drives you towards distraction. So we have to start with the internal triggers that if all human behavior is driven by a desire to escape discomfort, we have to understand what is the preceding discomfort that drives these distractions as well. So what is the boredom, the loneliness, the uncertainty, the fatigue? It's not coming from your phone. It's coming from inside your head. And so this is where we need a bit of introspection. We have to understand, wait a minute, why can't I sit with my family without checking my phone every five minutes? Why can't I do my work without constantly looking at stock prices or email or whatever it might be that pulls me away from the big important projects I need to work on? It starts with

mastering those internal triggers or they will become your master. Because at the end of the day, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, you will always find distraction because we always have found distraction. Plato talked about it 2,500 years ago. He called it Accracia, 2,500 years before the internet. So it can't be the internet's fault. It's part of training ourselves to learn this new skill of dealing with our discomfort. And if you don't learn how to deal with that discomfort in a healthy manner, you're always going to be distracted by one thing or another. Two of my favorite of your strategies are to beware of transition moments and to time box. Can you briefly explain both of this?

Liminal moments are these moments between moments, meaning you're just getting out of a meeting and you're just going to check your phone for a quick minute. Let me just check my email on my way back to my desk. And then before I know it, I'm still checking my email 20, 30 minutes later when I said I was going to work on that big project when I got back to my desk. And so those liminal moments can be very, very dangerous. We have to be very careful. Another example, you're sitting at a red light and it's kind of boring. So you check. your phone for a minute and then before you know the person behind you is honking their horn because the lights change. Dangerous. You want to be aware of those moments so that you can get back on

track. So timeboxing, I didn't invent time boxing. It's been around for a very, very long time. And in fact, it's the most effective time management technique around thousands of peer-reviewed studies back up this idea of setting what's called an implementation intention, which is just a fancy way of saying you're planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. And this is a much, much better time management technique than what many people do, which is just to simply keep a to-do list. But a to-do list has many fatal flaws, including the fact that it has no constraints. You can always add more to a to-do list. And so what happens is when you have a to-do list that has endless tasks complete, there's no constraints. There's nothing that tells you

how to prioritize this versus that. And so we're stuck in this endless loop of not feeling good enough. Whereas a time box calendar, we have that constraint of 24 hours in the day. And so that helps us prioritize, I'm going to do this, but not that. And so it forces you to make these tradeoffs based on your values. I keep thinking about the example of Zoe Chance. It is astonishing to me that Zoe, who's been a guest on three takeaways and who teaches Yale's very popular course mastering influence and persuasion, could have gotten hooked into doing something completely crazy. Can you tell us about Zoe and what the hook was and how it worked? Zoe's great and she gave a TED Talk where she talked about her experience getting hooked to this fitness app that gamified

her experience. It was this app that gave her points when she walked more steps. And she got so into it, she got so enamored by it that she found herself walking way more than she intended. She says in her TED talk about how at four in the morning, she was walking up and down the stairs to her basement because it was racking up all these points and she wanted to get to the next level. And I use that as an example of what would otherwise be a very healthy behavior, right? This is a way that technology can help us get in shape, can help us be more active. You know, we're struggling with this obesity epidemic. Wow, isn't it amazing that an app like this could help people exercise more. But of course, there's a downside that sometimes we can

overdo a good thing. And so who's to blame here? What's going on? Who's responsible? And when Zoe dug deeper, you know, she wanted to kind of blame the technology. We all do. We all want to say, oh, it's social media, it's Twitter, it's Facebook, it's this, it's that, it's all this stuff outside of us. But when Zoe was honest with herself, what she revealed to this audience was that she was in the middle of a very difficult divorce. And in that time, she was using this app as an escape from reality. And this is what we see as a hallmark of addiction, not habituation. Habits are very different from addictions. Addiction is never a good thing. It's always harmful. Whereas a habit, we have good habits as well as bad habits. So that's when it became a good habit turned into

an addiction for Zoe because she was using it as an escape. She was using it as something that would qualify as a distraction in my book. Right. She was getting rewards from the app for every additional step or stairs that she walked or climbed. Exactly. What are the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today? Number one, behavior can be designed. When you understand the deeper psychology driving our behavior, you can create experiences to shape your behavior, your customer's behavior.

There are ways to design those behaviors. That's number one. Number two, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. that if you plan ahead, there is no distraction that you can't overcome. And number three, beliefs matter more than you know. It's not good enough just to tell people what to do and why they should do it. There has to be an underlying belief there that they can do it, which is the cornerstone of motivation. Thank you, Neer.

I really enjoyed both your books, hooked and indestructible. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. if you're enjoying the podcast and i really hope you are please review us on apple podcasts or spotify or wherever you get your podcasts it really helps get the word out if you're interested you can also sign up for the three takeaways newsletter at three takeaways dot com where you can also listen to previous episodes you can also follow us on lincoln x instagram and facebook i'm lind Tomin, and this is three takeaways. Thanks for listening.