Good Life Project - Becoming Indistractable | Nir Eyal

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

Five years ago, Nir Eyal showed the world how tech-companies build apps, games, and platforms that highjack your attention and become near impossible to stop using in his book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. That book became a global phenomenon and opened people's eyes to the power of technology to not just help, but consume our lives. His new book, Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (https://amzn.to/2KXnkMx), serves as a guidebook for getting the best of technology and reclaiming our attention, without letting it get the best of us. In addition to writing and speaking, Eyal has also lectured at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. You can find two tools references in the conversation here: schedule maker tool (https://nirandfar.com/schedule-maker/) | distraction guide (https://www.nirandfar.com/distractions/).-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I first stumbled upon the work of my guest today, Nir Eyal, when he came out with his book about five years ago called Hooked. Hooked was this deep dive into deconstructing how some of the biggest tech companies and app developers develop their platforms, their apps, their tools, their programs to make them sort of irresistible. Like you start playing them and you kind of can't stop. And then you keep going back over and over and over and over again. And in that book, he laid out sort of a four-step process that all of these companies already know about, but as a reader, you could actually see what was

happening. And it kind of armed you to understand what was going on and then to make different choices and to understand how to maybe step out of the slipstream of those devices and technologies and programs. He has a new book out now called Indistractable, which in my mind is almost like the part two to Hooked because it picks up where Hooked left off and says, okay, but what do we really do? Like, give me more of a detailed science-backed roadmap to actually be able to reclaim a sense of agency and intentionality and control over my life without having to completely step away from technology. Like, I want to engage with this on a daily basis, but how do I do it in a way

which is conscious and constructive and intentional? And the conversation both covers a bit of his background, how he came to these explorations. And then we really deep dive into the steps that we take and deconstruct them. He does a lot of really powerful myth busting that opened my eyes too. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results

will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. I kind of relish turning over apple carts a little bit. I think that's carried out throughout my work. What I've always done is kind of to look for either deeper insights or unconventional insights or counterintuitive insights. And that's what I really enjoy. Yeah.

So what were you into as a kid then? I mean, what was your thing? Did you have a thing? Watching TV, video games, Cheetos. Right. This was the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't know, right? Watching TV, video games, Cheetos. Right, this was the 80s. Yeah, we didn't know, right? Big hair, acid-washed jeans. Yeah, well, big body. I was clinically obese. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. I remember going to fat camp and my mom taking me to the doctor and, you know, the doctor showing me a chart and saying, okay, here's normal weight, here's

overweight, here's you. You're in the obese category. And I think that was another experience that kind of, you know, looking back in retrospect really shaped my view of the world in that I remember being, having this feeling that food was controlling me. And it wasn't until I got control back that in retrospect, I could look at that situation, analyze, you know, what was going on in my life. And it's actually not that far of a leap from how food controlled me to what I currently research and write about, about how technology affects our behavior.

Yeah, I mean, it's all sort of these things that our body gets wired into in various ways and depending on who you talk to, using the word addicted to it to a certain extent. For you, when did that, when did your relationship, your understanding and your weight start to shift? Was it earlier or was it much later in life? It was when I got interested in girls and they weren't interested in me. So I, you know, in Florida, everybody has a swimming pool. We, we, we didn't have a pool. We had, we lived in a condo

complex and there was one pool for the entire complex. And I would get together, you know, school or on weekends and we would go to the pool and I'd never take my shirt off. I would go into the pool with my shirt on because I didn't want anybody to see my rolls. And when I noticed that people were getting girlfriends and boyfriends and nobody was paying attention to me, That's what I just said. I, you know, felt lonely, frankly, and I wanted to do something about it. So I started researching how to lose some weight. Yeah. So what was, I mean, as a kid to take that on yourself is kind of a big burden. But it's also, I mean, to do that and then to be successful at it is unusual. Well, I still struggle with my weight. It's still something that I have to think about on a daily basis. I think my natural tendency, it's funny because I

write this book about distraction and the natural reaction is, oh, you must have a lot of self control. You must have a lot of self-discipline. No, exactly the opposite. I do not have a lot of self-discipline. That's why I need to write this book because I wanted to look for the answers for how do I do what I say I want to do. And it took me a really long time because I went down a lot of dead ends. One of the most common mistakes I would make is I would go on these binge diets, as many people do, right? I would say, okay, 30 days, no fast food, 30 days, you know, vinegar and cayenne pepper or whatever. And it never works. Of course it never works. This whole idea of a temporary diet doesn't work. Why would we do a

temporary diet? If we, do we want to be healthy temporarily? No, we want to be healthy for the rest of our lives. And you know, so I would do these, these fad diets for 30 days. And then, you know what happened on day 31, right? It all comes back, right? You eat in excess when you're off the diet. And it's interesting because that's exactly the advice we hear given today when it comes to our digital distractions. Do a digital detox, right? Go on a 30-day plan. And it's wrong and it doesn't work for the exact same reasons because it doesn't look at the real reasons why we overuse something, whether it's food or technology.

I wasn't eating because I was hungry, right? I never ate because I was hungry. I ate because of what I was feeling and what I couldn't deal with inside. And that's really the source of why we overuse technology. That was kind of my, it wasn't obvious to me at first, but the more I dove into this

field of distraction, not just technology distraction, but all distraction, this question of why don't we do what we say we're going to do? And this is a really old question, right? Socrates and Aristotle talked about it 2,500 years ago. They called it akrasia, this tendency to do things against our better interest. It's a really interesting question, right? We know what to do. We know we should eat healthfully. We know we should exercise. We know if we want to have a good relationship with our loved ones, we have to be fully present with them. We know that if we want to excel at our jobs,

we have to do the work, especially the hard work. Why don't we do it? It's such an interesting question. And it turns out that the core of all that are what we call internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states that we seek to escape from. And if we don't deal with those internal triggers, we use these distractions as pacifiers. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, everyone's looking for more information, like the next thing, like the new thing. I need to learn something new or something bigger or something different

because that's going to help me solve the problem. I remember reading a couple of years ago, Derek Sivers wrote a sentence, which was something like, if more information was the problem, we'd all be billionaires with six pack abs. So true. So that's exactly the point.

There is no information problem. We all know basically what to do. We know that chocolate cake is not as healthy for us as a salad. We know we should be exercising, all this stuff. It's not a knowledge issue. That's right. And so I didn't see, I only write books that I look for us as a salad. We know we should be exercising, all this stuff. It's not a knowledge issue. That's right. And so I didn't see,

I only write books that I look for and can't find. So I read everything else on this topic and didn't find the answer I was looking for because so many books tell you what to do. They don't tell you how to not do the things you know you shouldn't do. And so that's really what I wanted to write about. Yeah, I wanna jump back into that in a lot more detail.

Let's fill in a little bit more of your story and then we'll sort of circle, we'll work our way back there. You ended up in Emory University. What'd you actually study? I studied political science, econ, and journalism. Because you wanted to or because, it's funny, I was poli-sci also.

And that was most people I knew who ended up there were just like, I can't figure anything out. So I'm gonna be poli-sci. No, so I did a gap year between high school and college. I was the second class of AmeriCorps, which is a domestic peace corps. So this was 1996. And Clinton had signed this into law, this domestic peace corps. So I served for a year in southwest Atlanta, the SW Swats, in an underprivileged school.

And it was a really eye-opening experience in that, you know, basically you get paid minimum wage plus a scholarship at the end of $5,000. And, you know, I went into the experience thinking direct service was the solution. Kind of a, you know, if I can get in there, I can fix things. And I was, by the end of the experience, I was surprised that there were systemic problems that I didn't appreciate. And I think because of that awareness,

that's why I got interested in poli-sci and econ because it's not that simple. And with many of our problems in life, we always, we tend to want the simple solutions. We want the simple story. This is called a proximal cause as opposed to the root cause of the problem. And so I remember going to college.

One, I was really invigorated, right? So that I hadn't realized how fortunate I was, how I'd won this, you know, genetic lottery of growing up as a heterosexual white male in a family that could send me to college. And then taking that year off and doing direct service and, you know, seeing what it's like to live on minimum wage and seeing the lives of the kids I worked with. I mean, some of them literally, you know, this was in a pretty rough part of Atlanta, dirt floors, like literally I would go to their homes and they'd have dirt floors in the United States of America, if you can believe it.

And so I felt a real responsibility to kind of do something with this opportunity of going to college. I'm so glad I went because I'm sure had I not had that gap year, I would have just said, okay, this is more school. It's just a continuation of high school as opposed to when I landed, you know, first week of school, I took it very seriously. And I wanted to figure out like,

how can I systemically change some of our problems in the world? Yeah, I mean, it's such a powerful shift in the mindset that you bring to the whole college experience, right? Because you go there with a sense of purpose, rather than a sense of, I'll figure it out along the way,

which is what most of us end up doing. So you get out of Emory though, and you end up in BCG, right? Doing consulting work. Yeah, yeah. So I went from being very politically liberal to, I'm still socially quite liberal, but when I took my first economics classes

and I kind of learned, again, the proximal versus the root causes of problems, I became what I would, I mean, to me, of course, everybody says they're a realist. But I think I got a more realistic view of how many times good intentions go awry, that it is really about incentives. I mean, I saw firsthand in the public school system how incentives for teachers create some pretty crazy results. And that's not my area of expertise, so I don't want to go into a ton of depth there other than my gap year. That's what I know of the experience. But I remember kind of through these economics classes having a much greater appreciation for the power of business to change people's lives. That when people are empowered to start companies, to build products, to help their customers through the profit motive, through the incentive of the profit motive, we have more choice. We have technological innovation.

And so that became, I think, my vehicle for seeking to change the world through better products and services that, that serve more people. Of course, capitalism isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. But that, that was kind of the vehicle that I, that I chose. So BCG, to answer your question, BCG was, I didn't plan to be a consultant for very long, but Boston Consulting Group was a way to kind of get my foot in the door into the business world. Because economics is very different from practical business. Yeah, day-to-day business. Yeah. It's interesting also that you bring up the sort of like the idea of business as a mode

of genuine social change and effective social change also, which is not the easiest thing on the planet. Because I think there's so much tension around that. I think so many of us see it and so many people aspire to try and make that marriage work. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they do with like really noble intention and they go in and realize, oh wait, I actually didn't really understand

the problem on the level that I thought I did and I'm potentially even causing more harm. That's right. Without intention at all. But it's been interesting to see sort of like that dance and the awakenings and the learnings over the last probably decade or so as a lot more people are wading into this sort of for-purpose business space. Yeah. Yeah. I think that there's, we also need to realize that innovation and social

change through business doesn't promise that everything will be smooth sailing. I don't know where we get this notion that if we have problems associated with system that we throw the system out. We do what's called stumbling through. Technological progress is always a process of stumbling through. Sophocles said 2,500 years ago that nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.

So whenever you have a huge technological change, you are going to have problems. And so what do you do? You continue to innovate. You fix the problems of the last generation of technology with the next generation of technology. That's how it works. Yeah. There's a certain amount of sort of continued grace that has to be woven into the process.

Right, right. You go from there then into your own business, renewable energy. Yeah, I started out in the solar energy business. So this was when we were, this was 2003. The United States was going into the second Iraq war. I had a pretty good hunch that fuel prices would increase back when, you know, I saw this opportunity that I had learned or I was able to identify because of my experience at BCG. I learned about this idea of economies of scale. And I basically had an opportunity to create a professional solar energy installation and distribution company, kind of like SolarCity.

What SolarCity does today, now it's part of Tesla. But this was way before SolarCity got started. And our timing was really good. And I started the business with my wife, and we kind of did the sales and marketing and distribution with folks who were already on Long Island. We did it right here in Long Island. And we sold the company a few years later and kind of got on our feet financially from that. Yeah. And then you end up back in school. Then, yeah. So I applied to one business school. I applied to Stanford. And what was your reason? I mean, what was the why at that point? I remember reading these stories about these people in Silicon Valley who were, you know, doing really well, building these amazing companies, and they had no inventory.

And I remember thinking, okay, they're selling. That sounds awesome. That sounds awesome. Cause I had a warehouse full of solar panels that I would have to fill up, you know, in the spring in anticipation of the summer installation season. And then we had to sell down all that inventory. And if the inventory didn't sell, it was on my back. And I remember thinking, oh my gosh, you can make a living selling bits instead of physical goods. That's amazing. I gotta, I gotta understand this. And so, you know, the hotbed of, of, of this was in Silicon Valley. And so I was trying to figure out how to, how to get into Silicon Valley with some kind of, you know, program. And so had I not gotten into Stanford business school, I would have just continued to, to stick with the solar business. But the, the acceptance letter came through. Yeah. Was that the time? Was it,

that was, I guess BJ Fogg was there sort of early in his, back when they called it the Persuasive Technology Lab. Persuasive Technology Lab. Yeah. Did you spend any time with him when you were there?

I did. I went to a workshop that he conducted at his home. Yeah. It was like a week and long workshop. And also good timing, right? I had good timing with solar

and I had a good timing when it came to persuasive technology because this was 2006, 2007. So Facebook was just kind of hitting its stride. And, you know, some of my friends were launching apps that – apps back then, by the way, didn't mean, you know, cell phone apps because nobody had an iPhone back then. This was 2006. Apps meant Facebook apps. And these Facebook apps would, you know, be installed by

millions of people. They were all silly, you know, throwing sheep and silly Farmville type stuff. But it was amazing to see how big they could get and how some of them became very engaging while others flopped. And that was very interesting to me. I wanted to figure out why that was happening. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting, the work that he has done over the years. It's really interesting also, for those who don't know, BJ Fogg ran this lab, which really deconstructed sort of behavioral design, especially in the relationship with technology. And many of the developers of some of the most addictive and broadly used apps out there on the planet now actually were students of his at one point,

went through his class. So you come out of that and what's your intention leaving there? So I started a business with some classmates and my wife as well. We started our second company together and that was in the gaming and advertising space. So we were putting virtual goods, which at the time, we raised several million dollars from Kleiner Perkins and a few other investors.

And they kind of thought we were crazy. Like, you know, for those who didn't invest, you know, virtual goods, what are you talking about, right? You're selling nothing in cyberspace and people are paying you money for like these little icon thingies. Of course, today, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. But back then, it was nascent. And so there wasn't really much to prove in terms of a market size. But we ran that company for a few years.

We sold that company. But in the course of starting that company, I saw the intersection of gaming and advertising, these two industries that are highly dependent on changing people's behaviors, right? Advertisers don't spend all that money for their health. They do it because it persuades people and game companies design experience, interactive experiences to progress you through a game. And so I had this front row seat to see how products were designed along with the work of BJ Fogg that I was exposed to there. And when the last company wrapped up, I had a hypothesis that as the interface shrinks,

as we went from desktop, you know, big screens on the desktop to smaller screens on the laptop, to mobile devices, to wearable devices like the Apple Watch and now auditory devices, right? Like the Amazon Alexa, as the screen shrank and eventually disappeared, habits would become more important. That as a company, if you're not on the first screen of someone's phone, if you're not top of mind, if you're not a habit, you might as well not even exist, right? Because they're going to forget about you and they're not going to use your product or service. So I said, okay, this is going to be really important.

Habits are going to matter to product design, to business in general. It's a huge competitive advantage. Where's the book on how to build habit forming products? And I couldn't find it. And so I, I started researching this, you know, I spent a lot of time in the Stanford library and talking to experts. And, uh, I, I had access to a lot of these people who were making these products and services and talking to them. And, started blogging about it just, you know, for my own edification. As I was learning, I started blogging about it. And then I had a, I got an email from a professor of mine, Baba Shiv at Stanford, who is a very highly regarded neuroscientist and teaches at the business school. And he said, look, I really like your model. I really like your stuff. Let's teach a class together. And so he was very gracious and kind of allowed me to design the curriculum for our first class. And that led into teaching for

many years at Stanford at the business school and then later at the design school. And what I taught in that class became Hooked, became my first book. And that was my first exposure to you actually was I found Hooked. When did that come out? 2011? 2014. So I actually self-published 2013, but the professionally published edition was 2014. Yeah. And I found that book and the book basically lays out sort of like the four key elements to a sort of like a product, which has a habitual use built into it where you sort of, you start using it and you kind of keep going deeper and deeper and deeper. And it literally becomes a part of who you are and your identity and your daily life. And it's kind of like an automated thing.

And I read that book and I had this split reaction to it. One, I'm like, this is freaking brilliant. Like now, you know, I can see how all of these things are working. I can potentially defend myself against it also. Yeah, you can unplug from the matrix and see what's going on. And then the other hand,

and I'm also thinking as somebody who's an entrepreneur, who's always making stuff, huh, like this is really, like now I can sort of like deconstruct and construct and diagnose like, you know, different things, especially if I want to create offerings that are in some way constructive for people's lives that I would love to see turn into habits.

And then the other side of my brain is saying, but this is also a roadmap for people and businesses who are looking to create products and offerings that are similarly habit forming that may not be constructive in people's lives. And I'm sure you're a thoughtful guy that you grappled with that on some levels. You were sort of like figuring out how do I bring this public in a way which is actually beneficial, circling all the way back to your time in AmeriCorps and like this underlying drive to actually do well in the world. Right, right.

So you really hit on the two reasons why I wrote the book. The first reason was to help democratize these techniques that people reading Hooked are not the social media networks. They're not the gaming companies. They have known these techniques for decades. What I wanted to do was to democratize these techniques so people could use them to build all sorts of healthy habits. So, you know, in the five years since Hooked was published, I've received

thousands of emails from people, companies like FitBod that builds an exercise habit in the gym for folks. Products like, there's education products that are used by millions of children these days that use the hook model. Products to help people save money, to exercise more, to eat healthfully. I mean, in the five-year edition that's coming out in the fall, I talk about all these products and how they've used the hook model. And, you know, that's the problem with business today is by and large, not that products suck you in the way that Facebook and Twitter might. The real problem for most businesses out there is that their products just suck. That's the real problem, right? Nobody's getting addicted to SaaS software.

They're forced to use SaaS software that's awful, but they don't want to use. And so my idea was, what if we could democratize these techniques to build healthy habits in users' lives? That's really what Hooked is for. Now, the other reason I wrote Hooked was, you know, I wanted to expose people to see how these products are built and hope that you could do something about it if you didn't like these habits. I wrote a section in the book called The Morality of Manipulation. Of course, I've been thinking about the ethics of this for a very, very long time, which is a guide to help you use these techniques effectively in a very moral way to build healthy habits and user lives. And the most important section of the book of Hooked is the very, very last chapter. And the very, very last chapter is the only case study, the only chapter devoted to a case study of one product. And that one product is the Bible app.

I didn't choose to do a case study on a video game or a social network. I did a case study on the Bible app, which is one of the most successful apps of all time. Hundreds of millions of people use this app every day. Daily, yeah. Daily. And they use the hook model, essentially. When I talked to Bobby Grinwald, he didn't know he was using the hook model at the time because the hook model wasn't published yet. But he used the hook model, essentially, when we broke down his app. He's using it to form this habit.

In fact, he told me, this is a great anecdote, where he told me that he got an email from one of his users that this user was about to walk into a strip club. And at that moment, he got a ping on his phone from the Bible app. And he said, oh, my God, the Lord is trying to tell me something. And he turns around and leaves the strip club and doesn't go in. So the reason I used the Bible app, it was very intentional. I didn't want to say, hey, be like Facebook, be like Instagram, be like whatever. I wanted to show people that this is a little bit more nuanced. Again, this isn't binary thinking. This isn't good versus evil. If you want good versus evil, read a nursery rhyme, right? That's

not the real world. There's nuance here. So if you believe that the Bible, that organized religion brings people together, gives them purpose, gives them meaning, gives them connection, then you think that the Bible app is a wonderful habit. But if you think that religion is a force for divisiveness among people, that it's giving them misinformation, that it's not true, then you probably think the Bible app is a bad habit. And so we really have to be careful about making these moral judgments about what's good for other people. I think that it really comes down to a few factors. It comes down to who is using the product, how much they're using the product, what they're

doing with the product, and what they would be doing without the product. So for example, if I told you, Hey, Jonathan, you know what? I'm thinking about starting a routine of running. Is that a good habit? Is that a good thing for me to do? Sure. Yeah. Running. That's a, that's a good thing. That's healthy. And then I told you, you know what, actually, um, the reason I want to do this habit is because I can't stand my work and my wife is driving me crazy and my kids are, are just unbearable. And the only way I can't stand my work and my wife is driving me crazy and my kids are just unbearable. And the only way I can get out of my head for a little bit is to go on a run and not have to think about my problems, right? Not have to deal with them. Well, then you might say, actually, buddy, you know what? That's not such a great habit. I would probably think about maybe dealing with what's

going on in your life. But then if I told you, actually, you know what? Running is what I'm going to do because I used to have a problem with alcohol. And it used to be the only way I could deal with my problems was to escape them through drink. And now I can find some solace in a run, and that's a much more healthy behavior. Well, then you say, okay, great. That's a wonderful habit. So it's more complicated than just good versus evil. It's not quite so simple. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's kind of the Buddhist lens on it, right?

Nothing is either innately good or bad. It's the context that makes it so. Right. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th.

Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. You know, since that book has come out, and it's like you said also, it's not like industry insiders didn't know this stuff and weren't deep down into actually building this into everything that they were doing.

It's sort of like the rest of the world that didn't actually understand what was happening. Just kind of say like, huh. So to a certain extent that it gives people a sense of agency. Right, right. I think knowing how the hook model works means you can break the hook. Yeah. And so Indistractable, my follow-up is a more detailed guide to how to put all distractions in their place. So five years later, so Hook comes out five years ago, right? We're hanging out in the studio. And now this new book, Indistractable, comes out. And like you said, this is kind of the logical, this is building on the idea and sort of saying, okay, so we're going to really map out to start exploring this, uh, occurred shortly after I

published Hooked. And I was sitting with my daughter. Uh, we had this afternoon together. She's an only child and we had this beautiful afternoon together. And one of the things we were doing together was, was reading through a book of activities that daddies and daughters could do together. And, you know, you could make a paper airplane or, uh, you know, all these different activities in the book. And one of the activities was to ask each other this question, if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I wish I could tell you what my daughter said, but I can't because in that moment when she was answering this question, I was on my phone. I was ignoring her and I was dealing with some stupid email or something on social media.

And she got the message that I was sending that my phone was more important than she was. And the next thing I knew, I looked up and she left the room. She went to go play with a toy outside instead of playing with her dad. And I remember thinking, this is messed up. There's something wrong here. And to be totally honest with you, Jonathan, if I told you that was the only time it happened, I'd be lying. It happened quite a bit. It happened not only in my relationships, it happened at work. I'd sit down and write and I'd constantly get distracted. I couldn't do the work I wanted to do. I was neglecting my health. I wasn't working out. I wasn't taking care of myself. And so I kept

getting distracted. And so that's where I kind of, you know, when I chewed on this and this bothered me for quite a while, especially because look, I know as an insider, I wrote the book hooked. I know how these things worked. And so I figured I really need to figure out how to, how to deconstruct this stuff. How do I understand how to put it in its place? And that's when I started exploring solutions to this problem. And it's such a fascinating problem, right? We talked about it earlier, but we know what to do. Why don't we do it? I know that it's wrong to ignore my daughter when we have time together. I know that I should do the work I plan for myself to do,

and yet I get distracted Googling or going on Slack or checking email. Why don't I do the things I say I'm going to do? That's when I started to dive into this whole topic. And this was five years ago. And my first step was, you know, I don't write a book unless I can't find a book that's already been written about this. And so I read everything on this topic. And every other book on this basically said the problem is the distraction. So I bought every book I could possibly find. And they said, it's technology's fault. Technology is melting your brain. So I said, okay, let me take their advice. So I bought every book I could possibly find. And they said, it's technology's fault. Technology is melting your brain. So I said, okay, let me take their advice. So I went on Alibaba and I bought myself a $12 flip phone that had no internet connection,

no apps. All it did was send and receive calls and text messages. I went on eBay and I bought myself a word processor that they don't even make anymore, but has no internet connection. All you can do is type on it. And I said, great, I got rid of the technology, problem solved. And I'd sit down to write. And then I'd look behind me on the bookcase and I'd say, oh, there's that book I've been meaning to read. And you know, my desk is kind of messy here. Let me just organize my desk for a minute or the trash needs to be taken out. And I would constantly distract myself again and again without the technology. So clearly it wasn't technology's fault, let alone the fact that I need this stuff, right? Most of us don't

have the luxury of some college professor that says, oh, just stop using it. No, our livelihoods depend on this stuff. So I needed to find a better way. And so that's when I said, okay, I want an answer for myself first and foremost. How do I get this superpower of doing what it is I say I'm going to do? How do I live with personal integrity? I would never dream of lying to someone else. Why do I lie to myself all the time? And so that's really what this process was about. How do we do what we say we're going to do? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also to make that distinction between it's technology doing this to me versus no, actually, it's me doing this to me. The technology is just the sort of like the device that I'm pointing to as the reason why. But it's also disconcerting because it means that we have to stand in the center of responsibility and potentially blame and also action taking.

And like you mentioned, it's really complicated. It's not like you have an addiction to a substance where you can, if you go through a program and you can get yourself off of it, you can live the rest of your life, never doing it and be completely fine. With technology, it is so woven and in many ways, so beneficial. It gives so much good to the way we live our lives. And very often it's necessary to the way we do our work and earn our livings. We can't just completely cut it out and go on for the rest of our lives unless we want to kind of become hermetic to a certain extent. So it's, you know, the idea of completely eliminating it from your life and that'll be okay. It just doesn't work anyway.

No, it's exactly what we talked about earlier with those binge diets, right? 30 days of digital detox is no more effective than 30 days of no fast food. We have to deal with the root causes. Technology is the proximate cause. It's not the root cause. And I think that, so that's a big theme of my work is always look for the root causes,

not the proximate causes. Because when we blame the proximate cause, it limits our understanding and it doesn't fix the problem. And we see that this is so prevalent today in our society that we want an easy scapegoat to blame. It's technology that's hijacking my brain. This term addiction, oh my God, everything is addictive these days.

We're all addicted. No, that is not true. An addiction is a pathology. That is not what most of us experience with technology. Now, why do people keep using this term? Why do people love saying that technology is addictive? Because when you have an addiction, you have a pusher. You have a dealer. Somebody's doing it to you. Whereas if we call it what it really is, overuse, that requires now, wait a minute, that's something I can do something about.

Now, little asterisks here, big asterisks actually. Some people do get addicted, for sure. Some people get addicted to all sorts of things, right? Many people drink alcohol. We're not all alcoholics. We gamble. We're not all problem gamblers. Many people who have sex are not sex addicts.

So lots of things can be addictive to some people, but not to most people. I used to say that Ian Bogost had this quote that I would repeat a lot saying that technology is the cigarette of the century. It's not true. It's not true because cigarettes have nicotine in them, right? So when we smoke, we ingest nicotine

and that affects our prefrontal cortex in a way that creates this chemical dependency, apparently. What technology is much more like is not like cigarettes. It is much more like cannabis. Cannabis, we know, has nothing chemically addictive about it. And it's ironic, by the way, in an age when we are deregulating cannabis that people are calling to regulate technology, there is nothing addictive about cannabis. Addiction experts will tell you there is no nicotine in cannabis.

THC is not chemically addictive in the same way nicotine would be. And yet, 9% of people who use cannabis have a cannabis use disorder. How can that be? How can it be that a substance that is not addictive addicts people? Because the lesson here is that any analgesic is potentially addictive to someone. Anything that solves pain, anything that solves pain that is used by a sufficient number of people will addict someone. So when we have a product like Facebook that's used by 2.5 billion people, of course, some people are going to get addicted to it. And those people require our assistance, right?

This is, I've been writing about this for the past four years. Companies need a use and abuse policy. This is the one type of legislation when it comes to this domain that I do think we need to regulate, that if companies are not willing to reach out and help those addicts, they need to be regulated to do so. But for the vast majority of us, it is not an addiction. It is not. It is overuse. And one of the worst things we can do is to convince ourselves that it's hijacking our brain, that it's addictive, that it's doing it to us. Why? Because this creates this phenomenon of learned helplessness.

We stop trying to do something about it because the algorithms are doing it to us, because these big bad tech companies are doing it to us. And that is so pernicious. That is so unhelpful. We do have the power to do something about it. We just don't know how, or we haven't tried. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting

that you sort of frame it up that way. When I think about addiction, a lot of the conversation that I've had around addiction and, you know, if it's in the same sentence with technology is sort of split into, okay, so there's chemical addiction and then there's behavioral addiction. Say somebody is a smoker or they use drugs. Like what most people in conversations I've had with people who are experts in this stuff will tell me is within three to five days, the chemical addiction essentially is washed out of you.

But the behavioral addiction remains because you have this loop that has been processed in your brain for years and years and years. But what's interesting is that so much of the behavioral addiction is about circumstance. It's context related. So this is why we saw when there were people who were in war where they were around a lot of opiates

and a lot of our soldiers were users when they were there, but they came back and almost none of them, they all just stopped. And the research was like, well, the chemical addiction ended pretty quickly, but it was the fact that it was just all over the place then. They didn't have to actively create, you know, their own behavioral changes or circumstantial changes. When they came back here, it just wasn't around anymore. And so you're citing from the Vietnam Veterans Study, right? Where they, it was a huge number.

I think it was a third of Vietnam veterans were using. Regularly. And it's more than just the availability. It was actually the circumstance of why they were using. If you are in the hell of war, that was the Vietnam conflict, you know, taking orders from incompetent generals, you know, seeing death all around you, the only logical thing to do would be to get out of your head. Right. I would have used heroin if I was in the Vietnam War fighting. But what happened when they came home and they had supportive families, they had communities, they weren't in the hell of war, they didn't need the escape anymore. And so one of the models I want to perpetuate out there that I want people to know about

is this idea that addiction is a confluence of three things. Nobody, it's never just about the product. We love to think it's just the product. We love to think, you know, this Nancy Reagan notion of just say no, that if you just don't do drugs, that's all we need to do. Everybody just needs to say no.

We know that's BS. We know that doesn't work. And it doesn't work because it's never just about the product. Nobody steps on a heroin needle and becomes a heroin addict. It doesn't work that way. Meanwhile, millions of people receive highly addictive substances. For example, fentanyl.

Fentanyl. This is one of the most addictive substances we know of on the face of the earth. Millions of women receive fentanyl when they deliver a baby via C-section. Tiny percentage ever become addicted. 1% ever become addicted. Why? It's a highly addictive substance because it's never just about the product. It's a confluence of the product, the person, and their pain. So one, of course, the product plays a role. The second component is the person. Does the person have a predilection for addiction? When I was doing this research, I talked to many experts who work with children who have a so-called gaming disorder or

a gaming addiction or a computer addiction. They told me that 100% of the time, 100% of the time, there are a confluence of factors. There's a comorbidity with obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD, trauma in their life. There's something else going on in their lives that is a comorbidity that's associated with why they are escaping. So it requires the product, the person who has a predilection for addiction. And then the third part, third critical component is a source of pain that they cannot escape otherwise, that they don't know how to deal with in a healthier fashion. So the veterans in the Vietnam War, when they were in this very painful,

psychologically painful situation that they could not escape otherwise, they were looking to get out of their heads. And of course, drugs provide that relief. And that's a very important insight that even for people who are overusers, not addicted, for the rest of us who sometimes overuse technology or any product for that matter, whether it's booze or internet pornography or gambling, whatever it might be, we have to ask ourselves, what's the

source of that psychological discomfort? What are we looking to pacify and satiate? What feeling are we looking to escape in this unhealthy manner? And then what we do about it, we can do either one of two things. We can either fix the source of the discomfort, right? Get out of that hellscape of war that's causing you the discomfort. But in real life, we can't always do that. We can't always fix the source of the problem. Many times we can, but not always.

So the second answer is to learn techniques to cope with that discomfort. And so I talk about many ways that we can actually all learn to deal with that discomfort in a healthier manner. But that's the most important first step is to understand why we are seeking escape from this discomfort. Yeah. And I think as uncomfortable as it is for so many people to stop pointing at a thing as the source of everything, you know, as all the source of their demise to say, okay, so sure, it may play a role, but there's more going on here.

And I have more ability to step in and exert control and change the outcome and change my experience than I thought that I had. And then the thing is you have to accept responsibility to actually take action. Which people hate. Right. Because then you're like, ah, but now it's on me. Maybe I'll just actually take action. Which people hate. Right.

Because then you're like, ah, but now it's on me. Maybe I'll just live with it. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that's where I want to call bullshit a bit. Yeah, completely agree. Because no doubt in this day and age that it's easier than ever to get distracted. If you are looking to get distracted,

it's right there in your pocket, easier than ever. And they will take advantage of you. Absolutely. These companies know how to make you click and what makes you tick better than you understand yourself. And so if you are not armed with these techniques, if you don't know how to put this stuff in its place, yeah, they're going to get you. They're going to get you. They're going to get your kids. They're going to get your colleagues, unless we know how to become indistractable. The good news is it's actually not that hard, right? There's just four steps to it and anyone can do it. Yeah.

Can we walk through sort of like a high level exploration of those things? Sure. Yeah. So the four steps to becoming indistractable, I'll go through them super quick and then we can dive into the areas that you think are particularly interesting. The first step is to master our internal triggers, which we talked about the most so far. The next step is to make time for traction. The third step is to hack back external triggers. And the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pacts. So let me back up and kind of paint this picture in the listener's mind for this

model, this idea that helps inform the strategy behind how we manage distraction, not so much the tactics, right? Strategy, sorry, tactics are what we do. Strategy is why we do it. So if I can get across the strategy, whether people buy the book or not, I don't care. What I want people to understand is this strategy, this framework that they can make up their own tactics that work for them. So here's the strategy. Before we can talk about why we do things we don't want to do, right? Why do we get distracted? Let's start with what the definition of distraction actually is. What are we talking about when we use this word distraction? The opposite of distraction is not focus. The opposite of distraction is traction, right? Traction and distraction actually come

from the same Latin root, trahare, which means to pull. And both words end in A-C-T-I-O-N, action, right? Distraction and traction both end in action, reminding us these are things we do, not things that happen to us, things that we do, actions we take. So if you can think of a big plus mark, and on the horizontal axis, you have to the right an arrow pointing towards traction, things we want to do, actions that we do with intent. The opposite of traction is distraction, any action we take that moves us away from what we want to do. Now, this is really important because what this model says is that anything that you want to do with your time, anything that you do with intent, anything that is consistent with your values is traction. Do it. If you enjoy playing video games, do it. If you want to meditate, do it. If you want to take a long walk

and think of nothing, do it. It's all traction if you do it on your schedule, not on somebody else's. And so it frees us from this ridiculous moral high ground that people take that says, oh, watching football is somehow okay for four hours, but playing Minecraft or Candy Crush, that's not okay. That's somehow melting your brain. That's ridiculous. They're both pastimes. So whatever it is you want to do with your time is up to you as long as it's consistent with your values. It's also pretty pernicious, actually, when we think about it. This is what I see a lot with business professionals. They'll say, yeah, I wanted to do

that big project today. I have to finish my slides or I have to do this bit of research. It's really hard, heavy lifting, but I needed to check my email. So I emailed for three hours. Well, email, if that's not what you plan to do, is also just as much of a distraction, right? It feels worky, but this is what we call pseudo work. It feels like that's what you're supposed to do. It feels like traction, but it's not. Distraction tricked you because unless you planned to do that activity, it is also just as much of a distraction.

So that's the horizontal axis, traction, distraction. Now we got the vertical axis. And the vertical axis, I want you to think of two arrows pointing to the center of where these lines intersect. Okay? And these represent the two things that drive all of our behavior. The triggers. External triggers and internal triggers.

So external triggers are the pings, the dings, the rings, all of these things in our environment that give us some piece of information for what to do next. Right? So if a phone rings, that's an external trigger that prompts you to either traction or distraction. If you were waiting for that phone call and that was what you wanted to do, well, great, it's moving you towards traction. But if you're in the middle of trying to concentrate on a big project that requires focus and you want to do something else and you get that phone call, well, now it's moving you towards distraction. So those are the external triggers. The most important is that first step, the internal triggers. So it turns out one of the revelations that I had writing this book was that I subscribed to, I think what most people think

is the nature of motivation, that nature of motivation, according to Freud, was the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, right? Freud's pleasure principle. Turns out it's not true. That psychologically speaking, neurologically speaking, it's not about the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. It's actually pain all the way down. That all human behavior is motivated by a desire to escape discomfort, all human behavior.

Even wanting something that feels good, wanting to connect with a friend, wanting something, any pleasurable desire is itself psychologically destabilizing, right? And so what that means is that if everything we do, even the pursuit of pleasure is really about the desire to escape an uncomfortable emotional state, wanting, craving, desire, that means that time management is pain management. And that was a big, big revelation for me. And I hadn't seen it kind of expressed this way before, that fundamentally, if we don't do what we say we're going to do, it's the first step has to be figuring out what uncomfortable sensation we're trying to escape. And so I give techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy. It's not technique. I hate these self-help books that say, well,

it worked for me, right? Take cold showers because that's what worked for me. No, I want to see the peer-reviewed study on everything I recommend and I want to try it myself. And it turns out there's some really simple techniques that we can use to help us deal with those internal triggers in a healthier manner so that we can do things that are healthful as opposed to hurtful. Yeah. It's so interesting that you sort of say when you really deconstruct it also that it's pain all the way down.

Because I think a lot of people would, they don't want to actually believe it. So they'll reject it out of hand because like, no, no, no, no, my life isn't all about pain. It's like, I don't wake up in the morning and every action I take is not about avoiding some degree of pain. Like my motivation for some things is love. It's delight. It's service. It's all these different things. I mean, you could probably look at each one of those

and say, okay, so that is in fact, you know, like the positive frame that you're putting on it. But what's underneath that, that you want less of? Right. Or what do you, or is the desire for that positive state itself uncomfortable, which it always is. Right. The brain doesn't get us to act because something feels good. It gets us to act because something felt good. Right. Right. So, and one of the things that I take issue with in the self-help personal development community is this notion, this false notion that somehow if we're not happy, if we're not satisfied, that something's wrong with us. Yeah.

Nothing could be further from the truth. You are built for dissatisfaction. Yeah. Our species is designed to never be satisfied. If there was ever a branch of homo sapiens that was satisfied, they got killed and probably eaten by our ancestors. They didn't make it. So we are perpetually perturbed and there is a confluence of different cognitive quirks

like heuristic hedonic adaptation and negativity bias, boredom, rumination. Exactly. But the thing is, most people will go into two categories when they get distracted. I call them the blamers or the sham go into two categories when they get distracted. I call them the blamers or the shamers. The blamers get distracted.

They don't do what they say they're going to do. And they say, oh, you see, I have a short attention span or I have an addictive personality. There's something wrong with me, right? Those are the blamers. The shamers say, you see, it's that company that did it to me. They're trying to addict me.

It's their fault. And the answer is neither. Neither of those are correct. Because what this really is, is behavior. And behavior can change. It's not about blaming. It's not about shaming. It's about learning how do we deal with our behaviors in a more healthful manner. And the power is really ours. We really can do this. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

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that you talked about, so we've been focusing a lot on the internal triggers and we focused a bit on the external stuff. You mentioned this thing, two other things, hackbacks and pacts.

Tell me a bit more about these because I think these are really fascinating also. Yeah, yeah. So the first step is manage internal triggers. The second step is make time for traction. The third step is to hack back the external triggers. So hacking back external triggers is about removing all of these things in our environment that prompt us towards distraction as opposed to traction. Not only, you know, the obvious culprits like our phones and our laptops, which by the way, I can show you how to fix and make them indistractable in less than an hour, right?

Very, very quickly, I can teach you exactly how to make those things indistractable. And by the way, big bad Mark Zuckerberg can't do anything once you've turned off those notification settings. Two thirds of people with a smartphone never change their notification settings. Really?

I don't wanna hear about your phone becoming distracted if you haven't taken a few minutes to change your notification settings. That was the first thing I do with mine. I have nothing that comes through. Exactly. And so there's all kinds of other things we can do. Like, for example, do not disturb while driving. Well, this comes standard on iOS. You can use do not disturb while driving so that you can customize that message. So if you call me, for example, when we're having a conversation, I don't want to be interrupted. It'll say I'm indistractable right now. If this is urgent, text me the word urgent.

So if that, God forbid, something is really, you know, really happening and I need to, it needs my attention. Okay, that will come through now. But nine times out of 10, it's not urgent. It can wait a little longer.

So there's all kinds of things we can do to hack back our technology. What many people don't consider, however, you know, we like to beat up on technology, but distractions are all around us, right? If you set out to work on something and your kid comes in and interrupts you, well, that's also a distraction. If a colleague comes by, you know, one of the most common forms of distraction is the open floor plan office. Constant source of distraction that people have to operate under. So I found this beautiful anecdote that really illustrates this point. Let me back up.

If I were to ask you, what's the third leading cause of death in the United States of America? I'll give you the first two. Number one is heart disease. Number two is cancer. What's the third leading cause of death, would you think? My mind goes to accidents or something like that. Yeah. Maybe accidents or Alzheimer's or stroke. Not even close. If it was a disease, the third leading cause of death would be prescription mistakes. People in hospitals receiving the wrong medication or the wrong dosage of medication from a healthcare practitioner.

200,000 Americans are harmed every single year because of prescription mistakes. Turns out this is a 100% preventable problem. Most hospitals in America just say, well, that's a fact of life. What are we going to do? Until a brave group of nurses at UCSF actually decided to take on this challenge. And they wanted to figure out why were all these prescription mistakes occurring? Again, this is not something that,

you know, the patient messes up. This is healthcare practitioners messing up. And they found that the source of all of these errors that were killing people and harming a lot of people was distraction. Turns out that what was happening is when a nurse practitioner was dosing out medication, somebody would interrupt her,

a colleague, a doctor, a patient would interrupt her or him and they would get distracted and their work would degrade. Now, what's interesting here is the nurses didn't realize that this was happening. So the mistakes weren't evident until much later. And this is exactly what happens to us, us knowledge workers. We think our work is fine, right? But we don't realize how much better our work could be if we were not interrupted all day long. And so what was the solution? So

this group of nurses came up with a solution that reduced the number of prescription mistakes by 88%. 88% reduction in prescription mistakes occurred, not with some multimillion dollar app or technology. What they did, they had the nurse practitioners wear bright plastic vests. And these vests said on them, medication round or dosing rounds in progress. And they told their colleagues, don't interrupt me right now. I'm doing something that requires me to not be distracted. And so they had remarkable results. And so what can we learn from this? As knowledge workers,

what can we learn from, glean from this? So inside every copy of Indistractable, there is a cardstock, one sheet of cardstock with this bright red print on it that you tear out of the book, you fold into thirds, and you put it on your monitor. And on your monitor, it says, so that everybody can see it, every colleague can see, I'm indistractable, please come back later. So it sends that message. And you say, okay, I can put on headphones. Not really, because people don't know if you're listening to this podcast right now, right? We want to send a very clear message that, nope, this is the time that I cannot be distracted. Now, I'm not saying you should do this all day, but if you want to do your best work, you have to carve out time in your what we do for a living. And the fact is we can't do it unless we make time for focused work. If we don't make ourselves that time,

if we don't hack back those external triggers, both the digital kind, as well as the kinds in our physical environments will constantly be interrupted and we won't do our best work. Yeah, and you build on top of that, right? Not only do you become more focused, do your best work and very likely in less time,

but it also buys you a certain amount of bandwidth to go and do some of those other things that you say are really constructive and valuable in your life, but that you were either becoming distracted by or your distractions during the work process made it take so much longer and you become so much less effective

that you legitimately don't have time for these other things anyway. So it like buys you back, not just that, but a whole bunch of other bandwidth to do these other things anyway. So it like buys you back, not just that, but a whole bunch of other bandwidth to do these other beneficial things. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's, you know, so this is where the second technique of making time for traction comes in,

that it turns out that two thirds of people don't keep a calendar. And even the third that do keep a calendar, most of them don't keep it, let me say, correctly. And the idea here is that we have no right to call something a distraction unless we know what it distracted us from. So I talk about this friend of mine

who I talk about in the book, where she came to me and she said, you know, you wrote this book, Hooked, and now I'm completely distracted. I can't get anything done. You know, Twitter and Facebook and my boss, and you know, I'm constantly on Slack channels. It's all your fault.

And I said, wow, you know, I'm really sorry. Can you tell me what you got distracted from today? What is it that you wanted to do that you didn't accomplish? Show me your calendar. And she takes out her phone, kind of sheepishly hands it to me. And you know, I can see in her calendar app,

it's completely blank. There's nothing on her calendar. Maybe like a dentist appointment was there or something. So we have to plan our time because in this day and age, if you don't plan your day, someone else will. The technology is too persuasive. You're going to use it, right?

Your boss is going to reach out to you. Your kids are gonna want something. Your significant other, Trump is gonna say something that is going to get you off track unless you plan your day. And I'm not gonna tell you what to put in your day. I don't care. I want you to live your day according to your values, to make time for yourself, for your relationships and for your work with time on your calendar to do the things that are important to you. Yeah. It lets you reclaim a sense of intentionality. That last thing, pacts.

Pacts. Yeah. So this is the fourth and final step. Some people have heard of this technique. It's a very old technique and they use it in the wrong order and it backfires. So before I describe what it is exactly, I want to emphasize that you have to use this technique last. It is only effective after you've done the other three, right? If you do this first, it will backfire. You have to first master the internal triggers, make time for traction and hack back the external triggers. Pacts are all about pre-commitment. So one mantra that I like to repeat is that the antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. The antidote for impulsiveness is forethought. If you are lifting the chocolate cake to your mouth, it's too impulsiveness is forethought. If you are lifting the chocolate

cake to your mouth, it's too late, right? Too late. If you are sleeping next to your cell phone and you find yourself picking it up every morning to check Instagram, too late, you lost. You have to plan ahead. So pre-commitments, the first documented use of a pre-commitment device was way back with Ulysses in the Odyssey written by Homer 2,500 years ago. So Ulysses is this Greek hero. He's sailing his ship home and along his path, he needs to pass the island of the sirens. The sirens are these mythical creatures

that sing this magical song. And anybody who hears the song crashes their ship onto the island of the sirens where they die. So Ulysses knows this is coming and he decides to, you know, the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. He decides to do something to prevent himself from getting distracted. He tells his crew to put beeswax in their ears and to tie him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go.

And they abide. And you know what? They sail right past the island of the sirens, safely returning home. We can use that same lesson throughout our lives. We do this already. So the purpose of a 401k that has penalties if you withdraw your money before retirement, the purpose of a marriage ceremony, all of these things are pre-commitments

to make sure that when we are tempted to do something, we add a little bit of friction to make sure we don't do something we don't want to really do. So we can use three types of packs, effort packs, price packs, and identity packs. Effort packs are when we insert some bit of work in between us and something we don't want. So for example, every day when I do my writing time, and writing is hard work, right? I constantly get distracted. I want to, or I should say, I want to get distracted. I want to go on Google.

I want to check email, but I don't. And I don't because I use this free app called Forest. And Forest, you set a little timer. And as soon as you click go on your phone, it plants a little virtual tree. And if you pick up the phone and do anything with it, the little virtual tree dies. It's a it plants a little virtual tree, right? And if you pick up the phone and do anything with it, the little virtual tree dies. It's a stupid virtual tree. Who cares? Right? But it's enough of a, of a, of a bit of effort there that reminds me, nope, I made a pact with myself. That's not what I want to do. Another example. So in my home, we've been talking

now for a while. I can get a little vulnerable here. I can, I can tell you a personal story. I've been married for 20 years and, or almost 20 years. And a few years ago, our sex life was really suffering because every night we were going to bed and instead of being intimate, I was fondling the iPad and she was caressing the computer or the phone or something. And night after night, this would happen. We weren't getting enough sleep and we weren't having any time to be intimate together. So I went to the hardware store and I got a $5 outlet timer. And this outlet timer plugs into the wall and whatever you plug into that outlet timer

will turn off at any time of day or night that you set. So what did I plug into that outlet timer? My router. So every night at 10 p.m., my internet shuts off. Again, a bit of effort. If I really wanted to go turn it back on, of course I could, but it's a bit of effort to keep me from doing something I don't want to do. So that's an effort pact. A price pact involves some kind of cost to doing something you don't want to do. So there's different ways you can do that as well. We can go into, but my favorite of the three packs is the identity pact. The identity pact is when we build

a self-image that helps us stay consistent with the person we want to be. Now, where did this insight come from? It comes from organized religion. When you think about how an Orthodox Jew doesn't say to themselves, hmm, I wonder if I should have some bacon today. No, they just don't eat bacon because they are Orthodox observant Jews. They don't eat it. A Muslim, an observant Muslim doesn't say, hmm, I wonder if I should have that gin and tonic. No, observant Muslims don't drink alcohol.

It's part of who they are. There's a joke that goes, how do you know someone is a vegetarian? Don't worry, they'll tell you, right? It's part of their identity. I was a vegetarian for five years. And I remember, I'll tell you, when I was a vegetarian, meat was not something I had to struggle with.

It's something I just did not eat because I was a vegetarian. And so this is why the book is called Indistractable. Because I want people to have this moniker around how they identify themselves, right? That this is the kind of person that I am. I am the kind of person who strives to do what they say they're going to do. Hey, I'm sorry.

You know, someone complains to you and says, why didn't you reply to my text? Oh, you know what? I'm indistractable. That's not what I do. Why do you put up that crazy screen sign on your monitor to tell people that you can't be bothered? Oh, you see, I'm indistractable.

Why is that any more or less crazy than saying, oh, I'm an Orthodox Jew or an observant Muslim? No, it's not. It can be part of our identity. And so that's the third type of pact, creating identity for yourself that keeps you consistent with what you want to do, because it requires no self-control, right?

You don't have to expend any kind of self-control. It's not something that is difficult anymore once it's part of your identity. Yeah. So I'm in, I buy it all. I get it and it makes sense. Like there's science behind it. And in the real world, you know,

let's say you work in an office, right? And you've got your little card, which says like, I am, you know, like indistractable and you put it up on your computer, right? And your immediate supervisor walks by, rips off your computer and says, no, you're available when I need you to be available. That is your job. That's what you're getting paid for. And the culture of either, maybe it's the culture of where you work is that that's not okay.

Or maybe it's the culture of the social groups you hang out with where that's not okay. Or maybe it's the culture of where you volunteer, whatever it is, you know, if the place that you seek either employment or belonging normalizes distraction, how do you then, but you buy into everything that we've been talking about. You're like, yes, I want to do this. How do you navigate those? Such a great point. I'm so glad you brought it up. Let's first acknowledge what the real source of the problem, what's the proximate cause, what's the root cause. Let's say you work in an office environment where this is the case. People are constantly checking email all day long, all day long on Slack channels. Nobody can get any focused work done.

What's the real source? Is it the technology? Or is it that boss that doesn't let you get any time for focused work that won't leave you alone? It's the culture, right? Exactly. It's the individuals and the culture. It's the culture. That's exactly right.

So there's an entire section in the book. It's probably my favorite section in the book that's titled, Distraction in the Workplace is a Symptom of Cultural Dysfunction. So let's first acknowledge that we need to let technology off the hook here. It ain't Slack doing it to you.

It's your goddamn boss. And it's a crappy workplace culture where people can't talk about their problems. That's the real source of the problem. Now, technology accelerates this flywheel of responsiveness. So your boss expects you to be always on. That's who gets promoted is the person who's constantly checking every Slack channel

and every email all day long. They get promoted. So now everybody's got to do it. And it becomes a hellish place to work. The good news is, is that we can do something about it. It's not easy, necessarily. Some circumstances, you know, extreme circumstances, you know what, you're just not in the right office culture. Sometimes, by the way, if you're okay with this, right, if you want to be an investment banker, you probably need to know what you're getting into. You're going to be working a lot of hours. That's just the way that industry works, right? If you're okay with this, right? If you want to be an investment banker, you probably need to know what you're getting into. You're going to be working a lot of hours. That's just the way that industry works, right? If you're allergic to pollen,

you probably shouldn't be a forest ranger. So you should know what you're getting into. But what I advise is if there's a misalignment of expectations, right? So the way knowledge work is paid is I'm going to give you money, I'm going to give you a salary, and there's an expectation of how much time you give me back, right? Correlated with some kind

of output to your work product. If there is a lie there, you know, you thought you were going to work 40 hours a week, but now you're expected to work 50, 60 hours a week and always be on call nights and weekends, there was a fib here. There was a fraud that occurred that you didn't expect to be always available to that degree. And if that's the case, the solution is not get rid of the technology. That's stupid. That's not going to happen. The solution is a conversation. And so it turns out that organizations that have a good relationship with technology and do not get constantly distracted. It's not the companies you would think of.

You would think, hey, if technology is correlated with all this distraction, well, then the companies that use technology the most should be the ones that are the most distracted, right? Take a look at Slack, for example. It's a case study in the book. Slack makes this group chat product. If anybody should be constantly distracted,

it should be the people at Slack. They use Slack more than anybody else, right? That's not the case. Because at Slack headquarters, by the way, if you go to Slack headquarters, at six o'clock, the office is empty. All weekend long, nobody is using Slack. Because if you go to Slack headquarters,

you will see a big sign in big pink neon that says, work hard and go home. It's part of the company culture. And so what we see is three traits at companies that have a culture where distraction is not a problem. The three traits are, they give people psychological safety, meaning that people feel they can talk about their problems without fear of retribution. Two, they make a space, a regular space for people to talk about these problems with psychological safety with point one. And three, leadership exemplifies what it means to be indistractable. And without those three criteria, you get crappy culture that leads to employee churn, a high employee turnover.

It actually has been correlated with symptoms of depression and anxiety disorder. Literally, our work is making us crazy. But the point here is it's about the culture. And thankfully, the culture can change. Yeah, it's amazing. As you're talking, I had this flashback years ago, I was doing some short-term consulting for a company and there was an all-hands meeting and all leadership and senior leadership were called into this meeting by the CEO who showed up a half an hour late. When he walked in the door, his head was down. He never looked up from his device. He didn't say hello to anybody. He bounced his way over to a seat, sat at his table with his head down and just on his thing for another 15 minutes.

45 minutes later, he got up in front of the group and talked about how morale was at an all-time low, productivity was all-time low. The turnover was five times the industry rate. And we need to make some big, abrupt changes now to make things better, to right this ship. And I'm just, I'm thinking to myself, wow. Crazy. Right.

But that is not, and what I've learned over the years is that is not an uncommon experience. You know, so much of this, it's built into the fiber of the culture and very often in organizations, it's top down, you know? Very true. And it's, if you are not at that top level where you do have a lot of control, then sometimes they're really tough decisions that you have to make within an organization about, you know, can you make change? Can you not make change?

And how genuinely constructive or destructive is the nature of this culture, not just to your productivity, but to your ability to flourish as a human being. So true. I mean, the studies are remarkable. We know that there is a confluence of two factors that are not only correlated, but have actually shown a causal relationship with depression, anxiety at work. These studies were conducted by Stansfield and Candy. They find that the confluence of work environments where people have high expectations coupled with low control.

These are the type of work environments that literally lead to depression, anxiety disorder. And we've all been in them. Burnout factories. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Where you, you know, you have super high expectations and there's nothing that you can do to get in control of that situation. And so what do people do this? Why does this lead to depression, anxiety disorder? It creates these internal triggers, these uncomfortable emotional states. And what do people do with uncomfortable emotional states? They look for solutions. So what do they do? They send more emails. They call more meetings in a desperate attempt to feel control over their circumstances. And the problem gets worse and worse and worse. So what I recommend is I do a profile of Boston Consulting Group. We're coming

full circle here because that's where I used to work. It was my first job out of college. and worse. So what I recommend is I do a profile of Boston Consulting Group. We're coming full circle here because that's where I used to work. It was my first job out of college. And let me tell you, I got out of Boston Consulting Group as quickly as I could because back then, our employee turnover was very high. It was a very high stress environment. I mean, I literally suffered from depression, anxiety. I didn't diagnose it back then, but I'm sure that's what I had because it was the epitome of high expectation, low control work culture. And they have made this massive transformation in the past few years. And they started very small.

They started with a case team, one case team of eight people. And they asked this case team to come up with a solution to this problem. What would it take to give everyone on this team one predictable night off per week? That's it, one night per week. Because remember, this is the service. So when they pose this question, people said, oh, that's impossible.

We're in multiple time zones. We're in the service business. What if somebody needs us? Impossible, can't be done. Well, then they said, okay, well, what if it's not us, right? This isn't for BCG. This is for one of our clients. Our clients comes to us and says, hey, we want to give everyone a predictable night off. What's your recommendation, BCG, your strategy consultants? What do we do? And it turns out once they framed it in that sense and they opened a dialogue around, hey, what would it take? What would it take here? Right? They didn't, I see a lot of companies saying, okay, well, let's copy what somebody else is doing. Email-free Wednesdays or, you know, no Slack Fridays. That stuff doesn't work.

It doesn't work because it's not customized to the organization and it doesn't fix the real problem. Again, those three solutions that I talked about earlier, psychological safety, time-to-air concerns, and exemplification of being indistractable by company leadership, none of them involved email-free Fridays. It's about airing your concerns. It's about having an environment where people can say without fear of retribution, hey, you know what, boss? This isn't working for me, right? I don't like the fact that I can't go to my kid's basketball game without fear that I'm going to be needed back at the office. And if you can't have that conversation, here's the amazing part. Once BCG implemented what they now call PTO, predictable time off, they have these small groups that talk about the problem. And when they talk about the problem, guess what happened? They realized there were all kinds of

other skeletons in the closet, all kinds of other things that nobody wanted to talk about, just like they didn't want to talk about the fact that they were constantly tethered to their devices. And so it improved not only employee retention, it improved customer service because people were talking about issues that they had otherwise kept inside. And so that's the real source of the problem is these companies that don't have a culture where people can air their concerns. The good news is that you can start very small. Case team of eight people, now it's something that's done throughout the organization. Yeah, that's amazing and inspiring and hope-giving to a certain extent that even the largest of organizations can start small, run these experiments, and then slowly let it ripple out. focus on a single issue, but that in a way telegraphed to everybody that we're opening the doors to hear you and it's safe to talk to us about this one thing. So maybe it's safe to

talk to us about other things too. Bingo. Bingo. Slack does this in a really interesting way. So Slack uses Slack a lot, this group chat service, and they actually have all of these Slack channels. Slack channels about everything within the company. There's a Slack channel for Star Wars fans and a Slack channel for people who want to get launched and all kinds of different Slack channels. One of the Slack channels is called Beef Tweets. And it's a channel to talk about gripes about the company. What's interesting is so that's the, you know, we talked about those three criteria, psychological safety, a forum to talk about your problems and an exemplification of being indestructible by leadership.

So it turns out that, you know, at BCG, they have these meetings. Okay, we're all gonna get together in a room and talk. At BCG, they do it over, I'm sorry, at Slack, they do it over Slack. And so that's the forum. And they do something really interesting. They actually use emoji to solve this problem.

So management will look at this channel of, you know, different gripes about the company. I don't like this. I don't like that, whatever it might be. And they'll use the eyes emoji to let people know, like Stuart Butterfield, the CEO will come in and say, yep, I saw that. A point taken. Acknowledging. Acknowledging. Exactly. And what does that do? So we talked about how high expectations, low control are these terrible workplace cultures. What does that do to your sense of agency and control when all of a sudden the CEO saw what you said and acknowledged it and is doing something about it? Well, your sense of agency and control now rises. And he literally, he created a Slack channel called the Hand Slap, which was for his employees to call him when he's off mission or doing something intentional or distracted or doing something that's,

you know, they perceive as not being in line with the ethos and the culture of like what they're about and the mission of the business. I mean, and he's like, I want to know, like I'm going to give you an actual channel to just tell me, you know, like this is a virtual hands lap, like, hey, we need to talk. So, you know, the final thing that, and we've kind of talked about it, but I think it's really relevant, especially to a lot of our listeners, is the idea of the way that we model behavior, you know,

for people who are either leaders of communities, leaders of organizations, or parents. So many people look to us to understand how to behave in the world, and especially as parents. We're both parents of kids. We can say all we want about the way to behave, the way to feel good about what we're doing in the world. But kids look to us as they just look at what we do. Have you looked at this, you know, so, and this is really coming full circle, right? Cause when we started out, you said a lot of the impetus

for actually going deep into this work was you sitting with your daughter and just being tuned out, you know, when the only thing she wanted was you to be there with her. And that of course transmits to her that that's, that's the appropriate way to behave as a person in the world. So when we come full circle and you're like,

okay, so how do we effectively model this for kids? How do we bring this into the way that we parent? Are there any shifts that you or deeper insights? Absolutely. So this is an area where believing and stopping with just the proximal cause is really dangerous. The proximal cause being, you see, this is what's happening to our kids.

This is what's happening to our kids. It's technology's fault. Because that's what's changed. And just as when I was with my daughter, looking at my iPhone, when we were playing, we had playtime together, it wasn't the iPhone's fault. There was stuff going on

inside me that I had to deal with. That's why I was distracted. There were emotions that I didn't know how to deal with in a constructive way. That was what was really going on. And you're absolutely right. It's ridiculous. Kids can smell hypocrisy from a mile away. And so if you're saying, get off Fortnite while you're checking email, they don't listen to you. And I feel so passionately about this area when it comes to kids. Because again, if we don't get to the root cause of the problem, we are not only ignoring the real problem, we're actually doing real harm. So let me explain why. So first of all, let's give some historical context here that parents have had a whole laundry list of reasons why their kids act in weird ways. We always have. Right. So one of the rock and roll, rock and roll and heavy metal and the radio and television and video games, the comic book.

Oh, my God. I was I was reading the transcripts for the 1950s Senate hearing around comic books. Literally the same language, like word for word for what people are saying in front of Congress today about social media, gaming, and technology. Like the same exact words. It's causing depression. It's causing suicide. It's melting their brains. Same exact words. Still not true.

Still not true. And here's why it's not true. First and foremost, we need to, let's talk about what's really going on with our kids. We do see a rise in suicide rates among teens in this country. But here's what nobody tells you about that statistic. Remember we talked about earlier when it comes to tech use, the issue is never black and white, that we have to think about who is using, what they're doing when they're using, how much they're using, and what they would do as an alternative. So when it comes to this rise of suicide among kids, which by the way is not at an all-time high, it's at a high since about 2006, 2007. It was much higher in the 1990s,

we don't know why. It turns out that almost all of that rise in teen suicide doesn't come from cities. It comes from rural areas. It comes from Trump country. And we don't know why. There is something going on in the heartland of this country, in the rural areas of this country, that is a cancer. We don't know what's going on in the heartland of this country, in the rural areas of this country, that is a cancer. We don't know what's going on exactly. But if the hypothesis is that tech is leading kids to suicide, well, then it should be happening everywhere kids are using tech, right? It should be happening in urban areas, which by the way, have higher penetration rates of cell phones

and social media than rural areas. It should be happening in other countries. And yet it turns out this is a homegrown American problem. Teenage suicide rates are not rising in any other OECD country. In Japan, they're falling. In Nordic countries, they're falling. Or they're staying stable in all other OECD countries.

And technology is still through the roof in those. Of course. They've been using social media and Facebook and the technology just as much. So that doesn't make sense. We should also acknowledge, by the way, that if we're going to blame technology for these problems, and I think this is correlation, but people love finding causation. Well, then why aren't we looking at all the other statistics? You know, what's also happened since 2008, since the adoption of the iPhone, is that all the bad stuff that kids used to do is way,

way down. Truancy, incarceration, murder, drug use, pregnancy, all of these things are at record lows. I mean, this was the generation of the super predator. There are prisons empty because juveniles didn't commit the crimes they were supposed to commit. So I would argue if you were going to invent a device to keep kids off the streets, off the roads, right, preventing driving fatalities and safely at home, you would invent these technologies. So we also need to, that's that fourth point around what would they be doing as an alternative? My daughter had this list of 100 best movies you should watch. And one of the movies was American Graffiti.

Have you seen this movie? It's like from 1970 something, right? Classic. It's Richard Dreyfuss. And it's about like good old days, right? They based Happy Days, the television series on this movie. And I thought, okay, this would be the good old days, the 1950s when kids were innocent and had good fun.

It's horrible. It's about how kids used to drag race and drink and drive and all these terrible things that kids used to do, which are all at record lows. It is statistically the safest time in history to be a child today. And so if we're gonna blame technology

for all these things, we should probably also look at some of the potential good aspects. Now, let's get into the weeds here a little bit. Just because I think pretty conclusively we can say that technology is not causing these problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't find ways to help our kids manage the use of the technology. Because the real problem is not that it's melting your brain. There has been zero studies, zero studies that show that two hours or less of extra screen time has any negative effects on our kids. It's only when you get into the extreme use, five,

six hours a day, that's when you start seeing small negative correlations with wellbeing. The real cost, the real harm done is the opportunity cost. It's what you could do instead. And we explained this to my daughter starting at a very, very young age. You know, some of her first words were iPad time, iPad time. She constantly wanted to use the iPad. And so we could talk to her in this way of saying, look, there's nothing wrong with these things, but it comes at the cost of being with your friends, being with us, going outside, right?

All of those things are the price of spending a lot of time on your iPad, watching a video or playing an app. As long as it was age appropriate, of course we have to monitor. And so we gave her the keys. We said, how much time is good for you to spend watching Netflix, for example, these age appropriate shows? And she said, 45 minutes, right? Well, she actually said two episodes, two episodes in her mind. And

so that calculates out to 45 minutes. Great. So now she has the responsibility. Now she's 11 years old. She has the responsibility to monitor her own time. So I do advocate for helping kids monitor overuse, but here's the real heart of the issue. We talked about a lot about proximal causes versus root causes. We need to ask ourselves why those kids who are overusing do so. And my conclusion after looking at all the research out there that I could possibly find is that our kids today are deficient in psychological nutrients. So we have physiological nutrients. We have carbohydrates, protein, and fat.

And it turns out there are three psychological nutrients. Now, I didn't make this up. This is 40-year-old research from Desi and Ryan called self-determination theory. And Desi and Ryan say that these three pillars of self-determination theory, this is the most widely studied theory of human motivation out there, that all of us need a sense of competency, autonomy, and relatedness. These three things are critical to everyone's psychological well-being, especially our kids. But when we look at the world our kids inhabit today,

they have a deficiency in these three psychological nutrients. So the needs displacement hypothesis says that when you don't get these psychological nutrients met in the real world, you look for them in the virtual world. So competency, for example. What's also correlated with the rise of increased tech use is the rise of teaching towards the test, right? The rise of standardized testing means that our children are told multiple times a year that they are incompetent, that they can't cut it. And so when we test the hell out of them, I mean, kids today in public schools are tested constantly with these standardized tests. Exactly. And so for some kids, that's fine. For a minority of kids, they do well, they're fine. But a lot of kids get the message, you are not competent. And they need it.

It's a psychological nutrient. So where do they go? The gaming companies are very happy. Fortnite comes along and says, hey, guess what? In this virtual world, you are God. Yeah. You are super competent. So interesting.

So that's where they go. That's the proxy for competence. Exactly. Let's take the next one, autonomy. We know that kids today are hyper-regulated and scheduled, right? More than any time in history. Peter Gray did some fascinating studies where he showed that the average child today has 10 times more rules imposed on them than the average adult, twice as many as an incarcerated felon. There are two places where we allow society to

tell people what to do, what to think, where to go, what to wear, who they can be friends with, what to eat, and that's school and prison. And so is it any surprise when we treat children like animals in cages that they behave as such. They do things that are very antisocial and counterproductive. And so if they are starving for autonomy, if they are starving to control their behavior and do what they wanna do with their time, again, is it any surprise they go online

and go play Minecraft where they can have autonomy to do whatever they want in this virtual world? Of course, that's the proxy. That's where they get that psychological nutrient meant. And then finally, relatedness. There has been a crisis of play in this country. Jonathan Haidt talks about this, and I know you've talked to him. A wonderful book called The Coddling of the American Mind. We don't agree on all our conclusions, but what he points out, and I agree with, is that we have seen a precipitous drop off in the amount of free play that kids are given today. Neighborhoods in this country used to sing with the sound of kids

playing outside. You don't see that anymore because parents are terrified. We've been told by the media that somebody's going to kidnap your kid and abduct your kid. It turns out this is the safest time to be a child in American history, but we don't let our kids go outside either because we're too scared to let them outside. Or we think we're doing them a service by getting them into Kumon and Mandarin lessons and swim lessons. And we schedule their entire day and they have no time to do one of the most psychologically beneficial things they could possibly do with their time, which is to play. Without supervision from coaches, without supervision from adults, play is where we learn our place in the world, where our peers tell us, hey, you know what?

You're not so great. If you want me to be nice to you, you have to be nice to me. Play is critical. But when kids can't find that time to socialize, to get that vitamin of relatedness fulfilled, guess where they go? Social media, Snapchat, Instagram. That's where they go. If we don't make time for our kids to socialize with free play, well, we can't expect them to sit there and and we just played. Kids don't do that anymore. And that, those three deficiencies in psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy, and relatedness, that is why kids overuse technology. Yeah, so powerful. And it really helps you reframe what's going on there. And I think as a parent,

I wonder if you think, as a parent, I think you hear this and you're like, yeah, I get it. I wonder if you offer the same argument out to a kid, to a teenager, if they would just roll their eyes or if they're like, oh, huh, this is actually causing me harm. And maybe I would make different choices now that I kind of understand what's really going on here. Yeah. You know, we have to think about what it's displacing. I think that's super important. Frankly, like, who am I to give advice to a single parent who would much rather have their kid at home playing Fortnite than on the streets, right? So again, it's not so simple. I do think there are some

hard and fast rules. For example, what the hell are parents doing giving their kids access to social media before age 13? I don't get that. If the companies themselves tell you, do not let your kid use this before age 13, they are telling you don't let them do this. Why would we let our kids use it? So I don't think kids need a smartphone before age 13. Give them a flip phone. Give them a GPS watch. They don't need apps and all that stuff before age 13. They definitely don't need to be on social media before age 13, maybe not until college. I just don't see enough benefit to it. And you say, oh, but all their friends are using it. So? So? We pay the cell phone bill. So when it comes to the discussion of the kids, I don't know if I would go into this whole self-determination theory. Yeah, you can't do that with a 14 year old. Right. What I would do is this argument that I did with my five-year-old around how much time do you think is a good investment into these

tools, right? How much time is okay for you to watch Netflix because it comes at the cost of all the stuff you have to do your homework, time with friends, play with us, all this other stuff. And in those terms, I think they get it. Yeah. I think. And the interesting thing is you can actually use the same four steps of mastering the internal triggers, making time for traction, hacking back the external triggers and using pact. You can teach them how to be indistractable for themselves because look, when they leave the house,

if all we do is to say no Xbox, no Fortnite, no iPhone, that can't be. Yeah. We know what they're going to do in college. Yeah, exactly. So we have to teach them how to be indistractable now

before they leave the house. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. This is so fascinating. I love that we've sort of been able to weave the thread through your journey, through the fundamentals of these ideas and then bring it full circle back to kind of where we started.

So sitting here in a studio, thinking about these ideas and thinking about the bigger context of you and your life, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life, we should empower ourselves as much as possible to understand the root causes of our behaviors.

And as much as we can understand the root causes of what's happening in the world around us. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible.

You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes. And of

course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.