Christina: [00:00:00] Welcome to the JOMOcast. I'm your host, Christina Crook. Join us as we sit down with leading founders, creators and thought leaders to learn how they embrace the joy of missing out.

These guests are choosing to digitally detox and usher balance into their busy lives. Let's dive right in.

NIR Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a lecturer in marketing at the Stanford graduate school of business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of design at Stanford. Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies [00:01:00] since 2003, and was dubbed by the MIT technology review as the prophet of habit-forming technology.

He authored two best-selling books, Hooked: how to build habit-forming products, and the more recent Indistractable: how to control your attention and choose your life. Nir is also an active investor in habit-forming technologies; some of his past investments included eventbrite, anchor.fm, which was acquired by Spotify, Marco polo, and more.

He attended the Stanford graduate school of business and Emory university. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to Nir Eyal.

Nir, thank you so much for being with me today. This is the JOMOcast and I wanted to start off our conversation today by asking you, what is the joy of missing out mean to you?

Nir: So the joy of missing out is about living your life. According to your values. I'm [00:02:00] very big on values. And I, and if I'm honest with you before I started this line of research that led to publishing my book Indistractible, I didn't actually really understand what values were. If you ask me, okay, what are values and values are, if you would have said are values important to you?

I would've said yes, values very. But what our values, I don't really know. But now I do know the definition, my definition of values are attributes of the person that I want to become. Those are my values- attributes of the person I want to become. 

And so when it comes to the joy of missing out, I think that it's really about living according to what you say is an attribute of the person you want to become without the influence of what other people want you to do with your time; what other people want you to do with your attention; what other people want you to do with. It's about taking the joy, the pleasure in living your life on your terms, controlling your attention, therefore controlling your time and your life.

Christina: I love it. Amazing answer. So you've already referenced Indistractible. We know you're the author of Hooked and Indistractible. We heard that in the [00:03:00] intro today, but could you tell us more about your work and particularly what do you love about what you do? 

Nir: Oh, man. I really love my job now. I did. This is the first job I've ever really, to be honest.

I started a couple companies. I worked as a consultant. I've had a lot of jobs in my life and this is the first one I really love. And I finally found what I want to do for the rest of my life. And the reason I love it so much is because, as a fellow author, my good friend, Gretchen Rubin, maybe you've read some of her books, happiness project she's written several books now.

But she told me once that research is me-search, that what I love about my job is that I get to come up with interesting questions and answer them for myself. And that's why I write books. And that's why I do my research is because I got a problem. And for most of my problems in life I'll talk about them with my wife, I'll write about them. I'll think about them. I'll process them. If I still don't get a satisfactory answer, I'll go read somebody else's book on [00:04:00] it. And most of the time somebody else has done research that gives me my answer. But then once in a while, about every five years or so has been. They will be a problem that I read the experts books on, and none of them fix my problem.

And my problem a few years ago was distraction. I've never been good about self control. I've never been good about willpower. And even like saying those words still gives me. Like makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up because I used to be clinically obese. I remember hearing my grandmother and my mother tell me about how I should just have more self control and, stop eating so much.

And I just hated it. It was just such a terrible thing. And I think that, overcoming these behaviors that I felt like controlled me, whether it was food, and then more recently all kinds of distractions, particularly in the form of the technology that I used and to a harmful extent.

Because I get to research this I read all the other books on the topic about distraction and all the other books on the topic basically [00:05:00] said it's the technology's fault. It's all Facebook's fault. It's all the big tech companies fault. Stop using technology, right? Another professor in some ivory tower saying just stop using your cell phone.

Thanks stupid. I can't do that. I have a job and I have a family that lives thousands of miles away that I want to stay connected with. So that doesn't work for me. And even when I took the advice. Okay. So I said, you know what, I'm just going to try it. I'm going to try one of these digital detoxes.

And I got myself a flip phone. I bought it online on Alibaba for 12 bucks, like straight from China, this like flip phone, like we used to have in the 1990s. And I got myself a a word processor from this library in like middle of Wisconsin on eBay, they were selling these 1990s word processors with no internet connection.

All you can do is type on it. And I said, okay, I'm going to follow their advice. Nothing's going to distract me. I've got this old technology with no internet, And I would sit down and I was okay, now I'm going to. But, what, there's that book that I've been meaning to finish?

Let me just check that out. Cause there's probably some good research in that book or let me just tidy up my [00:06:00] desk or let me just clean up, I need to take out the trash, right? Oh, the laundry. I got to go do laundry. And I would still get distracted even without the technology! It's snack time.

Oh, you know what? I need to make a pour over coffee right now, because then I'll be able to, to very important. Yeah. Yeah. And so what I discovered was that distraction is a much deeper. And I think more interesting problem than just the tools that distract us because people have been blaming the tools forever, right?

If you look at historically people blame the television and the radio and the comic books, and it's like literally the same words that people use today to talk about how, video games and Facebook are melting your brain. It's the same exact words people said about the latest moral panic, the one before.

And so that can't be the source of the problem. I wanted to go much deeper to figure out really why I was getting distracted. 

Christina: Awesome. So let's talk about the book. Let's talk about habits. So you referenced some of the challenges that you've personally sought to overcome and have overcome. What's been the [00:07:00] hardest, bad habit for you to break? What behavioral change projects have you embarked on personally? And how did they go? 

Nir: I will say lately. So first of all, becoming indistractable. So the title of the book doesn't mean you never get distracted. Okay. I still get distracted from time to time, but I think the difference is a distractable person lets the same thing, distract them again and again.

Pola Coelho has a wonderful quote. He says "a mistake repeated more than once is a decision." And so distractible people -like I used to be-decided to be distractable. We let ourselves get distracted by the same thing again and again. Now I am indistractible: an indestractible person strives to do what they say they're going to do.

They are as honest with themselves as they are with other people. And I find that most people are very honest with others. We never want to be called a liar. That's a terrible thing to be called. We would never lie to the people we love or friends or, our colleagues, we would never lie to others, but we lie to ourselves all the time.

We would [00:08:00] say, I would say I was going to work out. I didn't, I would say I was going to eat right. I'll start tomorrow. I would say I was going to work on that big project. Okay. It can wait and I would keep lying to myself all the time. And that's how, why I was a distracted person. Whereas now, because I'm indistractible, I know why I got distracted and I can take steps today to make sure I don't get distracted tomorrow. 

But when things change, so you asked what did I struggle with? When things change, there are surprises, right? So you can get distracted once, right? If it's not a repeated thing, then you don't have the defenses yet to defend against it. You don't know why you got distracted. 

So when Corona hit, I thought the world was distracting before Corona, and then all of a sudden we have all these new distractions. So my biggest challenge was the news. That I would check the news thinking it's my civic duty to stay up to date on every political, this and that.

It's you know, I have to keep up to date with what's happening every day. Like I should be an armchair epidemiologist to make sure that I'm prepared to fight the [00:09:00] virus. But if I'm really honest with you, it was a way to deal with my anxiety. It was a way to deal with my fear. I wasn't solving the problem by worrying about something a thousand miles away.

I can't do anything about 99% of what's in the news. I was doing it to escape. I was doing it to alleviate my discomfort of uncertainty and fear and stress, but of course, the news was just making things worse. I was getting more stressed, more anxious, more uncertain. And frankly, this is the same reason I was obese, that same spiral of I wasn't eating because food was delicious. That was literally the icing on the cake. So to speak, the real reason I was overeating was because I was eating when I felt stressed, I was eating when I felt lonely, I was eating when I felt shame for eating too much. That's why I was doing things I didn't want to do.

And so it's the same with all distractions, whether it's too much food, too much, Facebook, too much news, too much booze. It doesn't matter. It's all about this [00:10:00] fundamental understanding of impulse control of this problem of doing something that is not what you said you would do is always an impulse control issue.

It is not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you. It's simply that we haven't learned the tools to get out of our own way so that we can do what we really want to do in life. 

Christina: How did you get out of that news cycle? Was that the first step was becoming aware that it was just feeding your anxiety and then did you, how did you stop?

Nir: So I told my wife when Corona erupted, I said, I indestractible came out late last year 20 in late 2019. And I told her, I said, thank God I wrote this because I would be a hot mess right now because I had to take my own medicine. Like when I saw that this wasn't making me happy, I was spending more time than I wanted on these silly distractions to comfort myself.

I took out the book and I literally reread it. I literally started following the advice that had taken me five years to write. And I still reference it from time to time because [00:11:00] there, there are 30 pages of citations of peer reviewed studies, and I really wanted to get, I didn't want just, I hate these business books or personal advice books.

That's "Hey here's what worked for me. So it's going to work for everybody." That's not good enough. I really want to see when I read a book, it's nice to hear anecdotes, but I really want to see the peer reviewed studies, right? Like I am man of science. I want to see the publication that it was reviewed by other academics, like the replicated studies.

And so that's why it was really important for me to understand the science behind why I got distracted. And so I just followed my four strategies that I talk about in the book. So step number one is mastering the internal triggers. So that has to be the first step. And there's all kinds of strategies for how to do that.

The second step is to make time for traction. What's happened I think in this age of people working from home is that for many people, their schedules have been obliterated, right? That it turns out that getting up at a certain time of day to wake up the kids and get them fed and get them to [00:12:00] school and getting stuck in traffic, but then getting to work and having lunch meetings, all of that stuff provides us with a certain amount of structure that suddenly has evaporated from people's lives and that's had some really deleterious consequences. In fact, Google has reported that there's been this exponential spike in people searching for the term "what day is it?" Okay. People literally type into Google. What day is it? Because they can't remember like they've lost all track of time. 

Christina: One long March break.

Nir: Exactly. It's, it's maddening literally. And so what we have to do is to reimpose that schedule and this was part of my solution was having that strict schedule that kind of got obliterated during, all the madness that ensued. So going back to having a, what we call a time box schedule was very important.

And then step number three is about hacking back to the external triggers, right? Taking the steps to make sure you don't have all those pings and dings interrupting you and leading you towards distraction rather than the things you want to do, the acts of traction in your [00:13:00] life. And then finally, the fourth step is to prevent distraction with pacts.

And this is where we make promises to ourselves to others or ironically enough use technology to block out technology distraction. So I use all kinds of tools. Many of them are absolutely free. Anyone can use them. They're free for the taking to make sure that in a moment of weakness, when all they want to do is go, check the New York times or, watch some news or whatever that there are blocks in place as a firewall, as a last line of defense to make sure I don't get distracted. But it really.

These four strategies, not only in concert, but also in order, you have to do them in order. 

Master internal triggers, 

make time for traction, 

hack back external triggers and 

prevent distraction with pacts.

Christina: In your opinion, if you could only name one, what is the worst tech habit that most people have? 

Nir: TV

Christina: Tell me more. 

Nir: The average American, according to [00:14:00] Nielsen spends five hours a day on television, five hours. 

Christina: And now of course, TV encompasses like Amazon prime and Netflix and all of that. 

Nir: No, this isn't screen time. This is television time-just cable.

It pales all other sites, if you think about, for example, Facebook and their filings, they say that the average user of all their products. So Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, the average user, I think is around 50 minutes. So TV is five times more than that. That is by far the biggest distraction. When we talk about, Facebook influencing the elections or, manipulating people's brains or addicting, it's not even close, right?

Like the effect that Fox news had dwarfs any kind of impact that that you know, whatever your aunt spread rumors on Facebook or whatever it might be. 

Christina: It's so wild to think about. I've heard those stats before, but I think when I think about my peer group, and maybe you have the same [00:15:00] experience, none of my friends are watching the right traditional television, but is it the baby boomers that are just throwing that number way off?

Nir: Probably, could be, but it's the one thing I want to be careful of because I'm leading. I may, people may think that there's a conclusion here that I don't agree with. Which is, I don't think it's the technology itself and that technology could be the television, the radio, the internet.

It doesn't matter. Anything that you do with intent is fine, right? So I'm not one of these chicken, little tech critics that says technology is distracting and it's hijacking your brain. It's addicting you that is just not true. That's bunk. If you plan to use it on your schedule, what you are doing is essentially taking a distraction and turning it into traction by using forethought. 

So now I have time in my schedule to check Facebook. I have time for Twitter. I have time for LinkedIn it's in my schedule. And so if what you want to do with your time- back to your [00:16:00] values- if one of your attributes of the person you want to become is yeah, I want to interact with people online.

Great. Do it, enjoy it and do it without guilt. But do it on your schedule and with forethought, not when you feel lonely, bored, indecisive, stressed, anxious to escape reality, but do it thoughtfully because that's something that is part of your value system. It's part of the attributes of the person you want to become.

Christina: I like that a lot. 

Okay. I would like to talk a little bit about your first book, hooked, and how it relates to your new mission in life. So your book indistractible is written for the individual trying to change their behavior, but most of your prior work advises brands and how to make their products and experiences more habit-forming. Is it possible that someone now needs your help breaking out of the excessive use of a product whose brand has followed your other advice? 

Nir: I doubt it. At least I've never worked with a company. So first of all, there's certain, okay. Let me explain why I wrote hooked in the first place. So I wrote hooked I published it [00:17:00] in 2014 and I wrote it to steal the secrets from the big tech companies.

I wanted to democratize their techniques. They already know these techniques, right? Facebook and Instagram and Amazon and the gaming companies. They've known these techniques for years. They don't need my book. That's where I learned these things. I talked to people on the inside to learn how they do it.

The idea was what if all sorts of businesses could use the same psychology that makes these products so sticky, so engaging, so habit-forming, to build healthy habits. So companies like Kahoot, the world's largest educational software company, they called me up shortly after I published the book and the CEO Johan called me and said, "Hey, look, I have this idea for a business. I'm using your hook model. What do you think?" And I said, oh my God, this is incredible. I love it. And I invested in the company and today they're worth over a billion dollars. They just went public in October. And they are getting kids hooked onto online learning. I love it. I think that's a wonderful application of how we can build good habits in people's lives. Fit [00:18:00] on another app that uses the hook model gets people hooked to exercise.

In fact, the only case study in the book is uh, not some social media company, it's not some video game business. The only case study in hooked is the Bible app. It's one of the most widely used apps in the world. It would certainly be a multi-billion dollar company if it was publicly traded, but it's not. It's owned by a church.

And it turns out that the Bible app uses the hook model. And many people are surprised by that because they think, oh, it's sounds like an ominous title. And they only think about, the bad applications of technology. But what you think about the Bible will tell you a lot about what you think about the application of these techniques.

Because if you think religion is a force for good, that it brings people together, that it gives them a moral calling, that it gives them purpose in life. You're all for using behavioral design tactics that I described to help people engage with scripture. But if you're someone who believes that religion is a force for divisiveness, that it pulls people apart, that it separates us on sectarian [00:19:00] grounds, then you think that using the Bible app, using behavioral design for, to get people to use the Bible app is a terrible idea.

And so what I was trying to do was, I didn't call this out explicitly, but I'll tell it to you now. I wanted, I didn't want to make a case study out of Facebook or some video game company. I wanted to make it out of the Bible app, because if you were to ask is the Bible app good? Is it bad?

The answer is yes to both. 

Christina: It's back to your values again. 

Nir: Exactly. It's back to your values. Exactly. Is Facebook good or bad? Yes, both. It depends again on your values. And so I really wanted to show that it's not about these techniques. It's about how these products are used. That really makes the difference.

And so that's why I wrote that book in the first place. And to date, it's, I do have some rules around companies that I will not work with. So I don't work with any companies that prey on children, for example, because children are a protected class of people, right? There are laws that protect children from doing things they're not ready to do because they don't have sound mind and bodies.

We, my daughter, who's 12 years old. [00:20:00] She can't walk into a bar and order a gin and tonic, saunter into a casino and play blackjack. She's not ready for it. So anybody who caters to children, I don't work with. I won't work with any companies that knowingly pursue people who are pathologically addicted.

So I won't work with tobacco. I won't work with casinos. I won't work with pornography companies because those businesses depend on people who are pathologically addicted to stay in business. But for, the companies that use my book hooked it's healthcare companies that people want to use a medical device, but they keep forgetting to use it.

That's the kind of product that might use the hook model or of course education or those types of products.  

Christina: So last question on this topic related specifically to habits, is there a use case for a brand making their product or experience less habit forming and related to that? Is it by definition always better for a brand to maximize the amount of space they occupy in the consumer's minds or not?

Nir: I think if it's too much. You would hear about it. So if it's a burden you would know that. So part of the hook [00:21:00] model, there are four steps to the hook model, like the indistractable model. There's also four steps. I'm partial to four step models, apparently. So the, there, there are four steps in a hook model.

And so you have the trigger, the action, the reward and the investment. And one thing that's very important to realize is that if the product fundamentally the reward has to scratch the users. There has to be a connection there. So if the product is not rewarding, if it is not giving the user what they want, if it is not alleviating the pain point, they came to solve with.

They're not going to keep using it. People are not puppets on a string. You can't manipulate them any which way you want. They have to use the product because it benefits them in some way. So typically if a product is taking up too much space in someone's life people aren't stupid. They say, gosh, this product is too engaging, it's too much.

I don't need it this much. Like why does it keep bothering me? And they will disconnect from it. They'll find an alternative. They'll turn it off. They'll switch off notifications. They'll find something that serves them better. And everything and hooked, it's not mind control. It's about building kind of products that people use [00:22:00] because they want to not because they have to right.

Christina: Is the itch that social media is solving human connection. 

Nir: Yeah. 

Christina: So much to talk about it we'll just leave it at that for now. I think we'll circle back. I want to talk a bit about children and parenting as it relates to your topic. So you talk on your blog and in speaking events that you do not believe that screen time and social media use are the root causes of youth issues today.

And in fact, observe that a moral panic we've already talked about this a little bit, has accompanied every society, changing technology. Do you believe that children today are broadly no more emotionally unhealthy? Their ancestors. 

Nir: I think the opposite. I think they are more emotionally healthy than past generations.

If you look in fact at the 1980s, this, we talked about you hear every day, how the suicide rate is so high today, well it is high from a multi-year low around 2008. But if you go back further than 1980, some much higher suicide rates in children than we see. [00:23:00] Why? We don't know. And there's no good conclusion around that.

We also know, people who say, oh, social media is causing an increase in suicide and depression symptoms. If that was true, wouldn't you expect that to happen wherever we find cell phones and social media. That would make sense. If you introduce a factor let's say during the thalidomide crisis, there was this drug that when pregnant women took this.

Their children had birth defects and everywhere that, that there was the children were born with birth defects. Okay. That's a very there's a lot of evidence for a causal relationship there that the caused birth defects. Wouldn't we see something similar. If we can make a claim here around causation, you would think everywhere that children are using cell phones and social media, you would see an increase in depression, anxiety, and suicide that ain't happening.

Uh, Not only is it not happening internationally, it's only happening, it turns out, in North America, and the UK. Japan has higher rates of children using [00:24:00] technology, higher cell phone penetration rates, the Nordic countries, higher cell phone, penetration rates, in fact, all the other OECD countries, except for north, for Us, Canada and UK, all other OECD countries have seen the decline of teen suicide since 2008, not the increase like we see in, in those three countries, the U S, Canada, and the UK.

We don't know. Furthermore, even if you look at the U S, you would think that where you see higher cell phone penetration, if cell phones apparently are causing suicide, you would expect to see wherever there's higher cell phone penetration, higher rates of suicide, not true. Even in the United States, the highest rates of cell phone usage is in urban areas.

Urban children tend to use cell phones more, and more of them use it then in rural areas. But the number of suicides that is occurring in United States is among teens has been flat in urban areas since 2008. Almost [00:25:00] all of the increase in teen suicide comes from rural areas, right? Comes from Trump country, to be honest, that's where we're seeing this increase in suicide.

So clearly there's something else going on. The correlation that I think is quite spurious to say that this is somehow caused by technology somehow. We do not need to have a techno panic to find ways to use technology in a more responsible manner than we use it today with our children. I cannot stand when I go to a restaurant and I see people giving their kids... it drives me crazy.

Whoever told people that I pads I-Nannies. Where, Where does that say that? On the box? Steve jobs never said, "Hey, parents want to stop being a parent, give your kid a, a device to shut them up." That's not the technology doing it. That's a tool that I think is misapplied. And I think something very similar would happen if we said, okay, kids read your comic books at the dinner table.

No, [00:26:00] we need conversation. We want to interact with each other. And whether it's a comic book or Harry Potter or an iPad, any form of media that is taking away from something as precious as time with your family, that's not a technology problem. I think that's a parenting problem, frankly.

Christina: So you've written and spoken numerous times about how you strive for healthy tech habits with your daughter, who you mentioned a little bit earlier, you said she's 12.

Amazing. I've got an 11 year old daughter. In your view, what do you think is the most important strategy or intervention that parents are missing? You talked about it already a little bit. I would love to hear a little bit about what parameters you do have for your daughter, if any. 

Nir: Sure.

Okay. So let me give you, let me start with the most important piece of advice. And I'm hesitant because parents aren't going to like it, but I'm going to say it anyway because we parents sometimes need tough love too, which is we, as parents need to stop being hypocrites. [00:29:00] You cannot tell your child to stop playing Fortnite while you're checking Facebook. Doesn't work that way.

Okay. We have to become indistractable. And it's perfectly okay to be vulnerable with your children and to tell them, look, I am struggling as well. There are some very smart people out there making these products in such a way that makes these products very engaging. That makes me want to check them. Just like when I'm nervous about what's happening in the world, daddy really wants to turn on the news on TV, or when I've had a really hard day. I really want to watch some football to take my mind off my problems. It's all from that same source. And I think talking about this dilemma, I think many parents think, oh, I'm not allowed to show any weakness to my kids. I can't let them know I'm struggling. And I think it's quite the opposite, that when children see that you are making an effort that you are struggling with this, I think that creates greater empathy and it makes us part of the same team. 

And then what we're gonna do is we're going to walk through these very same four steps, the same four steps that [00:30:00] you walk through to become indistractable, we help our children walk through as well. 

Mastering the internal trigger. So children's internal triggers are very different from adult internal triggers. And there's a whole section in the book about how to raise indistractable kids, where I dive into what I call psychological nutrients that you know, physiologically, we know that there's, there are these three macro nutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat, the three macronutrients that we all need to survive. And psychologically, it turns out there's some 40 year old research, this is called self-determination theory, that says that there are these three psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy, and relatedness that we all need these. But if you look at children's lives today, they are sorely deficient in these three psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy and relatedness. And so when there's this theory called the needs displacement hypothesis, that says, if you don't get what you're looking for offline, if you are not getting your psychological nutrients, in the real world, you go [00:31:00] looking for them in the online world.

And I think that tends to happen with many children today who overdo technology. And so we need to talk about those internal triggers and figure out what's where are children deficient and fix those deficiencies. And many times it's something simple as my daughter asked to watch a show on Netflix.

Yeah, but you know what, instantly, when she has the opportunity to play with a friend or even interact with a friend on zoom, if the friend is quarantining, she'll always take that in a heartbeat. She would always in the absence of that social interaction that, that critical need of relatedness, where else is she going to go? She's looking for relatedness, she's looking for connection. 

I always encourage parents to interact with whatever it is their kid is supposedly obsessed with. If you've ever played Fortnite, a year ago, everybody thought Fortnite was melting all the kids' brains. Fortnite, isn't a video game, it's a social network. It's a way to connect with your friends. And I remember when I was a kid, I'd be on the phone for three hours a night with my friends. That's what kids are doing today on Fortnite. They're just connecting with each other. They're relating with each other. Now, can it be overdone? Absolutely. It can be [00:32:00] overdone, but we need to understand their internal triggers. 

Then the next step, same as for adults. It's about making time for traction. So as long as a child is intentional about that time about, "Hey, how much time do you think is good for you to play a video game or to watch YouTube videos or whatever it might be?" Of course, little caveat must be age appropriate should go without saying, but I need to say it anyway. 

Christina: 17 hours. 

Nir: Not only about the time but the age appropriateness, right? Like I wouldn't take my child to a library and say she could read any book.

Christina: Reading is wonderful, but there's a lot of books that a 12 year old is not ready for. So of course you need to be careful around what kind of content your child is interacting with online. It has to be age appropriate. But having that conversation with them, you'd be surprised. I had this conversation with my daughter around how much time do you want to watch videos or play apps?

It was nowhere near as much time as I thought she would say all day, no. When given the choice and putting it on her schedule, it was, she wanted 45 minutes. She wanted two episodes a day. [00:33:00] Okay. So I said, as long as you're responsible for monitoring that time, and we did this by the way, when she was only five years old.

And so she had a little timer that she could use to, to keep track of herself of her time. Now she actually uses, it's interesting, she uses Amazon Alexa, and she says, Alexa set a timer for 45 minutes and she'll watch her little episode. I got no problem with that, as long as she knows that she's using that time, the way she intended.

And I got to back off. As much as I want to say something and interrupt her. No. That's the time she planned to watch her show or play a video game. There's no data, not even one study that says that two hours or less of extracurricular screen time has any deleterious effects. So as long as she's mindfully using that time, no problem.

I think the third thing, back to the third step, just for adults, the same as children around hacking back external triggers, a big mistake that parents make that is so easy to correct, is realizing that if there's one thing that is pretty much undebatable is that children need proper rest.

In fact, this is another area that parents are hypocrites. We say, [00:34:00] of course our kids need a bedtime, but do we have a bedtime? 

I do, but I'm old like that. 

Nir: Awesome. I didn't adopt a bedtime until I wrote indistractible and realized how important it is to have a bedtime myself also to set an example for my kids.

But what we don't realize is that anything that pings or dings or rings, in a child's room, not just the cell phone, of course not just the computer, the television. I don't know why a child needs a television in their bedroom for the life of me. I don't know why that's a good idea. Anything that interrupts a child's sleep, even a radio, does not need to be in a child's room.

If it beeps, boops, whatever, if it can interrupt their sleep, it should not be in the bedroom. That's how we can hack back those external triggers, teaching your child, by the way, how to disconnect from these things to say, I get this question a lot: how do I know a child is ready for a particular technology?

First step is to ask the manufacturer, right? So if you look at, before you install Facebook, it says minimum age, in the app description, minimum age 13. Okay. Why would [00:35:00] you let your kid use a product that the manufacturer says do not let them use until a certain age? Oh, but all their friends are using it.

So what you're paying the bill. 

Christina: And you're the parent! 

Nir: And you're the parent! I don't care what they're doing. And we've had this conversation for generations. So if the company itself says, don't let your kid use a product until a certain age, please believe them. Okay. But also the test to see if they're really ready for it is, do they know how to turn it off. Right. So if you say, look, we're going to let you have a cell phone, but if you bring it to the dinner table, which is a no phone zone, then we're gonna have to revisit this conversation. If you can't turn on the do not disturb feature while you're doing homework, we're going to have a conversation about that. So this is how we make sure they know how to hack back the external triggers. 

And then finally preventing distraction with pacts. This is actually, typically, the kids' favorite part because we can use technology to block out technology and kids tend to love this because it gamified.

The, their ability to stay focused. And so let me give you a [00:36:00] good example. There's this wonderful app called forest- for EST. And basically what it does, it's this app, and you dial in how much time you want to do focus, work for. So you let's say you say 45 minutes or an hour, whatever it is. You push a button that says plant and then this cute little virtual tree is planted on your screen.

Now, if you pick up the phone and do anything with it, the little virtual tree gets chopped down and dies. Okay, and you don't want to kill the cute little virtual tree. And of course, if you fulfill your time, then you get to upgrade the tree and decorate the tree and my daughter loves it. And so basically what that is a pact. It's a pre-commitment device that blocks out the phone for certain times of the day when they need to do homework or, family time, whatever it might be. So that again is how we use these four steps with our children to help them become indistractable as well. 

Christina: I just wanna mention Freedom because they mentioned that they've got a great relationship with you.

And I recently did, I [00:37:00] chose to block off all distracting websites. I love the pop-up. It was just like this beautiful green, like empowering statement. And it just was like that perfect little reminder. I'd made a prepact to not be, hooked into those distracting websites. I love that you advocate for using, these free and paid tools to support us.

I want to get into talking about our social lives, like the good of engaging our human connections and relationships, which you talk a lot about, like me, you believe in the importance of doing the necessary work and maintaining and nurturing friendships and to create a healthy network of warm human relationships.

I just want to give a little shout out to our mutual friend, Jillian Richardson, the author of Unlonely Planet who I recently had on. Your family, I believe has a weekly kibbutz to talk about a serious topic with friends. What are the conditions you [00:38:00] feel create quality interactions that help nurture relationship? 

Nir: Absolutely. So I think, this is such an important issue because we, we are going through a loneliness epidemic in this country. I know you're in Canada. I don't know what the stats are in Canada, but in the United States, certainly, we know that experts tell us that loneliness is as detrimental to our health as smoking and obesity. So it is a very serious problem. And I think part of the reason that this has happened, and this isn't a new problem, by the way. This is not something that the internet created or Facebook created. I think Facebook and these social networks are a desperate attempt to regain some of that lost social time.

It's because we are desperately lonely that we are looking for connection somewhere back to that needs displacement hypothesis that we talked about. If you don't have your needs met offline, you look for them online. And what's happened since the 1990s. This was, there was a book written by Robert Putnam called bowling alone, that came out in the 1990s that was documenting this phenomenon of since the 1950s, people don't [00:39:00] engage in these social activities, right? The civil society that we used to have, the bowling league, the church group, the Kiwanis club, the charity meeting that every Thursday, you had to show up for and people would expect you to be there.

Those are disappearing. Largely, this is because of secularization that less people are religious now than they used to be. And so they are not going to the church or the synagogue or the mosque, on a regular basis and they're not expected to. They don't have that social bond. And I think that has caused some really deleterious consequences.

And look, I'm not very religious. I'm not telling people to go necessarily, go against their moral beliefs just for the community. But I would say that we, we must for our physical and mental wellbeing, we must find that community somewhere and we must keep that time sacred. We have to protect that time.

I think if there is one silver lining to the Corona crisis, people are booking time on their schedule for these zoom meetings, with their loved ones, [00:40:00] because at least in my family, I know I've talked, I've spoken to, many of my friends have observed the same phenomenon, when it came to our close friends, we would say, "all right, we'll see you when we see you" or our family members, "okay. I'll call you from time to time." But because of the nature of these zoom calls that we have to check in whether FaceTime or zoom or whatever. We have to put that on our calendars. So in my family, it's every Saturday we see our family. We all get together in three different time zones on zoom and it's in our calendars, and I'm looking forward, I hope that even after Corona, that people keep that time on their calendar and keep it sacred for those relationships. Just like you would protect a business meeting with a VIP, I think we should also keep that time for our our closest relationships as well. 

Christina: Do you think part of it like tied into the secularization?

Do you think it's also the shift of thinking of ourselves as citizens to thinking of ourselves as consumers. That's made that shift in terms of social commitments and being engaged in more social communities and, active citizism. That's not a [00:41:00] word citizenship. 

Nir: I think there's probably a there's, there's a lot of factors going on. I think part of it is that we the fact that we can entertain ourselves by ourselves is a relatively new phenomenon, starting with mass media, the printing of books. Once, once it wasn't just rich people who had books, but anyone could read a book that led to more social isolation.

And then of course you get the radio and then you get the television. And of course now with the internet, the time that you spend by yourself is a lot less boring. It doesn't mean you're not lonely, you're still lonely, but at least you're not as bored. Whereas before, on a Friday night it was really boring hanging out at home.

You wanted to go to the bowling league to the, to get some kind of entertainment. Uh, And so I think we need to actively fight that and find ways to, to realize that this is why we feel lonely, right? This is why we're desperate for hiring a therapist or for, going on social media or finding some way to fill that hole.

The hole we're missing is friends, right? [00:42:00] Knowing that we understand people and that people understand us. That is a fundamental human need that we are desperately looking for. And I think the way to fill that need is not just party all the time. That's not what I'm talking about. It's about consistent interaction.

It's the consistency that makes for these lifelong friendships that, that, that give us that psychological nourishment that I think many of us are missing. 

Christina: Two things about that. I think like many people I'm fascinated by Scandinavia and how they often rank right, highest or very high on the world happiness report year after year. And I think I had this incredible realization where I read this study about how the average person in Scandinavia is a member like four to six social groups. So that, on a, every Thursday they're going to knitting club and every Friday they're at, X club and that whole decision making fatigue around, what should I do tonight, what should I not do tonight? It's like those decisions have been made, and they're going out on a [00:43:00] regular basis to be in community. And I think that is something that we can start to model in our own lives in terms of building traction in terms of building traction in human connection.

And. Yeah. Building relationship, like having those commitments built in your calendar and, having integrity, like we started the conversation today, talking about integrity with ourselves, having integrity with ourselves and with other people, those pacts you're talking about. 

Nir: Absolutely. And I think it goes back to your, to the whole theme of your podcast, around the joy of missing out, like knowing that you don't have FOMO when you know that there's a joy in missing that because in order to miss that you have this other time planned. Okay. I'm not going to go out spontaneously right now, because I said I was going to do something else. I said, I was going to go to the gym. I said, I was going to finish that report.

I said, I was going to play with my kids, and I'm not going to feel bad about it because I know on my calendar is time for friends. I have that booked. I think part of the reason that so many people [00:44:00] feel constant FOMO is that they don't know that the time is coming. If there's a time and a place for socialization.

So they said they're going to work out. And they said, they're gonna spend time with their kids. They said, they're going to do whatever they're going to do. But then they get this offer to go out with a friend or to, have drinks with a buddy. And it's so rare that they can't help but jump at it. And then they actually don't do what they said they're going to do. Of course, going out with your buddy is a wonderful thing, but not if you promised your kids you were going to play with them, not if you said to your spouse that you're going to go on a date day. So it's really about having that regular interaction. And so I talk about different strategies.

Like for example, you mentioned the kibbutz, these regular interactions that I have with my friends to say, this is on the calendar in perpetuity, we're going to get together. You're going to see me. And this is how we maintain those friendships that, most friendships, statistically,.

Uh, Friendships, if you look at why friendships end, most friendships don't end, because two people got in a fight and said, we don't want to be friends anymore. The vast majority of friendships, starve to death, they just " we just lost touch. It's been so long [00:45:00] and I'm not going to call her because it's been so long, it'd be, we'd have to catch up. It's awkward now that we haven't talked. So whatever." That's why friendships die. They starve to death. 

Christina: Oh man. We could talk so much about all the things that we starve in our lives, not just friendships. I'm mindful of our time Nir, and I'm so grateful you've been with me. I would love to just wrap up with hearing about some of the books and thinkers or programs that are influencing your thinking right now on this topic.

Nir: Oh, wow. Um, so, uh, I spent the past five years kind of immersed in this topic and there were so many people who influenced my thinking: bJ Fogg Robert Bandura Robert Sapolsky, Jonathan Haidt, the list goes on and on. There's a lot of people I have to thank, and you can see all the acknowledgements in my, I know I'm missing a ton of people. But yeah. I've had been very fortunate to have access to some amazing thinkers out there. 

Christina: And what are you just curious about right now, what's sparking your interest or curiosity right now? 

Nir: Oh, there's all kinds of things. I think [00:46:00] recently I've been getting into the science of motivation around, why are some people able to sustain the desire, the energy to do something while other things other people and with certain tasks, it's a lot of effort. It's a lot of heavy lifting to motivate ourselves to do something, particularly in the workplace context. I'm really curious about, can you engineer the type of job that someone would love to do even when the work sucks? 

I think a lot of people this is a harsh term, so I don't talk about it much, but so I'm still struggling with it. So if this is offensive, please forgive me. But it's something I struggle with. I think there are a lot of wage slaves out there, that people who are working for no other reason, but the money. And it's hard to call that anything but slavery. Like I think, if we look back a hundred years from now, and we look back at 2020, I have a feeling there'll be a lot, there has to be. Like if we look back at 1920, there's all kinds of things that people did in 1920 that we thought were ridiculous that we can't imagine.

Of course you like the way [00:47:00] people thought about other races, unconscionable, the sexism, there's all kinds of disparities that today we think are crazy, and very immoral. And I think in a hundred years, there will be lots of things that we look back and think are completely immoral.

And I think one of those things is wage slavery. That how can it be that if somebody is doing a job, like, in a hundred years, I think we will look back and say, " there used to be an age that I remember grandchildren or great-grandchildren, that there was a time when, if you didn't work you were gonna starve.

You wouldn't have healthcare, at least in America. And you wouldn't be able to feed your family and you were gonna starve." Like you, like that was okay. And so that's been something that's been occupying my brain now. I don't know the answer. People are floating around UBI, universal basic income, and various ideas.

So that's something, again, I don't have a fully formed answer, but you asked, what am I thinking about? So I don't have any answers yet. 

Christina: That's okay. No I'm just always curious about books and, influences on people's lives. And sometimes those can be like BJ Fogg, for example, obviously has been, has [00:48:00] informed a lot of your writing and thinking.

But sometimes we somehow, discover something unexpected. Like I'm reading a book right now called The Wander Society, and it's like this interesting blend between reality. You don't really know if it's fiction or non-fiction and it's very playful and it's all about this theme of being indistractible or being distracted and just wandering through the world, attentive to what you see around yourself.

It's kind of this manifesto, but reclaiming, wandering. And it's by Carrie Smith. Yeah. I recommended it, it's super weird and it's got lots of art and visuals and I discovered it because I was doing a talk at fireside conference. And this girl that was at my talk came up and she had it in her hand, and I was curious about it and open it up and thought it was magical.

And anyways, sometimes we just stumble upon things that are quite exciting and interesting. 

Yeah. Check it out. 

Thank you NIR. So much. It must be late there. 

Nir: [00:49:00] Yes. It's 9:30 PM over here. 

Christina: I'll let you head on to your bedtime routine. Nirandfar.com is where people can find you. Is that correct? 

Nir: That's right Nir and far Nir is spelled like my first name. So that's N I R and far.com. And I should mention as well that there is an 80 page workbook that you can download there for free. We didn't fit into the final edition of the book because it got too fat. So we decided to make it available for free. Anyone can grab that at Nirandfar.com. And the book again is called Indistractible: how to control your attention and choose your life. 

Christina: Amazing. And we'll of course, link to all of those in the show notes. Thanks again, Nir. 

Nir: Thank you. It was a pleasure.