 First of all, I think I'd like to learn a little bit more about your personal story. How did you get started in this crazy product tech world? Yeah, so let's see. So I helped start two tech companies. The latest was in the advertising and gaming industry where I learned from many of my clients how they built products and services to change user behavior. And this was also at a time when Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Slack, Snapchat, all these companies were really hitting their stride. And I had this front row seat in Silicon Valley to try and understand how they did it. And my goal was really to understand how could we utilize that same psychology that these companies use to build habit-forming products? What if we could use these techniques, not just for social media, for Volody or video games? What if we could actually use these techniques for good? And so that's why I wrote Hooked. It came out of a class that I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And the goal of the book was to democratize these techniques to steal the psychological secrets of these stickiest companies in the world, the YouTubes and Facebooks of the world, so that the rest of us can build products and services to build good habits using the exact same psychology. And that's exactly what's happened since Hooked was published my first book. Companies in edtech, fintech, health tech, SaaS products, every conceivable industry that requires customers to come back on their own out of habit have used the Hooked model to build the kind of products and services that people use because they want to, not because they feel like they have to. I know I've seen the Hooked model absolutely everywhere when people are talking about how to build habits. I keep seeing it referenced. So it's really great to see how far it's spread. So my next question, as product people, we always reinforce the idea of falling in love with the problem and not the solution. What's the problem that you're the most passionate about at the moment? You know, I think that the reason I love my job and the reason I love this community of product builders is that we get to do something super important. We get to solve people's pain. I mean, this is why this is God's work. We get to solve people's pain. How cool is that? How many jobs can say that they really do that? And as product designers, that is where we have to start. We have to begin with understanding what I call in my books, the internal trigger, that psychological itch, not just on a functional level. It's not just, oh, the cool gimmicks that your product can do. That's not what's special about your product. What's special about your product is that it addresses a core human need, loneliness, boredom, uncertainty, fatigue, stress, anxiety. These are universal human problems. And so it's up to us as product designers to pinpoint which one of those problems we're going to tackle and to build a solution for that problem. Again, not just on a functional level, but on a psychological level. Absolutely. So you mentioned your books. I am dying to dive in and talk to you about your books. So you've written two bestsellers so far. I mean, first of all, congratulations on both of their classes. Where do you get your inspiration from? Maybe let's start with Hooks. What was your inspiration for writing Hooks? Yes. So for me, selfishly, I wanted to understand how these products did it. I was in Silicon Valley when these amazing habit-forming products were really hitting their stride. And I didn't really understand the deeper psychology. I mean, a lot of it looked like cutesy little crazy products, and some of them succeeded, and some of them failed horribly. And I kept seeing this consistent problem where a company would achieve massive growth, but no engagement. And I kept seeing this happen again and again and again, that Silicon Valley would go crazy over some company that was getting unbelievable growth. It was so viral. Viral used to be the big buzzword, and everybody wanted to be a growth hacker, because it was all about growth. And what I was kind of sitting in the back row saying during this whole time is like, look, what's the big deal? You can always buy growth. Growth is not that important. You can always buy growth. You just buy more ads, right? Give money to Google or Facebook or the television stations. You can always get people to try your product. You can buy growth. What you can't buy is engagement. You can't buy repeat use. That has to be designed into the product. And so what I kept seeing was what we call leaky bucket businesses, businesses that were really great at that viral growth. They get lots of people to try the product, and then they'd all leak out the bottom. They wouldn't stick around, because there were crazy churn rates with these products, because they weren't designed in such a way that people would stick around and keep using the product. So that's a big fat waste of time and money in human capital that we would build these products that people wouldn't stick around and use. So I think what I'm really on a mission to change is this perception of the product design community that growth is what matters. No, growth without engagement is a waste of money. First, you have to nail engagement, then you pour on growth. It's something I feel like is a lesson that has not in a small part, thanks to your book. It's a lesson that has spread across the product design world. But why do you think it's a mistake that companies still make even to this day, that they prioritize growth over retention? Yeah, I think it's impressive. Like what happens is human beings, we tend to extrapolate the future based on the past. A good metaphor for this is if you look at the states of matter, right? So water, take water, for example. If you heat up water, it'll get warmer, warmer, warmer, warmer. And if you just look on that trend of, oh, okay, the water is getting warmer and warmer, you could extrapolate that, oh, it's going to get infinitely hot. But that's, of course, not what happens, right? The temperature gets hotter and hotter. Then it stays constant. And then the water evaporates. It has a phase change, right? And companies are kind of that way that for many companies, they see this impressive growth. And then the VCs start salivating and saying, ooh, let's jump in, let's invest, or the internal stakeholders say, let's invest, look at this amazing growth, let's keep doing that. And they don't realize that at a certain point, there's a phase change where if you don't focus on engagement, then all that work was for naught, that you have to focus on that first. But I think it's really exciting, especially now. I think when we're in a type of market where VCs are preemptively investing in companies before the companies even go out and raise, everybody's trying to get in on deals. And so they'll mistake growth as a sign of product market fit. And it's typically a very big mistake. I suppose, especially with all of the freemium models that are out there, it's so easy for people to just try something. And then when it comes to actually having the payment come out of the bank, they go, eh, no, that's okay for me. So yeah, definitely an important lesson that more companies are thankfully picking up. I think growth, by the way, isn't important. Growth is incredibly important. It's necessary, but it's not sufficient. Absolutely. So that was the inspiration for Hooked. At what point did you say to yourself, okay, you know what, time to strike gold again and go for number two? Where did intractable come from? I appreciate it. I don't know if I quite struck gold, but again, it was for me, it was the same methodology. It was the same practice of, look, I'm looking for answers here. I have a question. When I wrote Hooked, I honestly looked around for where's a book on how to build habit-forming products? And I didn't find such a book. So I read as many books as I could around the topic, but there wasn't specifically what I was looking for. How do I design for habits? I couldn't find that book. So I decided to spend, what, five years researching and writing it. And the same thing happened with indistractable. That I found in my own life, I was really struggling with distraction. I would say I would do one thing and yet I would do something else constantly, whether it was with my relationships, whether it was at work, whether it was in terms of taking care of my physical health. I knew what to do. And frankly, I'm not alone. Don't we all basically know that if you want to be healthy, you have to eat, write, and exercise? We know that. If we want to excel at your job, you have to do the work, especially the hard stuff that you don't want to do. If you want to have good relationships with people, you can't be stuck on your phone when you're having breakfast with your spouse or your kids. You have to be fully present with people to have good relationships. So we know what to do. What we don't know is how to stop getting in our own way. How do we stop getting distracted? And so that was really the challenge I wanted to focus on, frankly, because I was struggling with it. And normally what I do when I struggle with something is that I read every book I can get my hands on on the topic. I read all the academic research. And most of the time, that helps me solve my problems in life. But in this case, the books were wrong. The books were just plain wrong. Like they totally tell you stupid stuff like going to digital detox, digital minimalism, right? Get rid of your devices. Like some professor in an ivory tower that's never had a social media account telling me to dump social media, well, I need it for my job, right? I can't stop using email. I can't stop using my phone. I'll get fired from my job. What kind of advice is that? So I was really looking for a solution not only for me, but for people out there who are struggling with these distractions, but still utilize these tools. And what I discovered was that the problem really is not the tech. The problem is in here. The problem is our relationship with these distractions. And it's not a new problem. It's something that people have struggled with since time immemorial. Plato talked about this problem 2500 years ago. It is not something that technology suddenly invented. And so what I wanted to do is to take a deeper dive into the root causes of distraction, the deeper psychology around why we go off track, why we don't do the things we know we want to do with our time and our attention and our life so that we can get some actual practical answers. And I have to tell you, in the five years it took me to write that book, there's no facet of my life that hasn't improved. I'm in the best shape of my life at 43 years old. I spend more quality time with my family than ever before. I'm more productive in my writing career than ever before. I've made better investments. Like everything I do professionally and personally has improved because I now have this skill that I think is the skill of the century, which is the power to control my attention, which is ultimately how we choose our life. Okay. I loved hooks and it definitely sounds like I need indestructible. I'm like a magpie with my attention span. Like, oh, shiny. Off I go. We all are. Yeah. I'm speaking from personal experience. I mean, I really struggle with this. You'll read in the book indestructible. I kind of, you know, lay my story bare and tell you all the horrible mistakes I made along the way. I used to be clinically obese. I neglected my daughter. I neglected my work. I did all I made all the mistakes you could possibly imagine, but it wasn't that, you know, I think what most people do, what I did was to blame the technology or shame myself. Right. Most people are blamers or shamers, right? We blame things outside of ourselves or we shame ourselves. I'm broken. I must be deficient somehow. I must be messed up. And neither of those two solutions are very helpful, right? Because when we blame things outside of ourselves, we can't change that stuff, right? Like we can't change the Facebook's not going anywhere, people, right? Like email is not going anywhere. We have to learn how to deal with these technologies. And then shaming yourself only makes things worse because when we feel crappy, when we make ourselves feel shame, guess what we do to escape the discomfort of shame? We look for more distraction, right? That's what I did when I was obese. I would eat my feelings. I wasn't overweight because I was hungry. I was overweight because I was trying to avoid being bored, being feeling lonely, escaping the shame of how much I had overeaten. And so it's the same thing with distraction. It's not about the technology. It's about our desire to escape discomfort. And if we don't deal with that first and foremost, we can't be our best selves. It sounds like with that book in particular, you listened to the excellent writing advice of write the book that you need to read. One of my mentors, Gretchen Rubin, told me, research is research. And that could not be more true than in my case. Incredible, incredible. So there's a few more things I'd like to touch on with you. So what would you say are some of the most important skills that have helped you to grow in your career, going back to growth again, of course? But what were the skills that have helped you to grow personally? And more than anything, I think is curiosity. There's a wonderful Dorothy Parker quote that she said that the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. So I think many of us, we make the mistake of kind of thinking that all the answers, all the questions have already been answered, that if a guru doesn't tell us the answer, then, you know, we haven't looked hard enough. And many times all it takes is sitting down and thinking. And you know what's amazing? Nobody does it these days. Like very few people sit down, make time to think without distraction. If you want to kill it in your career, if you want to be better than the competition, if you want to be better than your colleagues, make time to think. Because that time to think is something that nobody else is doing. And few people realize what a superpower it really is. That most people all day long, they want email to tell them what to do. They want their boss to tell them what to do. They want Slack notifications and SMS and WhatsApp and all these tools to tell them what to do so they don't have to think about what to do. And what we end up doing is running real fast in the wrong direction. And we say, oh, we're so busy, but we're not actually living according to our values and doing what actually propels us forward. We're doing the easy and the urgent work as opposed to the hard and important work that really moves us forward in our careers and in our life. And so making time to think and allowing your curiosity to drive you forward, at least in my case, has really served me well. Do you think that's why so many people say that inspiration strikes them in the shower because it's the only time that we can't be on our phones or watching TV? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And so, you know, we all know that. And we know about the power of just being with our thoughts for a little bit. And the good news is you can make time for that. No, I'm not saying all day. You're not going to sit there in an ashram and meditate all day. Like, yeah, many of us do have day jobs. But, you know, you can make some time in your day to sit with your thoughts. You know, I constantly have a pen and a notebook here constantly to just make time in my day. Now, it's scheduled in advance. I have time for what we call reactive work that, of course, is part of my job. I have to react to emails and respond to notifications. Of course, that's part of my day, but it shouldn't be your entire day. You have to make time for what we call that reflective work to make sure that you have time to be creative, time to plan, time to strategize, time to think, must be done without distraction. That's such valuable advice. So, just while we're on the topic of sort of curiosity, what are some of the things that you're most interested in learning these days? Is there anything that you're sort of investigating for yourself? Maybe book number three? Oh, my gosh, I have like a million things I'm curious about. Endless curiosities. There's so much out there. I'm fascinated by human motivation. I'm fascinated by still by human psychology. I'm fascinated by the application of psychology towards product design and how products and services can shape our habits in good ways and how we can defend against the bad habits in our life. So, I think what I'm going to do is continue along this chain, right? There's like, you know, there's kind of an order here of how to build habit-forming products. This is my first book, how to break bad habits from other products, not the same products, right? We want to get hooked to the exercise app or get hooked to the app that helps us save money while, you know, making sure that we can break the bad habits around the frivolous things that don't enhance our life, like too much social media or video games, whatever. We want to, you know, those aren't the same products. We want to apply this stuff traditionally. And I think the next book will be something along this vein. I haven't quite figured out. I need to figure out what problem I really want to solve for myself. And that's probably where my next book is going to come from. So, in the process of writing a book, how did that compare to some of the other things that you're working on? Were there any sort of specific tactics or methods that you had to employ to like get the book written? Or was it very much in the same vein of how you approach the other things that you're working on? Yeah. So, I'll tell you a little secret that the reason it took me five years to write Indistractable was because I kept getting distracted, right? I kept using conventional advice like keeping a to-do list and, you know, all kinds of bad advice. And I talk about in the book why running your life on a to-do list is one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity. And that's kind of one of these accepted wisdom. So, another one is about how willpower is a depletable resource, right? We've all heard this, like, you know, I feel spent. I'm out of willpower. And it turns out that's a complete myth. There's so many of these myths that I overturned just by digging into the research and actually saying, wait a minute, is this really true? Let's start from first principles here because we've all heard this advice. And it turns out that much of it is not serving us. In fact, it's hurting us. So, it took me a lot of time to unwind these bad productivity tips and look at what the research really says. You know, I'm really big into the research. I don't like these self-help books that say, oh, this work for me is going to work for everyone. No, no, no. I want to see the peer-reviewed studies. That's convincing to me. And it has to work. So, so that was really important. But once I did learn these techniques and separate the wheat from the chaff and actually figured out, hey, here's what really is effective, then my life completely changed. And what are some of the things that you're the most excited for coming up in the future? So, I'm pretty optimistic. I might be the only one, but the media loves to sell us glumen doom. But I'm pretty optimistic. I think there's going to be a lot of wonderful things that come from the ability of technology to change our habits for good. That I think I'm very excited around the opportunities around crypto. I'm very excited about the opportunities around ubiquitous technology that is around us. And of course, there's always room for abuse. And we'll have to navigate those waters as well. It's not perfect. But on the whole, I think I'm pretty optimistic. I think there's the right days ahead. And how do you think product people can... Well, you mentioned that the media is peddling a lot of doom and gloom at the moment. How do you think that maybe the tech industry as well, but how do you think the product and design communities can mentally fortify ourselves for facing the future with more optimism? Yeah. So, it's not easy because what's happening right now is that we are having a changing of the guards between old media, traditional legacy media and new media. And that's very threatening. And so, what's happening is that traditional media, print publications, cable news, they won't tell you that they're in the same exact business as Facebook, right? Guess what? They sell your eyeballs to advertisers. They're in the same business, right? And of course, new technologies are disaggregating them in terms of competition for the same ad dollars, as well as more importantly, the competition for your time and attention. So, it's not necessarily these are bad things. These aren't bad businesses. We just need to remember that when we read negative stories about technology, which if you look at the press, it's gotta be 100 to one because a good story always has a villain or there's always a bad guy. And so, right now the bad guy is the tech industry. Not that the tech industry is lily white. I'm not a tech apologist. There's lots of things that we can do better. But that's the nature of technology. Paul Verrillo said when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. And so, of course, every new technology is going to have a period of learning where we learn the negative repercussions of a technology. And so, what do we do? Do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships better, right? You almost never hear of shipwrecks anymore, even though we sail more ships than ever before. Why? Because we improve the technology. And so, that's exactly what the people listening to me right now need to do. People in the design community, we don't need to run away from this industry quite the opposite. We need to dive in. We need to fix the last generation of technology to make it better and safer. That's exactly what technology and technologists need to do right now. Okay. And well, first of all, I want to say thank you so much for your time. I'm aware that you're a very busy man and I don't want to take up too much of it than necessary. I just have one more question for you. What advice would you give to your younger self when you were trying to break into the product's world? Yeah, I think it's super important to work on something that you believe is important to devote your human capital to even if it fails. And one of the best tests I actually give this test in Hooked around if you can look... So there's a two-part matrix. It's called the manipulation matrix. And the manipulation matrix is a way to make sure that you use your human capital in an ethical way that you can use behavioral design towards persuasion or coercion. And persuasion is perfectly ethical. Persuasion is helping people do things they want to do. Coercion is getting people to do things they don't want to do. And that's clearly unethical. We never want to do that. So in order to judge how we should spend our own human capital, I give people a two-part test. And that two-part test is, am I materially improving people's lives? That's the first test. And you can only answer that yourself. Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, am I materially improving people's lives? But that's not good enough. The second part to this two-part test is a question that is designed to make you break the first rule of drug dealing. Do you happen to know the first rule of drug dealing? I don't want to put you on the spot. You know, it's not off the tip of my tongue. Okay, I'll fill you in. The first rule of drug dealing is never get high on your own supply. Yes, I heard that. So I want you intentionally to break that rule. I want you to get high on your own supply. Why? Because if there are any deleterious effects, you'll be the first person to know about it. So the second question I want you to ask yourself is, am I the user? So first question, does this materially improve people's lives? And number two, am I the user? And if you can answer in the affirmative to both those questions, you're what I call a facilitator, that you're building something that you truly believe improves people's lives and you're going to be the one that uses it. And not only is that a good ethical place to be, it's actually an incredible point of strength and leverage from a business perspective because the hardest part about building something people want is knowing what the hell they want. So if you as the user are building this yourself for you, you can't fail. Because even if you don't go public, even if your company crashes and burns, you will have built a product that you yourself wanted. Now, that doesn't mean you can't be successful building a product that you don't believe materially improves people's lives or that you don't use yourself. I'm not saying that you can't get monetary success that way. I would just ask you to consider whether that's how you want to spend your limited time on earth. That I think we can get much more out of our human capital and our contribution to society and to the world by passing this two-part test and only working on stuff that materially improves people's lives and you are the user. I think that's a great place to be.