Optimize Interview: Irresistible with Adam Alter

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimize interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Adam Alter, the author of a great book called Irresistible, subtitled the Rise of Addictive Technology in the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Adam is a professor of marketing at NYU's Stern School of Business. He's also a great writer. This is a really, really compelling book. We use it a lot in our work with our community and with the coaches we're training. So I appreciate you, the work you've done this book and taking the time to chat about it today.

Thanks, Brian. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

I also appreciate the casual look.

It seems, seems, seems appropriate coming from an Australian academic. This is, you know, add academic and Australian together and you get fairly casual. It's casual squared.

That's fantastic. Right on. All right, well, let's talk about Irresistible. I've got some favorite ideas, but let's just start at the very top. Irresistible. When you're thinking about the book you wanted to write, what led you to call it Irresistible?

I think it's the best, most succinct description of my experience of screens in the year 2019. When I started writing the book five years ago, it was the same way. And I was trying to think of a way to sum up in either just a word or in the title, what it was like to be in front of a screen for the average consumer or the average consumer of screen content. And I think it is basically irresistible. I think it's an apt word that describes our experiences, the phenomenon of being in front of a screen. So it seemed like the right title. I was going for something fairly pithy and short, and one word seemed about as brief as I could get it. And so that's why I settled on that title.

Yeah, right on. And then I agree. I think it's the absolutely perfect title. Then, of course, in the book you unpack the underlying kind of psychological hooks that are being used and the triggers that are being kind of pressed that get us to a point where we're truly addicted to these technologies. Let's start with the story you share in the book on Steve jobs and his 90 minute presentation on the marvels of the iPad, yet give us that story. I think it captures the essence of this so powerfully.

It does for me as well. I think it was one of the first things that got me really engaged in this topic. So I had been one of the people who every time Apple released a product, especially during the Jobs era, I'd log on and watch the whole presentation. I was fascinated by it. I still think Apple's brand is the strongest in the world, and it was even stronger under Jobs. And so I was always curious as a marketing academic about what Apple was about to put out and how it would describe its products. And so when Jobs got up on stage in 2010 and started talking about the iPad, he said all the right things. He said, this is a miraculous product. The best way to consume pretty much any experience on a screen. And it's interesting, if you think back to that time, there was quite a lot of pushback. A lot of people, journalists, experts, said, this is a weird product. I don't understand it. It doesn't seem to have a true need. You know, we have an iPhone, which does most of what this does. This is just a larger iPhone that doesn't allow you to make phone calls, which seemed like an inferior product. So people pushed back. They made fun of the name, the iPad. Go back to the articles about it. People said it was a silly name. I found all of that fascinating. But Jobs pushed ahead, and he was right. It's an incredibly successful product. A couple of months after he talked about it, basically said, you should have one, your kids should have one, a journalist from the New York Times called him. They had a conversation about it, and he said, you know, the end of the conversation, they had a conversation about the iPad. And at the end of the conversation, the journalist said to him, so your kids must love the iPad. And his response was so surprising that it formed the basis for an article in the Times that's been read I don't know how many millions of times Jobs said they've never used it. We don't allow the iPad in our home. Which is incredible, because the gulf between what he had said publicly and what he was doing privately was striking. Anytime anyone practices one thing and preaches another, you have to ask, what explains that gulf? And so, for me, this is the perfect kind of emblem which we're looking at. The people who know the most about these products, and they themselves are very cautious about how they use them. This article that I'm talking about in the Times doesn't just talk about Jobs. It talks about a whole lot of tech titans, the people who know the most about tech, who are incredibly careful about how much they consume, how they release those products to their kids, whether they bring them into the home. So it seemed like the perfect emblem for this era where there are people Making an incredible amount of money in the tech world who themselves will not consume those same products and needs to be unpacked. And that's what drove me to write the book.

I love it. And why, why is he so concerned? Why doesn't he give his kids the iPad?

I think he understands, or he understood better than anyone, and I think tech giants understand better than anyone that the. The way these products are designed is so sophisticated, so careful. It's just so well done. In almost every case, every successful tech product has been engineered to within an inch of its life. It's been evolved over time so that it's the kind of maximally addictive, maximally hard to resist version of whatever it began. So, I mean, if you look at Facebook in 2004, I was among the early users of Facebook when it was. It was basically just a place to go and read what Jobs, your friends had, where they were living, things like that. It was like an electronic version of something that may as well have been on paper. There was nothing about it that, like, hooked you, that sucked you in. But give it 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and suddenly it's a product that we can't stop using for all sorts of reasons. So I think Jobs knew that for all the advantages his kids enjoyed, the fact that they were well educated, that they were smart, that they were driven, despite all of that, the screens were designed better than their brains could resist. So I think he just knew that the smartest thing to do would be, as a parent, to be very careful. I think that's true for all of us. If he was doing that, it's a good lesson for the rest of us.

Yep. And it's interesting because the subtitle again is the Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. So I just read Nir Eyal's newest book called Indestructible. And of course, Nir wrote Hooked, which all these companies used from his work at Stanford in order to hook us. And then he found himself hooked. So we're going to be chatting soon about going from hooked to being indestructible and using technology which is obviously inherently neutral when used properly for what it's great for, without getting sucked into the addictive tendencies, et cetera. Again, so much we can chat about there, but I want to step back and talk about addiction. So you do a really powerful job of shining a light on behavioral addiction in general. And then, of course, specifically with technology, talk to us about the role of environment in addiction. It was one of the things I found most compelling in the book. And then I want to talk about how we get hooked and addicted and then how we can obviously undo it. But can you share that a little bit?

Yeah. So, you know, one of the controversies in this book is that I use the word addiction at all. Most people think of addiction as something that's reserved for a reasonably small part of the population that has substance addiction issues. And the addictions I'm talking about in this book are behavioral addictions. These are things we can't stop doing, but that don't involve the ingestion of a substance. So, you know, the earliest version of this, I think, was probably gambling, where slot machines were very, very well engineered to hook us. That once you sat down in front of the machine, it was hard to stop using. But apart from gambling, there aren't that many addictions between, say, the 1950s and 2005 or so that really grabbed us. And all of a sudden, there's just this proliferation of these behavioral addictions. So the book is partly about technology, but it's also more broadly about how. How many things we can't stop doing that don't involve the ingestion of a substance. You ask about environment. I think one of the theories, or a lot of the theories people have about addiction suggest things like there are major individual differences. Some people just have the addictive personality. Or, you know, if your brain's wired a certain way, you're going to be in trouble. And you're going to struggle to resist addiction through your life. Now, there is certainly an individual difference component, but we are all put in the wrong situation, going to be addicted. We're going to develop something that approaches or approximates an addiction. And I think the fact that analyses suggest, depending on the definition of addiction, you use something like 50 or 60% of adults now have at least one behavior that they engage in that fits the definition of addiction. And the reason that is, I think, is just because the environment has been crafted around us so well by the producers of these products that it's really difficult for us to resist. It doesn't matter how competent you are, how well educated, how much self control you have, what your willpower looks like, it's very, very difficult to resist these experiences. You mentioned Nir Eyal Nir's book, Indistractable, is fantastic. One of the things I love the most about it is it talks about personal responsibility, that we all have the ability to wean ourselves off these devices. I completely agree. I just think we're outmatched and so I think it would be better to have an even playing field. We don't have that right now. And so as a result of that, whether because we don't have enough willpower, whether because we're not strategic enough, whether because there isn't enough regulation, we're in a position where most of us would like to spend considerably less time in front of our screens. That's at least my experience, having interviewed thousands of people.

Yep. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the data, and then we'll get into the actual, practical tools we can use to kind of break some of these addictions. Before we do that, even I want to go to the etymology.

So you.

You broke down the etymology of the word addiction, which I found fascinating. Can you share that with us?

Yeah. Addiction basically began meaning slavery. So it's an ancient word from. From ancient Rome that. That has traces its roots to the idea of slavery. The idea with addiction is that you are a slave to whatever it is that's causing the addiction. So I think it's absolutely fascinating. Another version of the word, a slightly different take, suggests that it's like prison. It's an imprisonment. You are being caged by whatever it is that you're addicted to, and that this thing leads you along. It has a tremendous amount of power over you. And like. Like a jailer, it's basically deciding that you are within this confined space, and you live your life thinking about, paying attention to, following around this thing that you're addicted to. I thought that was, incredibly, a powerful idea. Certainly describe, I think, the way a lot of people's lives now revolve around their experiences with screens. And certainly anyone who's ever experienced some sort of substance abuse issues knows 24 hours a day you're thinking about that thing. It's difficult to find a space apart in your life from that thing, that object. So that etymology, I think, is very powerful, and it was instructive for me. The idea that this rises to the level of something like slavery or imprisonment seems to capture the way I think a lot of us lead our lives today, unfortunately.

Yeah, no doubt. And then it was interesting because I love to look at the etymology, and then I looked at the antonym of addiction, which is indifference. And then I was. The thought of the Roman slave Epictetus in his stoicism, you know, it's. It's all about indifference to the things that are external to us. So how do we develop this? Not addiction and compulsion to use, but an indifference, and then to go back to near, you know, a conscious decision to use it in a way that actually serves our purposes, you know, and gets traction on our goal vis a vis in being distracted. But let's talk again about some. Some of the data. So you talk about how much time we waste, and I don't think most of us are aware of just how much energy and time we're squandering on it, and everyone's doing it, so it can't be that big of a deal, et cetera. But walk us through some of the data of usage patterns, et cetera.

Yeah, it was one of my first questions. There are trackers everywhere now, so on your iPhone, your iOS 12 and beyond, we're now on iOS 13. It's all built in, so the companies are starting to actually build this in. But for a long time, for many, many years, people couldn't answer the question, how much time do you spend on your screen? And I wonder that. It was one of the first questions I had. And I found a guy, Kevin Holish, who was developing an app called Moment. And Moment was one of the first great trackers out there that tracked not only what you were doing, but how long you were spending doing it and how happy or sad it made you. So occasionally you'd get pings that would say something like, based on what you're doing on your screen now, do you feel happy or sad? And I thought that was great. So he had just troves of data from thousands of users of all sorts of different apps. And I said to him, how long do we spend? Like, what's the bottom line here? How long do we spend in front of our phones? And he said, you know, usually I like to ask people to guess. This is about. This is probably five years ago we had this conversation, and I said to him, I'm going to guess 90 minutes. And he said, that may be true, but that would put you in a small minority. The vast majority of American adults use their phones much longer than 90 minutes a day. In fact, at that time, the average was three hours. And I was. I was just struck by that. And I said, well, surely that's unusual. Most people are probably better at guessing. And he said, absolutely not. Most people think they use their phones about half as much as they actually do. So he said to me, why don't you download the app, see what happens? And he was right. I was at three, three and a half hours. And it's only got worse for me and also for the rest of the population. I got back in touch with him A couple of years later and said, is anything different now? Are we doing better? Have we mastered this? And he said, to the contrary, we're actually worse now. So it used to be three hours, it's now four hours, and I think now the average is between four and five. And I verified this by. I teach about 300 MBA students every year, and we have this discussion about, about the devices. And the numbers that come up are five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours. And they're routine. These are not outliers. So I think the average is between 4 and 5. And a huge number of people use for much longer than that. And teens are way above often five or six hours.

Yeah, I don't even know what to say about that.

A lot of time.

Yeah. And you connected it to the, you know, fact that's 100 hours. Now it's more than 100 hours a month. And if you add that up, that's 11 years of our life. Now of some of that time is, quote, productive. But are we using it deliberately and consciously as a tool, or is it cycling into that addictive pattern where we're just compulsively grabbing it, et cetera?

Well, I mean, just imagine this. This is heavy stuff, but I think it's a really good way of capturing it. Imagine you get to that, the end of your life, and you have the ability to reclaim those hours, and you have the choice. You can relive those hours the way you live them, probably mindlessly scrolling through some sort of social network, or you can have them back and you could do something with them that's enriching, makes you happy, connects you to other human beings. I'm sure everyone at that point would say, I wish I'd done things differently. So, you know, part of the reason for writing a book like this is to try to get people to make that change before they get to that point where regret sets in. And that's. That's the ultimate aim.

Yeah, I love it. And then what do you do? So what are your practices to manage both the screen on a high level, smartphone usage, email, Internet usage? What practices have you adopted to kind of optimize?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing I do, I think, is I try to have sort of an on button and an off button. I'm very big on boundaries for these things because I think the biggest problem with screen tech is that it bleeds into every aspect of your life. 75 to 80% of American adults say that 24 hours a day, they can reach their phones without moving Their feet. Which basically means that it may not be a wearable device or an implanted device, but it has the same function. It's there all the time, so it can ping you at any moment. If you want to know what's going on on your phone, it's right there for you to reach it to play with. So I try my very best to do two things. One is to have as much time as possible during the day where I cannot reach my phone, where it's in a different room, it's in a drawer, it's far away, it's on airplane mode. Whatever I can do to defang it. I think of it as a sort of wild animal that's following me around with its fangs bared. And when I turn it on airplane mode, the fangs retract a little, and then I another room in its little cage. And then it's not likely to influence my life as strongly as it normally does. So I try to do that for as many hours of the day as I can. At work, I have a filing cabinet, and there's a drawer deep in the filing cabinet, and it goes in there as much of the day as possible. Of course, I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer screen, which is a different issue. But I think that's true for most of us that we have. If you work and your work happens to involve screens, as many of us have, have as an issue, it's tough to get away from them altogether. So when you can, when you have that discretionary time at the end of the workday, you have to have that off button. For me, meals screen free, that's. That's a universal. Whether I'm alone, whether I'm with other people, I want my meals to be without a screen. On the weekend, I try to do something that I found quite helpful. I have two little kids. My daughter is 2, my son's almost 4. And I want to be able to capture everything they do. So I want to have a phone that's a camera, but I don't want the phone itself intruding. So I put the phone on airplane mode for much of the weekend. Like 9am On a Saturday, on goes airplane mode. At 5pm, I can turn off airplane mode. So from 9 to 5, I have a dumb phone that's a camera, but it's not intruding. And I find that really helpful. Apart from just saying I'm going to take the phone away. I also try to bring in things that to me are the antithesis of the phone. So just an hour before we started our conversation, I went for a run. I happened to live very near the ocean. I'm very lucky to have that. I went for an hour and a half long run right by the water. Spent some time just kind of taking that in. I think, based on what I've studied, nature is the antithesis of technology. So if you're in a natural environment and you cannot tell what year it is based on what your eyes are telling you, it may as well be the year 1900 or the year 1800 or the year 1700. This scene may have looked this way 300 years ago. That, to me, is the way we should live our lives for at least part of the day or part of the week, if possible. If you're in a big city, it's tough to do. I live just outside New York, so I'm lucky to have that. But I think it's something to cultivate the antithesis of tech. Whether it's looking into someone's eyes as you communicate with them, whether it's being in a natural environment, these things are replenishing, and I think they're critical in a world where we're bombarded by tech.

Yeah, that's great. And then just ask the question, Juan, your hour and a half run. Tech. No, tech.

I'm pretty competitive, so I run, and I want to know how fast I'm running. Not compared to anyone else, but compared to the run yesterday or the day before. I don't think that will ever change. But what I do is I don't like the phone, the watch. Sorry to intrude on the run itself. So I put a little sticker over it so I can't see it. It's tracking all the data that it needs to track. And then at the end of the run, I run by feel. But at the end of the run, I'll look at it and say, okay, I know roughly where I was there. The other thing that does is it kind of trains you to listen to your body. So I can now tell you in running what it feels like to run a certain pace, to run 10 seconds faster a mile, 10 seconds slower a mile. And you train yourself to do that by not relying entirely on tech. You rely on this kind of. It's known as interoception. It's the ability to kind of track your inner state, what your body's telling you about how it feels to be engaging in a certain activity. And I find it makes running and any physical activity a lot more rewarding. And I Enjoy it way more.

Yeah, that's awesome. And then smartphone or no smartphone. So we've got no.

No smartphone.

That was, that was the essence of what I want to get at is you take the time to bother, get out of the technology and truly be purely in nature and then you go one step further. So I wear a suunto that doesn't do anything other than giving my heart rate. I actually train heart rate zone. So it's meaningful for me to match my own qualitative with the quantitative. But new technology like let's give ourselves these windows of time, whether it's on a trail doing our workout or at the beach running, or with our kids, where we are not in that 247 loop of. We talk a lot about enervated anxiety. You know, just the anxiety that comes when we're always on and we're not oscillating into a deeply replenishing, you know, energized tranquility is a phrase we use to juxtapose it. I love it. Appreciate you sharing your own practices on that. Let's jump back to some data email. What's our average? That number was crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah. So the vast majority of emails are checked within six seconds of their arrival in your inbox. The vast majority well over three quarters. And I think it's got quicker. That was a few years ago. I don't think the numbers look any more favorable now. And it's because we have push notifications activated. It's because we have the little thing that pops up on the screen when we're. When we're sitting in front of a laptop or a desktop and we're very curious. I mean, it's basically where Pavlov's dog salivating at the thought that this might be something interesting or appealing, or even if it's something not appealing, we want to know what it is so we can deal with it. And what that means is you're basically taking yourself out of the here and now constantly, every few seconds. And it suggests something about the way we should consume email, that we should be batching it more, so turning off the program completely. Or if you're actually the manager of a workplace, you are the head of the company or whatever, and you have the ability to batch emails. It's something that a lot of companies are starting to do now, where, for example, they'll release emails in three tranches a day at 10:00am, 1:00pm and 4:00pm and then have a rule like do not send internal emails within the company's. Internal system between, say, 6pm and 9am the next day. Just unless it's an absolute emergency, no one should be getting emails internally. And I think it means that the worker who arrives at the desk at 9am the next day is actually replenished, ready to go. Much more efficient and effective at the job. And more and more companies are realizing this, that it's not really about time in front of the screen or time at the desk. It's about the quality of that time. It's about doing the deep work, as Cal Newport has discussed. I know you think a lot of his work, as do I. You may as well be doing really rich and enriching work for less time, being way more efficient, more effective, being a happier human being. I think that's better for the employee and better for the employer as well.

Yep. And I love your math on, you know, being distracted by email. It takes you, you know, X minutes to get back. And if you.

They say 25.

Yeah, 25 minutes. And if you check your email 25 times a day or whatever it is, and you're one of the people that, the vast majority who checked your email that quickly, you can literally mathematically ensure that you never get a truly productive moment of deep work into your life.

Absolutely. It's an incredible stat. I often think about how it relates to, say, sleeping like you imagine. You think about how long it takes to get into the really deepest forms of sleep that are the most enriching, the most replenishing, getting into REM sleep, getting into stage four sleep. It takes a lot of time to get there. But imagine every time you dipped below, say, that the very surface layer of speech, of sleep, sorry, you allowed someone to come into the room and just kind of jab you and say, wake up, wake up. And that happened all the time. You would always be floating at this really unenriching form of sleep. That's exactly what it's like to be in the workplace today. That's how the workplace has been engineered. You have to resist really hard not to have that happen. You have to turn off your emails. And then a lot of workplaces require that you respond to emails really fast as a measure of your conscientiousness, which is just totally backward.

Yeah, it's amazing. And then one of the things we do a lot in our work with our kind of mastery students and coaches is turning off your electronics, putting in a different room so you actually got to walk there and hide it, etc. An hour before you go to sleep. Because we also know that that late night, both the blue light and then just the intellectual stimulation is going to make it take us longer to get into deep sleep than make that more shallow. So I love the parallel in terms of productivity. And then of course you're waking up tired, so then what are you going to do? Then you're going to go for the easy, quick hit task, which is a reactive email rather than the deep hard work. Right. That requires a well energized, well rested person. You know, one of the phrases that has stuck with me the most, that I may have shared the most out of, out of everything you discuss in your book, is the idea of cucumbers versus pickles. I mean, as a guy who, you know is finding the optimal relationship to my own technology, I'm unquestionably pickled. And it's so humbling and so as you said, confronting, yet also empowering to recognize that and then to create the right structures. But can you walk us through that? The cucumbers vis a vis pickles?

Yeah. It's an idea that was shared with me by a couple of people who had started a center called Restart, which is a treatment center for people who developed screen based addictions. It's a phenomenal center out just outside Seattle. And I visited them, spent some time speaking to some of the people who were there. Most of them had addictions to games, in particular, World of Warcraft, some of the other role playing games, which is not uncommon. And one of the people who works there, Hilary Cash, a psychologist, basically said to me, the way she thinks of it is if you spend your entire. This is true especially for kids and teens, but it's also true for adults. If you spend your entire social life growing up in front of a screen. So instead of having face to face communication, instead of trying things and then seeing what their instant response is, you get this kind of slow form of feedback through a screen. It's easier to be anonymous, it's easier to post horrible comments on message boards, on YouTube and so on. You begin being a cucumber, kind of healthy cucumber. And then over time you become pickled. And the pickling process is the progressive degradation of your social skills, your ability to interact socially in a way that's smooth, that makes sense, where you pick up good social cues, you know how to respond in a way to get the kinds of responses you're looking for. All of that takes an incredible amount of skill, trial and error. If you look at a two year old or a three year old, they make A lot of social mistakes. I mean, a kid thinks the best way to get what he or she wants is to kind of grab things or to bop another kid on the head. It takes time to learn that that's not the best way to manage your life. The only way you learn that though, is by trial and error. It's watching other people in real time and it's also engaging with other people in real time. And you need to be in the same physical space. So Hillary Cash was basically describing this process of putting kids in a situation where most of their social lives happens either behind a screen or in front of a screen. They don't get that high fidelity feedback, that rapid sense of what's working and what isn't. And the pickling process is the brain basically becoming a less effective tool for socializing, for engaging in the social universe. And as a result, they are less effective in the workplace, less effective as parents, less effective in pretty much every context.

Yeah, that's powerful. And then I believe you also made the distinction of like in any particular domain, in addition to the social, whether that's video games. If you've become addicted to video games or to use a substance, you know, addiction of alcohol or some other substance that's become addictive for you, once you have developed that addiction, you can't undo it. There's a cucumber to pickle process. And then you made a line too, or a reference to a, a line from one of the guys you interviewed who said that the most dangerous time for an addict is the moment they feel they've gotten to a point where they no longer need to worry about their addiction. That just struck me as wow, you know, and it's one thing with a very socially obvious addiction vis a vis these behavioral ones we're talking about. But it's amazing to me. I spent a long time out of email. I get back in and it's like this whole rewiring just bubbles up again. And of course I've got different practices, but it's amazing thing to step back and observe the fanged, you know, little beast that wants to take over.

Yeah, absolutely. This guy was amazing. He was so eloquent in describing his experience. He had, he developed an addiction, excuse me, to World of Warcraft. And he was an A, straight A student, absolutely brilliant guy. He'd been on the football team, you know, he's a scholar and athlete. He had everything going for him. He was just an incredibly charming guy, had plenty of friends, was just a lovely guy in every respect. And he Went to the center, he went through the treatment program, developed ways of coping with his World of Warcraft addiction, went back to the other side of the country, back to school, started studying again, went back on the football team, started working out again, became healthier in every respect. And at the moment when he reached what he felt was his healthy point, he got back to where he wanted to be. He said, I could totally just play an hour, maybe half an hour of World of Warcraft and I'll be fine. Completely relapsed. It took a chunk like another year long chunk out of his life before he was recovered. He had to go back to the center, back for inpatient treatment for several weeks, back for outpatient monitoring and then he got through it. He's an incredibly successful guy now. But the amount of heartache and toil he had to deal with to get there because of that. Exactly what you're describing, the sense that he had, he'd reached a point where he was safe and healthy again, obviously that's just not the way addiction works.

Yeah. And then again, longer chat. But there's kind of Roy Baumeister's bright lines. Willpower, pre commitments. If it's 100% and paradoxically 100%, I'm just not doing it is way easier than 99% where you need to constantly negotiate with that part of your, you know, voice in your head telling you just this one time and again, having the humility to really look at this and then to make the decisions you referenced of fast forwarding to the end of your life and then coming back and saying, really, are we going to burn 11 years of our lives? And yeah, everyone else is doing it, but that's no sign that in today's society it's the thing to do and make that 100% commitment. Which leads us to the final idea I had in the note, which was your self determination theory interview process where the autonomy is kind of given to the individual. Can you walk us through that a little bit like someone who's contemplating this and almost give us like an exercise of the question that was asked that was so effective in that process?

Yeah, I love this idea. It's called the motivational interviewing process. And what you basically do when you work with someone who has substance abuse issue, whether they are doing something they want to do less of, whether it's using emails or screens or whatever it might be, is you ask them at the beginning of the process, how do you feel about your use of this thing? Let's say It's Facebook from 1 to 10, where 1 is, I feel totally fine, totally happy. My life is great. My interaction with Facebook is healthy and happy. It only brings me joy to 10. This is a disaster. It's destroying my life. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow because I can't face the world the way I'm interacting with Facebook, whatever it may be. And people will give you a number and then you say, okay, how do you feel about that? Do you want to change that? Do you want the number to shift? And some people, and this is an absolutely fine response, some people will begin saying, I'm at an 8. This is a real problem for me, But I don't really want to do anything about it right now. Most people, though, given enough time, when they think more about it, they introspect about it, will eventually say, you know what? I'm at an 8. I'd like to be at a 6 or a 5 or a 4. But giving them the autonomy means they have ownership over that process, which is really important. You're not just imposing on them as parents do to kids. You are not allowed to use the screen more than this time during the day because that only lasts as long as the stick is there. You've got to have the punishment just sitting right there. The parents saying, if you don't do the right thing, this is what's going to happen. If it resides within you, if it's an intrinsic thing that resides in you, you, self will it, you drive it, it's much more likely to stick over time. So I think it's a really effective process because it gives ownership of change to the person who's actually making that change. The other thing it does that's really interesting and important, I think, is we all use screens for different reasons. For most of us, my sense, based on the research I've done, is that it's just a way we paper over boredom. It's low level boredom. It's why you get into an elevator. There's mild social anxiety being in an elevator. It's a weird situation. You're all crammed in there. Everyone pulls out the phone. It's universal. Even if you're in there for five seconds, everyone pulls out the phone. I see this every day at school at NYU where I teach. I mean, it's universal. So I think for most of us it's about boredom, but it's worth understanding what it is that you're doing on your phone. Is it you're treating basic low level boredom? Is it loneliness? Is it anxiety? Is it depression? Is it something else altogether? What exactly does the phone bring to you? And once you know the psychological needs that are being met by, you can find other ways to meet those needs that don't involve sitting in front of a screen. And most people find that kind of balance. So meeting that need in a more healthy way makes them much happier. That's part of what this interview process uncovers is the true psychological state that's being driven by those experiences.

Right on. I love it, man. Is there anything like we didn't. I know we barely scratched the surface. We covered a few different, you know, salient ideas, but anything that we didn't cover, you think is like, this is worth talking about or shining a bright light on real quick.

I think from a. You know, I am a marketing professor. I'm very interested in how all of this matters in the, in the world of business. And I think one of the things, both personally and professionally, that I've started to think a lot about is how making life better is essentially about systematically shaving down friction points. A lot of our lives involve annoying friction points, things that are difficult for us to deal with. And if you can find them, if you can do a sort of friction audit and find where those friction points are and sand them down, life becomes much easier, much, much better to engage with. Some screens actually help with this. I think the best thing about screens is when they involve utilities, things like Google Maps, education software. All of these things make life easier, make the friction points a little bit less full of friction. They kind of sand them away at the same time. The absence of friction is often problematic as well. So you've got to know when not just to shave down friction points, but also when to introduce them. For most of us with screenshots, the issue is not that there's no friction there, but, sorry, not that there's too much friction there, but that there's no friction. So Netflix systematically introduces this feature where at the end of one episode, the next one automatically begins. You've got to find a way to short circuit that process, whether it's turning off that post play feature or whether it's having an alarm clock set in a different room for an hour from now, so that you know you'll have to get up and turn it off, which will break that cycle. And a lot of tech, the bottomlessness of scrolling, it's all designed to remove friction points so you never get the feedback that it's time to move. So I think one of the sort of most Successful changes a lot of people can make in their lives, personally and professionally, is to work out where there is friction that needs to be sanded down and to work out where there is not enough friction, where we need a little bit of help from friction points to guide us and how to introduce those systematically to improve life more broadly.

I love it. Just made me think of James Clear and his atomic habits. And we talk about algorithms. If this, then that Installing and deleting. Installing, you got to make it easy. Deleting, you got to make it hard. So your friction of make it easy to do the right thing by removing the friction and then the deleting make it hard to do the thing you know you don't want to be doing. And there's simple things in our environment from putting it in your file cabinet when you get to work or whatever. Awesome. Appreciate you. Irresistible. Highly recommended. What's the best place for people to find you and learn more about you and your work?

I always feel weird saying this. Go to the screen. You'll find me there. I don't have much of a social media presence. I tweet occasionally. My handle is Adam Lee Alter. A D A M L E E A L T E R. And if you search for me, the thing about academics is we're everywhere online and we have no choice. We have to be out there. So if you search for Adam Alter, you'll find my NYU homepage, my personal homepage, my books. Perfect.

And then get the hardcover of the book as I recommended in the note. You know, get yourself an opportunity to go deep, go old school like it's 1900 or something.

Yeah, I agree.

Right on, man. All right, well, appreciate you. Great work.

Thanks, Brian. Thank you.

Okay, see you, Adam.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hey guys, this is Brian with a quick little P.S. i'm really excited to let you know about an event we're working on. Plan is to make it the premier self optimizing event of 2020. We're calling it Optimize 2020. You the modern hero. Basic idea. Five days, 101 world class luminaries, 1 million people. You can learn more and get your tickets to the online and offline event at Optimize Me 2020. Again, that's Optimize Me 2020. Hope to see you.