Nir Eyal Interview with Adam Alter Author of Irresistible

Hi, I'm Nir Eyal, and this is the near and Far Podcast. This podcast is about business behavior and the brain. On this show, I do a few things. I read quick articles I've written about topics shaping your behavior. I interview authors of books I enjoy, and from time to time, I devote episodes to answering your questions. If you want to ask me a question, visit the podcast page on itunes, go to Ratings and Reviews, and ask me a question by leaving a review. I promise to read it and possibly include your question in a future episode. So please ask me anything now. Enjoy the episode and for more, you can always Visit me@nearandfar.com Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. This is Nir Eyal. My guest today is Adam Alter, who is the author of the Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. Adam is a friend of mine as well as a professor at nyu, and he's written another book called Drunk Tank Pink. And today we're going to be talking about Irresistible. We have a lot in common to discuss on this book, and so I cannot wait to dive in. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. It's great, great that you are here. We've met up a few times now, and it's. I really enjoyed the book. It's extremely well written. There is a lot in it that I've been dying to kind of ask you. But before we dive into my questions, can you just give the listener a basic overview of what the book is all about? Yeah, sure.

So I'm a psychologist by training. I'm very interested in addiction and things that we can't seem to stop doing that are essentially not very good for us. When we think of addiction, we traditionally thought of it as addiction to a substance. There had to be a substance involved, and you had to ingest that substance. This book is about the new forms of addiction that involve behaviors without any substance. So those include things like using smartphones, email, playing games, Internet, behavior, work, gambling, all sorts of things that, generally speaking, are pretty new, pretty recent on the backs of really new, flashy technology. A lot of people quibble over the definition of the word addiction. And so that's always a thing to discuss. But for me, I think that that word actually does fit. And so this book is a description of what those. Those new addictions are, a description of how they arise. That's the bit that really interests me. What is it that makes an experience so hard to resist? And then what should we do about it as a. As a society? And as consumers.

So let's start with the definition. Just so we're all on the same page. You say that in the book about 40% of us have some kind of addiction. How are you defining the term?

Yeah, so that's based on a paper. It's a meta analysis that combined dozens of papers with thousands and thousands of adults measured from 2011. So it's a little bit out of date now. And the suggestion is that the number might even be higher. But the basic definition is an addiction is something that you do in the short term that feels beneficial or good in some way that you return to compulsively over and over again, but that ultimately in the long term compromises your well being in. In at least one way. So those ways are socially, psychologically, physically, or financially. So, you know, you spend too much money in a way that you didn't plan, or it diminishes your wellbeing and relationships with the people around you. Or it makes you psychologically less well off because, say, it changes your threshold for boredom and you're constantly agitated or physically. It keeps you on the couch and you don't exercise. So there are lots of different features of that definition. But I think a lot of the behaviors that I talk about in the book satisfy that definition.

Interesting. So I think we use kind of similar definitions. Although I wouldn't expect my definition to accommodate so many people. The definition that I go off of is persistent compulsive dependency on a behavior or substance that harms the user. So it sounds like we have a.

Lot of the same things.

It has to cause harm, and it has to be something that's persistent and compulsive. Meaning even if you wanted to stop, you couldn't.

Yes.

And it shocks me that 40% and you're saying maybe even more because this is an old study of people are struggling with these compulsions. Can it really be that high?

I think it can. I mean, I think if you talk to most people, they experience some level of compulsive behavior with respect to technology. That definition encompasses more than just tech, though. And the study that mentioned the number 41% also talked about more than technology. It was about all sorts of different behaviors. So behavioral addiction, as they defined it, wasn't just about the use of things like screens, but most of the people tended to have those kinds of addictions. I think one important point to make early on is that when we think of the word addiction, we think of it as a clinical problem, something that needs to be treated clinically by A psychotherapist or by drugs. I don't think that's necessarily true. I think addiction can describe a problem that is subclinical, that doesn't require that kind of treatment. So for me, if you satisfy the definition, if it makes your life less good in some way, but you don't need treatment, it could be just a malady that affects society or culture in this broad way. That's how I think of most of those 41%. I think only 1 to 5% of people have a clinical addiction that requires treatment.

1 to 5%. Okay, so that's the number that would.

Be more like what you.

Yeah, but I guess the thing I struggle with is that everything in life has a cost. Everything has a potential harm. Right. If I love the hell out of my wife, I love the hell out of my kid. But many times to show them my affection, I will spend money with them, I will spend time with them, and then that causes me harm in some sense is that there's a cost. There's an opportunity cost to my money, there's an opportunity cost to my time. I could be spending that time writing or working on my business. So everything has that inherent cost. If I want to watch a football game on tv, that has a price to be paid there. It's time I'm not spending with other people. But would I say that I'm addicted to my kids or my wife or football?

If there's something that you're doing compulsively over and over again and it's ultimately mainly reducing your well being or harming you in some way, then I'd say yes, that's a compulsion that may even rise to the level of addiction using this definition. It's essentially a good thing that has a few costs on the back of it, which I think is true of so much of what we do. You know, a lot of what we do for the long term that's good in the long term is actually really cost in the short term. It feels bad. There's something to this definition, I think that's important, at least my definition that suggests that in the short term, a lot of these addictive behaviors feel good or they satisfy us, but they're really bad for us in the long term in a sort of more deep and meaningful way. So, you know, if you have a relationship with someone and there are some costs, for example, you have less free time of your own, or you can't work as many hours as you'd like, or have as much leisure time or whatever you know, in the short term, that's. That's not pleasurable. But the idea is that in the long run, you're building this really meaningful relationship that I would not call an addiction. It also sort of lacks the compulsive dimension, I think, which is present in so many of these behaviors that in the long term are bad for us.

And so what is it that's different about technology today? And this is really the core of your book that you're saying that there's something particularly new about technology today that makes us compelled or titled the book irresistible.

Yeah, I think it's a number of features. I think one of them is just that the people who create technology today are more sophisticated than they used to be. They talk to people like me and people like you, and we know a lot more than we. A lot of the research in the last 10 to 15 years has armed us with more information about how to create an addictive experience. So I think that's part of it. I think it's also that there's access to data that was not available before. Huge data sets, troves of data that tell you, you know, you're releasing a game. There are two versions of a mission. People play this one mission 50% longer than the other one. So then you say, all right, let's do away with that version that's less compelling. Then you take the one that's more compelling. You split that into two versions, you repeat. So you, a, B. Test the game to within an inch of its life. You can do that because you have access to data that I think have only been accessible and available recently. So it's partly that as well. It's about the sophistication of the hardware itself and the technology itself that allows you to deliver really rapid feedback. So when I spoke to one of the people who heads up a clinic near Seattle called Restart, she said to me, you know, I don't play too many video games because I find myself becoming quite addicted to those games. So I still play games from the 90s that routinely crash. They aren't able to handle what the developers brought to them. Right. And so, you know, their shortcomings made them less likely to cause addictions. And so I think there just aren't as many of those shortcomings. And the tech is just smoother and more streamlined than it used to be.

Right? I guess so. I don't know. I think I might have mentioned this to you in one of our earlier conversations that I actually picked that title at first for the Title of my next book. And then I decided not to use the title because I couldn't convince myself that the technology was actually irresistible. That. I mean, I think a lot of what you call addictions, I would call maybe bad habits, maybe distractions, but I wouldn't call them addictions. And I don't think that many of the technology that you describe in the book rise to the level of something that is actually irresistible that I cannot stop using. And I'm wondering, why does it rise to the level? Why is it something that really, even if you wanted to stop, you couldn't stop?

Yeah. I think first to say about the word addiction, I think it's easy to become distracted by the word itself, and I'm always happy to jettison the word if we want to have a conversation about similar issues where we overlap. I think addiction does fit here, and a lot of people do, but a lot of people don't. So we could put the word addiction aside, but the term, it is a tricky word. I think the word irresistible is, for me, more aspirational than descriptive of what goes on now. I think what companies are trying to do is to create something that's irresistible. I think some of them are getting pretty close. The World of Warcraft as a game for people who play it is not too far from irresistible. They cannot stop playing that game. Half of them develop addictions for at least short periods of time. And to me, that then if you can get half the population to keep playing to the point where they can't.

Stop, but that's people who have immersed themselves in the game. It's not like if you came up. If you came up to me with World of Warcraft and you slapped me in front of the game, I wouldn't get addicted because it's not very interesting to me.

Right.

It's just not. Doesn't compel me in the first place. My mom would not get addicted to World of Warcraft. Lots of people don't get addicted to World of Warcraft.

Yeah, absolutely. That's 100 million people, though.

Oh, it's a huge population. Even World of Warcraft is an interesting example because if you play World of Warcraft for a while, starts to get really boring. Unless it's about your guild.

Yeah, it's so true.

It's about other people. And so part of me prompts, you know, when I hear World of Warcraft used as an example, it's like, well, yeah, people get, you know, very closely attached to other people all the time. That's what people do. In the real world, Sure. I mean, that's the biological need. You talk about in the book, about how, you know, addiction is fundamentally about some kind of itch, something that you're looking to relieve in some way. And I totally agree with you. But that's the most basic core and even beautiful part of our humanity is that we need other people. So in many ways, I think World of Warcraft is a great example of an experience of a game that is replicating something that people can't get otherwise. And now they can get through this online experience because they're not comfortable in person with others. Geography separates us. I mean, evolutionarily, we had our tribe of 150 people or so, and they knew us and we knew them and we protected each other. Well, that's kind of what's happening on World of Warcraft, right? It's very much simulating that experience. I guess the harm element is what's exactly is what we need to worry about.

You took the word right out of my mouth. I think for some people, it's beneficial that people who perhaps don't have those social connections in the real world and so they find them in the World of Warcraft world, and that is a benefit. I'm not suggesting that the game shouldn't exist and that its existence is essentially a bad thing. Whoever created the game to be this way did a very good job of making it compelling for people. And building in the social element is actually a choice that designers make. Very early on, Instagram did include the social element. By having a native social network attached to Instagram, Hipstamatics founders decided not to do that. And there's a big difference now in the valuation of those two and how compelling they are over the course of six, seven years. So I think that's just a decision like any other that developers and designers make. I mean, a lot of this is actually capitalizing on these basic human needs. I think, and I think we probably both agree on that, that once you understand what human needs drive us as individuals in the world, then by building a program that sort of fits perfectly those needs. Like Hand to Glo is the way that you get people to engage. And if you do a really, really good job of that, the engagement might rise to the level of something like addiction or irresistibility or something's just below that if you. If you don't like those words. So I'm willing to accept that there's nothing inherently bad about social interaction online. It's just that when people stop going to university, they Stop going to classes. They have to go into treatment because they sit in their rooms for five weeks in a row. There's something about this game that goes beyond just healthy social connection.

Right. What surprised you most about the research for.

I think I was surprised initially by a lot of the giants in the tech world themselves approached technology. There was a caution and a carefulness about the way they approach their own technologies and other people's technologies. And I didn't expect that. I thought there were two kinds of people in the world, Luddites and evangelists, and that's just not how the world works. I mean, even Steve Jobs described the iPad very famously as a wonderful device that should be basically in everyone's hands at almost all times, because you can do everything on the iPad. And. But then he wouldn't let his kids use the iPad. So, you know, I found a lot of cases just like that, and that surprised me. And it suggested to me that tech titans recognize these issues, that the rest of us should at least know that they are there.

Right.

What. What exactly is it that people like Jobs were afraid of?

Right.

And so that. That really drove me to write the book.

Yeah, that is. That is a great. A great story. And I think it's. I'm. I'm not terribly surprised because my background is in the gaming industry and advertising industry, and that's where I learned a lot of these techniques, and that's where my book Hooked came out of, was the lessons I learned in those. And, yeah, I'm very cautious about how I use technology. Certainly my wife doesn't have a Facebook account. You know, we're very cautious about how we let our daughter use technology. Do you see that as something that people are becoming more aware of? Is that something that's. Now it seems like it's entering the conversation more and more.

Yeah. I think people are realizing it organically with their own use. They recognize that there's an unhealthiness to the way they use technology, particularly with respect to their relationships. That's how I initially got involved in this. I was sitting for hours and hours and hours playing games. My wife was next to me on Instagram or Facebook. And we realized that the whole night would pass and we hadn't spoken to each other. And I just felt that there was something not quite right about that. Even though in the moment I felt happy, I felt that the relationship was suffering. And that wasn't because I'd read anything, but I do think there's more recognition in the culture at large that this is Becoming an issue.

So gaming is your drug of choice?

Yeah, well, this is very low level gaming, I guess. It was never an truly immersive game. It was things like Angry Birds, more iPad and iPhone games.

So what have you done since doing this research, since writing the book? How have you changed your life?

I build in stopping cues or stopping rules into my life. So there are certain things that tell me now is the time not to have a screen nearby. And then I'll put it as far away from me as possible. So it's things like dinner time, is a screen free time doesn't matter. If I'm alone with other people at home, traveling, it doesn't matter. There is no screen involved at dinner time.

Even if you're by yourself? Yeah, you just eat in silence.

Or I'll read something in a magazine which feels different in some measurable way. It probably isn't if you're reading on your screen, but there's just this temptation to escape the book that you're reading on the screen and do something else. So I put the phone as far away from me as I can. The other thing I've been doing recently is on weekends, that's the best quality time I have with my son. And so when my wife and I go out with him, we put our phones on airplane mode. So the phone is essentially just a camera. And that I think is an easy stopping rule. And it's definitely made our weekends richer in many respects. I sort of look at that almost as a Sabbath from, from tech. And it makes me feel better when Monday morning rolls around. And I've had a couple of days where I haven't really done much emailing or engaging with tech.

So you go the whole whole weekend with it.

Small breaks. We have some breaks where, you know, once he goes down to bed, I'll check my emails just to see if anything urgent came in. You know, right after I released my book, there were more emails and so I checked a little more frequently. But as a general rule, this idea of having these, these breaks that you build in or these rules that say, hey, this thing just happened now is that's my cue to stop for a while? Yeah, I found that really helpful and I've spoken to a lot of people who've started doing that. And what's really interesting to me is that almost universally they start small with like an hour a day. Almost everyone expands it. So I'll say that was really good. I want to do that for the first hour when I wake up in the morning or the first, the last hour before bed, or whatever else they decide. And so it obviously works for people.

So this is beautiful. I mean, I love these techniques and I've kind of been collecting them since I wrote Hooked up what other people do to put technology in its place. Do you think that this is a trend that will catch on or does the technology ultimately win and beat us and we're not going to be able to disconnect the way that I think both of us do?

Yeah, it's not a fair fight. Obviously we have to try really hard. I mean, the fact that you have to collect these techniques and the fact that people share them, like.

But it's new, right? The whole industry is what, 15? The iPhone is just 10 years old. Right. So it's brand new.

Yeah, no, that's true. I mean, the industry is very new, but I think it's the rate at which the industry advances is far greater than the rate at which humans can keep up. That's my sense. Because 10 years ago I didn't have this problem. Now I have it in spades. In 10 years, when VR and AR are everywhere, you know, I'll have the choice to sit in this imperfect, complex world or to put on my goggles and go to the perfect best possible of all worlds. I think it's going to be really hard to resist that in a way that we haven't even yet comprehended. So looking forward, my concern is that we will not be able to keep up with the advances of the tech and of the people who create the tech.

So you're pessimistic. It sounds like a little bit.

Yeah, I'm concerned about it. I at least think you should be cautious about it or we should be cautious as a society. I think once VR and AR run away and the programs are sophisticated enough, it's going to be very hard for us to pull back. So I think it makes much more sense to be really cautious as we roll out mainstream, widely used forms of VR and ar. And just to monitor usage, you know, if you find that 80% of the population is in their goggles eight hours a day, that to me is a major concern. And we should at least think about whether.

Wait, say that again.

If 80% of the population is spending, say eight hours a day inside the VR or AR.

Oh, that's someday.

Someday, if that happens. Yeah. I think at that point something needs to change and it'd be best if we changed something before we got to that point.

Right, and you think that's realistic? You think we might get to that point.

Yeah, I do. I mean, I think our phones already draw us away. You know, the latest data from various tracking apps is four hours a day for Americans.

Okay, so it sounds horrible, but then when you look at the same or similar studies, like Nielsen has this study around television viewing, and it's five hours a day, which is not a new problem. Right. I mean, before we were talking about Internet addicts, we were talking about couch potatoes. I met a woman a few weeks ago who is addicted, and I use it in this very strict definition of the 1 to 5% population around romance novels. And she literally can't. I mean, to her detriment. She wants to stop at can around romance novels. And people have all kinds of behavioral addictions. And I wonder, you know, back to this question of how really different this is. Are we spending so much time on our phones? Well, because, look, our phones today are not our phones. They're our books. There are our contacts are there, our audio files are there. It does what 100 different things used to do for us. So of course we're going to be on it.

One thing that I found really interesting was I'd been collecting data on how long we spend on our phones for a long time. But recently some of the apps have built on track, built in tracking software that also tells you exactly what people are doing. And what's interesting is some of them will interrupt you as you're doing that and they'll say, how are you feeling now? Are you happy or unhappy? We spend more than three times as long on the apps that make us unhappy, which I think is interesting. Yeah, I also think it's interesting you bring up tv, because TV hasn't changed a lot since its early days. It's, you know, the picture is crisper, the sound is a little bit better, but essentially it's still moving picture. But I think the rate at which things change in screens that we use on phones and iPads and tablets and things like that, the rate of change there is really rapid. And I think, you know, my book is about today, but I think it's more about where we're going from here. And I think if. If the word irresistible doesn't apply yet, I would be surprised if there aren't technologies in the next five years that are. That you will agree are irresistible to everyone. I think to pretty much everyone. Yeah.

But if we're. So what is it that will happen that will make these technologies irresistible in the future? What's the principle that makes it something that you and I Obviously can stop using these technologies on the weekends. It requires a little bit of willpower. It requires some planning. Maybe it requires an app. Like I use two or three different apps that block access when I want to really concentrate. Apps like Focus and rescuetime. And I mean, there's thousands of these different apps. What is going to happen that is going to make technology something that we really can't put down?

I think a big part is that it'll be built, it'll sort of be interwoven into the fabric of social life, and not just social life, but life at large in a way that email has been. I think email snuck up on people. You know, they thought it was amazing. Hey, I can just, you know, type one liner, send it, it immediately reaches someone else. It sounded like a lot of fun at first, but now people are drowning in emails. And that's partly because it's how you travel, it's how you work, it's how you fill out job applications, it's how you do everything. You can't really get by without email.

But then a new technology comes along like Slack.

Sure.

And fixes all the shitty things around the last generation of technology. So isn't that the natural evolution of these?

I think it is. But even Slack and even those new technologies will ultimately just take the place of email or they'll end up soaking up time themselves. And I think a lot of these things that I think we're going to find very hard to resist really have that much of a choice. You know, VR and AR become a huge part of work. Then you'll have to use them for some of the day and suddenly you'll have to be accessible at 3am by putting on your goggles or whatever.

Yeah, but I have to push back on you there because then it's the work's fault. And I'm right with you.

Sure. Yeah.

Like, I just think it's important to put the blame where it belongs. You know, if you ask folks, look, you won the lottery and you got $20 million and you never have to work another day in your life. Do you keep using your work email account? Do you keep using your Work Slack account? Well, hell no. Actually, I asked somebody this question. They said yes for one day to tell everybody at work to go screw themselves. But they wouldn't continue to use those technologies because it's not the technology, it's our crazy work culture.

I think it's part of it. I think it's a huge part of it. In fact, in the book, I talk a lot about the role of the workplace and the role of managers in deciding how we use tech as a major driver. This isn't just a book that blames technologists and the people who design tech. It's a book that says, this is a problem, we all face it together. What do we do about it? So I'm totally on board with the idea that some of the blame should lie at the feet of the people who are designing workplaces. But I think a lot of the technology becomes really compelling separate from that. So some of it's interwoven into the fabric of life. Some of it, like a lot of what we do on our phones, seems to grip a lot of people. And I think it's only going to become more compelling when VR allows us to and AI allow us many more degrees of freedom and ways of shaping worlds in ways that are really, really compelling to us. I think it's gonna be hard for us as humans based on the general idea that we're seeking things that are pleasurable and moving away from things that are less pleasurable to avoid them.

You know, I think people would say the same thing about movies. When movies first came, and they did, in fact, they said, that's it. You know, once movies are piped into people's homes via the television, people will never leave their homes. And people said the same thing around novels. They said the same thing about comic books, they said the same thing about radio. I mean, is it the. Or is there something that's fundamentally this breaks the mold of art?

I think the two big differences between what we're seeing now and movies and books and things like that, the one big difference is you've got people who are trying very actively to engage you, to suck up your attention in a way that I don't think was true for people who were designing what was going on on the tv.

Why not soap operas? I mean, look, you know, the biggest demographic today playing video games is middle aged women.

That's right, yeah.

And they have taken their time away from soap operas. My mom, throughout my whole childhood, maybe not addicted, but certainly habituated to spending hours watching soap operas.

I think those, those shows were designed to obviously be engaging, but the goal wasn't quite the same as the goal of people who were designing programs to suck up your attention and take it away from other things. I think it's a very explicit engagement goal that's a little bit different. And I think that's a really important but perhaps subtle difference that if your goal is to say, I'm worried that people are going to want to sleep rather than do this thing that I'm designing. How do I ensure that they don't go to sleep? Which is a conversation that's happening when people design certain technologies. That's different from someone saying, my soap opera needs to be better than the other soap operas.

Well, it needs to. I want to make sure that as many people. It's ratings. Right. I see as many eyeballs. It's hard for me to actually figure out the difference because it's same thing.

Right.

Selling eyeballs to advertisers. And so I need your attention.

Yeah. I mean, I think it is a subtle difference, but I do think the difference is in how you conceive of what you're trying to do. And I think if you're trying, but it's a very active goal now. People talk about the attention economy. No one said anything like the attention economy when soap operas were around. And part of it is about the infrastructure around them. So you'd watch the soap opera and then you'd go about your day, and then it would be on the same time the next day, and you'd watch again. You'd be very compelled for 30 to 60 minutes a day. But you didn't sit binging for hours and hours and hours and hours. That's partly about the way the technology's evolved, which I said was one of the factors that's changed. It's allowed the technologies to be weaponized.

I also think in some ways it's better in a way, because when a popular show came on, everything stopped. I mean, we would rush home so that we could get to watch the television show.

Right.

Hee Haw or whatever stupid show.

Right, right.

And we would have to, like, run home to watch that certain life really did stop. Whereas now, if you want to watch an hour here, an hour there, in many ways it's much more flexible.

So, yeah, I think that's the theory. I think a lot of people think of the convenience of everyday life and the number of choices we have about timing. You know, on demand sounds incredibly attractive. The problem is it's always available. So the dark flip side of that is it's always available. And when everything's always available, you're overwhelmed as a human being. I think it's very, very hard for you to say, I should be doing these other things now that are less pleasurable but that demand some attention. So that's the natural flip side. Yes. Everyone rushed home. They all watched at the same time and then talked around the water cooler. The next day. So perhaps you could argue for that 60 minute period when the show was on. You know, that was a major form of compulsion or irresistibility, but it was very limited. And I think that's no longer the case. I think at all times there are a million of those things that you could be doing. And that's what's so hard for so many people.

I think the thing that I struggle with is when people say, oh, it's changing our brain, or the Nicholas Carr argument of technology is changing us in ways that we don't expect. I think that is certainly the case. I am positive it is changing our brains because everything changes our brains. If I learn tennis or play the piano, that changes my brain. I think what's been really hard for me to answer is, but is it bad? That's the part I can't seem to grasp. I mean, there will be, I have no doubt that there will be negative consequences. We will look back. We're this guinea pig generation that is not certain about the negative repercussions. And there will absolutely be negative repercussions. And I don't want to put myself forward as a defender of the industry. I think that there are all types of very shady things that Facebook and Google and these companies. I just wonder if, if there's a cost or a risk to focusing on the wrong thing. Focusing on the irresistibility element sometimes scares me because of two reasons. One, I think there's an opportunity cost of people saying, oh, I don't wanna go into this industry because it's so shady. It addicts people and it creates these products that are meant to create robots. And then two, I worry that people won't use these techniques for good. And you talk about this in the book as well, about how it's really about the application of these technique. There's no reason the same thing that keeps us compelled to keep using Facebook doesn't help us live better lives in a way. So my hope is that people can use the techniques you describe in your book and my book to build technology to make things better.

It's funny, I've never thought of there being a shortage of people who say technology is great. I think the first thing that happens when there's a new form of technology is we all focus on how wonderful it is. That's certainly been true about the products from the many of the biggest tech companies. I can't think of too many people who only focus on the bad initially. I think this is a natural backlash though. And so in writing a book like Irresistible, I'm focusing on those things that I think have been neglected, the other side of things. And now there's a small wave, and I wouldn't quite say a tidal wave. But there are a lot of people now questioning the benefits of these forms of tech. And it's partly because they themselves, as they live their lives, can feel some of those negative effects. I've heard this before, the argument that we may be deterring people from going into these fields. I haven't seen a lot of that, at least in my MBA classes. So I teach some of the ideas from the book, and most people, at least personally, sort of resonate with the idea and they say, yes, that sounds totally true about my life. And then they still go on and a lot of them end up in tech careers. So I don't know that this actually scares them away from the career. But I think you're right. It's so important to describe the mechanisms, but not say that they're always going to be geared towards the bad or necessarily need to be. I think they're all agnostic techniques. Once you understand the human brain and how people operate, you can get them to save more or eat better or exercise more, or you can get them to spend a huge amount of time in front of a screen texting people, if that's what they're going to do. So I think there's no inherent reason why this needs to be bad.

Fantastic. Well, maybe we'll end it there on a high note. I appreciate you coming by. This was really, really fun.

Thanks for having me. Nir. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the near and Far Podcast. You can always find more at my blog, nearandfar.com and don't forget, if you have a question you'd like me to explore in a future episode, leave me your question. The former review for the podcast on itunes.