#420： What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life
Episode Stats
Summary
Our smartphones are a blessing, but for many people, they can also feel like a curse. You feel compelled to check your device all the time, leaving you feeling disengaged from life. What is it about modern technology that makes it feel so addictive? In his new book, "Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked," author Adam Alter explores that topic.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're
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like most people, you've got a powerful computer in your back pocket that allows you to listen
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to this podcast, check the score of your favorite team and learn the population of Mickey Mantle's
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hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma. Answer, 2473. Our smartphones are a blessing, but for many people,
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they can also feel like a curse. You feel compelled to check your device all the time,
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leaving you feeling disengaged from life. What is it about modern technology that makes it feel
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so addictive? I guess he explores that topic in his book, Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive
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Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. His name is Adam Alter. Today on the show,
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we discuss what makes today's technology more compelling than the televisions and Super
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Nintendo's of old, whether our itch to check our phones can really be classified as an addiction,
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what soldiers use of heroin during the Vietnam War can tell us about why our attachment to our
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phones is hard to shake, and how the reward we're looking for on social media isn't actually the
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likes themselves. Adam then shares what he thinks is the most effective tactic for taking back control
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of our tech, and how consumers may also be able to influence the direction of its future.
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After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash irresistible.
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So you published a book called Irresistible, and it's all about the rise of addictive
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technologies and the businesses that support that. I'm curious, you're a marketing professor, right?
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So how did you get interested in writing a whole book about addictive technology?
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Well, I think these platforms are addictive to everyone who uses them. It doesn't matter who
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you are or what you do. One of the fascinating things about them is that they tap into very
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low-level human psychological features. So as a marketing professor, I perhaps know a little
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bit more about what goes into designing them, and so that makes me the right kind of person to write
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a book. But I'm just as susceptible to their charms as anyone.
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Yeah. Well, I mean, so let's talk about that. Why do companies design for addiction? And we're
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going to talk about addiction, whether there's such a thing as tech addiction, but it feels
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like that. So why do they do that? Is it just the bottom line? Do they have insidious
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motivations, or do they actually think they're helping people by making them check their phone
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Well, I can dispel that notion. They definitely don't feel that they're designing products for
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our well-being. They're not under that misapprehension. They know that what they're doing
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essentially is designing products that addict us. And they have to do that based on the model,
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the model of the market they're in. So the model of the market is such that they get
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more money the more time we spend on their products, their devices, their apps, their
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platforms, because they're attracting ad revenue. That's really where they live and die. And ad
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revenue is greatest when you have more subscribers, more people who pay attention, and people who
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not just arrive at your site but stay there for a long time. So if you can tell advertisers
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people will consume our content for three hours a day, that's better than saying they'll
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arrive but leave after five minutes. And so maximizing well-being of the consumer doesn't
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require that they're engaged for a huge amount of time, because what's really good for consumers
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is that they're engaged for the right amount of time, which often isn't very long. But because
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of the way this model works, these companies have to privilege addiction. They have to privilege
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attention-grabbing rather than privileging our well-being. And it turns out it's not good for us.
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It's not to our best advantage to spend that much time on these platforms.
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And yeah, I love how you begin the book with this great antidote about Steve Jobs. And it's when he
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announces the launch of the iPad, and he's talking about how fantastic it is. You can type on it. You
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just use a finger. That's it. It's amazing. But then you talk about how he never let his kids use an
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iPad. Yeah, that was fascinating to me. And it was something I discovered quite early on. And that
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really made me interested in this topic. We always turn to the experts on any topic to get a sense of
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how we should be thinking of it. I was no expert in the iPad or on any tech particularly. And yet I
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found as I searched that a lot of the tech titans were very careful about their own tech usage. And
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also, I think more importantly, they were very careful about allowing their kids to use these
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products. So Steve Jobs, as you mentioned, was very cautious about how much time his kids spent
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in front of various tech devices. And he didn't even let them near the iPad, which says something,
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right? I mean, he was publicly telling the world this is a wonderful product, but then wouldn't let
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his kids near it. And he's not the only one. There are a lot of tech titans in a similar position.
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And so that led me to dig a little bit more deeply to try to understand what exactly is it that
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concerned him and these other giants? What were they worried about? And that's where the book came
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from. Yeah, it's like that saying about drug dealers, right? You know, never consume your own
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stuff. Exactly. All right. So let's talk about this idea of tech addiction, because that's
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controversial in the mental health field. Is it possible to be addicted? Because it's not a substance,
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not like drugs or whatever. It's a behavior. What's the status of behavior addiction in the
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world of mental health? Yeah, it's an interesting question, this question of whether you can develop
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an addiction to something that doesn't involve the ingestion of a substance. And it turns out,
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I think you can. And we've actually known this for a long time. Certainly, drugs were the first
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products that led to addiction. There were drugs, there was nicotine, there was alcohol. But then,
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you know, casinos became very sophisticated. And suddenly, you had this raft of thousands of
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gambling addicts. And no one really disputes that. I think we're all fairly comfortable with
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the idea that you can be addicted to gambling. Going a step further, though, I think you can also
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become addicted to other experiences that don't involve any of these substances and that don't
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involve gambling. And it really just rests on the definition you use for addiction. So for me,
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it's any experience that we return to compulsively over and over again in the short term,
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because we want to do that. It's something we feel we want to do. But in the long run,
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it undermines our well-being in at least one of several different respects. It can harm your
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social life, it can harm your financial well-being, it can harm you psychologically,
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or it can harm you physically. And I think that that describes how a lot of us experience the tech world.
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So I mean, what are some of the statistics about this whole tech thing? It's new, right? I mean,
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it's relatively, I would say, maybe 15 years, I mean, computers have been around for more than that. But I'd
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say 15 years, things really started kicking off. Like, what are we finding about how this technology,
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smartphones, constantly connection, constantly connected to the internet? How is it affecting
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Yeah, it's a good question. And one that we don't have a fantastic answer to just because,
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as you say, this is really a 10 to 15 year old problem. And we haven't tracked kids based on usage
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over time, because there just aren't that many kids to track yet. They're still quite young,
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and we don't know what they'll look like when they're teenagers and when they're in college and
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when they're adults and they have their own kids and they're in the workplace. So that remains to
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be seen. So we don't really know. But what we do know is that the amount of time we spend on these
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devices is colossal, and it's growing dramatically. In 2007, we spent an average of 18 minutes on our
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phones. And later that year, Apple introduced the first generation of the iPhone. And eight years later,
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by 2015, we were spending an average of three hours a day on those screens. And just two years
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after that, in 2017, the number had jumped from three hours to four hours. So the average American
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today, the average American adult, and it's actually worse among teenagers and kids, spends four hours
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of the waking day staring at the phone. I'm not talking about using it as a phone to have a
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conversation. I'm talking about looking at the screen. Now, even if you don't use the term
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addiction to describe that, we are spending four hours of the day. We don't even have that many
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hours when we're awake and not eating and not at work to do that. And it's just sucking up just a
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colossal amount of our time. Yeah. I mean, this could hurt productivity of businesses. I imagine,
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you know, it's time looking at the screen is time you won't be looking at or talking,
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interacting with people face to face, and that could have some deleterious effects. So there's a lot of
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problems here. Yeah, exactly. It's hampering our ability to do our work. I think the biggest
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effects, though, are probably social. I think the biggest factor is that we're spending less time
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having face-to-face conversations, which are really the richest kinds of conversations we can have.
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Now, there are those of us who are old enough to remember a time before this, before 15 years ago,
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when we did have more time. We didn't spend as much time on screens. And some of us are nostalgic
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for that time to an extent. But then you have this generation of kids that's growing up now.
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And instead of spending time with other kids face-to-face, you know, fighting over toys and
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realizing that actually that's not the best way to do things, learning conflict resolution techniques,
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learning to empathize, things like that. Instead of doing that, they're buried behind a screen and
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they don't get the same rapid feedback. And so they don't see, hey, it turns out taking this other
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kid's toy, it's going to cause conflict. The kid's going to bop me on the head or the kid's going to
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start crying. I need to learn another way. And therefore, I think there's going to be this
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generation of kids that is now still quite young that will grow up perhaps looking quite socially
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different from every generation that came before, because they won't have had access to that same
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trial and error process that you're supposed to have when you're quite young.
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Yeah, it's a brave new world. So what's different? I mean, you and I, I was born 82. I grew up with a
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computer in the house, had Super Nintendo. So technology was there, but I never felt compelled
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to be on there all the time and play it. I mean, what is different about today's technology compared
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to say, 25 years ago that makes it so you want to just compulsively check it?
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I think the biggest thing by far is that technology goes everywhere with you. So 75% of American adults
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can reach their phones without moving their feet 24 hours a day. That means it's next to your bed,
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it's under your pillow or on the bedside table. It means it's in your pocket or on the desk.
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And that means that it's going to have a huge outsized effect on your psychological experience
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of the world. Now, TV, Super Nintendo, I was born a couple of years before you, 1980, same thing. I had
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all of these gadgets. I watched a ton of TV, but at the end of the day, I had to leave the home. I had
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to go to school. I had to go to the shops. I had to do other things. And when I was doing that,
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I didn't have my TV with me. I didn't have the Super Nintendo with me. That liberated us to some
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extent. When you start making games travel-friendly, when you make TV travel-friendly, when you have
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access to these things at all times, that really changes how we interact with them and makes them
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much more difficult for us to shake because there's no enforced break period as there was for something
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So its environment has changed. I love the example you gave of Vietnam and heroin addicts. Can you
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talk about that? And maybe what can we learn from that about why technology is so addicted today?
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Yeah, I think the Vietnam anecdote is really important. One of the questions people have is,
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is there an addictive personality? We have this lay belief that some people are likely to become
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addicted to stuff and other people are not. Some people are just addictive personalities or have
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addictive personalities. And to some extent, that's certainly true. There are individual differences,
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but they don't explain all that much. The bigger factor by far is, I think, environment.
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So during the Vietnam War, a lot of the soldiers, the GIs would go over to Vietnam and they'd spend a
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lot of downtime waiting for action. And they'd just be sitting in camps. It was hot and steamy and
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they were in the jungle and there wasn't that much for them to do. They drank a lot of beer and they
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played a couple of sports, but there wasn't much for them to do. And so what ended up happening was
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they got access to heroin. There was a lot of heroin at that time being produced in that region of the
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world. And it actually became much cheaper to buy around then. It became much more refined.
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So you had this huge epidemic of GIs trying heroin and then developing addictions because what else
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was there for them to do? It was the best way to treat their boredom. And the government in the US
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heard about this. Richard Nixon was in power at the time and he was very concerned. He worried that
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you'd have hundreds of thousands, perhaps, of vets coming back to the US after the war,
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needing treatment for heroin addiction, which was a major concern because we knew from all sorts of
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evidence that people struggle to get off heroin. 90% or 95% of people go back on heroin at least once
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or twice before they fully shake it if they ever do. So this is a major concern. So the government
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started to put all sorts of resources into place to deal with this future influx of heroin addicts.
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And what happened was very surprising that these guys came back from Vietnam. They got back into
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everyday life. They, you know, they spent time with their families. They went back to whatever
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jobs they had, perhaps started new jobs or college. And the relapse rate, instead of being 90% to 95%
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was just 5%. Only one in every 20 Vietnam vets went back on heroin after arriving back in the States,
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which was such a huge surprise to everyone. And the researchers who started to look into the problem
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and figured out what was going on. Well, not the problem. The great outcome here was,
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it was really driven by the fact that when you get out of the context, when you escape it,
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you have social support, you go back to work, the addiction itself kind of dies down. You don't get
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all those inspiring cues that say, hey, remember when you were doing heroin, you're no longer in the
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steamy jungle. You're now back in your hometown doing whatever it was you were doing before.
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Everything's really different now. And so you don't have the same inspiration
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to do the drug and you have all the social support that also pushes you past it.
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That's very different from how most heroin addicts use drugs and how most behavioral addicts
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have their experiences. And that once you try to go off the experience, when you're trying to
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withdraw yourself from it, you are reminded constantly because you mix with the same people,
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you're in the same city much of the time. And so one of the big lessons for people who are trying
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to escape an addiction, whether it's to a drug or whether it's to an experience is,
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if you can, leave the city, mix with different people, do completely different things with your
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time. Because like these Vietnam vets, if you change the context, if you change the environment,
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you are much more likely to be able to escape that addiction.
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Well, maybe this is getting a little ahead of ourselves, but with technology,
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that's hard to escape, right? Because you need to use it for a lot of services these days or just
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That's exactly the lesson, right? I mean, if you're the kind of person who finds it hard to stop drinking
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alcohol and you decide you're not going to go into bars, that's one thing. But if you're the kind
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of person who's playing video games or finds that you have a problem checking emails a thousand times
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a day, there is really no stopgap. There's no measure that can help you completely remove yourself
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from the tech world. Because if you want a job, if you want to be able to travel, if you want to
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connect with people in a way that's very natural, the way we live our lives today, you have to have
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some access to technology. You probably need a, you don't need a smartphone perhaps yet, but you
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will. And I think all of us will have them at some point where penetration is already huge on that.
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I think it's just very, very difficult to live a mainstream existence and not be immersed in
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technology. And so, as you say, if you have one of these addictions, it's very difficult for you
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to remove yourself from the context completely.
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We'll get later on about some tactics we can use. But before that, let's get into
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some of the tactics that companies are using to get us to check their devices or check their
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software, their platform all the time. And the first one we talk about is how they are hijacking
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our desire to seek after goals. What are they doing there?
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Yeah. I mean, goals are incredibly powerful. They drive us on and human beings are very motivated by
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goals. It might be a goal of earning a certain amount of money, or if you're an exercise addict,
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it could be that you want to walk a certain number of steps or run a certain number of miles in the day
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or the week. We pay a lot of attention to numbers. These metrics sort of drive us forward. And there
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are a lot of metrics built into a lot of the screen experiences we have. If you're on Facebook or
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Instagram or Twitter, it'll be followers or friends or likes or retweets or regrams or shares or
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comments, whatever it'll be. All that stuff is a way of quantifying how engaged people are with you.
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It's a way of quantifying the social feedback you get. And so people do form goals. I think
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that the clearest example of this for me is looking at how Fitbits and other wearable tech
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have influenced how people exercise and how they work out, how they pay a huge amount of attention
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to these numbers. So when you get the Fitbit, a lot of people will try to walk 10,000 steps a day.
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And then they'll hit a sort of ceiling and they'll say, I think I should do more than that.
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Then they'll end up doing it. Instead of 10,000, they'll try 12,000, then 14, then 16. Suddenly,
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they're spending a huge portion of the day walking or exercising. And a lot of the time,
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what happens then is you pay much more attention to this external goal than you do to what your
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body is telling you. So there's been a rise in stress-related injuries because of the Fitbit.
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Now, it's wonderful getting people off the couch. That's fantastic. If you're sedentary,
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if you don't work out and the Fitbit drives you to work out, that's great.
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But if you're already engaged in some sort of exercise, and then you end up consulting
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this device as a sort of goal metric of deciding whether you've hit a goal,
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you end up overdoing it. And a lot of people end up having these major injuries as a result.
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Yeah. And the funny thing is that you won't burn any more calories walking more. At a certain point,
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your body adapts and adjusts its energy consumption or how it expends energy. So you're not going to
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actually lose more weight by walking more. No, exactly. You've got to change things up.
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You've got to do things a little bit differently. You've got to pick a different kind of exercise.
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In effect, you need to surprise your body. So by doing just more of the same thing,
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sometimes you are going to hit the ceiling and you'll plateau. And yet your body is going to
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become more and more exhausted. You're going to push past the point where you get injured. So
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these goals can be very alluring, but they often lead us to behavior that's counterproductive,
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Yeah. I'll admit, I've done that. When I had the Fitbit, there were a few days where it was like,
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you know, nine o'clock at nine. I was like, oh, I got 1500 steps to go. I'm going to go take a
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Well, so also you talk about how casino games or casinos have influence perhaps how tech companies
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design things to make their devices or platforms more addiction. What's going on there?
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Yeah. Casinos are very sophisticated. They've been doing some really smart,
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devious things for a long time. You know, the way you build a slot machine to encourage people to
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sit there and play for hours on end is quite sophisticated. There's a lot that goes into it.
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And casino operators have really refined this and slot machine designers have refined it over the
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last, I don't know, five, six, seven decades. Obviously the world of social media, the world of screen
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tech is much newer. And yet screen tech designers have borrowed a lot of the techniques. So if you think
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about what it's like to play a slot machine, it's not like, you know, when you're going to win. And
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in fact, part of what makes slot machine so alluring is the promise of maybe at some point
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hitting the jackpot. It's that question mark. So if you could build in a slot machine like mechanic
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or experience into the process of using say Facebook or Instagram, people are much more likely to keep
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playing. And the way they do that is with the uncertainty associated with how people are going to
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respond to you, how they'll respond to a post that you put out into the world or you, you know, you do
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people respond at all. You know, the worst thing that could happen is you put something out there
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and no one actually responds. You just hit, you hit, you hit silence. You get zero responses, zero likes,
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zero comments. That's like pulling the lever on the slot machine and not winning the jackpot or really
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not winning anything. And yet we keep going back because there is this promise of at some point
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getting some form of reward and that drives us forward. And obviously we end up spending huge
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amounts of time seeking out that kind of reward. So really these, these, uh, designers of say
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Facebook and Instagram use a lot of those same techniques to, to ensnare us. That's, that's why
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the like button was one of the smartest things Facebook ever did. So get this straight. It's not
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the actual reward, like, you know, seeing the like that drives us. It's the anticipation of perhaps
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that it's there. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's like when people play the lottery, if you buy lottery
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tickets or scratch cards, it's nice to win, but it's really that feeling just as you're about to
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start playing that buzz you get from wondering whether this is the time you're going to win.
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It's that, that's really addictive to people. And certainly we like rewards, but rewards actually
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it turns out are a little bit anticlimactic. You might think that you get the reward, you get a
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thousand likes to a post or whatever. And you're like, that was amazing. I've got to do this again.
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And that's not really what drives us. What drives us is that feeling of anticipation that comes
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before engaging with the experience. It's like hearing the ding on your phone and wondering
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whether this next email will be something hugely beneficial, something great, or whether it's just
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another mundane email that isn't that important in your life. It's always that sense of anticipation
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that drives us on. Yeah. I think I remember watching something on 60 Minutes about Instagram. And
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one of the things they do to design, to create that anticipation factor is they'll, when you go in,
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you know, you can always see how many likes you've gotten, like a number, sometimes like they'll hold
00:21:10.980
off showing that number until you get a large amount. And then you see that you're like, Oh my
00:21:17.220
gosh, that's great. But then like the next time they'll like, they'll show a lower amount. So like
00:21:20.720
every time you go, you're seeing a different number to create that anticipation on what you're going to
00:21:26.560
see when you check in on Instagram. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. These companies have a huge amount
00:21:31.280
of control over how they drip feed these rewards. And so if you decide based on feedback, you know,
00:21:37.300
they have access to huge amounts of data, they could try different approaches and see what works
00:21:41.220
best, what grips people the hardest. And so if you go onto Instagram, maybe the minute someone likes
00:21:47.460
your post, you should Instagram should tell you that and you find that rewarding. Or maybe as you say,
00:21:52.960
they should withhold that until you hit say 15 likes, or three likes, or whatever number they decide is
00:21:58.200
the best one based on the data, they should only tell you you've got likes when that happens. And
00:22:02.560
so instead of seeing one, two, three, you know, you're climbing up slowly, perhaps getting hit in
00:22:07.420
the face with 15 likes, you're like, wow, people love this. That's amazing. Maybe that feeling of
00:22:12.660
going from zero to 15 is more rewarding. And that's actually, it seems to be what they found that we
00:22:17.800
really like to see this big jump rather than seeing it slow drip feeding of that reward. And so they can
00:22:23.660
artificially control that. And that's what they seem to be doing.
00:22:25.880
One of my favorite chapters you hit on was about video game designers and how they on ramp players
00:22:32.680
to get them hooked. And you talked about how Super Mario Brothers, right? Like they set the
00:22:38.100
standard for that. So walk us through like, how the on wrapping process for video games to get people
00:22:43.740
hooked, and how say maybe a Facebook or Instagram or other app companies have used that same idea or
00:22:50.100
template to get people hooked on their platform.
00:22:52.720
Yeah, so the biggest challenge for the creators of content, whether it's a video game or a TV show
00:22:58.820
or a book even, is there's going to be a barrier to entry. When you start something new, it's going
00:23:05.800
to be hard to get people hooked initially. And so the best books, I mean, if you think back to the
00:23:10.260
books you really loved, or the TV shows you loved, often the successful thing they do in the beginning
00:23:15.020
is they get you hooked with a very early cliffhanger or piece of information that's really amazing. Or
00:23:20.460
it's, it's like, there's not a big startup cost, you want to make sure that the startup costs are
00:23:24.200
small. Otherwise, people just say, you know what, this is too much effort, I'm going to move on to
00:23:27.460
the next thing. And that's how we are with books and TV shows and video games. Now, Super Mario,
00:23:32.280
the best thing about that game, I think among many things, is that when you first start playing that
00:23:36.700
game, the character educates you automatically, because there are only so many things you can do with the
00:23:42.200
controls, you can't go to the left. And so you learn that the game mechanics are such that you
00:23:46.500
only move towards the right. Very early on, you get this little character that you have to jump over
00:23:51.200
or jump on top of to kill. And so you, you work that out really fast. Then you have these blocks
00:23:57.560
above you and you realize that you have to jump to get on top of the blocks or to hit the blocks from
00:24:01.660
below. There's a question mark, the question mark on the block suggests that you need to hit it so
00:24:05.880
that you can see what's inside. And so even within the first 10 seconds of playing the game for the
00:24:09.880
very first time, if you watch people play for the first time, they will understand, you know,
00:24:14.640
the five or six most important things you need to know to play this game. And really, there isn't
00:24:18.940
that much more to learn after that. There are a few other things that happen also during that first
00:24:23.140
level. But you feel like you're making progress the entire time. There is no moment when you start
00:24:28.560
playing that game when you say, oh, this is just too much work, I'm not going to do it. I've never seen
00:24:32.940
anyone play that first level of Super Mario and not want to play the next one. And that's a testament to
00:24:37.720
the design skills of Shigeru Miyamoto, the guy who designed the game and indeed many of the most
00:24:42.600
successful games of all time. And that's how a lot of really good experiences, a lot of social
00:24:49.320
networking and social media experiences work that way as well, where it's totally clear the first
00:24:54.560
time you use them what you should be doing. They onboard you in a way where there's a list of things
00:24:59.940
you're supposed to do. They're fairly small things. You feel like you're making progress through the
00:25:04.060
list and suddenly you've done everything you need to do to use the platform. It just doesn't take
00:25:07.800
that much energy or effort. And every little barrier they put in your way is likely to lose
00:25:12.740
a certain proportion of their potential audience. And so a huge part of what it means to design things
00:25:18.100
successfully is to remove as many friction points or pain points as possible so that the onboarding and
00:25:23.620
then the usage process is really friction-free. But the video games, that can get pretty boring
00:25:29.440
really fast. So they add in more complexity to make it more difficult, which hooks you even more.
00:25:36.360
Yeah, exactly. In fact, if you had to ask people as they're playing a game like Super Mario or Tetris,
00:25:41.000
how difficult is the game in this minute? And the scale went something like so easy that it's boring
00:25:46.560
all the way up to so difficult, I can't do this anymore. Most of the time, the best games, people will
00:25:51.940
say, this is just slightly more difficult than I'm comfortable with. And that is the sweet spot. That's the
00:25:56.760
golden spot that you're trying to hit. It's always a matter of trying to create an experience that is
00:26:01.720
just a little bit challenging. Not so much so that you disengage, you get demotivated,
00:26:06.940
and not so easy that you're bored. So it's really hitting that sweet spot between too difficult and
00:26:11.820
too easy. And the best experiences challenge you in just that way. So when you first start playing
00:26:17.120
Super Mario, just learning the mechanics, the controls of the game is difficult enough. But if that's
00:26:22.120
all you ever did, you'd get bored really fast. And so each level gets progressively more difficult,
00:26:26.280
more challenging, so that it's always just beyond reach. And so you feel that you're always just
00:26:31.420
challenged the right amount. So we have all these different elements, goal seeking,
00:26:35.600
we can see our progress, we are getting constant feedback, things are frictionless in the beginning,
00:26:40.260
they get more difficult as they progress. But we had all those things, right, as we talked about with
00:26:46.000
Nintendo and Super Nintendo and email. But the thing that's changed, I would say, and you talk about
00:26:52.100
in the book is like, in the past 10 years, social media has come on things. So how does social media
00:26:56.200
amplify all these addictive ingredients in our technology?
00:27:00.280
Well, a big part of what makes games hard for us to resist, and these are the games that are most
00:27:04.580
addictive to people are the games that have social components to them. And part of this is just the
00:27:09.140
nature of social interactions online. So if you think about, say, World of Warcraft, which is arguably
00:27:13.920
the most addictive experience that we've ever encountered. World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game,
00:27:19.300
it's a role playing game. And so what happens is you end up forming guilds with other players.
00:27:23.920
Now, sometimes those other players might live in the same town you live in, but a lot of the time
00:27:27.520
they'll be scattered all across the globe. And so if you imagine you're all going into battle together,
00:27:33.060
or you're all going into battle to solve some mission or some quest, if they are, if other players
00:27:40.340
in your guild are awake when you are supposed to be asleep, because you're living in different time
00:27:44.440
zones, you're a sort of band of brothers, you get together, and you all work together to try to
00:27:49.920
solve whatever challenge is ahead of you, and it doesn't matter, sleep comes second.
00:27:54.040
And this is the mentality that a lot of people adopt, which basically means that, first of all,
00:27:57.780
these other people you're playing with become your very close friends a lot of the time,
00:28:01.420
which is great, but also means that you're on the hook a lot of the time to be awake when other
00:28:05.780
people are awake in other parts of the world when you should be asleep.
00:28:07.980
But it also means that you're playing the game at all hours. And so a lot of people who play these
00:28:11.960
social games describe letting sleep go by the wayside because they have to play in the middle
00:28:17.840
of the night. They end up effectively doing a night shift to play the games. And that's obviously not
00:28:23.260
good in the long run. You can do it for a short while, but you can't do it all the time.
00:28:26.880
And so this is one of the really big challenges for people who play these games. The social element
00:28:30.800
makes it so hard to resist. Now, Super Nintendo was fantastic, but it was a really, it was an asocial
00:28:35.720
experience. It was just you and the game. Perhaps you do, you know, you'd play with another player,
00:28:40.500
you'd have the two controllers or even four controllers, depending on the platform.
00:28:43.940
But it was nothing like the kind of social experience that you have now on, on something
00:28:48.800
like World of Warcraft. And that I think drives a lot of these, these obsessive behaviors,
00:28:54.360
Right. It's not only World of Warcraft or video games, but like, that's what makes Instagram
00:28:57.380
so addicting and why people spend so much time trying to come with the best pictures and
00:29:02.640
get as many likes. It's just that, that social approval. Like we all want that so badly.
00:29:09.160
Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, if you look at the history of Instagram, it's quite fascinating.
00:29:13.200
So in 2009, there was an app that came about called Hipstamatic.
00:29:18.860
Yeah, I had it too. And in an audience of, of say a thousand people, when I asked people
00:29:23.400
who knows of Hipstamatic, a very small number of hands will go up, but some people certainly
00:29:28.780
downloaded it at the time. Hipstamatic was like Instagram in that you'd take a photo
00:29:32.780
with your phone and then it would apply a filter. Now the difference between Hipstamatic
00:29:36.520
and Instagram, Instagram came about, about 10 months later, was introduced about 10 months
00:29:41.440
later. They were very similar in what they did to the photos. They applied filters to
00:29:45.800
the photos. The big difference was the creators of Hipstamatic won an award for photography.
00:29:52.180
One of the people who used their platform was a journalist for the New York Times. He went to
00:29:56.480
Iraq and took some photos that were incredible and he applied the Hipstamatic filters to them
00:30:01.340
and he ended up winning one of the journalism photo, most impressive photo awards that year.
00:30:07.540
And so the Hipstamatic team decided, you know what, we're really good at making great photos.
00:30:11.720
We should just keep doing that. That is our core competency. We're going to keep doing that.
00:30:15.860
The Instagram guys came along and said, people are going to get bored of even the best photos
00:30:20.400
if we don't have a mechanism for ensuring that they share them with other people and get responses.
00:30:24.580
Because we know that the only engine that really drives people on in the long run is a social
00:30:29.200
engine. So what they did was they said, we have to create our own native social networking app.
00:30:33.300
We can't just rely on people to post their photos on Facebook. And that's why Instagram is now worth
00:30:38.740
tens of billions of dollars because we keep returning to it more than a decade, almost a
00:30:43.020
decade later. Whereas Hipstamatic now has very few users. People have just decamped to Instagram.
00:30:49.160
That's where they spend all their time. And that's because of this social engine that drives them on.
00:30:52.800
The ability to get likes and feedback on your photos.
00:30:55.660
And that's why Facebook bought them for a billion dollars.
00:30:59.360
It was a good deal. So let's talk about that question we talked about earlier. So environment
00:31:03.840
plays a huge factor in whether something, whether a substance or a behavior becomes addictive.
00:31:10.380
And as we mentioned earlier, technology, we can't escape it or it's hard to escape.
00:31:14.000
So how do you get a handle on an addictive or a compulsive behavior that you can't abstain
00:31:20.100
from? Are there any best practices you've come across in your research?
00:31:23.640
Yeah. You know, people are always looking for some, I don't know, really out of the box
00:31:29.280
solution. But I think the very best solution is to develop a habit of having times of the
00:31:34.480
day that are kind of sacred and tech free to some extent. So the easiest thing to do to begin
00:31:39.240
is to say, you know, I'm going to pick a time of day. It might be, say, dinner time, or it might
00:31:43.440
be a certain number of hours a day. It could be 5 to 7 p.m. or 6 to 8 p.m. or whatever it is you
00:31:48.280
decide. And that is the time when you will lock your device in a drawer as far away as possible.
00:31:54.980
It won't be anywhere near where you are. You will not use screens. And you'll do that every day to the
00:31:59.360
point where it becomes a habit. And what you do with that time is up to you. But for many people,
00:32:03.520
it's the time when they're going to exercise or it's the time they're going to have face-to-face
00:32:07.420
interactions with friends and loved ones. It could be just time to read or to do anything
00:32:12.960
that you like doing that's important to you that you find you don't have time to do anymore.
00:32:17.440
And watching people go through this process of making that decision and then sticking to it is
00:32:22.080
pretty interesting because it's hard in the beginning. You know, you have massive amounts
00:32:26.420
of FOMO. You feel like people are going on in that digital world without you. You're getting left
00:32:31.020
behind to some extent. But in the end, people report that they feel much happier and better for having
00:32:36.700
that time carved out each day. So that, I think, is the single best thing we can do. And you can
00:32:41.840
expand it if it works for you. I now, I have two young kids. I have a two-year-old son and an eight-month-old
00:32:47.420
daughter. And they are constantly doing things that are, you know, hysterical and fascinating as
00:32:52.480
they grow. And so I use my phone all the time as a camera, but I put it on airplane mode on the
00:32:58.060
weekend whenever I can because that way it just, it's a dumb phone. It's really just a camera. And that
00:33:03.060
saves me from having to keep checking my email, from having tons of phone calls or whatever else
00:33:07.160
might be going on. And so I think that's the key is just to be a little bit more mindful to design
00:33:11.800
the world around you in such a way that you relieve yourself of that temptation to check your phone all
00:33:17.260
the time. But as you highlight in the book, some people have, they feel like their addiction is so
00:33:21.480
bad that they actually like go to detox centers to get it, help them get a handle on this stuff.
00:33:26.020
Yeah. It's a much smaller group of the population. It's anywhere from one to 5%. So it's not a big
00:33:30.900
number, but there are certainly people. The most extreme example I came across was a guy who was
00:33:36.600
addicted to World of Warcraft, which we've already mentioned. And he actually relapsed once. He went
00:33:42.000
back to the game after going through treatment, but he went to an internet addiction treatment center
00:33:46.840
near Seattle called Restart. And they have a whole lot of, they're all males. They're all teenage males or
00:33:53.740
males in their sort of early adulthood years who have played games like World of Warcraft to the
00:34:00.080
point where they can't stop. And they learn skills for living. They are most importantly removed from
00:34:05.380
whatever context they were in where they were playing the game. Now, this guy, before he went
00:34:10.180
for treatment, he was, he described how he was, he was a star athlete. He was on the football team at
00:34:15.660
his university, at his college. He was a straight A student. And then he developed this addiction and
00:34:21.100
he started playing World of Warcraft. He at one point spent five weeks straight, basically sitting in a
00:34:26.980
chair, barely sleeping, playing for up to 23 hours a day. He paid a guy to deliver pizza boxes to his
00:34:32.580
room. And so the pizza boxes piled up. He put on 40 pounds of fat, lost most of his hair, and was
00:34:39.320
obviously incredibly unhealthy psychologically and physically. And this was a guy who was formerly
00:34:44.240
very, very successful. He was very well adapted. And so this is unusual. It doesn't happen to many
00:34:49.260
people, but that's the extreme case of what can happen.
00:34:51.460
And you also highlighted in China, this is a really like, or even like some of the other
00:34:55.560
Asian countries, like South Korea, this is like a big, like cultural wide problem that they're,
00:35:03.380
Yeah. It's a much bigger issue among teens in China and South Korea in particular. East Asia in
00:35:08.600
general has, has a much bigger problem with this and it's partly cultural. It's about, you know,
00:35:13.180
the number of video game parlors, the fact that a lot of young kids will go and watch very good
00:35:18.280
video game players play sometimes in very big stadia. You have a stadium filled with tens of
00:35:24.620
thousands of kids watching some guy who's really good at playing a video game. And that doesn't
00:35:29.080
happen as much in a mainstream way in the United States. But what it means is that screen and tech
00:35:33.800
addiction is much more common, especially video game addiction is much more common in that part of
00:35:37.600
the world. And so the government has, has called it the single biggest threat to the wellbeing of
00:35:42.120
teenagers, at least in China and South Korea. And so you have many of them going through
00:35:47.040
treatment that hasn't happened to the same extent in the U S and Western Europe and other parts of
00:35:51.300
the world, but we are becoming more mindful about it over time as, as we're paying more attention to
00:35:57.120
the dangers of overusing Facebook and Instagram and other video games as well. Yeah. I think we're
00:36:02.440
starting to see the rise of e-sports. I'm hearing a lot more about that where people watch like a
00:36:07.640
football game, like people playing video games. Right. Exactly. Well, I'm curious, Adam, in the past,
00:36:13.920
I would say past few months, there's been a lot of hubbub about Facebook and a lot of the other tech
00:36:20.100
giants, like they're getting a lot of scrutiny that they haven't had before. I'm curious, do you
00:36:24.840
think anything will come from that on how they do change the way they do business, design their
00:36:30.300
platforms to make them less addictive? Or do you think things will just be sort of a business as
00:36:34.960
usual? It's hard to say whether there will be major change. I think all of these companies live and die
00:36:41.080
on attention. And if a lot of the population pushes back, which is starting to happen in a way that I
00:36:47.020
think is quite encouraging. If people who use Facebook and other platforms like it say, we will
00:36:52.180
not use you anymore. If you don't start to respect us as consumers, I think you'll start to see that
00:36:57.080
these companies will make some changes. I'm, I'm extremely skeptical though, that, that those changes
00:37:02.220
will be widespread wholesale changes that will make the platform much friendly to us because the
00:37:07.560
platform can't survive unless it captures our attention. So there's a, there's a real
00:37:12.300
tussle there. It's really either we do what's best for Facebook or we do what's best for the consumer.
00:37:18.120
That isn't true, for example, with say Apple. So Apple requires that you buy its products,
00:37:22.980
but they don't really care how long you spend on each new phone, as long as you use it a little bit
00:37:26.960
and like it and want to buy the next one. So Apple's uniquely well positioned to, to work with
00:37:32.740
consumers. And that's why they're starting to build in features like the do not disturb feature when
00:37:36.620
you're driving helps you stay off the phone. That's okay for Apple to do, but for Facebook,
00:37:41.800
Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, they really need you to be embedded in that process of being on
00:37:46.540
that platform as much time as possible. The only routes to change are from the bottom up where
00:37:51.880
consumers say, we're not going to use the platform unless you become more attentive to us, or from the
00:37:57.020
top down where the government gets involved and says, we're going to make rules about what you can
00:38:02.100
and can't do. Now I see basically zero percent chance the government's materially going to
00:38:07.660
intervene. Obviously on the privacy front, they might make some changes like, you know, protecting
00:38:13.680
consumers from some of the privacy and data mining concerns that have, have been a major concern for
00:38:21.740
Facebook lately. But that's not going to change how addictive the platform is. Those are two separate
00:38:25.980
issues. So I think from the addiction perspective, it's, it's hard to imagine the government saying,
00:38:29.820
for example, that you can't make your feed bottomless because people spend too much time
00:38:33.640
on the platform. That's never going to happen. So I think it's really going to have to come from
00:38:37.540
the consumers. That's my sense, at least in the US. Right. And we're not going to see labels on
00:38:41.840
Facebook. This can cause addiction like you see on cigarettes and packages. I think it's unlikely.
00:38:48.600
And I actually think it'll probably make it more appealing. Right. You're probably right.
00:38:52.260
With Facebook. Yeah. So it's up to us then. So it's up to us being proactive and setting
00:38:56.800
aside time where we just take a break from our technology. Yeah. I mean, think about what's
00:39:02.360
happened in the world of, you know, industrial production. For a very long time, the biggest
00:39:07.360
industrial companies in the world dumped pollutants into waterways. And no one really said
00:39:11.800
much. There wasn't much demand from consumers. The government didn't intervene. And at some point,
00:39:16.440
consumers started to become concerned about the environment in ways they weren't in the 50s and
00:39:20.920
60s and 70s. And these companies were first forced to change what they were doing. You know,
00:39:25.000
consumers would start to say, if you don't have a symbol on your bottles, on your packaging that
00:39:29.920
says you are friendly to the environment, we're just going to buy your competitors' products.
00:39:33.720
And suddenly, these companies, pushed partly by government intervention, saying things like,
00:39:38.140
you can't dump pollutants into the oceans, but partly just by consumers who started to demand
00:39:43.160
environmentally friendly practices from the companies they were buying from, you started to see
00:39:48.500
changes in the way these companies behave. They had to become more mindful about what they were doing
00:39:52.300
to the environment. I really think something like that will happen over time as consumers become
00:39:57.100
savvier about what companies like Facebook are doing to ensnare them. And as they become savvier,
00:40:02.360
they'll demand, you know, more attention to consumer well-being. And I think that will move the needle
00:40:08.260
a little bit in our favor. Yeah, I think another example is food. You know, there's the whole organic
00:40:13.460
food thing. That wasn't a thing 20 years ago, but now people are, I'm concerned about what's going
00:40:17.580
in my body. And so, companies responded to that. Yeah, exactly. They don't have to respond until,
00:40:22.420
you know, we push them, until we as consumers decide something is a big enough issue that we
00:40:26.480
need to pay attention to it. And that's, I think, we are at the very early stages of that happening.
00:40:32.720
One of the big events that pushed that along was Sean Parker, one of the early Facebook investors,
00:40:37.780
coming forward and saying, it turns out we've never really cared about you. We've always really
00:40:41.260
cared about capturing your attention as much as possible. And he said that in a very bold way.
00:40:47.340
He was very clear about it. You know, he said, we knew from very early on,
00:40:50.640
all we were trying to do was to mine your attention. And I think when people like Sean
00:40:55.460
Parker come forward and admit that, and then a number of other tech titans have come forward
00:40:59.280
saying the same thing, that pushes us as consumers to consider what we're doing and whether we're doing
00:41:04.360
what's best for us. I mean, if these people are concerned, then we should probably be concerned
00:41:07.560
as well. So, I think that's been a huge, huge event in pushing consumers towards being more
00:41:15.540
mindful about their own consumption. Well, Adam, this has been a great conversation.
00:41:18.600
Is there some place people go to learn more about your work?
00:41:21.060
Yeah, I have a website. So, it's adamleealter.com. That's A-D-A-M-L-E-E-A-L-T-E-R.
00:41:28.980
You can find me on Twitter at Adam Lee Alter. And then I've got one book, Irresistible,
00:41:34.160
which is about tech addiction. And another book that I wrote a few years earlier called Drunk
00:41:37.800
Tank Pink, which is about how things in the world around us shape how we think,
00:41:41.760
feel and behave. Things like colors and the weather and so on.
00:41:44.900
So, but you're not on Twitter on the weekends, right? Because...
00:41:47.540
Yeah, you have to see the tweets that I'm posting during the week because there's not
00:41:53.460
Well, Adam, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:41:56.600
My guest here is Adam Alter. He's the author of the book, Irresistible. It's available
00:41:59.520
on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can also find out more information about his work
00:42:03.240
at adamalterauthor.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash irresistible,
00:42:08.740
where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:42:11.760
Well, that wraps up another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,
00:42:27.920
make sure to check out the Art of Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And if you enjoy
00:42:31.380
the podcast, you've got something out of it. I appreciate if he gives a review on iTunes or
00:42:34.620
Stitcher. Helps out a lot. As always, thank you for your continued support. Until next time,