The Art of Manliness - #420： What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. If you're

00:00:18.420 like most people, you've got a powerful computer in your back pocket that allows you to listen

00:00:21.740 to this podcast, check the score of your favorite team and learn the population of Mickey Mantle's

00:00:25.520 hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma. Answer, 2473. Our smartphones are a blessing, but for many people,

00:00:31.560 they can also feel like a curse. You feel compelled to check your device all the time,

00:00:35.160 leaving you feeling disengaged from life. What is it about modern technology that makes it feel

00:00:39.420 so addictive? I guess he explores that topic in his book, Irresistible, The Rise of Addictive

00:00:44.080 Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked. His name is Adam Alter. Today on the show,

00:00:48.080 we discuss what makes today's technology more compelling than the televisions and Super

00:00:51.800 Nintendo's of old, whether our itch to check our phones can really be classified as an addiction,

00:00:55.960 what soldiers use of heroin during the Vietnam War can tell us about why our attachment to our

00:01:00.180 phones is hard to shake, and how the reward we're looking for on social media isn't actually the

00:01:04.120 likes themselves. Adam then shares what he thinks is the most effective tactic for taking back control

00:01:08.580 of our tech, and how consumers may also be able to influence the direction of its future.

00:01:12.400 After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash irresistible.

00:01:16.200 Adam joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:21.800 Adam Alter, welcome to the show.

00:01:33.940 Thanks for having me.

00:01:34.840 So you published a book called Irresistible, and it's all about the rise of addictive

00:01:38.520 technologies and the businesses that support that. I'm curious, you're a marketing professor, right?

00:01:44.620 I am.

00:01:45.440 So how did you get interested in writing a whole book about addictive technology?

00:01:48.880 Well, I think these platforms are addictive to everyone who uses them. It doesn't matter who

00:01:53.840 you are or what you do. One of the fascinating things about them is that they tap into very

00:01:57.380 low-level human psychological features. So as a marketing professor, I perhaps know a little

00:02:03.440 bit more about what goes into designing them, and so that makes me the right kind of person to write

00:02:07.640 a book. But I'm just as susceptible to their charms as anyone.

00:02:11.020 Yeah. Well, I mean, so let's talk about that. Why do companies design for addiction? And we're

00:02:16.740 going to talk about addiction, whether there's such a thing as tech addiction, but it feels

00:02:20.600 like that. So why do they do that? Is it just the bottom line? Do they have insidious

00:02:24.580 motivations, or do they actually think they're helping people by making them check their phone

00:02:30.260 all the time?

00:02:30.760 Well, I can dispel that notion. They definitely don't feel that they're designing products for

00:02:34.900 our well-being. They're not under that misapprehension. They know that what they're doing

00:02:38.700 essentially is designing products that addict us. And they have to do that based on the model,

00:02:43.580 the model of the market they're in. So the model of the market is such that they get

00:02:47.600 more money the more time we spend on their products, their devices, their apps, their

00:02:51.980 platforms, because they're attracting ad revenue. That's really where they live and die. And ad

00:02:57.360 revenue is greatest when you have more subscribers, more people who pay attention, and people who

00:03:02.220 not just arrive at your site but stay there for a long time. So if you can tell advertisers

00:03:06.300 people will consume our content for three hours a day, that's better than saying they'll

00:03:11.380 arrive but leave after five minutes. And so maximizing well-being of the consumer doesn't

00:03:17.260 require that they're engaged for a huge amount of time, because what's really good for consumers

00:03:21.480 is that they're engaged for the right amount of time, which often isn't very long. But because

00:03:25.960 of the way this model works, these companies have to privilege addiction. They have to privilege

00:03:29.920 attention-grabbing rather than privileging our well-being. And it turns out it's not good for us.

00:03:35.520 It's not to our best advantage to spend that much time on these platforms.

00:03:38.940 And yeah, I love how you begin the book with this great antidote about Steve Jobs. And it's when he

00:03:45.300 announces the launch of the iPad, and he's talking about how fantastic it is. You can type on it. You

00:03:49.960 just use a finger. That's it. It's amazing. But then you talk about how he never let his kids use an

00:03:55.500 iPad. Yeah, that was fascinating to me. And it was something I discovered quite early on. And that

00:04:00.740 really made me interested in this topic. We always turn to the experts on any topic to get a sense of

00:04:06.740 how we should be thinking of it. I was no expert in the iPad or on any tech particularly. And yet I

00:04:13.060 found as I searched that a lot of the tech titans were very careful about their own tech usage. And

00:04:18.220 also, I think more importantly, they were very careful about allowing their kids to use these

00:04:22.300 products. So Steve Jobs, as you mentioned, was very cautious about how much time his kids spent

00:04:27.300 in front of various tech devices. And he didn't even let them near the iPad, which says something,

00:04:31.920 right? I mean, he was publicly telling the world this is a wonderful product, but then wouldn't let

00:04:35.420 his kids near it. And he's not the only one. There are a lot of tech titans in a similar position.

00:04:39.900 And so that led me to dig a little bit more deeply to try to understand what exactly is it that

00:04:44.700 concerned him and these other giants? What were they worried about? And that's where the book came

00:04:48.680 from. Yeah, it's like that saying about drug dealers, right? You know, never consume your own

00:04:53.740 stuff. Exactly. All right. So let's talk about this idea of tech addiction, because that's

00:04:58.480 controversial in the mental health field. Is it possible to be addicted? Because it's not a substance,

00:05:04.400 not like drugs or whatever. It's a behavior. What's the status of behavior addiction in the

00:05:10.680 world of mental health? Yeah, it's an interesting question, this question of whether you can develop

00:05:15.740 an addiction to something that doesn't involve the ingestion of a substance. And it turns out,

00:05:20.800 I think you can. And we've actually known this for a long time. Certainly, drugs were the first

00:05:26.200 products that led to addiction. There were drugs, there was nicotine, there was alcohol. But then,

00:05:30.740 you know, casinos became very sophisticated. And suddenly, you had this raft of thousands of

00:05:35.520 gambling addicts. And no one really disputes that. I think we're all fairly comfortable with

00:05:39.260 the idea that you can be addicted to gambling. Going a step further, though, I think you can also

00:05:44.280 become addicted to other experiences that don't involve any of these substances and that don't

00:05:48.600 involve gambling. And it really just rests on the definition you use for addiction. So for me,

00:05:53.300 it's any experience that we return to compulsively over and over again in the short term,

00:05:58.100 because we want to do that. It's something we feel we want to do. But in the long run,

00:06:02.180 it undermines our well-being in at least one of several different respects. It can harm your

00:06:06.520 social life, it can harm your financial well-being, it can harm you psychologically,

00:06:10.780 or it can harm you physically. And I think that that describes how a lot of us experience the tech world.

00:06:17.140 So I mean, what are some of the statistics about this whole tech thing? It's new, right? I mean,

00:06:21.820 it's relatively, I would say, maybe 15 years, I mean, computers have been around for more than that. But I'd

00:06:26.720 say 15 years, things really started kicking off. Like, what are we finding about how this technology,

00:06:33.240 smartphones, constantly connection, constantly connected to the internet? How is it affecting

00:06:37.420 our well-being and psyche?

00:06:39.600 Yeah, it's a good question. And one that we don't have a fantastic answer to just because,

00:06:43.840 as you say, this is really a 10 to 15 year old problem. And we haven't tracked kids based on usage

00:06:49.540 over time, because there just aren't that many kids to track yet. They're still quite young,

00:06:53.740 and we don't know what they'll look like when they're teenagers and when they're in college and

00:06:58.200 when they're adults and they have their own kids and they're in the workplace. So that remains to

00:07:02.000 be seen. So we don't really know. But what we do know is that the amount of time we spend on these

00:07:07.460 devices is colossal, and it's growing dramatically. In 2007, we spent an average of 18 minutes on our

00:07:13.620 phones. And later that year, Apple introduced the first generation of the iPhone. And eight years later,

00:07:20.300 by 2015, we were spending an average of three hours a day on those screens. And just two years

00:07:25.800 after that, in 2017, the number had jumped from three hours to four hours. So the average American

00:07:30.940 today, the average American adult, and it's actually worse among teenagers and kids, spends four hours

00:07:37.160 of the waking day staring at the phone. I'm not talking about using it as a phone to have a

00:07:41.460 conversation. I'm talking about looking at the screen. Now, even if you don't use the term

00:07:46.060 addiction to describe that, we are spending four hours of the day. We don't even have that many

00:07:52.200 hours when we're awake and not eating and not at work to do that. And it's just sucking up just a

00:07:58.940 colossal amount of our time. Yeah. I mean, this could hurt productivity of businesses. I imagine,

00:08:04.580 you know, it's time looking at the screen is time you won't be looking at or talking,

00:08:08.580 interacting with people face to face, and that could have some deleterious effects. So there's a lot of

00:08:13.360 problems here. Yeah, exactly. It's hampering our ability to do our work. I think the biggest

00:08:20.260 effects, though, are probably social. I think the biggest factor is that we're spending less time

00:08:25.200 having face-to-face conversations, which are really the richest kinds of conversations we can have.

00:08:29.620 Now, there are those of us who are old enough to remember a time before this, before 15 years ago,

00:08:33.580 when we did have more time. We didn't spend as much time on screens. And some of us are nostalgic

00:08:39.780 for that time to an extent. But then you have this generation of kids that's growing up now.

00:08:43.840 And instead of spending time with other kids face-to-face, you know, fighting over toys and

00:08:48.120 realizing that actually that's not the best way to do things, learning conflict resolution techniques,

00:08:52.820 learning to empathize, things like that. Instead of doing that, they're buried behind a screen and

00:08:57.820 they don't get the same rapid feedback. And so they don't see, hey, it turns out taking this other

00:09:02.460 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

00:09:06.560 start crying. I need to learn another way. And therefore, I think there's going to be this

00:09:11.320 generation of kids that is now still quite young that will grow up perhaps looking quite socially

00:09:16.400 different from every generation that came before, because they won't have had access to that same

00:09:20.520 trial and error process that you're supposed to have when you're quite young.

00:09:24.140 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

00:09:31.680 computer in the house, had Super Nintendo. So technology was there, but I never felt compelled

00:09:37.580 to be on there all the time and play it. I mean, what is different about today's technology compared

00:09:42.420 to say, 25 years ago that makes it so you want to just compulsively check it?

00:09:48.140 I think the biggest thing by far is that technology goes everywhere with you. So 75% of American adults

00:09:53.860 can reach their phones without moving their feet 24 hours a day. That means it's next to your bed,

00:09:59.960 it's under your pillow or on the bedside table. It means it's in your pocket or on the desk.

00:10:05.480 And that means that it's going to have a huge outsized effect on your psychological experience

00:10:09.620 of the world. Now, TV, Super Nintendo, I was born a couple of years before you, 1980, same thing. I had

00:10:15.600 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

00:10:21.860 to go to school. I had to go to the shops. I had to do other things. And when I was doing that,

00:10:26.420 I didn't have my TV with me. I didn't have the Super Nintendo with me. That liberated us to some

00:10:31.160 extent. When you start making games travel-friendly, when you make TV travel-friendly, when you have

00:10:37.800 access to these things at all times, that really changes how we interact with them and makes them

00:10:42.300 much more difficult for us to shake because there's no enforced break period as there was for something

00:10:47.800 like the Super Nintendo.

00:10:48.800 So its environment has changed. I love the example you gave of Vietnam and heroin addicts. Can you 0.99

00:10:56.540 talk about that? And maybe what can we learn from that about why technology is so addicted today?

00:11:01.720 Yeah, I think the Vietnam anecdote is really important. One of the questions people have is,

00:11:06.080 is there an addictive personality? We have this lay belief that some people are likely to become

00:11:11.640 addicted to stuff and other people are not. Some people are just addictive personalities or have

00:11:16.280 addictive personalities. And to some extent, that's certainly true. There are individual differences,

00:11:20.520 but they don't explain all that much. The bigger factor by far is, I think, environment.

00:11:25.000 So during the Vietnam War, a lot of the soldiers, the GIs would go over to Vietnam and they'd spend a

00:11:30.880 lot of downtime waiting for action. And they'd just be sitting in camps. It was hot and steamy and

00:11:35.780 they were in the jungle and there wasn't that much for them to do. They drank a lot of beer and they

00:11:39.840 played a couple of sports, but there wasn't much for them to do. And so what ended up happening was

00:11:44.460 they got access to heroin. There was a lot of heroin at that time being produced in that region of the

00:11:50.800 world. And it actually became much cheaper to buy around then. It became much more refined.

00:11:55.220 So you had this huge epidemic of GIs trying heroin and then developing addictions because what else 1.00

00:11:59.840 was there for them to do? It was the best way to treat their boredom. And the government in the US

00:12:04.640 heard about this. Richard Nixon was in power at the time and he was very concerned. He worried that

00:12:08.900 you'd have hundreds of thousands, perhaps, of vets coming back to the US after the war,

00:12:13.380 needing treatment for heroin addiction, which was a major concern because we knew from all sorts of

00:12:19.480 evidence that people struggle to get off heroin. 90% or 95% of people go back on heroin at least once

00:12:26.600 or twice before they fully shake it if they ever do. So this is a major concern. So the government

00:12:32.920 started to put all sorts of resources into place to deal with this future influx of heroin addicts.

00:12:39.860 And what happened was very surprising that these guys came back from Vietnam. They got back into 1.00

00:12:45.020 everyday life. They, you know, they spent time with their families. They went back to whatever

00:12:49.720 jobs they had, perhaps started new jobs or college. And the relapse rate, instead of being 90% to 95%

00:12:56.480 was just 5%. Only one in every 20 Vietnam vets went back on heroin after arriving back in the States,

00:13:02.740 which was such a huge surprise to everyone. And the researchers who started to look into the problem

00:13:07.680 and figured out what was going on. Well, not the problem. The great outcome here was,

00:13:12.100 it was really driven by the fact that when you get out of the context, when you escape it,

00:13:15.960 you have social support, you go back to work, the addiction itself kind of dies down. You don't get

00:13:21.600 all those inspiring cues that say, hey, remember when you were doing heroin, you're no longer in the

00:13:26.180 steamy jungle. You're now back in your hometown doing whatever it was you were doing before.

00:13:31.240 Everything's really different now. And so you don't have the same inspiration

00:13:33.820 to do the drug and you have all the social support that also pushes you past it.

00:13:38.440 That's very different from how most heroin addicts use drugs and how most behavioral addicts

00:13:42.380 have their experiences. And that once you try to go off the experience, when you're trying to

00:13:47.060 withdraw yourself from it, you are reminded constantly because you mix with the same people,

00:13:52.200 you're in the same city much of the time. And so one of the big lessons for people who are trying

00:13:56.900 to escape an addiction, whether it's to a drug or whether it's to an experience is,

00:13:59.940 if you can, leave the city, mix with different people, do completely different things with your

00:14:04.940 time. Because like these Vietnam vets, if you change the context, if you change the environment,

00:14:09.920 you are much more likely to be able to escape that addiction.

00:14:12.600 Well, maybe this is getting a little ahead of ourselves, but with technology,

00:14:16.520 that's hard to escape, right? Because you need to use it for a lot of services these days or just

00:14:22.240 getting by.

00:14:23.240 That's exactly the lesson, right? I mean, if you're the kind of person who finds it hard to stop drinking

00:14:27.820 alcohol and you decide you're not going to go into bars, that's one thing. But if you're the kind

00:14:31.800 of person who's playing video games or finds that you have a problem checking emails a thousand times

00:14:37.600 a day, there is really no stopgap. There's no measure that can help you completely remove yourself

00:14:44.140 from the tech world. Because if you want a job, if you want to be able to travel, if you want to

00:14:48.120 connect with people in a way that's very natural, the way we live our lives today, you have to have

00:14:53.080 some access to technology. You probably need a, you don't need a smartphone perhaps yet, but you

00:14:57.900 will. And I think all of us will have them at some point where penetration is already huge on that.

00:15:02.720 I think it's just very, very difficult to live a mainstream existence and not be immersed in

00:15:07.320 technology. And so, as you say, if you have one of these addictions, it's very difficult for you

00:15:11.720 to remove yourself from the context completely.

00:15:14.840 We'll get later on about some tactics we can use. But before that, let's get into

00:15:18.500 some of the tactics that companies are using to get us to check their devices or check their

00:15:25.180 software, their platform all the time. And the first one we talk about is how they are hijacking

00:15:29.660 our desire to seek after goals. What are they doing there?

00:15:33.660 Yeah. I mean, goals are incredibly powerful. They drive us on and human beings are very motivated by

00:15:40.260 goals. It might be a goal of earning a certain amount of money, or if you're an exercise addict,

00:15:45.700 it could be that you want to walk a certain number of steps or run a certain number of miles in the day

00:15:49.800 or the week. We pay a lot of attention to numbers. These metrics sort of drive us forward. And there

00:15:55.000 are a lot of metrics built into a lot of the screen experiences we have. If you're on Facebook or

00:15:59.520 Instagram or Twitter, it'll be followers or friends or likes or retweets or regrams or shares or

00:16:06.800 comments, whatever it'll be. All that stuff is a way of quantifying how engaged people are with you.

00:16:12.920 It's a way of quantifying the social feedback you get. And so people do form goals. I think

00:16:17.900 that the clearest example of this for me is looking at how Fitbits and other wearable tech

00:16:22.080 have influenced how people exercise and how they work out, how they pay a huge amount of attention

00:16:29.100 to these numbers. So when you get the Fitbit, a lot of people will try to walk 10,000 steps a day.

00:16:34.940 And then they'll hit a sort of ceiling and they'll say, I think I should do more than that.

00:16:39.160 Then they'll end up doing it. Instead of 10,000, they'll try 12,000, then 14, then 16. Suddenly,

00:16:44.700 they're spending a huge portion of the day walking or exercising. And a lot of the time,

00:16:48.700 what happens then is you pay much more attention to this external goal than you do to what your

00:16:52.580 body is telling you. So there's been a rise in stress-related injuries because of the Fitbit.

00:16:57.600 Now, it's wonderful getting people off the couch. That's fantastic. If you're sedentary,

00:17:01.280 if you don't work out and the Fitbit drives you to work out, that's great.

00:17:03.880 But if you're already engaged in some sort of exercise, and then you end up consulting

00:17:08.660 this device as a sort of goal metric of deciding whether you've hit a goal,

00:17:13.600 you end up overdoing it. And a lot of people end up having these major injuries as a result.

00:17:17.800 Yeah. And the funny thing is that you won't burn any more calories walking more. At a certain point,

00:17:23.040 your body adapts and adjusts its energy consumption or how it expends energy. So you're not going to

00:17:30.360 actually lose more weight by walking more. No, exactly. You've got to change things up.

00:17:34.080 You've got to do things a little bit differently. You've got to pick a different kind of exercise.

00:17:37.540 In effect, you need to surprise your body. So by doing just more of the same thing,

00:17:43.460 sometimes you are going to hit the ceiling and you'll plateau. And yet your body is going to

00:17:47.240 become more and more exhausted. You're going to push past the point where you get injured. So

00:17:51.340 these goals can be very alluring, but they often lead us to behavior that's counterproductive,

00:17:55.880 that makes us less happy and less well.

00:17:58.820 Yeah. I'll admit, I've done that. When I had the Fitbit, there were a few days where it was like,

00:18:02.880 you know, nine o'clock at nine. I was like, oh, I got 1500 steps to go. I'm going to go take a

00:18:07.800 walk around the neighborhood. Exactly.

00:18:10.780 Well, so also you talk about how casino games or casinos have influence perhaps how tech companies

00:18:18.520 design things to make their devices or platforms more addiction. What's going on there?

00:18:24.800 Yeah. Casinos are very sophisticated. They've been doing some really smart,

00:18:28.960 devious things for a long time. You know, the way you build a slot machine to encourage people to

00:18:33.220 sit there and play for hours on end is quite sophisticated. There's a lot that goes into it.

00:18:37.580 And casino operators have really refined this and slot machine designers have refined it over the

00:18:42.340 last, I don't know, five, six, seven decades. Obviously the world of social media, the world of screen

00:18:47.320 tech is much newer. And yet screen tech designers have borrowed a lot of the techniques. So if you think

00:18:53.060 about what it's like to play a slot machine, it's not like, you know, when you're going to win. And

00:18:57.440 in fact, part of what makes slot machine so alluring is the promise of maybe at some point

00:19:01.960 hitting the jackpot. It's that question mark. So if you could build in a slot machine like mechanic

00:19:08.120 or experience into the process of using say Facebook or Instagram, people are much more likely to keep

00:19:14.220 playing. And the way they do that is with the uncertainty associated with how people are going to

00:19:18.680 respond to you, how they'll respond to a post that you put out into the world or you, you know, you do

00:19:24.600 people respond at all. You know, the worst thing that could happen is you put something out there

00:19:27.560 and no one actually responds. You just hit, you hit, you hit silence. You get zero responses, zero likes,

00:19:34.060 zero comments. That's like pulling the lever on the slot machine and not winning the jackpot or really

00:19:38.580 not winning anything. And yet we keep going back because there is this promise of at some point

00:19:42.580 getting some form of reward and that drives us forward. And obviously we end up spending huge

00:19:48.180 amounts of time seeking out that kind of reward. So really these, these, uh, designers of say

00:19:52.900 Facebook and Instagram use a lot of those same techniques to, to ensnare us. That's, that's why

00:19:57.500 the like button was one of the smartest things Facebook ever did. So get this straight. It's not

00:20:02.640 the actual reward, like, you know, seeing the like that drives us. It's the anticipation of perhaps

00:20:08.980 that it's there. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's like when people play the lottery, if you buy lottery

00:20:14.060 tickets or scratch cards, it's nice to win, but it's really that feeling just as you're about to

00:20:19.800 start playing that buzz you get from wondering whether this is the time you're going to win.

00:20:24.440 It's that, that's really addictive to people. And certainly we like rewards, but rewards actually

00:20:29.280 it turns out are a little bit anticlimactic. You might think that you get the reward, you get a

00:20:32.880 thousand likes to a post or whatever. And you're like, that was amazing. I've got to do this again.

00:20:36.600 And that's not really what drives us. What drives us is that feeling of anticipation that comes

00:20:41.000 before engaging with the experience. It's like hearing the ding on your phone and wondering

00:20:44.920 whether this next email will be something hugely beneficial, something great, or whether it's just

00:20:49.680 another mundane email that isn't that important in your life. It's always that sense of anticipation

00:20:54.220 that drives us on. Yeah. I think I remember watching something on 60 Minutes about Instagram. And

00:21:00.140 one of the things they do to design, to create that anticipation factor is they'll, when you go in,

00:21:06.080 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,

00:28:53.060 these addictive 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.

00:29:17.540 Yeah, I had that.

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 0.94

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.

00:30:58.440 It was a good deal.

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, 0.99

00:35:01.300 they're wringing their hands about.

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. 1.00

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

00:41:51.460 much activity on the weekends. That is true.

00:41:53.460 Well, Adam, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:41:55.460 Thanks for having me.

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,

00:42:38.380 this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

00:42:41.760 불�aps out a lot.

00:42:42.940 God bless you.

00:42:43.080 Thank you.

00:42:43.960 Thank you.

00:42:43.980 Thank you.

00:42:52.360 Bye-bye.

00:42:52.760 Bye-bye.

00:42:53.760 Bye-bye.

00:42:59.940 Bye-bye.

00:43:00.720 Bye-bye.

00:43:04.820 Bye-bye.

00:43:05.780 Bye-bye.

The Art of Manliness - July 05, 2018

#420： What Makes Your Phone So Addictive & How to Take Back Your Life

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