00:00:00
Speaker 1: If you wanted to wrap up my over decade of work here into one mantra, it's this. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. It is fundamentally an impulse control problem. It's not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing broken about you or your brain. It's simply that we haven't learned the skill set to deal with impulse control. So we're constantly looking for something to take our minds off of that discomfort. Right, So we drink it away, we scroll it away, we click it away, we look for something to pacify that. But if you leave it to the last minute, they're gonna get you. It's too late, Right. If the cigarettes in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If the chocolate cake is on the fork on it's way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it. If you sleep with your cell phone every night on your nightstand, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning, because it's too late. If you leave it to the last minute, of course, they're gonna get you. And I think that's why most people feel like technology is controlling them, and the algorithms and all this evil stuff, because that's when it's already in your hand. That's too late. But the antidote is forethought.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: How much time do you spend doing stuff that, if you were really honest, you would rather that you didn't do, you know.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: Stuff that you never intended to do. But look, hey, look here you are. It's been half an hour.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: If you're anything like me, your answer to that question is somewhere between quite.
00:01:18
Speaker 3: A bit, a bit more than I actually like to admit, and can we tell about something else?
00:01:21
Speaker 2: Right? Happily? Questions like this make a case for the vital importance of being in control of your attention, of being what my guest today author near Aar would call indestractable.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: Which also happens to be the name of his second book.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: If you don't feel that you're in control of your time, if you feel like you get to the end of the day you've got no idea where it went, You feel like that has been the story of your life for like.
00:01:44
Speaker 3: Way too long. I'm actually quite excited for you to hear this.
00:01:47
Speaker 2: It's got some really interesting, very valuable steps and insights to hopefully help you change all that, but also to figure out exactly what.
00:01:54
Speaker 3: You would rather be spending your time on.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: So your time is meaningfully spent in the first place. I do have, though, once more distraction before we get to the conversation, because I do need to play some ads.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: We're back in a moment.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: Good. This is better than yesterday, making it better every single week since twenty thirteen. My name Joshia Ginsburg, and I'm very glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening. Before we get to near al, I just didn't want to remind you that tickets for the next Story Club gig are on sale right now. It is this Sunday at the Factory Theater in Marrickville. It's at Valentine's Day special. Rob Carlton and his wife Ado Ferrera are going to tell stories, as is Mark Sutton and Zoe Norton Lodge, who also happened to be married. So I'm very kind of looking forward to the dueling the different versions of romantic stories from whose husbands and wives there, as well as myself and fellow gold Logi loser Sean Macaliff. Yes, Sean mother fucking Macliffe is going to do story Club at the Factory Theater. Tickets are cheap and you can get the link in the show notes.
00:02:55
Speaker 3: And that's also where the sub stack is.
00:02:57
Speaker 2: Lots of good He's there, lots of great ways to stay in touch, send a recipe, ask a question.
00:03:01
Speaker 3: Whatever.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Near Al is here. He's an Israeli born American author, lecturer, investor a He's well renowned for his expertise in behavioral design and habit formation his book Hooked. It's actually quite hard to overestimate the enormous influence his work has had on the user experience and product design place in the digital space. Like if you find yourself using an app that keeps you on there long after you thought you were going to put it down, the chances of other people who designed that app are using Near's four phase model of habit formation, which is trigger action, variable, reward, and investment. In that book he also gets into the ethics of building apps which people can't put down, and in many ways, the book he's here to talk about today, Indestractable, is the antithesis of that. His mind bogglingly smart, was delightful to have in our home, even if it was rather warm and steamy in the middle of summer when he joined me here in Sydney, I hope you'll learn a lot as I did from listening.
00:03:55
Speaker 3: To near al. Really grateful. I wanted to talk to you today because.
00:04:02
Speaker 2: The impact that you've had on our society through your definitely your first book and also through your second. By the next the people that cited your first book as yeah, we read that and then we made this, do you think, like, do you think about what impact that's had.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm very proud of of what it's done. I'm in the book now. Is it's second edition now and sold over half million copies, and yeah, it's read worldwide, and I hear from people all the time, from all kinds of companies and industries I never would have imagined who are using it to build healthy habits and users' lives. So I'm I'm thrilled. I can't be. I mean, I wrote it for me, to be honest. You know, I don't write books about what I know. I write books about what I want to know. And so when I didn't have the answer to this question of how do you build have performing products at least with the first book, and then the same happened with Indistractable, the second book, you know, I followed my curiosity. I wanted to figure out the answer.
00:04:54
Speaker 3: The getting ready for chatting with you today.
00:04:56
Speaker 2: I was looking back through history at times when I mean, you broke it down into those the four steps, the trigger, the trigger, the action, the variable, reward, and the investment, and going back through time seeing how I mean you've been able to condense it and.
00:05:14
Speaker 3: Put it into four words. But this sort of sucks me going on for eons.
00:05:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh absolutely, And I wish I could say I invented it, but in fact I stole it. I went to look at what was it about the world's most habit forming tech companies and trying to figure out what were the common elements between Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat and Instagram and Amazon. What is it about these companies that makes their products so sticky? And the idea was, you know, they already know these secrets. They don't need my book. They know. I wanted to steal their secrets so that I could democratize it for the rest of us. So someone building a fitness app like fitbod used the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. Du Lingo use the hook model to get people hooked to learning a new language. So that was really the intent of the product of the book and my research.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: If I had my machine over here, I would play that little noise that Joe Lingo makes, and you know, thousands of people go exactly is very publican, you know, because it had to exactly you know, haptic feedback is and the noise.
00:06:13
Speaker 3: It's all. It's very interesting. And I have a different brain.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: You know.
00:06:18
Speaker 3: When I got diagnosed, doctor Connor said, well.
00:06:20
Speaker 2: What do you think you've got the career? God, you know, this is the brain you've got. You just need to manage it when it's you know, like all right. So that's why my phone hasn't made a ring or a buzz or a ping since two thousand and three.
00:06:31
Speaker 1: I love that you bring this up because I think the popular perception is that technology is doing this to us, that it's all technology's fault. That it must be Facebook, it must be Instagram, it must be you know what's in the news. It must be Donald Trump, it must be Twitter. It must be all these things happening to us. And I love the fact that you you know, you took us all the way back to two thousand and three. But it goes way way far than that, even right, because people used to say the same thing about television when I was a kid, you know, they call this all couch potatoes. And before that, in my dad's generation, it was the radio was melting people's brains. And before that, I mean literally things like the bicycle was comic books, of course, comic books, rock and roll music all the way. In fact, Socrates, the Greek philosopher, right, they said the written word was the worst technology that it would quote in feeble men's minds. So I think it's really important to take a step back and realize, number one, this is not new, and that number two, we do have agency that if you're looking for distraction, of course, it's easier than ever to find, but there is a lot we can do about it because people have been struggling with it forever. Right now, Plato said talked about acrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And so if he was struggling with this twenty five hundred years ago, the root cause of the problem can't just be our devices. There's something else going on.
00:07:39
Speaker 2: But Plato wasn't working with haptic feedback and the duo lingo noise, and you know an email has said, hey.
00:07:46
Speaker 3: Near you know that amazing shirt that you bought, the white one.
00:07:50
Speaker 2: Look, look there's only got two of these left, right, And if you don't buy it now, oh, hang.
00:07:54
Speaker 3: On to be like a one left now because the little pop up comes up. Now one's just gone. Right, do I have to deal with that?
00:07:59
Speaker 1: And think of all this shit we don't have to deal with, right. Plato slept in a bed that was probably the finest in his time, and I'm sure he had bedbugs and lice that I have a challenger now, Yes, exactly exactly, and he had he didn't have plumbing. I mean, we live like kings just a few There would be no king one hundred two hundred years ago who wouldn't gladly change and trade with us for a middle class existence today. So I think it's important to keep a historical perspective that the knee jerk reaction is always to think, oh, this is the worst time in history, and look at how hard things are today. Things are so easy to buy, that things are so entertaining, that people, things are so engaging. You can call anyone in the world at any time for free yep with video with why So here's the thing, this isn't a problem, it's progress, Yeah, right, that we need to take a step back and realize that these are the most first war problems you could ever have. That because we leave live in such an age of abundance, because we have all these things at our disposal, the price of that progress is that we have to learn some new ways of being. You know, Sophocles said it best. The Greek philosophy said that nothing enters the life of mortals without a curse. So there's nothing vast, there's nothing, there's nothing that is going to impact us that isn't also going to have some downsides. And Paul Verili, other philosopher, had something similarly, said that you cannot invent the ship without the shipwreck, and so of course we're going to have a downside, Like are we surprised that something as vast as the Internet is going to have a lot of good and some bad?
00:09:23
Speaker 2: When I would did Muscuba colls yeas ago, they said every one of these rules about decompression, every scuba safety rule has been written in blood, exactly because they learned along the way to figure out forty one minutes is e.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: That's right, that's exactly right, and there is always a guinea pig generation and that's who we are. Right. On the other hand, the good news is that what do we do. Do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships safer. So what humankind has always done whenever there's a technology that has the possibility of creating goods as well as bads is we do two things. We adapt and we adopt. So adapt our last generation of technology to make it better for the next generation. We adapt the technology. So we made ships safer. We sail more ships today than at any time in human history. When was the last shipwreck you heard of? It's very rare, right, it's not because we stopped sailing ships, just like we shouldn't stop using technology.
00:10:18
Speaker 3: The wheel, it's it's not designed.
00:10:21
Speaker 1: But even with the human error, you know, we sail far more ships and have far fewer accidents because we made the technology better. So we shouldn't be fearful of the technology. We should be leaning into the technology to make it better. And the second thing that we've always done, in addition to adapting, is we adopt. Right, we adopt new norms, new manners around how to use the technology so that we get the best of it without letting it get the best of us. So I remember when I was a kid. I grew up in the nineteen eighties. I was born in the seventies, but I remember the eighties, and I remember in our household and everyone we knuse household, in the middle of their living room, they had an ash tray. Everybody we're about more or less the same age.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: My dad smarked one cigarettes at home.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: There you go. So even if you didn't smoke, so my parents might my dad's smoke, but he had given it up at this time. And I remember that we have had to have an ashtray because if someone else smoked in the early mid eighties, they would come to your house and just.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: Expect to light up.
00:11:12
Speaker 1: Now today that sounds ridiculous, right, If you tell that to a millennial, they'll laugh. Why did it change? Did we pass a law? No, you could still smoke in someone's private residence. What change was? We have new norms, new manners. So I actually remember. So when my mom decided she didn't want that ashtray in the house anymore, and one of her friends came over and took out a pack of cigarettes and I was about to smoke. She said, no, no, no, no, we are non smokers. Right, she used that identity. We are non smokers. If you would like to smoke, if you'd kindly go outside. This woman got so offended that you would ask her to go outside to smoke. Well today that's commonplace, right, of course you would smoke outside. You wouldn't smoke in someone's living room. So it takes people like my mom, who took a stand used a noun to describe themselves. I am a non smoker, which is why my book is titled Indiestractable. Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It is who you are identity. So now when we're going to have a conversation and I want us to be fully present both in body and mind, we might say, you know what, can you put away your phone because I want to actually check it? And you actually see the younger generation doing this already. Right, So when I give these big, expensive talks and someone hires me to help teach their company to become in distracted with every sin, thank, I appreciate that every sin. But the funny thing is that who is it in the room using their phone. Yeah, it's not the millennial.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: I always look.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: No, you know who it is. It's the boomer that hasn't gotten the message that you know what, using my device in the middle of a conversation is rude. That's the person who hasn't gotten the memo. The younger people, the younger generations, they've already learned this because they've adopted these new norms, these new manners about how to use the technology. So I'm pretty optimistic.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: Actually, I've personally experienced my will being overpowered. I mean, like I said, like, I think about it a lot. As a sober person. I've had to think a lot about how impulsive behaviors and things have made choices for me that don't belong in the moment, things that I was doing automatically that were really bad for me and people around me. But I will notice now this is what it is. I have tried getting a brick phone donet work. I've tried giving my wife my scream time pass code like I'm seven, didn't work.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: I've found one thing that did work, and it has worked the last two weeks.
00:13:18
Speaker 2: Now. It's a magnet that sits on the whiteboard upstairs, and it's got a near field thing in it, and to unlock those apps, I actually have to walk upstairs and tap this thing. It's a physical thing external from me and that distance. I've got every app on my phone that is there to stop me from doing it, and none of them has worked except this thing.
00:13:38
Speaker 3: So I know what it is to be sucked in by this tech.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: Right.
00:13:44
Speaker 3: Yes, I have agency, but sometimes it is way too late.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: What did you do when you started to marty eat or your drinking? How did you deal with cravings?
00:13:56
Speaker 2: I just had to think it through, all right, and that was the It gets easier, but the first kind of ninety days or so, it's pretty it's pretty tricky because you are, well, what do I do?
00:14:09
Speaker 3: The sun setting?
00:14:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that was my cue, Right, what do I do? It's eleven am that you know, I'm in my house by myself. My ex walked out the door.
00:14:19
Speaker 3: Okay, put internet gambling, bang bang bang bang bank.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: I got to stay be there from man because that is so interesting. So that's step number one that I talk about, and for me, that was the biggest revelation, is to think about those internal triggers you said when you're ex walked out the door when you're all by yourself, when when things don't feel good, when they're not working the way you hope they will work. Yeah, it becomes your pacification debase. Oh yeah, it's it's an avoidant behavior.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: So I wanted to, you know, because I know this party of work is like, how do we tell the difference between this thing's distracting? Right, this is a distraction to me, or this is an avoidant behavior. I am doing this so I don't have to do something right, So.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: It's oliver what in behavior? So one of the misconceptions that I had until I started this line of research was this myth of the carot and the stick. Right, everybody's heard it right, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and they avoids of pain. Very simple metaphor. Sigmund Freud said this. Jeremy Bentham said this. Now we know, through the miracle of fMRI technology, when we can actually see what's happening in the brain, we know it's not true. It's a nice metaphor. It's not actually true that the way the reward system works is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It's only about the desire to escape discomfort, that even the desire to feel good, craving, wanting, lusting, hunger for the pleasure is it self psychologically destabilizing. So this is the most important thing you could possibly take away from my book, which is that distraction is not a character flaw. It's not a tech plot against you. You're not you know, nobody's hijacking your brain. It's not a broken brain. It's simply that you haven't learn how to deal with discomfort. Because it turns out what we now know is that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick exactly because everything we want is itself something that feeling of want and craving that is what gets us to pursue the pleasure. So once you realize that fact, you realize that everything is pain management. Because all human behavior is spurred by desire to escape is comfort. So that must mean therefore that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. And so the first step to becoming indistractable, whether it's you know, the distraction is too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, fundamentally, the first step has to be mastering internal triggers, or they will become your master. You have to have a practice in place so that when you feel that itch, when you feel that urge, you know what to do with it. And you've probably learned some of these already. But there's about a dozen different techniques that you can use that I put in my book. None of them did I invent. The comeform, Acceptance, comitment therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. These very quick tools in your toolkit that when you feel bored, lonesome, uncertain.
00:17:05
Speaker 3: What's the last one you used?
00:17:07
Speaker 1: So I love this what's called the ten minute rule. There's again a dozen different ones, and so the idea is there's no magic bullet. What you want is a toolkit. And again I didn't invent it, and I have to give credit to acceptance, to comic therapy. According to this technique, the idea is that when you feel the urge, check your phone, any kind of distraction it takes you away from what you plan to do. You want to sit with that urge for up to ten minutes. So what do I do? You know, I've been a professional writer now for well over a decade, and all I want to do when I write is anything but writing?
00:17:34
Speaker 3: How much fun is a big blank page?
00:17:36
Speaker 1: It sucks?
00:17:37
Speaker 3: It sucks?
00:17:38
Speaker 1: You know, or you know, I want to check the news, I want to look at email, I want to check stocks, prices or sports scores, anything but the actual writing, right or research? Let me just do some quick research.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: I'm just researching, honey, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I'm never going to get this done right. I want a deadline, And.
00:17:52
Speaker 1: Really I'm just escaping that uncomfortable sensation of is anybody gonna like this is gonna be any good? And what if it's a dead end, which happens a lot. So it's just these internal triggers bubbling up, which is the root cause of ninety percent of our distractions. Are these internal triggers.
00:18:05
Speaker 3: So what do I do?
00:18:06
Speaker 1: I send an alarm for ten minutes, and now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand whenever I'm ready, or I can surf the urge. These emotions they crust and subside, and that's not how most people think about these emotions. When you feel bored or tired or indecisive.
00:18:23
Speaker 2: Sean till this is that's going to be forever exactly. Better make a decision right now. I might just feeling and go away, make it right away exactly. I tell myself, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better.
00:18:35
Speaker 1: And if I just remind myself that maybe two or three times, what I noticed that after maybe a minute, maybe ninety seconds, I can get back to the writing and look. Every once in a while, I make it through the whole ten minutes and I surf the urge until the time went off, and I can go get distracted. Now, I can go check the email. Now, I can go to that, I think. But I would say about ninety ninety five percent of the time I'm right back at the task at hand. So that's only one of a dozen different techniques.
00:18:57
Speaker 2: I love it, and it when I first got help to stop drinking and using the place that I've got to help.
00:19:03
Speaker 3: They there's some rewards.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: Involved, and sometimes there you know, a week, month, ninety days for example. Years after that, and I heard someone talk about I'd give myself these rewards every five minutes, and I thought, yeah, whatever, and then one day I was like, holy shit, And I'll basically.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: Tell myself like Okay, can I do five more minutes? I can do five more minutes.
00:19:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, Because you know, people say, oh, whatever it is is day at a time, especially dis comfort totally. Yeah, it's day to time. Sometimes it's for an hour at a time. Can I make it to lunch. I can make it to lunch. Yeah.
00:19:33
Speaker 3: Can I make it tonight bedtime?
00:19:35
Speaker 2: Yep?
00:19:35
Speaker 3: Can I make it five minutes from now?
00:19:37
Speaker 1: I can make it fin This exactly proves the point the idea here is that when you set that time and we can resist pretty much anything for ten minutes, and if ten minutes is too long, make it five minutes. It really doesn't matter. But what you're doing exactly is you described you're increasing your agency. Now all of a sudden, it's not mine control. It doesn't you know, have agency over you. You're not a slave to this stuff. It's simply that you're learning, Okay, you know what the ten minute rule, I can make it to, the twenty minute rule. I can make into one day. I can make it into one week.
00:20:01
Speaker 3: And so you're.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: Teaching yourself that you have agency and control over this.
00:20:06
Speaker 2: We just need a moment, a white to take a break back in a minute, if you don't ever know any of this stuff. It'd be easy to see how gets sucked away from you know, we've seen it quite a bit, actually, not just from the life of kids. And you know, I'm sure you're not above it. I'm sure your kids researches, me search. I wrote this for me. I'm sure that your wife has looked at you looking at your phone, missing something your daughter's doing, and you're going fuck.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: I wrote the book.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Oh, this is why I wrote the book. In fact, if it took me five years to write the book because I kept getting distracted, that's exactly right. In fact, that's the kind of the inciting incident. Now about why I wrote this book. That I was with my daughter and we had some daddy daughter time planned together, and I remember we had this activity book of things that dads and daughters could do, like all kinds of you know, do a paper airplane, throwing contests, all this little stuff. And one of the activities in the book was to ask each other this question that if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question, but I can't tell you what she said because in that moment, that was the time that I said, hey, honey, I'm so sorry. I just got to do this one thing on my phone and when I looked up, she was gone. I told this story before while I was writing my book, but before it was published. I told this to a buddy of mine that this had happened, and I felt really guilty about it, and he said, oh, you know what happened to me? My dogt We have girls of similar age, and so he said that. He asked her this similar question, and she said that the superpower she would want is the power to talk to animals. And he said, that's interesting, the power to talk to animals. Why would you want that? And she said that when you and mommy are on your phones, I'll have someone to talk to.
00:21:47
Speaker 2: Ah in the scene in the Frisbee.
00:21:55
Speaker 1: So that was the impetus. I mean, that was really and I have to say now things have a complete changed. There is no air of my life that hasn't improved. I mean, I'm forty six years old. I'm in the best shape of my life, not because I like sports in particular, but because I do them. When I say it well, I eat healthy. When I say it well, I show up for my wife and my daughter. Because that's what I say I'll do, and so now I'm actually I am indistractable. And I like when things change, you know, like during COVID, a lot of things went crazy. I remember telling my wife, thank god I wrote this book before COVID, because it would have been I can't even imagine what would have happened trying to you know, all the figuring out the news and the elections and everything, all the craziness. I literally opened up the book that I wrote to remind myself of these techniques, and I still do now.
00:22:35
Speaker 2: And you mentioned it so because I did want to talk to you about it. Your country has just been through woh, really interesting year.
00:22:44
Speaker 3: Why what happened.
00:22:47
Speaker 2: Seeing your model in political campaigning and stuff like that? Once you say the my tricks, it must be weird for you to got gods, I'll see what you do want to eat?
00:22:56
Speaker 3: How can we be aware of these.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: Kind of hooky techniques comes to political motivations absolutely so.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: Step number when we talked about is master internal figure. Step number two. There's four steps. Step number two is make time for traction. So it's really important to define distraction. What is distraction? The best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. So the opposite of distraction most people say focus.
00:23:18
Speaker 3: It's not focus.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: The opposite of distraction is traction. Prefixes and suffixing exactly right. And I was never obvious to me. Maybe it was to you. I didn't realize that traction and distraction were opposites. Of course, when you look at them right next to each other, two interesting things things. Right, You've got distraction and traction so clearly. But then you've also got that both words and in the same six letters actio action. So traction, by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that move you close to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Everything else is distraction. So it's not about the action itself. It's about one word, and that one word is intent. So Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if what you want to do is to read the news or go on Facebook or watch a YouTube video, or play golf or whatever it is you want to do with your time, is fine. We should stop moralizing and medicalizing these things. The problem is when we intend to do one thing and then we did something else. So you can't say you got distracted unless you know what it distracted you from. So if I look at your calendar and you haven't turned your values into time so that you know what is it that you want to do at anything you want to do is fine. You want time for video games, put it in there. You want time for social media, put it in there. Whatever it is, it's important to you if it's in your calendar's traction. Everything that is not that now is distraction. So the way we overcome these techniques, which we need to realize it is not just social media that's trying to monetize our attention. All media is trying to monetize your attention. Every product is way advertising good invented. Of course, they're telling you about horrible crimes that are never going to affect you statistically, about you know, plane crashes that you're never going to have experience in your life, because that's what is selacious, that's what gets you to watch.
00:25:03
Speaker 3: Right, we have.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: This this negativity bias that keeps us tuning in to these salacious events. So recognizing that all form of media, I think actually legacy media, the Fox News of the world, the CNNs of the world, are way worse for us than actually social media, because at least in social media you have a conversation. You can have alternate viewpoints as opposed to one ideological perspective non stop all day long. I'd rush much rather live in this world where we have a diversity of voices, even if many of them are wrong, and that we can start judging for ourselves if and only if we make time for what we intended to do. So, if you want to spend time consuming the news or political this or that or whatever, there's nothing wrong with that activity as long as you're doing it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's.
00:25:48
Speaker 2: But you can't, you know, you can't ignore that if I I don't know, if I'm looking up something for you know, researching a guest coming in here, and like, for example, I'm looking up time management and one's worked in historical you know, behavioral nudges and things like that in history that I want to talk to you about next time. A ton on YouTube's like now I'm looking at Anty's Miching campaigns from the seventies. Now I'm see Ralph Knaighter is safe at any speed?
00:26:09
Speaker 3: Is like I didn't look at that.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now it's so you do get algorithmically fed stuff that keeps you in these things. How can we though when we're seeing, you know, really emotive stuff.
00:26:22
Speaker 3: This government is going to take white shirts away forever. I don't want that. I like this shit.
00:26:27
Speaker 2: And then whatever you're going to do that afternoon is now been taken over by you screaming at someone who's probably in an Imanian trifarm.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, look, there's a time and a place where there is an issue that you should get involved in. So I don't think that, you know, not participating is potentially the answer. And look, what looks like crazy sensational emotional to one person looks like a very important cause to someone else. And so there's two things. One you can look for altern perspectives. What I love about social media, and again I'm not a tech apologist. I think it's a lot they could do better. Is that every once in a while, you know, I have some very strongly held beliefs. However, I every once in a while will see a story fed to me from the algorithm that is diametrically opposed to what I believe. And I watched that video because it shows me the other perspective, and I see from the precise Oh okay, I mean this recently happened actually, where I said, huh okay, Now I get why they believe. I don't agree with them, but now I see why they believe that way. And two, as long as the way you're spending your time is the way you intended. So the problem with the scenario you gave was not oh, this political ad riled me up. It's that you spent all day cursing people up on social media.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: You've mentioned a few times the intent but also intent that's aligned with the values. If people never thought about that before, that's why we can start thinking about values. And I'm not talking like you know, twenty percent off here. I'm talking about like, you know, how do we even begin that conversation?
00:27:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: Okay, So what are values?
00:27:53
Speaker 3: Right?
00:27:53
Speaker 1: I'm kind of a word nerd. So values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. They're not things that can be taken away from you. These are attributes of the person you want to become. So if you want to know what someone's values really are, right, how are they becoming the person that they want to become? You look at two things. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time.
00:28:13
Speaker 3: That's it.
00:28:14
Speaker 1: You don't listen to what they say. People will say all kinds of stuff, right, oh, oh, you know what's important.
00:28:18
Speaker 3: Health.
00:28:18
Speaker 1: It's very important for me to become a healthy person. Will are you spending time in the gym? Do you have that in your schedule? Can I see when you're plenty to spend time on your house?
00:28:28
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, I'm going to start to work. This is totally me. How good chase keke another one and appreciate.
00:28:36
Speaker 1: Suld add how you spend your calories. That's actually get it on too. So I used to be clinically obese, so this was something I oh, all right, cut from the same claw. I give these three life domains, so it starts with you. You're at the center of these three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others, you can't make the world a better place. So you then comes relationships. Then the last life domain is work. Okay, So what you need to do is to take out your calendar and turn your values into time, because if you don't turn them into time, it's just talk. So starting with the you domain, how would the person you want to become take care of themselves? So physical health, Do you have a bedtime? Do you want time for reading or playing video games or whatever it is that's fun for you. Put that time in your calendar, like literally, book the time in your schedule for all the things that you need to do. Take care of yourself according to your values. Then your relationships.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:26
Speaker 1: Part of the reason we have this loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that the institutions we used to have to bond communities together kind of evaporated with the secularization of society. And I'm part of that too. I'm not particularly religious, but we lost something when we stop going to church, to the Kiwanis club, to these local groups that were on our schedule that we had to be we had to appear at. So booking that time with your friends, certainly with your spouse, with your kids, having that time set aside to live out your values, to be an involved father or mother or whatever the case might be having that time in your schedule for the relationships. And then finally, the work domain, which is where most people start. It's actually, I think the last one work we can separate into two areas. There's what we call reactive work, which is whatever he's familiar with. Reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to the tap on the shoulder from your boss. That's reactive work. Now, everybody has some level of reactive work in their day. Some people spend their entire day doing reactive work. But if you're not spending at least part of your day doing what's called reflective work, you're in big trouble. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking requires us to set time aside for that reflective work. If you're not doing that, if you don't plan at least sometime in your day, here's what happens. You run real fast in the wrong direction. So this is where we have this artifact that's called a timebox calendar, so that you can look at your day and say, okay, this is how I will spend my day according to my values. Because what's the big picture here, what are we doing? Are we just anti technology? Stop using technology?
00:30:55
Speaker 3: No?
00:30:56
Speaker 1: The idea here is to minimize regret is to live each day so that you can look back. And very few people have actually experienced the bliss what this is. This feels so amazing when you can look back at a day and say, you know what I spent that day according to my values. It's the best, which it includes time for fun.
00:31:15
Speaker 3: Right, let me get I'm gonna get a real wide angle on your heat.
00:31:20
Speaker 2: When it comes to distraction, when it comes to you know, time boxing, when it comes to putting stuff putting you know your time weight, your mouth is essentially where.
00:31:28
Speaker 3: Does denial of death come into all of this?
00:31:32
Speaker 1: I think that the denial part in the denial of death hypothesis comes from our lack of agency. We all know we're going to die. It only becomes scary when you feel like you don't control the days until you die. M that's when you begin to deny your mortality. But when you acknowledge the fact that, yeah, I'm going to die, so I better spend the days I have left the way I want to accord to my values, now it's not scary anymore. What's scary is what did I do with my year?
00:32:02
Speaker 2: Right?
00:32:02
Speaker 1: With my life? That's when it's scary.
00:32:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, hey, you go to stay your full Cancer Gainsburg. Yeah yeah, oh you know what.
00:32:07
Speaker 2: I'm real glad I scrolled seven thousand kilometers on Instagram of meaningless shit rather than spoke to my family.
00:32:13
Speaker 1: Right, Whereas now I have to tell you, and I don't want to jinnx myself here God for a bit. But look, if something terrible happened tomorrow, I would say that, you know what, since I become indistractable, I don't have regrets. I've been spending my days the way I wanted to. If you wanted to wrap up my over decade of work here into one mantra, it's this. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. It is fundamentally an impulse control problem. It's not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing broken about you or your brain. It's simply that we haven't learned the skill set to deal with impulse control. So we're constantly looking for something to take our minds off of that discomfort. Right, So we drink it away, we scroll it away, we click it away. We look for something to pacify that. But if you leave it to the last minute, they're gonna get you. It's too late, right If the cigarettes in your hand are gonna smoke it. If if the chocolate cake is on the fork on it's way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it. If you sleep with your cell phone every night on your nightstand, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning because it's too late. If you leave it at the last minute, of course they're gonna get you. And I think that's why most people feel like technology is controlling them and the algorithms and all this evil stuff, because that's when it's already in your hand, that's too late. But the antidote is forethought.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: And this is when you talk about the managing the external using managing the triggers, managing the things like this thing, I'll go to my thing upstairs. But also like for an example I would give was that I travel a lot for work and for years now, when I'm checking in a hotel.
00:33:41
Speaker 3: I'm in that says.
00:33:41
Speaker 2: Situation in my life now where I can ask people who book the thing for me, can you make sure this happens?
00:33:45
Speaker 3: But I chack into it. I always ask did you take the alcohol out of the minibar? And I say, yeah, Well, I'll send someone.
00:33:50
Speaker 1: Can do it.
00:33:51
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna do it, right, but it's just easier, right, It's like done. I have chocolate bars in the house.
00:33:57
Speaker 1: So you asked earlier about the algorithms. Yeah, and you say, you watch one video, then you get the next one, the next one, the next one. I don't. I don't because I took the alcohol the MINDI bar.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: How do I do that?
00:34:07
Speaker 1: I installed a free Chrome extension called YouTube DF. It's free DF stands for distraction free, totally free to go to Chrome the app story Chrome and you install this app, and so now you know all those distracting videos you see on the side, I don't see those. So that's what's step numberour. We skip number three, but step number four is hacking back the external triggers. So the solution to all this distracting technology is more technology that gets rid of the distraction. There are so many tools.
00:34:35
Speaker 3: I mean, look, how many.
00:34:36
Speaker 1: Devices can you name? How many products out there can you name that actively help you use the device less? Everybody's phone comes with screen time, and Google well being doesn't matter if if an Android or iPhone. They all come with this technology and it we just have to learn how to use it. So for example, when I'm watching YouTube, I install this thing once and now when I watch a video, I see one video.
00:34:56
Speaker 3: Where is regulation come in?
00:34:57
Speaker 1: We love regulation because it's really simple, right, like, just regulate that. But regulation comes with costs. You know, if you think about all the things that kill kids. Nobody ever talks about this, but actually today it's the safest time in history to be a child in the industrialized world. Drunk driving record lows, drug use record lows, teen pregnancy record lows, truancy record lows, homicide record lows. These are global record lows in the industrialized world. But why might that be? Why is truancy and homicide and drunk driving and all this stuff down, Well, if you wanted to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, there are some upsides when we have this knee jerk reaction to regulate one. We do it poorly, right, The geniuses in government are extremely hamphiested, and we learn that we are taking a lot of you know, we tend to throw out the baby with the bath road, not that I'm against regulation, like, I think there is something sensible to saying, you know what, maybe thirteen is too young for a certain content online, Maybe sixteen is not a bad idea. I think there is a right way to do that. There's certainly some wrong ways to do it. But we also need to be very careful that we don't throw out all the all the good that comes with it as well, and that we aren't getting to the heart of the issue that I think part of the reason that we're seeing so many problems with teen suicide is that I think we have pathologized the generation that we are. You know, there's so many other things that are going on that when we have a simple solution, Ah it's the rock music. Oh, it's the comic books. Ah, it's the radio. Now, it's the social media, we don't look at ourselves as parents or in the school system to see, hey, what else might be a deeper reason.
00:36:30
Speaker 2: I just got to flashback to the this famous footage of Judas priests standing in a court because some horribly tragic, tragic thing happened where a kid took their life and they found the record on the record player and their parents went it must have been the.
00:36:43
Speaker 3: Band, right, and then you're just pretty standing in the witness box, right, like we write Living after Midnight, we're in suits.
00:36:50
Speaker 2: We don't know what's going on here, Like it's I understand, it's you've got to blame something.
00:36:54
Speaker 3: But it was one of those moments where and parents love.
00:36:56
Speaker 1: That and they always have, right, it's called the moral panics. We every generation. Like literally, we know that there's writing thousands of years ago people talking about all the kids these days are die So this is nothing. So the problem is that it doesn't get to the heart of the issue. We're not really understanding what's going on, and I think that's the real danger.
00:37:13
Speaker 2: The last thing I wanted to to ask you about is that the people will listen to it to the time of year in Australia where we go back to school, all right, Now Jay's finish school little while ago Wolf's about to start. People won't be changing schools. It sounds like your daughter is at a part where like this is a serious business here, kid, all right, These a couple of years really count a lot as far as university and stuff goes. Is it easy for you to practice once you she said, you cracked your own book open. You know, as a parent, here, how can we support our kids around this schoolwork?
00:37:42
Speaker 1: So the difference, so I still get distracted from time to time being industruct So I made up the word indistractable. I can define it any way I want. So being indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. The difference is between a distractable person and an indistractable person, is that a distractable person keeps getting distracted.
00:38:00
Speaker 3: Had a wonderful quote.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once. This is such a good quote. So a distractable person because it's true. It's so true. A distractable person keeps getting distracted with how many times can we say social media and the news and how many ties can we say that before we do something about it. An indistractable person is ah, okay, I see what you did there. I got distracted that one time. Again. The antidote to impulsive this is forethought, what can I do today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow? And so that's a different between a distractable person an in distracted person. When it comes to our kids, the world is only going to become a more distractable place. So we have to teach our kids how to be in distractable. How do we do that? We follow exact same four steps and starts with By the way, the number one thing you could do as a parent if you want to raise indistractable kids is to be an indistractable parent.
00:38:48
Speaker 3: That's the worst thing about parenting, right example, I'll do what you show them, ah.
00:38:53
Speaker 1: Exactly, because they come with these invisible antennae. These distraction are these hypocrisy detection device that they're all with and they're constantly scanning to see where we screw up. So you cannot say, oh, put that you know, minecraft away, stop playing that game. What meanwhile, you're on your phone. You have to set the example. So that's number one. Then you can literally walk them through these four steps starting it. You know, we start with my daughter around seven eight years old. We started mastering internal triggers. What tools do you have to control these these icky feelings? Number two? Making time for traction For kids, that's very easy because most of their day is already scheduled, So it's about scheduling time to include the fun things. Right One, of the best things you can do for your kid if they're playing too much video games or whatever, schedule it in their day, like literally put time in the schedule so that they have to they don't have to constantly think about when can I play? When can I play? Put it in their schedule, but to have a discussion with them about how much time is good.
00:39:43
Speaker 2: So it's not an open ended exactly and you know, having that conflict of like how much I want to just one more, just one more episode?
00:39:49
Speaker 1: That's right, I show you exactly. There's some details on how to do this, but the idea is here that you're giving your kid agency. Because a lot of parents say, oh, they'll want to do it all day. You'd be surprised if you sit down with your kid and you you show them, hey, it's your schedule, it's your day. How much time do you need for homework, how much time do you need for your friends, how much time do you need to go play?
00:40:05
Speaker 3: Whatever it is.
00:40:06
Speaker 1: Sitting down to do that exercise, you would not believe how responsible kids can be when they're given the choice, as opposed to what most parents do, stop that, do this, do this. Kids are so regulated these days, right, if you think about you know, there's only two places in the world that we can tell people where to go, how to dress, what to eat, who to be friends with them, what to think, and that's school and prison. So is it any surprise that kids want freedom and autonomy? So where do they go for that? Guess where they go online? Where they feel like gods. Yeah, so we have to understand the deeper reasons why they want to use these technology this much as opposed to just being cops and telling them what to do all day, which only makes the problem worse, by the way. Yeah, so that's step number two. Removing the external triggers. Hacking back external triggers is step number three. So anything that beefs, buzzes are boops in the bedroom of a child or adult. That includes old technology like a television or radio, a fish tank, anything that could disrupt sleep. It's got to go televisions in the bedroom of adults either because we're setting that example, because it's not actually the TV that's the problem or the iPath that's the problem. The problem is what it disrupts. It disrupts sleep, and especially for children, they need sleep. We know that there's a direct correlation between children who don't sleep and psychiatric symptoms. We have to get kids their proper rest. So anything that buzzes or makes noise of any kind, including pets, unfortunately, does not have a place in the bedroom. We need kids to get their sleep. That's about hacking back the external triggers. And then the four step is preventing distraction with pacts where we teach kids actually to use technology to help them not use too much technology. So, for example, there's an app that my daughter uses. I love it. It's called Forest and Forest, very simple app.
00:41:41
Speaker 3: You open it up, you type in how much to uses?
00:41:44
Speaker 1: Oh us perfect, yes, exactly. So you're teaching them how to use these tools so that they can regulate themselves, because look, when they leave the house, you're not going to be there. So we're not raising kids, we're raising future adults. We want to teach them how to manage their own time.
00:41:58
Speaker 3: You've been so generous coming today. I'm gonna make a TV series for you. Man.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You are so much, You got so much to give, and I'm just really gratefully that you've done the work that you've done.
00:42:07
Speaker 3: Because it's good. It's good to have a like a white Angle.
00:42:11
Speaker 2: I'd ask you to tell me a clue of the next book that you got lined up, but you're probably under some sort of.
00:42:15
Speaker 3: Mad in the But whatever it's going to be, I can't wait to see it. I appreciates for visiting our country man.
00:42:21
Speaker 1: This has been fantastic and visiting with you has been one of the hat lights.
00:42:25
Speaker 3: You cut on the Koala.
00:42:28
Speaker 1: Okay, that wins, but only by a little bit.
00:42:32
Speaker 3: And that was near al.
00:42:33
Speaker 2: I'll put some links to his books Hooked and Indestractable in the show notes, as well as an article that he gave us on time boxing, some ways that you can explore your values, and a schedule make a tool which he wanted you to have.
00:42:44
Speaker 3: Tickets for the Story Club show on the February of the ninth on sale right now. It's this Sunday. You might get lucky that the factory.
00:42:51
Speaker 2: If we sell enough tickets to the factory, they can always put us in a bigger room.
00:42:54
Speaker 3: So look, we'll see how we go.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: But getting in because look it's Rob Carlton, Ato, Mark Dewey, Sean mccaloff, myself, It's a fucking mad lineup and it's an early night two six point thirty. Come on, we'll be home by night. He's got time for staying up late. Not May see you on the substack links in the show notes for everything, Thanks for listening,
Speaker 1: If you wanted to wrap up my over decade of work here into one mantra, it's this. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. It is fundamentally an impulse control problem. It's not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing broken about you or your brain. It's simply that we haven't learned the skill set to deal with impulse control. So we're constantly looking for something to take our minds off of that discomfort. Right, So we drink it away, we scroll it away, we click it away, we look for something to pacify that. But if you leave it to the last minute, they're gonna get you. It's too late, Right. If the cigarettes in your hand, you're gonna smoke it. If the chocolate cake is on the fork on it's way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it. If you sleep with your cell phone every night on your nightstand, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning, because it's too late. If you leave it to the last minute, of course, they're gonna get you. And I think that's why most people feel like technology is controlling them, and the algorithms and all this evil stuff, because that's when it's already in your hand. That's too late. But the antidote is forethought.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: How much time do you spend doing stuff that, if you were really honest, you would rather that you didn't do, you know.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: Stuff that you never intended to do. But look, hey, look here you are. It's been half an hour.
00:01:14
Speaker 2: If you're anything like me, your answer to that question is somewhere between quite.
00:01:18
Speaker 3: A bit, a bit more than I actually like to admit, and can we tell about something else?
00:01:21
Speaker 2: Right? Happily? Questions like this make a case for the vital importance of being in control of your attention, of being what my guest today author near Aar would call indestractable.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: Which also happens to be the name of his second book.
00:01:37
Speaker 2: If you don't feel that you're in control of your time, if you feel like you get to the end of the day you've got no idea where it went, You feel like that has been the story of your life for like.
00:01:44
Speaker 3: Way too long. I'm actually quite excited for you to hear this.
00:01:47
Speaker 2: It's got some really interesting, very valuable steps and insights to hopefully help you change all that, but also to figure out exactly what.
00:01:54
Speaker 3: You would rather be spending your time on.
00:01:56
Speaker 2: So your time is meaningfully spent in the first place. I do have, though, once more distraction before we get to the conversation, because I do need to play some ads.
00:02:05
Speaker 3: We're back in a moment.
00:02:10
Speaker 2: Good. This is better than yesterday, making it better every single week since twenty thirteen. My name Joshia Ginsburg, and I'm very glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening. Before we get to near al, I just didn't want to remind you that tickets for the next Story Club gig are on sale right now. It is this Sunday at the Factory Theater in Marrickville. It's at Valentine's Day special. Rob Carlton and his wife Ado Ferrera are going to tell stories, as is Mark Sutton and Zoe Norton Lodge, who also happened to be married. So I'm very kind of looking forward to the dueling the different versions of romantic stories from whose husbands and wives there, as well as myself and fellow gold Logi loser Sean Macaliff. Yes, Sean mother fucking Macliffe is going to do story Club at the Factory Theater. Tickets are cheap and you can get the link in the show notes.
00:02:55
Speaker 3: And that's also where the sub stack is.
00:02:57
Speaker 2: Lots of good He's there, lots of great ways to stay in touch, send a recipe, ask a question.
00:03:01
Speaker 3: Whatever.
00:03:02
Speaker 2: Near Al is here. He's an Israeli born American author, lecturer, investor a He's well renowned for his expertise in behavioral design and habit formation his book Hooked. It's actually quite hard to overestimate the enormous influence his work has had on the user experience and product design place in the digital space. Like if you find yourself using an app that keeps you on there long after you thought you were going to put it down, the chances of other people who designed that app are using Near's four phase model of habit formation, which is trigger action, variable, reward, and investment. In that book he also gets into the ethics of building apps which people can't put down, and in many ways, the book he's here to talk about today, Indestractable, is the antithesis of that. His mind bogglingly smart, was delightful to have in our home, even if it was rather warm and steamy in the middle of summer when he joined me here in Sydney, I hope you'll learn a lot as I did from listening.
00:03:55
Speaker 3: To near al. Really grateful. I wanted to talk to you today because.
00:04:02
Speaker 2: The impact that you've had on our society through your definitely your first book and also through your second. By the next the people that cited your first book as yeah, we read that and then we made this, do you think, like, do you think about what impact that's had.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm very proud of of what it's done. I'm in the book now. Is it's second edition now and sold over half million copies, and yeah, it's read worldwide, and I hear from people all the time, from all kinds of companies and industries I never would have imagined who are using it to build healthy habits and users' lives. So I'm I'm thrilled. I can't be. I mean, I wrote it for me, to be honest. You know, I don't write books about what I know. I write books about what I want to know. And so when I didn't have the answer to this question of how do you build have performing products at least with the first book, and then the same happened with Indistractable, the second book, you know, I followed my curiosity. I wanted to figure out the answer.
00:04:54
Speaker 3: The getting ready for chatting with you today.
00:04:56
Speaker 2: I was looking back through history at times when I mean, you broke it down into those the four steps, the trigger, the trigger, the action, the variable, reward, and the investment, and going back through time seeing how I mean you've been able to condense it and.
00:05:14
Speaker 3: Put it into four words. But this sort of sucks me going on for eons.
00:05:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh absolutely, And I wish I could say I invented it, but in fact I stole it. I went to look at what was it about the world's most habit forming tech companies and trying to figure out what were the common elements between Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp and Slack and Snapchat and Instagram and Amazon. What is it about these companies that makes their products so sticky? And the idea was, you know, they already know these secrets. They don't need my book. They know. I wanted to steal their secrets so that I could democratize it for the rest of us. So someone building a fitness app like fitbod used the hook model to get people hooked to exercise. Du Lingo use the hook model to get people hooked to learning a new language. So that was really the intent of the product of the book and my research.
00:05:59
Speaker 2: If I had my machine over here, I would play that little noise that Joe Lingo makes, and you know, thousands of people go exactly is very publican, you know, because it had to exactly you know, haptic feedback is and the noise.
00:06:13
Speaker 3: It's all. It's very interesting. And I have a different brain.
00:06:17
Speaker 2: You know.
00:06:18
Speaker 3: When I got diagnosed, doctor Connor said, well.
00:06:20
Speaker 2: What do you think you've got the career? God, you know, this is the brain you've got. You just need to manage it when it's you know, like all right. So that's why my phone hasn't made a ring or a buzz or a ping since two thousand and three.
00:06:31
Speaker 1: I love that you bring this up because I think the popular perception is that technology is doing this to us, that it's all technology's fault. That it must be Facebook, it must be Instagram, it must be you know what's in the news. It must be Donald Trump, it must be Twitter. It must be all these things happening to us. And I love the fact that you you know, you took us all the way back to two thousand and three. But it goes way way far than that, even right, because people used to say the same thing about television when I was a kid, you know, they call this all couch potatoes. And before that, in my dad's generation, it was the radio was melting people's brains. And before that, I mean literally things like the bicycle was comic books, of course, comic books, rock and roll music all the way. In fact, Socrates, the Greek philosopher, right, they said the written word was the worst technology that it would quote in feeble men's minds. So I think it's really important to take a step back and realize, number one, this is not new, and that number two, we do have agency that if you're looking for distraction, of course, it's easier than ever to find, but there is a lot we can do about it because people have been struggling with it forever. Right now, Plato said talked about acrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And so if he was struggling with this twenty five hundred years ago, the root cause of the problem can't just be our devices. There's something else going on.
00:07:39
Speaker 2: But Plato wasn't working with haptic feedback and the duo lingo noise, and you know an email has said, hey.
00:07:46
Speaker 3: Near you know that amazing shirt that you bought, the white one.
00:07:50
Speaker 2: Look, look there's only got two of these left, right, And if you don't buy it now, oh, hang.
00:07:54
Speaker 3: On to be like a one left now because the little pop up comes up. Now one's just gone. Right, do I have to deal with that?
00:07:59
Speaker 1: And think of all this shit we don't have to deal with, right. Plato slept in a bed that was probably the finest in his time, and I'm sure he had bedbugs and lice that I have a challenger now, Yes, exactly exactly, and he had he didn't have plumbing. I mean, we live like kings just a few There would be no king one hundred two hundred years ago who wouldn't gladly change and trade with us for a middle class existence today. So I think it's important to keep a historical perspective that the knee jerk reaction is always to think, oh, this is the worst time in history, and look at how hard things are today. Things are so easy to buy, that things are so entertaining, that people, things are so engaging. You can call anyone in the world at any time for free yep with video with why So here's the thing, this isn't a problem, it's progress, Yeah, right, that we need to take a step back and realize that these are the most first war problems you could ever have. That because we leave live in such an age of abundance, because we have all these things at our disposal, the price of that progress is that we have to learn some new ways of being. You know, Sophocles said it best. The Greek philosophy said that nothing enters the life of mortals without a curse. So there's nothing vast, there's nothing, there's nothing that is going to impact us that isn't also going to have some downsides. And Paul Verili, other philosopher, had something similarly, said that you cannot invent the ship without the shipwreck, and so of course we're going to have a downside, Like are we surprised that something as vast as the Internet is going to have a lot of good and some bad?
00:09:23
Speaker 2: When I would did Muscuba colls yeas ago, they said every one of these rules about decompression, every scuba safety rule has been written in blood, exactly because they learned along the way to figure out forty one minutes is e.
00:09:34
Speaker 1: That's right, that's exactly right, and there is always a guinea pig generation and that's who we are. Right. On the other hand, the good news is that what do we do. Do we stop sailing ships? No, we made ships safer. So what humankind has always done whenever there's a technology that has the possibility of creating goods as well as bads is we do two things. We adapt and we adopt. So adapt our last generation of technology to make it better for the next generation. We adapt the technology. So we made ships safer. We sail more ships today than at any time in human history. When was the last shipwreck you heard of? It's very rare, right, it's not because we stopped sailing ships, just like we shouldn't stop using technology.
00:10:18
Speaker 3: The wheel, it's it's not designed.
00:10:21
Speaker 1: But even with the human error, you know, we sail far more ships and have far fewer accidents because we made the technology better. So we shouldn't be fearful of the technology. We should be leaning into the technology to make it better. And the second thing that we've always done, in addition to adapting, is we adopt. Right, we adopt new norms, new manners around how to use the technology so that we get the best of it without letting it get the best of us. So I remember when I was a kid. I grew up in the nineteen eighties. I was born in the seventies, but I remember the eighties, and I remember in our household and everyone we knuse household, in the middle of their living room, they had an ash tray. Everybody we're about more or less the same age.
00:10:56
Speaker 3: My dad smarked one cigarettes at home.
00:10:58
Speaker 1: There you go. So even if you didn't smoke, so my parents might my dad's smoke, but he had given it up at this time. And I remember that we have had to have an ashtray because if someone else smoked in the early mid eighties, they would come to your house and just.
00:11:11
Speaker 3: Expect to light up.
00:11:12
Speaker 1: Now today that sounds ridiculous, right, If you tell that to a millennial, they'll laugh. Why did it change? Did we pass a law? No, you could still smoke in someone's private residence. What change was? We have new norms, new manners. So I actually remember. So when my mom decided she didn't want that ashtray in the house anymore, and one of her friends came over and took out a pack of cigarettes and I was about to smoke. She said, no, no, no, no, we are non smokers. Right, she used that identity. We are non smokers. If you would like to smoke, if you'd kindly go outside. This woman got so offended that you would ask her to go outside to smoke. Well today that's commonplace, right, of course you would smoke outside. You wouldn't smoke in someone's living room. So it takes people like my mom, who took a stand used a noun to describe themselves. I am a non smoker, which is why my book is titled Indiestractable. Indistractable is meant to sound like indestructible. It is who you are identity. So now when we're going to have a conversation and I want us to be fully present both in body and mind, we might say, you know what, can you put away your phone because I want to actually check it? And you actually see the younger generation doing this already. Right, So when I give these big, expensive talks and someone hires me to help teach their company to become in distracted with every sin, thank, I appreciate that every sin. But the funny thing is that who is it in the room using their phone. Yeah, it's not the millennial.
00:12:23
Speaker 3: I always look.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: No, you know who it is. It's the boomer that hasn't gotten the message that you know what, using my device in the middle of a conversation is rude. That's the person who hasn't gotten the memo. The younger people, the younger generations, they've already learned this because they've adopted these new norms, these new manners about how to use the technology. So I'm pretty optimistic.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: Actually, I've personally experienced my will being overpowered. I mean, like I said, like, I think about it a lot. As a sober person. I've had to think a lot about how impulsive behaviors and things have made choices for me that don't belong in the moment, things that I was doing automatically that were really bad for me and people around me. But I will notice now this is what it is. I have tried getting a brick phone donet work. I've tried giving my wife my scream time pass code like I'm seven, didn't work.
00:13:15
Speaker 3: I've found one thing that did work, and it has worked the last two weeks.
00:13:18
Speaker 2: Now. It's a magnet that sits on the whiteboard upstairs, and it's got a near field thing in it, and to unlock those apps, I actually have to walk upstairs and tap this thing. It's a physical thing external from me and that distance. I've got every app on my phone that is there to stop me from doing it, and none of them has worked except this thing.
00:13:38
Speaker 3: So I know what it is to be sucked in by this tech.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: Right.
00:13:44
Speaker 3: Yes, I have agency, but sometimes it is way too late.
00:13:49
Speaker 1: What did you do when you started to marty eat or your drinking? How did you deal with cravings?
00:13:56
Speaker 2: I just had to think it through, all right, and that was the It gets easier, but the first kind of ninety days or so, it's pretty it's pretty tricky because you are, well, what do I do?
00:14:09
Speaker 3: The sun setting?
00:14:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that was my cue, Right, what do I do? It's eleven am that you know, I'm in my house by myself. My ex walked out the door.
00:14:19
Speaker 3: Okay, put internet gambling, bang bang bang bang bank.
00:14:23
Speaker 1: I got to stay be there from man because that is so interesting. So that's step number one that I talk about, and for me, that was the biggest revelation, is to think about those internal triggers you said when you're ex walked out the door when you're all by yourself, when when things don't feel good, when they're not working the way you hope they will work. Yeah, it becomes your pacification debase. Oh yeah, it's it's an avoidant behavior.
00:14:43
Speaker 2: So I wanted to, you know, because I know this party of work is like, how do we tell the difference between this thing's distracting? Right, this is a distraction to me, or this is an avoidant behavior. I am doing this so I don't have to do something right, So.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: It's oliver what in behavior? So one of the misconceptions that I had until I started this line of research was this myth of the carot and the stick. Right, everybody's heard it right, that everything we do is about the pursuit of pleasure and they avoids of pain. Very simple metaphor. Sigmund Freud said this. Jeremy Bentham said this. Now we know, through the miracle of fMRI technology, when we can actually see what's happening in the brain, we know it's not true. It's a nice metaphor. It's not actually true that the way the reward system works is not about the pursuit of pleasure. It's only about the desire to escape discomfort, that even the desire to feel good, craving, wanting, lusting, hunger for the pleasure is it self psychologically destabilizing. So this is the most important thing you could possibly take away from my book, which is that distraction is not a character flaw. It's not a tech plot against you. You're not you know, nobody's hijacking your brain. It's not a broken brain. It's simply that you haven't learn how to deal with discomfort. Because it turns out what we now know is that the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick exactly because everything we want is itself something that feeling of want and craving that is what gets us to pursue the pleasure. So once you realize that fact, you realize that everything is pain management. Because all human behavior is spurred by desire to escape is comfort. So that must mean therefore that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. And so the first step to becoming indistractable, whether it's you know, the distraction is too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, fundamentally, the first step has to be mastering internal triggers, or they will become your master. You have to have a practice in place so that when you feel that itch, when you feel that urge, you know what to do with it. And you've probably learned some of these already. But there's about a dozen different techniques that you can use that I put in my book. None of them did I invent. The comeform, Acceptance, comitment therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. These very quick tools in your toolkit that when you feel bored, lonesome, uncertain.
00:17:05
Speaker 3: What's the last one you used?
00:17:07
Speaker 1: So I love this what's called the ten minute rule. There's again a dozen different ones, and so the idea is there's no magic bullet. What you want is a toolkit. And again I didn't invent it, and I have to give credit to acceptance, to comic therapy. According to this technique, the idea is that when you feel the urge, check your phone, any kind of distraction it takes you away from what you plan to do. You want to sit with that urge for up to ten minutes. So what do I do? You know, I've been a professional writer now for well over a decade, and all I want to do when I write is anything but writing?
00:17:34
Speaker 3: How much fun is a big blank page?
00:17:36
Speaker 1: It sucks?
00:17:37
Speaker 3: It sucks?
00:17:38
Speaker 1: You know, or you know, I want to check the news, I want to look at email, I want to check stocks, prices or sports scores, anything but the actual writing, right or research? Let me just do some quick research.
00:17:47
Speaker 2: I'm just researching, honey, Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, I'm never going to get this done right. I want a deadline, And.
00:17:52
Speaker 1: Really I'm just escaping that uncomfortable sensation of is anybody gonna like this is gonna be any good? And what if it's a dead end, which happens a lot. So it's just these internal triggers bubbling up, which is the root cause of ninety percent of our distractions. Are these internal triggers.
00:18:05
Speaker 3: So what do I do?
00:18:06
Speaker 1: I send an alarm for ten minutes, and now I have a choice to make. I can either get back to the task at hand whenever I'm ready, or I can surf the urge. These emotions they crust and subside, and that's not how most people think about these emotions. When you feel bored or tired or indecisive.
00:18:23
Speaker 2: Sean till this is that's going to be forever exactly. Better make a decision right now. I might just feeling and go away, make it right away exactly. I tell myself, this is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better.
00:18:35
Speaker 1: And if I just remind myself that maybe two or three times, what I noticed that after maybe a minute, maybe ninety seconds, I can get back to the writing and look. Every once in a while, I make it through the whole ten minutes and I surf the urge until the time went off, and I can go get distracted. Now, I can go check the email. Now, I can go to that, I think. But I would say about ninety ninety five percent of the time I'm right back at the task at hand. So that's only one of a dozen different techniques.
00:18:57
Speaker 2: I love it, and it when I first got help to stop drinking and using the place that I've got to help.
00:19:03
Speaker 3: They there's some rewards.
00:19:06
Speaker 2: Involved, and sometimes there you know, a week, month, ninety days for example. Years after that, and I heard someone talk about I'd give myself these rewards every five minutes, and I thought, yeah, whatever, and then one day I was like, holy shit, And I'll basically.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: Tell myself like Okay, can I do five more minutes? I can do five more minutes.
00:19:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, Because you know, people say, oh, whatever it is is day at a time, especially dis comfort totally. Yeah, it's day to time. Sometimes it's for an hour at a time. Can I make it to lunch. I can make it to lunch. Yeah.
00:19:33
Speaker 3: Can I make it tonight bedtime?
00:19:35
Speaker 2: Yep?
00:19:35
Speaker 3: Can I make it five minutes from now?
00:19:37
Speaker 1: I can make it fin This exactly proves the point the idea here is that when you set that time and we can resist pretty much anything for ten minutes, and if ten minutes is too long, make it five minutes. It really doesn't matter. But what you're doing exactly is you described you're increasing your agency. Now all of a sudden, it's not mine control. It doesn't you know, have agency over you. You're not a slave to this stuff. It's simply that you're learning, Okay, you know what the ten minute rule, I can make it to, the twenty minute rule. I can make into one day. I can make it into one week.
00:20:01
Speaker 3: And so you're.
00:20:02
Speaker 1: Teaching yourself that you have agency and control over this.
00:20:06
Speaker 2: We just need a moment, a white to take a break back in a minute, if you don't ever know any of this stuff. It'd be easy to see how gets sucked away from you know, we've seen it quite a bit, actually, not just from the life of kids. And you know, I'm sure you're not above it. I'm sure your kids researches, me search. I wrote this for me. I'm sure that your wife has looked at you looking at your phone, missing something your daughter's doing, and you're going fuck.
00:20:37
Speaker 3: I wrote the book.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Oh, this is why I wrote the book. In fact, if it took me five years to write the book because I kept getting distracted, that's exactly right. In fact, that's the kind of the inciting incident. Now about why I wrote this book. That I was with my daughter and we had some daddy daughter time planned together, and I remember we had this activity book of things that dads and daughters could do, like all kinds of you know, do a paper airplane, throwing contests, all this little stuff. And one of the activities in the book was to ask each other this question that if you could have any superpower, what superpower would you want? And I remember the question, but I can't tell you what she said because in that moment, that was the time that I said, hey, honey, I'm so sorry. I just got to do this one thing on my phone and when I looked up, she was gone. I told this story before while I was writing my book, but before it was published. I told this to a buddy of mine that this had happened, and I felt really guilty about it, and he said, oh, you know what happened to me? My dogt We have girls of similar age, and so he said that. He asked her this similar question, and she said that the superpower she would want is the power to talk to animals. And he said, that's interesting, the power to talk to animals. Why would you want that? And she said that when you and mommy are on your phones, I'll have someone to talk to.
00:21:47
Speaker 2: Ah in the scene in the Frisbee.
00:21:55
Speaker 1: So that was the impetus. I mean, that was really and I have to say now things have a complete changed. There is no air of my life that hasn't improved. I mean, I'm forty six years old. I'm in the best shape of my life, not because I like sports in particular, but because I do them. When I say it well, I eat healthy. When I say it well, I show up for my wife and my daughter. Because that's what I say I'll do, and so now I'm actually I am indistractable. And I like when things change, you know, like during COVID, a lot of things went crazy. I remember telling my wife, thank god I wrote this book before COVID, because it would have been I can't even imagine what would have happened trying to you know, all the figuring out the news and the elections and everything, all the craziness. I literally opened up the book that I wrote to remind myself of these techniques, and I still do now.
00:22:35
Speaker 2: And you mentioned it so because I did want to talk to you about it. Your country has just been through woh, really interesting year.
00:22:44
Speaker 3: Why what happened.
00:22:47
Speaker 2: Seeing your model in political campaigning and stuff like that? Once you say the my tricks, it must be weird for you to got gods, I'll see what you do want to eat?
00:22:56
Speaker 3: How can we be aware of these.
00:22:58
Speaker 2: Kind of hooky techniques comes to political motivations absolutely so.
00:23:02
Speaker 1: Step number when we talked about is master internal figure. Step number two. There's four steps. Step number two is make time for traction. So it's really important to define distraction. What is distraction? The best way to understand what distraction is is to understand what distraction is not. So the opposite of distraction most people say focus.
00:23:18
Speaker 3: It's not focus.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: The opposite of distraction is traction. Prefixes and suffixing exactly right. And I was never obvious to me. Maybe it was to you. I didn't realize that traction and distraction were opposites. Of course, when you look at them right next to each other, two interesting things things. Right, You've got distraction and traction so clearly. But then you've also got that both words and in the same six letters actio action. So traction, by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do, things that move you close to your values, help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. Everything else is distraction. So it's not about the action itself. It's about one word, and that one word is intent. So Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. So if what you want to do is to read the news or go on Facebook or watch a YouTube video, or play golf or whatever it is you want to do with your time, is fine. We should stop moralizing and medicalizing these things. The problem is when we intend to do one thing and then we did something else. So you can't say you got distracted unless you know what it distracted you from. So if I look at your calendar and you haven't turned your values into time so that you know what is it that you want to do at anything you want to do is fine. You want time for video games, put it in there. You want time for social media, put it in there. Whatever it is, it's important to you if it's in your calendar's traction. Everything that is not that now is distraction. So the way we overcome these techniques, which we need to realize it is not just social media that's trying to monetize our attention. All media is trying to monetize your attention. Every product is way advertising good invented. Of course, they're telling you about horrible crimes that are never going to affect you statistically, about you know, plane crashes that you're never going to have experience in your life, because that's what is selacious, that's what gets you to watch.
00:25:03
Speaker 3: Right, we have.
00:25:04
Speaker 1: This this negativity bias that keeps us tuning in to these salacious events. So recognizing that all form of media, I think actually legacy media, the Fox News of the world, the CNNs of the world, are way worse for us than actually social media, because at least in social media you have a conversation. You can have alternate viewpoints as opposed to one ideological perspective non stop all day long. I'd rush much rather live in this world where we have a diversity of voices, even if many of them are wrong, and that we can start judging for ourselves if and only if we make time for what we intended to do. So, if you want to spend time consuming the news or political this or that or whatever, there's nothing wrong with that activity as long as you're doing it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's.
00:25:48
Speaker 2: But you can't, you know, you can't ignore that if I I don't know, if I'm looking up something for you know, researching a guest coming in here, and like, for example, I'm looking up time management and one's worked in historical you know, behavioral nudges and things like that in history that I want to talk to you about next time. A ton on YouTube's like now I'm looking at Anty's Miching campaigns from the seventies. Now I'm see Ralph Knaighter is safe at any speed?
00:26:09
Speaker 3: Is like I didn't look at that.
00:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, but now it's so you do get algorithmically fed stuff that keeps you in these things. How can we though when we're seeing, you know, really emotive stuff.
00:26:22
Speaker 3: This government is going to take white shirts away forever. I don't want that. I like this shit.
00:26:27
Speaker 2: And then whatever you're going to do that afternoon is now been taken over by you screaming at someone who's probably in an Imanian trifarm.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, look, there's a time and a place where there is an issue that you should get involved in. So I don't think that, you know, not participating is potentially the answer. And look, what looks like crazy sensational emotional to one person looks like a very important cause to someone else. And so there's two things. One you can look for altern perspectives. What I love about social media, and again I'm not a tech apologist. I think it's a lot they could do better. Is that every once in a while, you know, I have some very strongly held beliefs. However, I every once in a while will see a story fed to me from the algorithm that is diametrically opposed to what I believe. And I watched that video because it shows me the other perspective, and I see from the precise Oh okay, I mean this recently happened actually, where I said, huh okay, Now I get why they believe. I don't agree with them, but now I see why they believe that way. And two, as long as the way you're spending your time is the way you intended. So the problem with the scenario you gave was not oh, this political ad riled me up. It's that you spent all day cursing people up on social media.
00:27:33
Speaker 2: You've mentioned a few times the intent but also intent that's aligned with the values. If people never thought about that before, that's why we can start thinking about values. And I'm not talking like you know, twenty percent off here. I'm talking about like, you know, how do we even begin that conversation?
00:27:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, great question.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: Okay, So what are values?
00:27:53
Speaker 3: Right?
00:27:53
Speaker 1: I'm kind of a word nerd. So values are defined as attributes of the person you want to become. They're not things that can be taken away from you. These are attributes of the person you want to become. So if you want to know what someone's values really are, right, how are they becoming the person that they want to become? You look at two things. You look at how they spend their money and how they spend their time.
00:28:13
Speaker 3: That's it.
00:28:14
Speaker 1: You don't listen to what they say. People will say all kinds of stuff, right, oh, oh, you know what's important.
00:28:18
Speaker 3: Health.
00:28:18
Speaker 1: It's very important for me to become a healthy person. Will are you spending time in the gym? Do you have that in your schedule? Can I see when you're plenty to spend time on your house?
00:28:28
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly, I'm going to start to work. This is totally me. How good chase keke another one and appreciate.
00:28:36
Speaker 1: Suld add how you spend your calories. That's actually get it on too. So I used to be clinically obese, so this was something I oh, all right, cut from the same claw. I give these three life domains, so it starts with you. You're at the center of these three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others, you can't make the world a better place. So you then comes relationships. Then the last life domain is work. Okay, So what you need to do is to take out your calendar and turn your values into time, because if you don't turn them into time, it's just talk. So starting with the you domain, how would the person you want to become take care of themselves? So physical health, Do you have a bedtime? Do you want time for reading or playing video games or whatever it is that's fun for you. Put that time in your calendar, like literally, book the time in your schedule for all the things that you need to do. Take care of yourself according to your values. Then your relationships.
00:29:25
Speaker 3: Right.
00:29:26
Speaker 1: Part of the reason we have this loneliness epidemic in the industrialized world is that the institutions we used to have to bond communities together kind of evaporated with the secularization of society. And I'm part of that too. I'm not particularly religious, but we lost something when we stop going to church, to the Kiwanis club, to these local groups that were on our schedule that we had to be we had to appear at. So booking that time with your friends, certainly with your spouse, with your kids, having that time set aside to live out your values, to be an involved father or mother or whatever the case might be having that time in your schedule for the relationships. And then finally, the work domain, which is where most people start. It's actually, I think the last one work we can separate into two areas. There's what we call reactive work, which is whatever he's familiar with. Reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to the tap on the shoulder from your boss. That's reactive work. Now, everybody has some level of reactive work in their day. Some people spend their entire day doing reactive work. But if you're not spending at least part of your day doing what's called reflective work, you're in big trouble. Reflective work is the kind of work that can only be done without distraction. Planning, strategizing, thinking requires us to set time aside for that reflective work. If you're not doing that, if you don't plan at least sometime in your day, here's what happens. You run real fast in the wrong direction. So this is where we have this artifact that's called a timebox calendar, so that you can look at your day and say, okay, this is how I will spend my day according to my values. Because what's the big picture here, what are we doing? Are we just anti technology? Stop using technology?
00:30:55
Speaker 3: No?
00:30:56
Speaker 1: The idea here is to minimize regret is to live each day so that you can look back. And very few people have actually experienced the bliss what this is. This feels so amazing when you can look back at a day and say, you know what I spent that day according to my values. It's the best, which it includes time for fun.
00:31:15
Speaker 3: Right, let me get I'm gonna get a real wide angle on your heat.
00:31:20
Speaker 2: When it comes to distraction, when it comes to you know, time boxing, when it comes to putting stuff putting you know your time weight, your mouth is essentially where.
00:31:28
Speaker 3: Does denial of death come into all of this?
00:31:32
Speaker 1: I think that the denial part in the denial of death hypothesis comes from our lack of agency. We all know we're going to die. It only becomes scary when you feel like you don't control the days until you die. M that's when you begin to deny your mortality. But when you acknowledge the fact that, yeah, I'm going to die, so I better spend the days I have left the way I want to accord to my values, now it's not scary anymore. What's scary is what did I do with my year?
00:32:02
Speaker 2: Right?
00:32:02
Speaker 1: With my life? That's when it's scary.
00:32:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, hey, you go to stay your full Cancer Gainsburg. Yeah yeah, oh you know what.
00:32:07
Speaker 2: I'm real glad I scrolled seven thousand kilometers on Instagram of meaningless shit rather than spoke to my family.
00:32:13
Speaker 1: Right, Whereas now I have to tell you, and I don't want to jinnx myself here God for a bit. But look, if something terrible happened tomorrow, I would say that, you know what, since I become indistractable, I don't have regrets. I've been spending my days the way I wanted to. If you wanted to wrap up my over decade of work here into one mantra, it's this. The antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. It is fundamentally an impulse control problem. It's not a moral failing, it's not a character flaw. There's nothing broken about you or your brain. It's simply that we haven't learned the skill set to deal with impulse control. So we're constantly looking for something to take our minds off of that discomfort. Right, So we drink it away, we scroll it away, we click it away. We look for something to pacify that. But if you leave it to the last minute, they're gonna get you. It's too late, right If the cigarettes in your hand are gonna smoke it. If if the chocolate cake is on the fork on it's way to your mouth, you're gonna eat it. If you sleep with your cell phone every night on your nightstand, you're gonna pick it up first thing in the morning because it's too late. If you leave it at the last minute, of course they're gonna get you. And I think that's why most people feel like technology is controlling them and the algorithms and all this evil stuff, because that's when it's already in your hand, that's too late. But the antidote is forethought.
00:33:26
Speaker 2: And this is when you talk about the managing the external using managing the triggers, managing the things like this thing, I'll go to my thing upstairs. But also like for an example I would give was that I travel a lot for work and for years now, when I'm checking in a hotel.
00:33:41
Speaker 3: I'm in that says.
00:33:41
Speaker 2: Situation in my life now where I can ask people who book the thing for me, can you make sure this happens?
00:33:45
Speaker 3: But I chack into it. I always ask did you take the alcohol out of the minibar? And I say, yeah, Well, I'll send someone.
00:33:50
Speaker 1: Can do it.
00:33:51
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna do it, right, but it's just easier, right, It's like done. I have chocolate bars in the house.
00:33:57
Speaker 1: So you asked earlier about the algorithms. Yeah, and you say, you watch one video, then you get the next one, the next one, the next one. I don't. I don't because I took the alcohol the MINDI bar.
00:34:06
Speaker 3: How do I do that?
00:34:07
Speaker 1: I installed a free Chrome extension called YouTube DF. It's free DF stands for distraction free, totally free to go to Chrome the app story Chrome and you install this app, and so now you know all those distracting videos you see on the side, I don't see those. So that's what's step numberour. We skip number three, but step number four is hacking back the external triggers. So the solution to all this distracting technology is more technology that gets rid of the distraction. There are so many tools.
00:34:35
Speaker 3: I mean, look, how many.
00:34:36
Speaker 1: Devices can you name? How many products out there can you name that actively help you use the device less? Everybody's phone comes with screen time, and Google well being doesn't matter if if an Android or iPhone. They all come with this technology and it we just have to learn how to use it. So for example, when I'm watching YouTube, I install this thing once and now when I watch a video, I see one video.
00:34:56
Speaker 3: Where is regulation come in?
00:34:57
Speaker 1: We love regulation because it's really simple, right, like, just regulate that. But regulation comes with costs. You know, if you think about all the things that kill kids. Nobody ever talks about this, but actually today it's the safest time in history to be a child in the industrialized world. Drunk driving record lows, drug use record lows, teen pregnancy record lows, truancy record lows, homicide record lows. These are global record lows in the industrialized world. But why might that be? Why is truancy and homicide and drunk driving and all this stuff down, Well, if you wanted to keep kids safe at home and off the streets, there are some upsides when we have this knee jerk reaction to regulate one. We do it poorly, right, The geniuses in government are extremely hamphiested, and we learn that we are taking a lot of you know, we tend to throw out the baby with the bath road, not that I'm against regulation, like, I think there is something sensible to saying, you know what, maybe thirteen is too young for a certain content online, Maybe sixteen is not a bad idea. I think there is a right way to do that. There's certainly some wrong ways to do it. But we also need to be very careful that we don't throw out all the all the good that comes with it as well, and that we aren't getting to the heart of the issue that I think part of the reason that we're seeing so many problems with teen suicide is that I think we have pathologized the generation that we are. You know, there's so many other things that are going on that when we have a simple solution, Ah it's the rock music. Oh, it's the comic books. Ah, it's the radio. Now, it's the social media, we don't look at ourselves as parents or in the school system to see, hey, what else might be a deeper reason.
00:36:30
Speaker 2: I just got to flashback to the this famous footage of Judas priests standing in a court because some horribly tragic, tragic thing happened where a kid took their life and they found the record on the record player and their parents went it must have been the.
00:36:43
Speaker 3: Band, right, and then you're just pretty standing in the witness box, right, like we write Living after Midnight, we're in suits.
00:36:50
Speaker 2: We don't know what's going on here, Like it's I understand, it's you've got to blame something.
00:36:54
Speaker 3: But it was one of those moments where and parents love.
00:36:56
Speaker 1: That and they always have, right, it's called the moral panics. We every generation. Like literally, we know that there's writing thousands of years ago people talking about all the kids these days are die So this is nothing. So the problem is that it doesn't get to the heart of the issue. We're not really understanding what's going on, and I think that's the real danger.
00:37:13
Speaker 2: The last thing I wanted to to ask you about is that the people will listen to it to the time of year in Australia where we go back to school, all right, Now Jay's finish school little while ago Wolf's about to start. People won't be changing schools. It sounds like your daughter is at a part where like this is a serious business here, kid, all right, These a couple of years really count a lot as far as university and stuff goes. Is it easy for you to practice once you she said, you cracked your own book open. You know, as a parent, here, how can we support our kids around this schoolwork?
00:37:42
Speaker 1: So the difference, so I still get distracted from time to time being industruct So I made up the word indistractable. I can define it any way I want. So being indistractable doesn't mean you never get distracted. The difference is between a distractable person and an indistractable person, is that a distractable person keeps getting distracted.
00:38:00
Speaker 3: Had a wonderful quote.
00:38:01
Speaker 1: He said, a mistake repeated more than once is a decision. A mistake repeated more than once. This is such a good quote. So a distractable person because it's true. It's so true. A distractable person keeps getting distracted with how many times can we say social media and the news and how many ties can we say that before we do something about it. An indistractable person is ah, okay, I see what you did there. I got distracted that one time. Again. The antidote to impulsive this is forethought, what can I do today to prevent getting distracted tomorrow? And so that's a different between a distractable person an in distracted person. When it comes to our kids, the world is only going to become a more distractable place. So we have to teach our kids how to be in distractable. How do we do that? We follow exact same four steps and starts with By the way, the number one thing you could do as a parent if you want to raise indistractable kids is to be an indistractable parent.
00:38:48
Speaker 3: That's the worst thing about parenting, right example, I'll do what you show them, ah.
00:38:53
Speaker 1: Exactly, because they come with these invisible antennae. These distraction are these hypocrisy detection device that they're all with and they're constantly scanning to see where we screw up. So you cannot say, oh, put that you know, minecraft away, stop playing that game. What meanwhile, you're on your phone. You have to set the example. So that's number one. Then you can literally walk them through these four steps starting it. You know, we start with my daughter around seven eight years old. We started mastering internal triggers. What tools do you have to control these these icky feelings? Number two? Making time for traction For kids, that's very easy because most of their day is already scheduled, So it's about scheduling time to include the fun things. Right One, of the best things you can do for your kid if they're playing too much video games or whatever, schedule it in their day, like literally put time in the schedule so that they have to they don't have to constantly think about when can I play? When can I play? Put it in their schedule, but to have a discussion with them about how much time is good.
00:39:43
Speaker 2: So it's not an open ended exactly and you know, having that conflict of like how much I want to just one more, just one more episode?
00:39:49
Speaker 1: That's right, I show you exactly. There's some details on how to do this, but the idea is here that you're giving your kid agency. Because a lot of parents say, oh, they'll want to do it all day. You'd be surprised if you sit down with your kid and you you show them, hey, it's your schedule, it's your day. How much time do you need for homework, how much time do you need for your friends, how much time do you need to go play?
00:40:05
Speaker 3: Whatever it is.
00:40:06
Speaker 1: Sitting down to do that exercise, you would not believe how responsible kids can be when they're given the choice, as opposed to what most parents do, stop that, do this, do this. Kids are so regulated these days, right, if you think about you know, there's only two places in the world that we can tell people where to go, how to dress, what to eat, who to be friends with them, what to think, and that's school and prison. So is it any surprise that kids want freedom and autonomy? So where do they go for that? Guess where they go online? Where they feel like gods. Yeah, so we have to understand the deeper reasons why they want to use these technology this much as opposed to just being cops and telling them what to do all day, which only makes the problem worse, by the way. Yeah, so that's step number two. Removing the external triggers. Hacking back external triggers is step number three. So anything that beefs, buzzes are boops in the bedroom of a child or adult. That includes old technology like a television or radio, a fish tank, anything that could disrupt sleep. It's got to go televisions in the bedroom of adults either because we're setting that example, because it's not actually the TV that's the problem or the iPath that's the problem. The problem is what it disrupts. It disrupts sleep, and especially for children, they need sleep. We know that there's a direct correlation between children who don't sleep and psychiatric symptoms. We have to get kids their proper rest. So anything that buzzes or makes noise of any kind, including pets, unfortunately, does not have a place in the bedroom. We need kids to get their sleep. That's about hacking back the external triggers. And then the four step is preventing distraction with pacts where we teach kids actually to use technology to help them not use too much technology. So, for example, there's an app that my daughter uses. I love it. It's called Forest and Forest, very simple app.
00:41:41
Speaker 3: You open it up, you type in how much to uses?
00:41:44
Speaker 1: Oh us perfect, yes, exactly. So you're teaching them how to use these tools so that they can regulate themselves, because look, when they leave the house, you're not going to be there. So we're not raising kids, we're raising future adults. We want to teach them how to manage their own time.
00:41:58
Speaker 3: You've been so generous coming today. I'm gonna make a TV series for you. Man.
00:42:02
Speaker 2: You are so much, You got so much to give, and I'm just really gratefully that you've done the work that you've done.
00:42:07
Speaker 3: Because it's good. It's good to have a like a white Angle.
00:42:11
Speaker 2: I'd ask you to tell me a clue of the next book that you got lined up, but you're probably under some sort of.
00:42:15
Speaker 3: Mad in the But whatever it's going to be, I can't wait to see it. I appreciates for visiting our country man.
00:42:21
Speaker 1: This has been fantastic and visiting with you has been one of the hat lights.
00:42:25
Speaker 3: You cut on the Koala.
00:42:28
Speaker 1: Okay, that wins, but only by a little bit.
00:42:32
Speaker 3: And that was near al.
00:42:33
Speaker 2: I'll put some links to his books Hooked and Indestractable in the show notes, as well as an article that he gave us on time boxing, some ways that you can explore your values, and a schedule make a tool which he wanted you to have.
00:42:44
Speaker 3: Tickets for the Story Club show on the February of the ninth on sale right now. It's this Sunday. You might get lucky that the factory.
00:42:51
Speaker 2: If we sell enough tickets to the factory, they can always put us in a bigger room.
00:42:54
Speaker 3: So look, we'll see how we go.
00:42:55
Speaker 2: But getting in because look it's Rob Carlton, Ato, Mark Dewey, Sean mccaloff, myself, It's a fucking mad lineup and it's an early night two six point thirty. Come on, we'll be home by night. He's got time for staying up late. Not May see you on the substack links in the show notes for everything, Thanks for listening,
