Building an "Indistractable" Household and Forming Healthy Habits | Nir Eyal (father of 1, author of Hooked & Indistractable)

StartupDad_NirEyal-V1

Nir: Remember, distraction is not a new phenomenon, right? Plato, the Greek philosopher, 2,500 years ago, 2,500 years before the internet, Plato was complaining about distraction.

He called it a tendency to do things against our better interest. So if people have been complaining about distraction for 2,500 years, it's not the internet that caused this problem.

Adam: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. In today's conversation, I sat down with Nir Eyal. Nir is the best selling author of Hooked, How to Build Habit Forming Products, and Indistractable, How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

They have collectively sold over 1 million copies in over 30 languages. He also co founded and sold two tech companies and now consults and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He's a husband and the father of one daughter. In our conversation today, we went deep on the lessons shared in both Hooked and Indistractable, with a specific focus on what parents can do to avoid distraction and build healthy habits in themselves and their kids.

Nir shared examples from his books, as well as his own life, and efforts on building an indistractable household. We also talked about habit formation and the role of extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, limit setting, and some of his thoughts on why kids reach for phones and technology today. The reasons will surprise you and took us into a fascinating journey on topics around self determination theory and the science of motivation.

Nir will teach you a lot of strategies that you can put into practice right away with your kids.

Adam: I would like to welcome Nir Eyal to the Startup Dad podcast. Nir, it is a pleasure having you on the program today. Thank you for joining me.

Nir: Thank you so much. Thank you, Adam. Great to be here.

Adam: So we're going to talk today about advice for parents based on the lessons that you share in your two books, Hooked and Indistractable, and we're going to bookend it a little bit with some questions about your own life because I would be remiss if I didn't give the listeners a little bit of history about you.

We're going to spend just a tiny amount of time on that. So I do want to jump in and just ask you a little bit, where did you grow up? What was life like growing up? were you like as a kid?

Nir: So I was born in Israel, but I moved to America when I was three years old. I moved to central Florida and this was in 1981. So a long time ago. And I had this weird name that no one knew how to place me. Like what ethnicity I was, where I came from. And so I always kind of felt like an outsider, to be honest.

I think a lot of people have that experience, but particularly for me you know, every time I would introduce myself, Hey, my name's near, near, like near and far, what do you mean near? And so, you know, the central Florida is at least used to be kind of is still a little bit, but it's kind of deep Southie.

So in many ways I tried to get the best of the cultures that I live in. So, today I live in Singapore before that I lived in New York city before that I lived in the Bay area before that I lived in Atlanta. So I've been bouncing around quite a bit, but as a kid, I think probably one of the things that defined my childhood was that I was clinically obese.

Not just overweight. I remember going to the doctor's office with my mom and the doctor saying, Hey, look, kid, this is normal weight. On the chart, you know, the green zone, that's normal weight. Here's overweight. That's orange. Here's you. You're in the red zone. You're obese. And so actually, I think, you know, if I trace back, like, what's my fascination with consumer behavior and consumer psychology, it probably traces back to that, that I felt that for a good chunk of my life, that food controlled me.

And at first, my knee jerk reaction was to blame the food companies, right? It's the Twinkies, it's McDonald's, it's Coca Cola doing it to me. And it wasn't until I, got that under control and realized like the deeper influences of why I was overeating, right? Like if you talk to people who are obese and they're really honest with you, at least in my case, I don't want to generalize, but for me, I wasn't obese because I was hungry a lot.

I didn't eat because I was hungry. I was overeating because I was eating my feelings, right? I was eating when I was lonely. I was eating when I was bored. I was eating when I felt ashamed about how much I had just eaten. And so that was the, I think my fascination with products and the deeper reasons why we consume and over consume.

And so that led me to eventually start a couple of companies. And then later I taught at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, and then later at the graduate school of business at Stanford. Where I developed my work around how to build habit forming products, which is about how to build good habits in the technologies we use.

And then after that, I wrote Indistractable, which is the other side of the coin, which is you know, if Hooked is about how do we build good habits, Indistractable, how do we break bad habits and more with a tilt towards technology habits, because that's the thing that, that so many of us are struggling today is how do we make sure we don't overuse or abuse these wonderful tools that sometimes can be too much of a good thing.

Adam: Yeah. And we're going to spend a lot of time talking about that today, which I think is super important for the audience of folks who listen to this. And before we get into that, I just wanted to ask you a little bit about your family now. So you have a partner and you have a teenage daughter, as I understand.

Is that right?

Nir: Right. Yeah. My wife and I, Julie, have been married for 23 years now. Uh, 

Adam: Congratulations!

Nir: Yeah, thank you. And my daughter is 15 and we live in Singapore now, but we've been here for about four years before that we lived in New York and we homeschool my daughter. So she's been homeschooled since the first grade.

Adam: Okay. Well, let's dive into some of the lessons learned in your books. And I want to start with indistractable. We'll kind of work backwards to hooked because for me personally, and one thing that I'm curious about is, you know, when you introduce kids to your life, that adds layer of potential distraction for busy parents.

And so my first thing, and we'll kind of get into all of the topics around  Indistractible, but what advice do you have for parents who are, you know, thinking about a family and the potential distractions. I hate to think of our as a distraction, but sometimes they are. But how do you think about that?

Both avoiding distraction from your kids and then also distractions to be more present and pay more attention to your family.

Nir: Yeah. Yeah. So this is a huge topic, right? This is subject of my entire book and over a decade of research, but I think the best place to start is to understand what is distraction, right? Let’s kind of define this for ourselves. So we know what we're talking about. I'm kind of a word nerd. And it's important to clarify what we're talking about.

The best way to understand what distraction is to understand what distraction is not. What's the opposite of distraction. So when people say, I don't want to get distracted, what do they mean? They say, I want to be focused. They think focus is the opposite of distraction, but that's not exactly right.

The opposite of distraction is not focused. The opposite of distraction is traction. Okay, they're opposites, obviously, until I put the words next to each other, I never actually realized this, but you've got traction and then you've got distraction. They're opposites. They actually both come from the same Latin route.

Trahare, which means to pull. They also end in the same six letter word. A. C. T. I. O. N. That spells action. Reminding us that distraction is not something that happens to us. Most people think, Oh, it's my kids. It's my phone. It's the news. It's these things that distracted me. That's not actually accurate.

These things are actions that you yourself take. So traction by definition is any action that pulls you towards what you said you were going to do. Things you do with intent, things that move you closer to your values and help you become the kind of person you want to become. Those are acts of traction. The opposite, distraction, is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do, away from your values, away from becoming the kind of person you want to become.

So this is really important. This isn't just semantics, because I would argue that any action that is done with intent, Is what you wanted to do ahead of time is traction, including the hobgoblins, right? All the evil things that we think are distractions. I think none of those are distraction unless you are not doing them with intent.

So as Dorothy Parker said, the time you plan to waste is not wasted time. Unfortunately, we believe this narrative that there are certain behaviors that are somehow morally wrong they're time wasters and some things are okay. And I think that's ridiculous. Why is playing a video game somehow morally inferior to watching sports on TV?

There's no difference. There's nothing wrong with either of them. As long as it's done with intent, as long as it's done with forethought. So we need to stop moralizing and medicalizing for ourselves and for our kids, these pastimes. If you want to watch a movie on Netflix, if you want to listen to a podcast, if you want to play a video game, whatever it is you want to do, do it! Without guilt, but do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's. Now it's an act of traction, and just because it's a work related task doesn't mean it can't be a distraction. So for example, for me, I would sit down at my desk for years and I'd say, okay, now I'm gonna focus.

Now I'm gonna concentrate. Nothing's gonna get in my way. I'm not gonna get distracted. I'm not gonna procrastinate. Here I go, I'm gonna get started on this big project. But first let me check email. Right?

Adam: Right.

Nir: And I would justify to myself, Oh, that's a work related task. I'm being productive. I got to do it anyway, at some point.

But if it's not what you said you were going to do ahead of time, it is by definition of distraction. Okay. So now we got traction. We got distraction. Now, what leads us towards traction and distraction? We have our triggers. We have what we call external triggers. External triggers are the usual suspects.

It's the pings, the dings, the rings, your kids, your boss, anything in the outside environment that tells you what to do. Those are external triggers. Now, this is, you know, per your first question, this is what people tend to focus on. Okay. How do I remove the external triggers? And that's fine and dandy. But studies find that is only 10 percent of the cause of distraction.

Only 10 percent of the time that you check your phone, for example, are you checking it because of a ping ding or ring? What's the other 90 percent the other 90 percent of the time we check our devices. The other 90 percent of the time we get distracted. It's not because of the external triggers. It's because of what we call internal triggers. And this is really important. This blew my mind. When I did this research, it turns out that 90 percent of the time that we get distracted, it's because of an uncomfortable emotional state, boredom. Loneliness, fatigue, guilt, anxiety, stress. That is the source of 90 percent of our distractions.

So it doesn't matter if you figured out how to avoid an external trigger, like your kids or your boss, your phone or Facebook or whatever, if you don't figure out the root cause of the problem. You will always get distracted by something, whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook.

You are going to get distracted unless you understand that distraction, for you and your kids, is an emotion regulation problem. It's not a moral failing, your brain isn't broken, the media is not conspiring against you, your kids are not trying to distract you. It's simply that you don't know how to deal with discomfort.

That is the root cause of the problem. So step number one is mastering the internal triggers or they will become your master. And we can talk about all the strategies you can use for that. Step number two is about making time for traction. If you don't plan your day, somebody is going to plan it for you.

Okay? So if you want to spend time with your kids or scroll Facebook or watch a movie or play video games or whatever it is you want to do, that's fine, but you have to plan time for it. Because you cannot say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I'm gonna say that again. You have no right to say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.

So if you didn't plan time to do one thing and then you started checking Facebook or your kid popped in your room or whatever, if you didn't plan what you were gonna do, you can't complain. Cause what did you get distracted from? And we can talk about exactly what do you do about that? Okay. There's some very excellent strategies, well studied strategies around how to make time for traction in your day.

Step number three. Now we hack back the external triggers. Now we talk about the pings, dings, and rings, your kids, your boss, whatever meetings, all that stuff. Now that 10 percent of distractions that come from external triggers, we should talk about them. But again, that's not the root cause of the problem.

Then step number four to becoming Indistractable is preventing distraction with external triggers. This is where we use a firewall against distraction, the last line of defense. So I just want to set the stage kind of, so we understand this model and this is what we can use ourselves as parents to become Indistractable.

So what we should teach our kids on how they can become Indistractable as well. So I just want to put in context kind of where these things fit in. So, okay, now that we have the map, let's talk about specifically your question was one, how do we prevent our kids from distracting us? Was that was the question?

Adam: Yeah. One is as parents, when you have kids, they are a natural, they love to come in at the absolute inopportune time. You're right in the middle of a meeting like the BBC dad at the beginning of the pandemic where the kid busts into the room, you know, so that's sort of one. And then the other one in, you kind of started to get at this with the reasons for distraction and it being about being more intentional with making time for traction.

But yeah, but what do you do as a parent, if you want to prioritize time with your kids and not pick up your phone and not sort of, you know, do something else.

So I guess it's two fold. One, what do you do when the kids are a distraction? And two. How do you cut off everything else and make time for the kids?

Nir: Yeah. Okay. So let's deal with the easier one. What do you do about your kids being a distraction? And they are, right? Like we talk about external triggers around your phone and all this other stuff in your environment. Well, kids are wonderful. We love them to death, but they can certainly be a distraction.

So I'll give you one very practical tool that we use in my household, starting when my daughter was just six years old. My wife went on Amazon and she bought what we call the concentration crown. The concentration crown. The concentration crown is this, cost about six bucks, it's this little light up wreath that she wears every time she needs to do focused work.

Okay. So what she's doing is essentially, interrupting the interruption, because frankly, like we got to give our kids some slack. They don't know when we're busy because busy looks the same as playing, right? If you're watching a YouTube video, they can't tell that that's not work, right? Or is work. They don't know because all they see is you typing away on your computer, looking at your screen.

How are they to know when and when you cannot be interrupted? So we sat down with my daughter. And we said, look, when mommy is wearing the concentration crown, you can't miss it because it has these light up led lights. Right. And you can use a funny hat and you don't have to get the concentration crown.

You can just go find a funny hat or something. If your kid is of that age and you say, look, when mommy is wearing the concentration crown, she cannot be interrupted for no more than 30 minutes, meaning when you have that work block, okay, for us, it was 30 minutes. And we told my daughter, the only reason you can interrupt mommy is if you are bleeding,

Adam: Right.

Nir: If you are bleeding, that's a good reason to interrupt mommy. But if mommy is wearing the concentration crown and this probably won't work for kids younger than six years old, there's other strategies for kids that are super young, like having someone else, another adult be on duty. But for kids, six years old and older they will get this, right?

Unless you're bleeding, you are not to interrupt mommy when she's wearing the concentration crown. This is if you don't have a door you can shut. Of course, if you have a special room that you can shut and for me, I got this door hanger thing for $2 that says, do not disturb, on my door so when I'm working in my office, okay, that was a clear signal to my daughter. But for my wife, when she was wearing the concentration crown, this worked every day. Unbelievably well, it worked like a charm 100 percent of the time. It also works not only with children, it works really well with husbands, by the way, to my wife all the time.

I say, Oh honey, can I just ask you some, she's like, I'm working right now. All right. I'm Indistractable. Well, I didn't know you were Indistractable. Okay, great. Now, when she wears a concentration crown, it's very clear. She cannot be disturbed. So that's a very easy tactic. That's just one of dozens of different things you can do.

But I think here's the deeper reason we talked about external triggers. Now I know some parents are listening and saying, yeah, but I can't do that, what if my kid needs me? Right? I'm sure some people are saying that, like I couldn't do that with my kid. My kid's going to need me.

Now. Let's interrogate that. Cause let me tell you, I've been doing this for over a decade. I have heard thousands of excuses from thousands of people telling me why this technique or that technique won't work. And at the core of almost all these excuses, I've never heard one that is a good excuse. At the core of these excuses, tends to be not objective facts, but subjective perception of those facts, which result in negative feelings. So when we took this bold step and said, honey, don't interrupt mommy, unless you're bleeding. That means that we need to be okay with her being a little bored.

Adam: Right.

Nir: So what? Right. It's a good skill to learn how to be bored, right? Go do something else. You've got coloring books, you've got games, you could go across the hall and find a friend.

There's all kinds of stuff you could do. Right. To keep yourself busy. But we, as parents are so terrified. We're so scared that something might happen and our kid might need us. That's why we don't even bother to plan the time to do our focused work. What we are doing is giving ourselves an excuse to not do the hard work.

That we know we need to do, and that's nothing more than an excuse, but it's an excuse prompted by a feeling, a subjective perception of reality, not reality itself. It's the fear that we might be needed. It's the stress. It's the anxiety that we might need to do the hard task, not the objective fact itself.

Adam: Yeah. That's interesting. Kind of gets back to that whole concept that you mentioned about the emotion, the sort of emotional underpinning of, these things. It's, you're kind of avoiding this thing that you need to do because it's going to be hard or uncomfortable or something like that, so.

Nir: I got to go exercise or I need to go do my taxes or I need to clean the house or I need to organize my books, whatever the case might be. We need to fundamentally, I can't emphasize this enough because people don't want to believe this is true, but it is absolutely the case that distraction is a symptom of dysfunction.

It's a symptom of our inability, by the way, I'm patient zero here. You know, it took me five years to write Indistractable. It took me five years to write this book. Why? Cause I kept getting distracted

Adam: Right.

Nir: And it wasn't until I learned these techniques for myself, because we're not taught this in school. I never had a class on emotion regulation, but it is the most important skill.

If there's one skill that we have got to teach our children in this age of all these distractions in the world, right? Virtual reality and augmented reality, and all the crap that's happening in reality, if you don't have this fundamental skill to regulate your emotion, if you are one of these people who is constantly flirting with, you know, every time I feel bad, I need a drink.

I need to click. I need something to take my mind off of what's happening right now. If you are one of those people. You are a sucker. You're a sucker. The media will manipulate you. Other people will manipulate you. Your boss will manipulate you. Your kids will manipulate you unless you stand up and say, hey hey, hey, I'm Indistractable.

I control what I do with my time and my attention, not someone else.

Adam: I'm putting on the concentration crown now. I love that. So I wanted to ask, because, you know, to get to a point where you're doing something like the concentration crown or the sign on the door, you and your spouse have to be on the same page about what this means. You said we had to sit down, we bought the things, we had a conversation with our daughter. I'm sure there's been more of those moments, but what are some of the kind of strategies that you employ with your wife to get on that same page about, you know, how you're going to teach your kids about distraction or good habits.

Nir: You know, I think the fear. That's so many parents have, and some of this is very warranted that our children are being distracted and manipulated by technology. We need to lean into that and then maybe even use that as the catalyst to have that conversation with our spouse, because, you know, I get asked all the time, how do I help my kids become Indistractable?

And in fact, there's a whole chapter in the book, a whole section of the book, I should say, that's about how to raise Indistractable kids. And I think it's the most important section of the book, because again this is the most important skill you can teach your kid, right? Because if you can't concentrate on a book long enough to gain that wisdom, well, then it's like, you didn't even read it.

Right. When they go to college, when they get a job, if they can't focus their attention, they’re going to be a slave to other people. So we've got to teach our kids how to focus their attention is the most important skill. So what do we do about that? Right. The first step, there's many steps here that you can take, happy to dive into it. The first and most important step, if you want to raise Indistractable kids, Is to become an Indistractable parent. I can't tell you how many parents I've met with over the years that tell me my kid won't get off Fortnite. They're constantly playing the video games and they're always on TikTok.

And meanwhile, while they're telling me this, they're checking Facebook or checking email. Kids are born with these invisible antennae. You can't see them, but they're there. As soon as the baby's born, these invisible antennae that this is what we call the hypocrisy detection device. Okay. Your kids come pre-installed with these invisible antennae that are constantly scanning to see where you screw up.

So we have got to stop being hypocrites. And if we want to raise Indistractable kids, we have to be Indistractable parents. That is the best thing you can do to prepare your kids for the future is to show them by example and to tell them you're struggling, right? To tell them, look, these devices are designed to be distracting.

That's the point. They're designed to be engaging and entertaining, not to scare your kids, but to show them, look that's the reality. And that's a good thing, right? The price of all this progress is stuff we want to use, right? What are we going to tell? Hey, Netflix, stop making your show so interesting.

I want to watch them. Hey, Apple, stop making your devices so user friendly because I want to use them a lot. No, that's stupid. The price of progress is that we need to learn how to use these tools in a way that serves us as opposed to us serving them.

Adam: So step one in the getting on the same page with your spouse on this is talking about what are the behaviors that we want to model to our kids, if we're on our phone all the time and with our head down, like. How can we expect them to be prioritizing paying attention

Nir: And frankly, let's be honest here. You know, if you're sitting at the dinner table and you can't have dinner with your family without checking your phone, or you can't have dinner with your family without giving your phone to your kids, that is not the phone's fault, folks. 

Adam:Yeah. 

Nir:That is not the phone. That is something that we are doing to ourselves. And it's got to stop. It drives me crazy. You go to a restaurant and people, you know, everybody around the table is checking their phone. Why? That's one of the worst things you can do. We know that people who eat with their children, children who eat with their families who have regular meals where they have conversations, they have lower rates of depression, lower rates of anxiety disorder.

They have fewer eating disorders. There's so much benefit to having a conversation with your family. Around a dinner table, around the breakfast table, do not let that time be stolen by distraction. And it's not technology's fault. We love to blame the technology. It's our fault. We put those devices in our kids hands.

We pay for the data plans. We paid for the phones, right? And so by leading by example and showing, Hey, look, this is a no phone zone. If we're going to be with each other, we need to be present, both in body and mind. A huge thing you can do to benefit your family.

Adam: Yeah. One of the things that you talked about is this idea of making time for traction. So let's say we're aware of the internal triggers were aware of the external triggers and we're going to make time for traction. How do you teach your kid how to make time for traction?

way or ways that you can do that?

Nir: Absolutely. So, making time for traction is about using this concept that does the most well studied time management technique in the psychology literature, which is called setting an implementation intention, which is a fancy way of saying, planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it.

Highly, highly effective. There's over 30 pages of citations in my book to peer reviewed studies. This is essential. So what you're doing is basically, you're just going to plan out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it for kids, this is relatively easy because most of their day is spent at school.

And so one of the best things you can do for your kid is to help them schedule their afterschool time. Which should include, okay, here's going to be a very counterintuitive insight, it's going to shock a lot of people. I want you to schedule time for your kid's distraction. What are you talking about?

Schedule time for the video games. Schedule time for whatever it is you think they're doing too much of, that you wish they would stop doing all the time? Schedule time for it. Why? Because when you do that, you are letting their brain stop ruminating on when can I do that? So, oh, you love to play Fortnite.

You love to go on Minecraft, whatever it is you like to do. Of course, make sure it's age appropriate, right? If your kid is under 13, for God's sakes, don't let them use social media. Then social media companies tell you 13 is the minimum age. I can't tell you how many parents, it drives me nuts. Why are you letting your kids use a product that the product manufacturer says don't let them use under a certain age?

I think the age for social media should be at least 16 plus, but that's personally what I believe. I think we're going to see regulation more and more showing that.

Let's say it's whatever it is that they like to do. As long as it's age appropriate, when you schedule time for it, what you are doing is you're letting their mind stop ruminating on when can I play?

When can I play? When can I play? You know exactly when you're going to play 7 p. m. Hey, after dinner, after you, you know, your chores are done, 7 p. m. that's time for Minecraft or whatever it is that they like to do. So two things happen. One, they can stop ruminating. Two, they can time box. How much time they want. So when my daughter was only six years old, we found that she had a little bit of an iPad obsession, right?

She would iPad time, iPad time, iPad time. And so as I started doing this research around how to become Indistractable, I discovered many of these techniques and the academic literature. And so I sat down with her at only six years old. I didn't believe this would work, but it really did.

I sat down with her and I said, honey look, there's nothing wrong with using the iPad, there's nothing wrong with technology. Don't scare your kids, by the way. One of the things that parents do, they say, Oh, it's melting your brain. And I heard somewhere that it's addictive and it's hijacking. Don't do that because the technologies that we have and these are the things that are essential for their jobs, right?

We don't want them to be scared of technology because they're going to have to use them for their wellbeing. We want them to not be technophobic. So we said, look, the cost of using the iPad is what you could be doing with your time. Right. You could go play with your friends. You could hang out with us.

You could read a book. You could do all kinds of other things with your time. So how much time do you want to spend with your iPad per day? How much time? So she thought for a minute, she said, okay, well, how about two episodes? She wasn't thinking in terms of hours and minutes. She was thinking in terms of what she did on the iPad and what she liked to do on the iPad was watch episodes on Netflix of whatever kids show she was watching.

So she said, how about two episodes per day? And she thought she was getting one over on me. Well, look, two episodes, that's about 45 minutes. There is not one study, not even one, that shows that three hours or less of extracurricular screen time has any deleterious effects. Okay, three hours or less, it turns out is fine as long as it's age appropriate.

45 minutes, sure, no big deal. But I said this, I didn't say that to her. I said, look, no problem. But I don't want to be the police officer here. Okay. I don't want to be the cop telling you to turn off your device. How can you make sure that you're only watching two episodes and no more? Right? And she said, well, how about this daddy?

Back then we had a, a kitchen counter where the microwave was below the kitchen counter. And she would see us using it from time to time as a timer. Okay, she would see us, you know, putting in a few minutes here or there as a kitchen timer. And she said, what if I use the microwave as a timer? And then when it beeps, I'll stop using the iPad.

Awesome!

Adam: Great solution!

Nir: Because now what am I doing? I mean, the goal of parenting, what's the big picture goal of parenting? The goal of parenting is not to raise your kids. Okay. The goal of parenting is to raise a future adult. So if I'm going to be the bad cop and says, stop using your device, give me your phone, put away that iPad, what's going to happen when she leaves the house, when she goes off to college or starts a job, am I still going to be there?

No. So I need to teach her the skills to self regulate her emotions. And so now she has this essential skill. And even today at 15 years old, she still does this 45 minute timer. She doesn't do it with a microwave anymore. She does it on her phone where she sets a 45 minute timer. She watches YouTube.

She does whatever she's going to do online. And then that's it. And so I taught her or she taught herself. I didn't teach her. I gave her the ability to teach herself this very essential skill. So when you plan time, when you make time for traction and you help your kids schedule the distractions, you're turning the distraction into traction.

Adam: That's really fascinating and it's something that we've tried with our kids and it's been pretty effective, which is we sit down and we look at the calendar for the week and we say, okay. You're going to have two chunks of TV time this week for 30 or 45 minutes, whatever, when would you like to schedule those?

What days are you going to have those? And we don't get down to the precise, you know, is it 7 PM or whatever, because our kids are a little bit younger. And it's worked pretty well. So this idea of making the time and carving that out and making it known. And I like that you mentioned it keeps the kids from kind of ruminating on it or getting, you know, twitchy about it or something.

And that's, that’s really fascinating. So that I have verifiable proof.

Nir: That's awesome. And you know, the step we skipped. So remember step number one was master internal triggers. This relates if maybe I can talk about that for just a minute, because I think it's super relevant for kids, you know, the problem with technology use and children is not use.

It's, over use. Okay. Again, no study has shown that three hours or less of extracurricular age appropriate screen time has any deleterious effects, right? Of course it's gotta be age appropriate, right? There's certain things that I wouldn't let a two year old do online. There's certain things I wouldn't let a 15 year old do.

So it has to be age appropriate, but it's not so much about the time per se, it's about the over use. It's when kids are, you know, six, seven hours a day. Now we got a problem. So what we want to do is ask ourselves, why are kids overusing and abusing technology. Where is that coming from?

So this is a really important concept. This is super relevant because you know, again, we know that distraction is an emotion regulation problem. So what's bugging our kids? What is it? That they're looking for online that they would use technology so much.

Okay. Well, this is where I refer to the work of what's called self determination theory. Self determination theory is the oldest, most widely established, most, the most widely validated theory of human motivation and flourishing. And self determination theory says That every human being on the face of the earth, children, adults, we have three psychological nutrients.

So just like we have the macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates and fat for our bodies, those are the three macronutrients for our body, there are three nutrients that we need for our brain, for our psychological well being. And those three psychological nutrients are autonomy, mastery and relatedness. Okay. We need these three psychological nutrients. Now, if you look at what's happened to kids lives over the past several decades, there is a severe deficiency in those three psychological nutrients. So let's start with competency. Okay. Competency is this need competency mastery.

This is this need to feel like we know what we're doing. The pleasure we get from feeling competent, feeling like we know what we're doing well, what has happened over the past several years, especially since around 2008, 2009 around the no child left behind act and many school districts now that compensate teachers and educators based on children's performance.

What we've seen is a severe uptick in standardized testing, that children are constantly tested. Many times, several times per year with these standardized tests. Cause that's how we figure out how much to pay teachers. Well, what does that do for a subset of children for certain children that constantly reinforces you are not competent, you are not enough.

And so what happens when you don't get your psychological nutrients met offline in the real world. What do you do? This is called the needs displacement hypothesis. If you don't get your psychological needs met offline, you look for them online.

Adam: Yeah.

Nir: So, where did they go? Well, when you play an online game.

You feel competent, right? When you get a lot of followers on social media, you feel competent. You feel like you know what you're doing. That feels really good. But again, that need comes from the fact that they're not getting that need met offline, so they're looking for it online. Autonomy, and this has to go back to what we're talking about in terms of scheduling, right?

Part of the reason that your kids are responding so well to scheduling out their screen time is that it's giving them a sense of autonomy. They're being asked, hey, what's good for you? How would you like to schedule your day? We know that this generation of American children is the most regulated and scheduled generation in history.

If you think about it, there's only two places in society where you can tell people where to go, what to think, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to eat. And those two places are school and prison.

 Adam: Yeah.

Nir: We know that the average child today has 10 times as many restrictions as an adult, twice as many restrictions placed on them as an incarcerated felon. So it's no surprise when we constantly tell people, when we tell kids what to do all day long, they want autonomy. They want freedom. They want to be left alone. Let me do what I want to do. In our generation what did we do? We hung out. We went and hung out at the 7 Eleven or around the neighborhood and nobody, we weren't tethered to our devices and constantly being pinged and dinged from our parents asking where we were all the time and monitored and tracked. We had freedom. We had autonomy. So what happens today when kids are so regulated and so constantly monitored by adults and coaches and teachers?

Well, what do they do when they don't get that need for autonomy in the real world? They look for it in the virtual world, right? When I go play Minecraft or World of Warcraft or, or, or whatever game, Fortnite, whatever I'm playing, I feel I have autonomy. I have freedom, right? That's what I'm looking for online.

If I'm not getting that psychological nutrient met in the real world. And finally, relatedness, the third psychological nutrient. We know that this generation of kids has less time for play than any generation in American history. Play is an essential act for developing these psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy, and relatedness, specifically relatedness, because in play, play is where we learn our place in the world.

It's one thing if your parent or teacher or coach tells you what to do. It's a whole nother thing if one of your peers says, hey, if you act that way, I don't want to play with you. Right. That is where we learn our place in the world. And it's only through free play that we develop healthy psychological wellbeing.

But it's the first thing that gets compromised, right? Between the test prep and the swimming lessons and the ballet and all the hyper scheduling that we put kids through, we leave no time for the most beneficial thing we can do for their psychological wellbeing, which is to let them play with other kids.

And what's surprising is as much as parents say, oh, my kid won't stop using their device. It's amazing. I've seen this with my daughter. I've seen this with other people's kids. When they have the opportunity to play with other kids, no game or social media stands a chance. 

 Adam:Right. 

Nir: When we give them opportunity to do something with their peers, as opposed to you're going to sit at home, right, by yourself because of stranger danger or some other myth, the media has fed us. Well, what do you expect them to do? Of course, they're going to go online. So we've got to give them these three psychological nutrients of competency, autonomy, and relatedness. This is the source of those internal triggers.

Remember we talked about how distraction is a desire to escape discomfort. Well, that's where the emotional discomfort is coming from. They are severely lacking in these three psychological nutrients.

Adam: Fascinating study on that. So I wanted to pivot a little bit in the waning time that we have and ask you a couple of things. One is, you know, you published Hooked, I think a little over 10 years ago, 2013 or so.

And that book is sort of the Bible for people who do what I do professionally, product builders, growth practitioners, especially because of you know, the fixation and obsession around retention and habit formation. And you know, in some cases, companies have taken this to the extreme. Most parents are pretty familiar, you mentioned, hey, you think social media is probably kids aren't ready for that until they're 16. I have heard you mention in other places that you do believe that we need some special protections for kids below a certain age. Especially when it comes to habit forming products, what are some of your thoughts around the kind of protections or age restrictions that are important until kids are able to handle some of the responsibility and build their own sort of Indistractable traits.

Nir: So first of all, so, so when it comes to building habit forming products, the idea is that we want to use this psychology for good. So the problem is almost exclusively, I can't think of any other examples. It's only media that's the problem, right? Nobody's complaining about FitBod, an app that helps you get into the habit of exercising, right?

Adam: Yeah, which I have used. Lovely product.

Nir: Yeah. Okay. I mean, it's a case study in the book.

Awesome. So they use the hook model. They, it's a case study in the book of how they use the hook model to get people into the habit of exercising, right? Nobody's complaining that a language learning app like Duolingo that they're spending too much time on it, right?

We want good habits to help us through technology. And it's wonderful, right? Technology has done so much to help us build good habits. The media companies are the ones that create bad habits, right? And so what are these bad habits? They're around distraction. So whether it's new media or old media, right?

If your kid is, you know, reading is wonderful habit. But if you're reading Harry Potter for six hours a day, that's not good. It's too much Harry Potter, that can also be too much because again, the cost is what else you could be doing with your time. So whether it's too much news, whether it's too much social media, whether it's too much books, any form of media, that's too much.

It can be a problem because of what it's distracting you from. So just to put it in perspective, what type of products are we really talking about, now when it comes to restrictions, I think there's a few layers that we can look at. We've got the legislative layer. And I think that, you know, 13 is probably too young.

I think anybody who lets their kids use social media before 13 is crazy. That's a bad idea. Even the companies tell you don't let your kid use this product under 13 years old. Why the heck would you, you know, go against what the company is telling you when they say, don't use our product. Under 13, I don't know what you're doing, but I think between 13 to 16, I think middle school is hard enough, early high school is hard enough, I think 16 plus minimum age but it also depends what kind of screen time, you know, screen time is not really a useful metric. You know, if my kid is talking to their grandma and grandpa you know, over FaceTime, that's screen time, but that's super healthy.

That's wonderful. I love it. If my daughter is learning how to play the guitar, I'd never paid for a guitar lesson. She completely taught herself how to play the guitar with YouTube. Wonderful. Right. There's nothing bad about that. If she's communicating with her friends on WhatsApp, yeah, that's social media, but you know, is that so different from a phone call?

Not really just much more convenient. I think it's the social media where you get into trickier territory is, you know, I think TikTok can be a huge waste of time if it's not carefully used but again, it's not so much the technology itself. It's what it's displacing. The worst thing it's displacing is sleep.

And I think a good chunk of the rise in teen mental health issues is not just simply saying, oh, it's what they're seeing online. It's what is happening to their brains when they don't get enough sleep. We know sleep is absolutely essential for cognitive development and performance, especially in kids.

So I think not just social media, not just screen time, anything. Anything that beeps, buzzes, or boops does not have a place in a child's bedroom. I don't think it has a place in an adult's bedroom either. Like we got rid of our television. We don't have a television in our bedroom. We don't sleep next to our phones.

There's no radio. There's nothing that beeps, buzzes, or boops in the bedroom other than an alarm clock. That's it. So anything that emits light, pets, right? Like if they wake your kid up at night, I'm sorry, Rover, you're going to have to sleep outside because your kid’s sleep is more important.

So that's actually I think a big cause of the problem is that kids are up late on their devices when they really should be getting sleep, but we can do something about that, right? We, as parents can say, okay, like in my household, all the devices are charged outside the bedroom. Right. We have a special place in our living room where everybody connects their devices, me too.

And that's where those devices sleep at night, not next to us. So I think that that's, you know, figuring out how we can again, this basic theme of how do we get the best of these devices without letting them get the best of us? We are not victims here. There's so much we can do without waiting for the government to regulate it for us.

So per your question, you know, there's some things probably legislatively. Yeah, maybe we take social media use from 13 to 16. I don't think that, that's probably not a bad idea, but most of the burden is going to be on us parents. Because remember, distraction Is not a new phenomenon, right? Plato, the Greek philosopher, 2,500 years ago, 2,500 years before the internet, Plato was complaining about distraction.

He called it a tendency to do things against our better interest. So if people have been complaining about distraction for 2,500 years, it's not the internet that caused this problem. But in our generation, there's always been a moral panic. When I was a kid, it was television, right? They called us all couch potatoes.

And before that it was heavy metal. And before that it was Dungeons and Dragons. And before that it was rap music and the radio, all the way back to the written words, Socrates said that this new technology of the written word was going to enfeeble men's minds. So we, as parents need to take a step back and realize that this is part of a very long and misguided historical tradition of what's called a moral panic.

Right. Where we freak out about whatever new technology didn't exist when we were kids, and we blame all of our kids problems on that technology because it absolves us of any responsibility. You see Johnny's acting crazy. Not because of anything I did. No, no, no. It must be because technology is melting his brain.

Well, that's what our parents said about the technology de jour when we were kids. And when Johnny grows up and has his own kids, hopefully they'll complain about something else and say, oh, remember the good old days when all we had to worry about was social media. I promise you that's what's going to happen.

So one, put this in perspective. Two, take responsibility where we can. Right. And so there's so much that we, as parents can do. The worst thing you can do is to say, well, there's nothing I can do. Technology is addicting us, right? It's hijacking our brains. Because when you have that mentality, it leads to what's called learned helplessness.

And when people feel there's nothing to be done, what do they do? Nothing. And so that's the worst of all possible worlds. Exactly. They give up.

Adam: Yeah. That concept of learned helplessness is one that, you know, it's talked a lot about in parenting circles and really sort of the opposite of building resilient and growth oriented kids. So I think that's a really good, that's a really good topic. I did have a listener question that I wanted to pose to you, which I asked the audience of folks who listen to this.

And they're obviously big fans of your work. And somebody raised something really interesting, which I wanted to get your perspective on. And that is in Hooked. And I'm super familiar with the book too, you talk about this idea of building habit as a trigger, an action, a variable reward and investment.

And that's the kind of the habit cycle. And I think rewards are a really interesting topic that parents rustle with. And so someone asked how do you think about rewards as a parent, especially in a world where. Maybe you're concerned that they might hamper intrinsic motivation or something like that.

So how would you recommend, or how have you thought about navigating this idea of the reward? It's not sort of the destination that you want with your kids, I guess.

Nir: So I think asking about the difference between an extrinsic motivation and an intrinsic motivation?

Adam: yeah, and sometimes I think people equate reward with dampening, basically it is an extrinsic motivation and it can dampen intrinsic motivation. I don't know if I agree or disagree with that, but I was curious to hear your perspective because it kind of came up a lot from people who think about this in terms of raising their kids.

Nir: Yeah, sure. So the answer is the same for any complex topic, which the answer is. It depends. So there used to be this kind of debate of extrinsic motivation, good, bad, intrinsic motivation, good, bad. And the answer is they're both tools. They're both tools to use on ourselves. They're both tools when we're designing experiences for other people.

They're both tools we can use in raising future adults. And so just like, you can bash in a screw with a hammer. It's much more effective if you use a screwdriver. So it's about using the right tool for the job. And so extrinsic rewards are things where the reward is not directly related to the task, meaning a participation trophy.

Okay. Or even actually any kind of award, any kind of, you know, you get the gold medal, it's not the doing the task itself that gets you the gold medal, the gold medal is what happens after the task, so participation, trophies and ribbons. Those are extrinsic rewards. You know, getting paid for something is an extrinsic motivator.

The problem with extrinsic motivators is that they tend to decrease creativity. When you are working solely for the result rather than the process itself, people tend to find the path of least resistance, right? The brain is a cognitive miser. So we're always looking for the easiest way to get what we want.

That's when we have an extrinsic reward. Now that sounds bad. It sounds like, well, why would we ever want to use extrinsic rewards? Turns out extrinsic rewards are very effective for short term tasks. Okay. So if it's, hey I gotta finish my taxes. I don't really want to do it, but it's something I got to do once a year.

And when I finish these taxes, I'm going to go out with my spouse for a wonderful dinner as my reward. I'm not going to let us go until we do that and we get our tax return. Okay. We can spend the tax return on a nice dinner. That's an extrinsic reward. But can it help you motivate for a short term task.

Extrinsic rewards are not so great when it comes to long term tasks. When it comes to tasks that require creativity, that's where intrinsic motivation is more effective. Intrinsic motivation is when the task itself is the reward. So, you paint because you love the act of painting, not because you care if anyone buys your art.

You write because it's so fun, like you find yourself giggling when you're writing because the act itself is pleasurable versus, oh, is anybody going to buy my book? You love to exercise because you love the way your body feels when you're running, not, am I going to win the race? Those are intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators.

And that's much more effective for long term behavior change. And so it's just a matter of figuring out what type of behavior you're facing for yourself, for your kids to use the right tool for the job.

Adam: That's fascinating. I heard a story once about someone who was potty training their kid and every time, you know, they went to the bathroom, they would give them a piece of chocolate or something like that. Their kid ended up just deciding like, oh, I know how to get the chocolate.

If I just sit here. All day. Eventually I'll have to go to the bathroom and I'll get this piece of chocolate. And so they sort of like inverted the economics of what they were trying to achieve, but to your point of, you're going to take the path of least resistance, right? The path of least resistance was the kid was like, well, I'll just never leave the bathroom and then, you know, I'll get my chocolate.

Nir: So this is actually how we potty trained our daughter but, but we, we had a restriction. We said today only, today's a special day, today's the day!

Adam: Yes. Yes.

Nir: So it was an extrinsic motivator to teach her, but then the intrinsic motivator became what was the intrinsic motivator to keep going on the potty versus her diaper, was it felt better, right?

The behavior itself, it feels a lot better to not have a wet diaper. Ah, okay. Now I get it. Now that becomes its own reward.

Adam: Yup. So setting this idea that it is, hey, this is temporary one day only. You know, this is a special moment. Okay. Well, I want to wrap and ask you just a couple of more questions. Just a few things about you as a dad, cause I'm sure people are curious about this.

But this has been a fascinating topical discussion. So I really appreciate it. I wanted to ask you This is something I ask everybody on the show, but if you think back to, you know, your journey through fatherhood, what is one of the most surprising things that you've discovered as a dad?

Nir: So I’ll tell you the last surprising thing that's kind of blown my mind, and maybe this won't resonate with anybody else, but it certainly has for me. So my daughter's 15, and everybody kept warning me about teenage girls that oh, teenage girls are so hard to deal with. They're so moody.

They're so this, they had all these perceptions of teenage girls. Like almost like, oh, I'm so sorry. You know, you're going to have it easy when they're young, but then you're going to have it super difficult when they're older and I haven't felt that at all. You know, I kept expecting it, but I'll tell you, you know, over the past few years I've gone from not only loving my daughter, right?

You always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born you love them. But now I actually like my daughter. Like I like the person she's become. I want to hang out with her. We do all kinds of fun things together. And I always expected there to be this drifting apart. And there, there has been times when that's happened, but more so than not we've gotten closer and closer and closer.

And so that never happened that like teenage rebelliousness. And so it turns out that this is a myth that it's something that we only see in the industrialized world that this idea of a rebellious teenager, that whole idea of a rebellious, like everybody thinks, oh, teenagers are always rebellious.

No, that's actually something that only happens in the industrialized world where we have institutionalized education. So in countries that pre pre-industrialized where teenagers are part of the family unit all day long, they don't go to institutionalized education. They don't rebel, right?

It's only when we send kids to school and tell them what to do all day that they become rebellious. And so I think something that's kind of dawned on me lately is that, you know, school is also a technology. School is a technology. Okay. It's not that old. It's like 150 years old. Institutionalized education is a technology just like our cell phones and social media are technologies.

This is also a technology and it has a lot of good and it also has some quirks. It also has some downsides. And so understanding that these preconceived notions, you know, just because that's the way things have been in our lifetime. Doesn't mean that's the way they've always been.

In fact, that's not at all the case that if you look at the history of education, for the most part, you know, very few people could afford education and those who could had tutors. They had some very small group tutor. They didn't have a classroom with 45 kids listening to some boring lecture in front of the room.

That's a very new technology and has a lot of downsides. So I think what I've realized over the past few years is that I think society kind of infantilizes teenagers that we think that they're like big kids and that they've got these broken brains that have hormones raging around them.

And I think I've realized that that's a societal construct. It's what we expect of our kids. And of course, that's what they do, because that's what's expected of them. And so I've really tried to rebel against that. And I think, you know, reaping the rewards, I think of having this really close relationship with my daughter, where now she's just a cool person I like to hang out with and that's been so satisfying and so enriching.

And I really hope other people might be able to experience that as well with their kids.

Adam: Awesome. I wanted to ask you something specifically about making time for traction. What's something that you and your daughter like to do together when you think about scheduling time or kind of making time for a shared activity? like one of your favorite things to do?

Nir: we do what's called planned spontaneity and planned spontaneity. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it's part of this whole philosophy of making time for traction, turning your values into time. And so one of my values is to be an available father. And so the way I do that is we have time in our schedule, blocked out.

Where we don't exactly know what we're going to do, but I plan that time. So I know what I will not be doing. I will not be on my phone. I will not be taking business calls. I will not be on social media. I will be with someone I love very much. Now if you're really curious, what we've been doing lately is they opened up just a couple of months ago, they opened up an infinite wave pool. It's like a surf wave that you can just hop on. It's constantly running. And so that's what we've really gotten into lately is we love surfing.

Adam: That's a lot of fun. And I'm terrible at it. So hopefully you're better.

Nir: I was terrible. Now I'm getting like less terrible cause I've practiced with her, but she's, you know, of course she's 15. So she gets it like that. She puts me to shame. She's doing 360s and all kinds of crazy stuff.

Adam: Yeah. Kids pick up on things so much faster than we do. It's pretty amazing.

Nir: Yeah, yeah, it's that whole you know, she weighs less, so it hurts less when she falls.

Adam: That's awesome. The last thing I wanted to ask you is what do you do to make time for yourself, what are some ways that you recharge your batteries or recenter yourself? I remember hearing that exercise is really important for you and being fit. I'm sure there are other things too, what are some of the kind of most important things for you to make time for?

Nir: Yeah. So in that section on making time for traction, the first place to start is actually taking time for yourself, right? If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. You can't make the world a better place. So the first thing I do when I make my schedule for the week is I make sure I have time to live out my values.

In accordance with how the person I want to become takes care of themselves. So time for reading in my schedule, time for exercise in my schedule, time for a bedtime, right? I used to be a hypocrite and tell my daughter, you have to go to bed. It's past your bedtime. And then one day she asked me, she said, daddy, do you have a bedtime?

Busted. I didn't. Now I do. So those are some of the most important things. I, not that I necessarily enjoy all these things. Like for example, I exercise, but I don't really like exercise, but it's part of my values to take care of my health. And so I don't preach to anybody what they should do with their time or attention.

What I want to help people do is to do whatever they want to do with their time and attention. And so if one of your values is to take care of your health. If one of your values is to be the kind of person who learns, you know, that has to be in your schedule as well as time for social media. I have social media times scheduled in my day.

So it's just a matter of figuring out what you want to do with your time and making sure that time is blocked out in accordance. And so even if it's, you know, if I have time for social media, if I do anything else, right, if I check my email or I do something, quote unquote, productive, that now is a distraction because what I said I was going to do was that one thing.

Adam: I love that. I love this idea of building in time for recharge, building in time to kind of follow your values as a foundation, that's a great point to end on. Last question for you. How can people follow along or be helpful to you? What's the best way to find out what your latest project is or what you're up to?

Nir: Sure. Thanks for asking. Yeah. So I'm writing another book actually. So if you want to keep updated on the progress and my latest writings and research you can go to nirandfar.com nir spelled like my first name N I R and far. com. And my book is called Indistractable, How To Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.

Adam: Thank you very much. Do we have a few minutes for the rapid fire round?

Nir: Sure. Let's do it.

Adam: Okay, here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product that you have ever purchased?

Nir: Baby wipes. It's gotta be.

Adam: What is the most useless parenting product that you have ever purchased?

Nir: The second parenting book, meaning what do I mean by that? So actually a friend gave us this advice that we didn't follow, but looking back, we should have, which is, he said, just buy one parenting book, like one parenting book, it actually doesn't matter what the parenting book is, just by one, get on the same page about that philosophy and that's it.

Because when you have two opposing, like one person reads one book and the other person reads the other book and they don't agree with each other. That's actually more harmful than just doing one and agreeing like, hey, we're going to be a family unit here and we're going to figure this out as opposed to opposing philosophy.

So the second parenting book.

Adam: I love that. That is the most unique answer I've ever had for that question. That's fantastic. What is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?

Nir: I guess it's that your kids keep changing, right? Especially when they're young. They don't change as much as they get older, but when they're young, just when you think you've figured them out, they change on you.

Adam: Mm Hm

Nir: That's also part of the beauty of it as well.

Adam: I love that. What has been the favorite age so far for your daughter? It sounds like it might be one of the more recent ages.

Nir: For sure now. Yeah, if I could clone her.

Adam: What about the least favorite age?

Nir: The sleepless nights weren't fun in the very beginning.

Adam: Yep. What would your daughter say is the most embarrassing thing that you've ever done in front of her?

Nir: You mean besides the burping and farting?

Adam: HAHAHA Yep. What's maybe the most absurd thing that your daughter has ever asked you to buy for her?

Nir: So lately she really wants to go to Australia for a concert that she really wants to go see a concert with from somebody who's not performing in Singapore, but they're coming to Australia. So that's pretty absurd.

Adam: Okay.

Nir: She’s going to have to pay for that one herself.

Adam: That sounds like a big one. Yeah. What is your favorite kids movie?

Nir: I don't know if it's a kid's movie, but I watched it as a kid and my daughter also loved it, Back To The Future.

Adam: Oh, that's a great one. My follow up to that was going to be what is the what is one nostalgic movie that you cannot wait to force your daughter to watch, but maybe, Back To The Future. Although it sounds like she did that on her own. So.

Nir: I’ll give you a better one, I think she needs to be maybe a little bit older to really appreciate it, but this is my favorite movie of all time and very few people have seen it. It's called Empire of the Sun. Have you ever seen Empire of the Sun?

Adam: No, I have not.

Nir: Nobody's seen this movie. Watch it today. Like, it is so good.

It's, okay, check this out. It's John Malkovich, who I'm a big fan of, Steven Spielberg directed it, and Christian Bale, at 14 is the star of the movie. Okay. Christian Bale.

It is so good. It's historical fiction, but it's based on what kind of events that could have happened. You know, it's one of these stories that, that you can imagine happening.

So good. My favorite movie of all time. I'm also a big airplane nut. So if you like airplanes and you want to see Christian Bale acting at 14

Adam: You've sold me, this, I am doing, I'm leaving this conversation and I'm going to go make time on my calendar to watch this movie.

Nir: It's a sleeper hit. Nobody saw it, but it was my favorite. It's still is my favorite movie of all time.

Adam: Okay, my final question. Do you ever tell your daughter back in my day stories?

Nir: All the time, all the time, specifically when it comes to music, right? Like, uh, cause now she's, you know, they they're starting to remix songs from our day into like their music. And we're like, oh, I remember this song from back in the day, but, you know, now it's something completely different.

Then when I listened, when she hears the original version, she's like, oh, that's not right. They messed that one up.

Adam: It doesn't have the same beat.

Nir: Yeah.

Adam: Well Nir, thank you so much. Your two books are Hooked and Indistractable. I hope everyone gets a chance to read those. I'm a huge fan of both and I learned a ton today so thank you so much for joining me on Startup Dad today.

Nir: My pleasure. Thank you.

Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Nir Eyal. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify. It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Heron.

You can join a community of 10,000 plus subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth, product and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF Newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.