Michelle: A study found that 79% of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. Another suggested we check our phones not 34 times a day, but closer to 150. Mark: Wow. Okay, I feel personally attacked by that first statistic. I’m pretty sure my phone is the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see at night. I always thought it was just my own lack of willpower. Michelle: That’s what most of us think. But what if it’s not a personal failing? What if it’s by design? What if the apps, the notifications, the endless scrolls—what if they're all part of an invisible architecture, meticulously crafted to keep us coming back? Mark: That sounds a little bit like a conspiracy theory, but honestly, it also feels deeply true. It’s like there’s a science to it. Michelle: There is. And that's the core of what we're dissecting today: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Mark: Right, and Eyal is a fascinating figure to write this. He’s not some outsider academic. He came from the heart of Silicon Valley, co-founding companies in the ad-tech space, and basically saw from the inside how these digital products were getting so good at capturing and holding our attention. He called it a 'superpower' and decided to codify it. Michelle: Exactly. He wanted to understand the psychology behind why we use certain products out of habit, with little or no conscious thought. And that’s where he starts—not with the tech, but with a simple, powerful distinction: what makes a product a 'painkiller' instead of just a 'vitamin'?

Mark: A painkiller versus a vitamin. I like that analogy. A vitamin is a nice-to-have. You take it because you think it’s good for you, but if you forget one day, it’s no big deal. A painkiller, on the other hand, solves an urgent, nagging problem. You need it now. Michelle: Precisely. Eyal argues that habit-forming products are almost always painkillers. They solve a pain point. And often, that pain isn't physical. It’s emotional. Think about it. What’s the 'pain' that Facebook solves? Mark: I guess… a fear of being disconnected? Or maybe just boredom, that feeling of having nothing to do for a few minutes. Michelle: Exactly. Loneliness, uncertainty, boredom, fear of missing out—these are all psychological itches. And a habit-forming product attaches itself to that itch as the go-to solution. When you feel that pang of boredom in the elevator, you don't consciously think, "I shall now alleviate my ennui." You just pull out your phone and open Instagram. The behavior is automatic. Mark: The product has become the default answer to the feeling. Michelle: It's entered what Eyal calls the 'Habit Zone.' This is where a behavior happens with enough frequency and is perceived as useful enough that it becomes a routine. The book has this fantastic little story about a woman named Barbra that perfectly illustrates how this happens in the wild. Mark: Okay, let's hear it. How did Barbra get hooked? Michelle: So, Barbra is planning a trip and sees a photo on her Facebook feed from the rural area she’s visiting. That’s the first step: an external trigger. It’s a notification, a link, something in her environment. She clicks the photo, and the link takes her to Pinterest. That’s the action—a simple click. Mark: So far, so normal. I do that a hundred times a day. Michelle: But here’s where the magic happens. When she gets to Pinterest, she doesn't just see the one photo she expected. She sees that photo, plus a dazzling, endless cascade of other beautiful, related images. Travel destinations, recipes, home decor ideas. It’s an explosion of visually appealing content, far more than she anticipated. Mark: Ah, the infinite scroll. The treasure hunt. Michelle: That’s the variable reward. It’s not predictable. It’s a delightful surprise, and it scratches that itch for novelty and discovery. The result? Barbra ends up spending 45 minutes on the site—pinning, following, collecting. She’s now invested her time and effort into the platform. She’s curated a little corner of it for herself. Mark: And that investment makes her more likely to come back next time. The site is now more valuable to her because her stuff is on it. Michelle: You got it. Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment. In one seamless loop, Pinterest took her from a casual click to a 45-minute deep dive, and primed her to do it all over again. Mark: Okay, but I have to push back a little here. Is boredom really a 'pain' that needs a 'painkiller'? Or are these apps creating the itch they claim to scratch? It feels like a chicken-and-egg problem. Am I bored because I’m bored, or am I bored because my brain is now trained to expect a constant drip of novelty from my phone? Michelle: That is the central tension of the book, and we’re definitely going to get to the ethics of it. Eyal’s argument would be that these negative emotional states are pre-existing. We’ve always felt lonely or bored. What these products do is associate themselves so tightly with the relief of that feeling that they become the reflexive solution. They don't create the pain, but they sure do offer a very convenient and potent painkiller, which in turn can make us more sensitive to the pain itself. Mark: It’s like they’ve built a superhighway from our emotions directly to their app. And that Pinterest story is a perfect example of the vehicle they use to drive us down it, which he calls the Hook Model. Let's break that engine down. The part that always gets me is the reward.

Michelle: Yes, the Hook Model is the core of the book. And you're right to focus on the reward, because that's where the psychological rocket fuel is. The four steps are Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, and Investment. We've seen them with Pinterest. Triggers get you to act. The action needs to be incredibly simple—Eyal says "doing must be easier than thinking." Mark: Like a single click, a scroll, or opening an app. Minimal friction. Michelle: Exactly. But the third step, Variable Reward, is the masterpiece of the model. It’s what separates a boring, predictable product from an endlessly engaging one. Eyal draws on the foundational work of B.F. Skinner, who famously experimented with pigeons. He found that if you give a pigeon a food pellet every time it pecks a button, it will peck when it’s hungry. But if you make the food pellet appear randomly—sometimes after one peck, sometimes after ten—the pigeon will peck compulsively, all the time. Mark: It’s the unpredictability that creates the craving. It’s a slot machine. You pull the lever for the chance of a reward. The anticipation is more powerful than the reward itself. Michelle: That’s it precisely! The brain's reward system, the nucleus accumbens, fires up most intensely in anticipation of a reward, not upon receiving it. That’s the feeling of hope, of craving. When you pull down to refresh your email or your social media feed, you are pulling a slot machine lever. You don't know what you'll get. Maybe nothing. Maybe a like. Maybe a life-changing email. That variability is what hooks you. Mark: Wow. So when Duolingo gives me a badge or a shower of points, it's not just a cute graphic; it's a variable reward tapping into my brain's ancient wiring. Michelle: Absolutely. And Duolingo is a perfect case study for the whole model. The trigger is the daily push notification: "Time for your Spanish lesson!" The action is a super simple, gamified, five-minute lesson. The variable rewards are the points, the badges, the leaderboard rankings—you never know exactly what you'll get. And then comes the final, crucial step: Investment. Mark: What’s the investment in Duolingo? I’m not paying for it. Michelle: Investment isn't just money. It's time, data, effort, social capital, or skill. In Duolingo, every lesson you complete, every skill you level up, is an investment. You're building something. You're creating stored value in the app. Mark: It’s the IKEA effect he talks about, right? We irrationally overvalue things we've put our own labor into. I built that wobbly bookshelf, so it's my wobbly bookshelf, and I love it. Michelle: Yes! You’ve built your language tree in Duolingo. You’ve earned your streaks. Switching to a different app would mean abandoning all that progress. You’re invested. The same goes for your playlists on Spotify, your network on LinkedIn, or your followers on Twitter. The more you put in, the harder it is to leave. Mark: That explains why I feel like I can't switch music apps—I've invested years in curating my playlists! The thought of starting over is exhausting. So the investment phase not only makes the product stickier, but it also loads the next trigger. My investment makes me want to come back to protect it or build on it. Michelle: And that closes the loop. The user is pulled through the hook again and again, strengthening the associations in their brain until the behavior becomes a true, unprompted habit. It’s an elegant and incredibly effective engine. Mark: It is. This all sounds incredibly powerful, which brings up the elephant in the room. The book has been widely praised, but it's also been criticized for basically being a playbook for addiction. How does Eyal handle the ethics of this 'superpower'?

Michelle: He tackles it head-on in the later chapters, which I think is essential. He fully acknowledges that this is a form of manipulation and that these techniques can be used for good or for ill. He even quotes a reader who told him, "If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower." Mark: I like that. It’s honest. So how does he propose we think about the morality of it? Where's the line? Michelle: He offers a simple but powerful tool called the 'Manipulation Matrix.' It asks the product creator to answer two questions. First: "Will this product materially improve the user's life?" And second: "Would I use this product myself?" Mark: Okay, I’m intrigued. How does that play out? Michelle: Based on the answers, you fall into one of four quadrants. If you believe the product improves lives AND you would use it yourself, you're a Facilitator. You're building something to solve a problem you genuinely have and want to help others with. You have empathy for the user because you are the user. Mark: That sounds like the ideal entrepreneur. Scratching your own itch. Michelle: Exactly. Then there's the Entertainer. You use the product, but you don't necessarily think it materially improves lives. Think of video games or viral media. It's fun, but it's fleeting. The third is the Peddler. They believe their product helps people, but they don't use it themselves. This is often where you see misguided attempts to 'gamify' things that people don't want, because the creator lacks true insight into the user's needs. Mark: And the last one is the one we're all worried about. Michelle: The Dealer. The dealer doesn't use the product and knows it doesn't improve lives. Their goal is purely to exploit and extract value, often money, from users by hooking them on a behavior that may even be harmful. Mark: That matrix is brilliant because it forces the creator to look in the mirror. Are you building something you'd want your own kids to use? Are you a Facilitator or a Dealer? That's the billion-dollar question for our age. Michelle: It really is. And the book provides two fantastic, contrasting case studies. For the Facilitator, he points to the YouVersion Bible App. Here's a product that uses the entire Hook Model—daily verse notifications as triggers, easy-to-read passages as the action, the variable reward of discovering a new piece of wisdom, and the investment of highlighting verses and tracking reading plans. It’s hooking users, but to a behavior they already want to cultivate: engaging with their faith. Mark: So it's facilitating a pre-existing, positive goal. It’s helping people do what they already want to do. Michelle: Correct. Now, contrast that with the story of Cow Clicker. This was a satirical Facebook game created by a professor named Ian Bogost to mock addictive games like FarmVille. The game was literally just a picture of a cow that you could click once every six hours. That was it. Mark: That sounds incredibly stupid. Michelle: It was designed to be! It was a blatant parody of empty game mechanics. Bogost was acting as a Dealer to make a point. But a terrifying thing happened: the game went viral. Tens of thousands of people started playing it. They became obsessed with clicking their cow. They'd set alarms. They spent real money on virtual cows. Bogost was horrified. He had accidentally created a true, addictive hook out of nothing. Mark: That’s chilling. It proves just how powerful these mechanics are, even when they're completely divorced from any real meaning or value. It shows how thin the line is between engagement and exploitation.

Michelle: Ultimately, Hooked isn't just a business book. It's a field guide to the modern world. It reveals that the most successful products aren't just selling a service; they're selling a routine. They find a space in our emotional lives—a moment of boredom, a pang of loneliness—and embed themselves as the default solution. Mark: They become the brain's automatic answer. And the book’s legacy is complicated because of that. It’s been a foundational text for a generation of product designers, but it also forces us to confront the consequences of a world designed for maximum engagement. Michelle: The power of the Hook Model is undeniable. It explains so much about our own behavior. But Eyal's final message isn't just for the creators. It's for us, the users. Mark: And for us, as users, understanding the model is a form of digital literacy. It’s like learning how advertising works. Once you see the machinery behind the curtain, you can’t unsee it. It's the first step to deciding which hooks we want to be caught on, and which we want to swim away from. The power isn't just in building habits, but in consciously choosing them. Michelle: That’s a perfect way to put it. It’s about reclaiming a bit of that conscious thought. So, a question for our listeners: what's the one app that has you hooked? The one product you can't seem to put down, for better or for worse? Mark: We'd love to hear which apps have you hooked. Share your thoughts with the Aibrary community. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.