Nir Eyal

Eyal built and sold companies in the gaming and advertising industries — 'where I learned techniques to motivate and manipulate users', by his own account — then spent years reverse-engineering why some products around him became compulsions. Hooked codified the pattern; five years later he wrote Indistractable, a book about defending your attention from exactly these mechanics. He insists the two aren't a recantation but the same behavioral science pointed in opposite directions — which is itself the clearest statement of how powerful he thinks the loop is.

Eyal wrote the manual on habit-forming products — then wrote the counter-manual. Hooked distilled behavioral psychology into the four-step loop (trigger, action, variable reward, investment) that product teams from gaming to fintech quietly run on, always paired with his manipulation test: would the maker use the product themselves? Five years later, Indistractable addressed the world Hooked helped build, teaching users to reclaim attention from the very loops he'd taught designers. Read together, they're one honest body of work about the same force, viewed from both sides of the screen.