The Peter Attia Drive - #360 ‒ How to change your habits： why they form and how to build or break them ｜ Charles Duhigg, M.B.A

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

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00:00:53.200 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.040 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Charles Duhigg.

00:01:06.880 Charles is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of several best-selling books,

00:01:12.000 including The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better, and most recently, Super Communicators.

00:01:18.540 He is one of the most trusted voices on the science of behavior change, performance, and

00:01:24.120 decision-making, and he's known for translating complex psychological and neuroscience research

00:01:29.640 into actionable insights that improve everyday life. I wanted to have Charles on the show because

00:01:34.080 habits are the foundation for integrating nearly everything we talk about on this podcast

00:01:38.760 when it comes to improving lifespan and healthspan, whether it's exercise, nutrition, sleep,

00:01:43.540 or emotional regulation. If the behavior doesn't stick, the benefits won't accrue. In this episode,

00:01:49.620 we discuss the neuroscience of habit formation, how cue, routine, reward loops govern nearly half

00:01:56.080 our daily behaviors, and why understanding this loop is integral to behavior change. Why positive

00:02:02.040 reinforcement is 20 times more effective than punishment, and how to harness rewards to build

00:02:07.080 lasting habits. How the military, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Behavior Change Research structure

00:02:12.920 environments to transform behaviors at scale. Willpower as a finite mental muscle, how it gets

00:02:19.640 fatigued, and how environment shapes its effectiveness, and how to preserve it for when it matters most.

00:02:25.560 The myth of 21 days to form a habit, and the truth about timeline, relapse, and learning through

00:02:31.240 failure. Building better habits with your kids, teaching them how to identify cues and rewards, and

00:02:36.980 modeling failures as data for learning. The power of social accountability and coaching in habit

00:02:43.700 change, and why self-judgment is counterproductive to lasting success. Creating cognitive routines that

00:02:49.460 foster deeper thinking, productivity, and innovation. Featuring lessons from elite pilots, parents,

00:02:55.700 and writers. How to gamify long-term goals like saving money or taking blood pressure meds using short-term

00:03:02.580 rewards and narrative cues. The relationship between identity, purpose, and behavior, and why meaning is

00:03:09.220 often the most powerful habit reinforcer of all. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation

00:03:14.420 with Charles Duhigg. Charles, thank you so much for making the trip out to Austin. Thank you for

00:03:24.980 having me. This is such a treat. You know, in many ways, you're kind of the OG guy when it comes to

00:03:29.300 talking about habit formation. It's hard to believe we were just talking a moment ago that it's been

00:03:34.580 13 years since your amazing book on the subject matter. I probably read it eight years ago, but it's a

00:03:42.820 topic that is relevant regardless of what you do. That said, for what I do, what my job is,

00:03:50.020 and how I try to sort of help people, it really comes down to knowing what to do and then putting

00:03:54.980 it into practice. Give folks a bit of a sense of your background and maybe even how that factored

00:04:01.220 into you taking an interest in this topic. Yeah, absolutely. So before I wrote The Power of Habit,

00:04:06.020 I had been a reporter for quite a while and a business reporter and a science reporter in particular.

00:04:11.220 I decided to become a journalist after I went to Harvard Business School and I got my MBA.

00:04:16.420 And about halfway through business school, I realized it's a lot more fun to write about

00:04:20.180 business than to do it. So I decided to become a journalist. And one of the things that I noticed

00:04:26.020 as I was writing, I was working at the New York Times at that point. One of the things I noticed,

00:04:29.620 because I had spent time overseas in Iraq during the war, I had reported on a bunch of different

00:04:33.940 things. I had two experiences that really got me interested in habits. The first is that when I was in

00:04:38.900 Iraq, I got embedded with a unit that was right outside of Baghdad. And I was talking to a captain

00:04:44.740 there. Actually, he was a major. I was asking him, how do you train soldiers to become soldiers?

00:04:49.780 Because one of the things that you see in a war zone in particular, anyone who's spent time around

00:04:53.060 the military, is that the behaviors are so deeply ingrained. The goal is to ingrain a set of behaviors

00:04:59.540 that if a bomb goes off, which happened underneath my car, everyone around you, the 50,

00:05:04.100 18-year-olds around you, who probably don't know how to do anything with their lives,

00:05:08.740 they know exactly what to do in that moment. And they react automatically. And so I was talking

00:05:12.900 to this major, and he's this little short guy, and he's really muscular. He chaws all the time. 1.00

00:05:18.180 And I said, how do you do this? And he said, well, the thing you have to understand,

00:05:21.780 son, because he called me son, the thing you have to understand is the military is a giant habit

00:05:26.820 change machine. This is what we do. We teach young recruits who maybe don't have any

00:05:32.900 self-discipline, maybe prone to emotional helpers. We teach them the right habits,

00:05:36.820 and we've made a science of it. And when I came back to the US, I kind of had this experience where

00:05:42.020 I was thinking about that. And I was thinking to myself, if I'm so smart and so talented,

00:05:45.780 if I have this great job and I win these awards, why can't I get myself to lose weight? Why can't I

00:05:50.660 get myself to go running in the morning every day? Why is this such a struggle for me when I'm so good

00:05:56.100 at other things? And I realized it was because I had not learned and studied how habits function

00:06:01.460 in my own habits. And that once I learned that, I had the tools to change how I behave automatically,

00:06:08.740 which is, of course, the most important component of our behavior, because it's what we do every day.

00:06:13.940 So you get back to the US, what year?

00:06:17.380 From Iraq?

00:06:17.980 Yeah.

00:06:18.480 I was there 03 and 04. So I get back at the end of 04, beginning of 05. And I started at the New York

00:06:24.580 Times. I was at the LA Times then. I started at the New York Times in 06.

00:06:27.220 And then what did you start writing about? When did you pick that thread up again?

00:06:32.100 So I did this piece that was really fascinating to me. I was writing for the business section of

00:06:35.460 the Times and I wrote a piece about the science of handwashing. There's been really, really

00:06:40.100 interesting research, particularly out of the United Kingdom, about how do we incentivize people

00:06:46.020 in developing nations to wash their hands? Something that would happen, and a lot of this was sponsored

00:06:50.540 by Unilever, the soap company. They found that people in poor communities, particularly in India and

00:06:56.340 Pakistan and in other parts of Asia, would buy soap. And then they would save the soap for special

00:07:01.700 occasions. It was like something you gave to a guest when they came over. It was something that

00:07:05.060 you used before you went to mosque or for prayer. And so as a result, they weren't washing their 0.84

00:07:10.340 hands every day. And of course, we know that using soap actually correlates with preventing a lot of

00:07:14.740 diseases. So a number of researchers in the UK took this on to try and figure out how do we create

00:07:21.380 handwashing habit using soap? And what they discovered was you need to be focused on the

00:07:27.380 reward. Unilever and all the advertisements would talk about the benefits you got from using soap,

00:07:32.600 that if you used soap, disease would go down. That was not influential.

00:07:36.420 Because it was too abstract?

00:07:37.860 A couple of reasons. First of all, it was too abstract. Second of all, you're trying to educate

00:07:41.980 people who don't think that they're at an education deficit. We see the same thing in the United States

00:07:46.680 around vaccine resistance and other things. Telling people, oh, you don't know enough. I'm

00:07:52.720 going to tell you the truth. That almost never works. What you have to do is you have to create

00:07:57.320 incentives where you get an immediate reward for that behavior. And so what they did is they

00:08:03.760 actually changed the scent of the soaps. They actually made the scent of the soaps less powerful

00:08:09.220 because it seemed less like a perfume, less like a fancy thing. And then what they would do is they

00:08:13.900 ran these ads where they equated washing your hands with taking care of your children.

00:08:19.060 Not necessarily your own health, not your own cleanliness. But when I wash my hands with soap,

00:08:24.400 I can feed my children. And so I'm creating that sense, that identity reward that says,

00:08:30.680 by doing this, you're a good parent. And that changed everything.

00:08:34.140 How long did it take them to figure out that that was the unlock? Was this iterative? What type of

00:08:40.600 research did they have to do? I'm always intrigued by this type of problem.

00:08:44.380 Yeah, absolutely. And there's really interesting papers if anyone wants to read them. It took them

00:08:47.600 years. It took a really sustained exposure. And what's interesting is part of this research and

00:08:54.000 where it came out of was trying to understand the neural roots of disgust. Disgust is a really,

00:09:00.300 really powerful instinct that all humans have. And they really wanted to understand how do we

00:09:06.800 capitalize on disgust as a negative reward. So they spent years on this. But like everything

00:09:14.500 that ends up having widespread change, it really paid off. Enormous dividends.

00:09:19.860 By the way, when you say they, who are the types of people? Are these behavioral economists? Are they

00:09:24.960 psychologists, sociologists? I'm very intrigued by who are the natural owners.

00:09:29.080 So there's a woman named Val Curtis, who in particular led a lot of this research. I hope I'm

00:09:33.840 getting Val's. It's been a little while since I read the research. So I hope I'm getting Val's name

00:09:36.840 right. So Val led a lot of this research. And I believe her background is in sociology. But they

00:09:42.860 brought in, this was during the heyday of behavioral economics when Danny Kahneman and others, Amos

00:09:48.060 Traversky's work was really getting noticed for the first time and was making its way into other fields.

00:09:52.560 And so they brought in a lot of the behavioral economists. They brought in a lot of psychologists,

00:09:56.100 because obviously that's what they're looking at. I think it points to something kind of

00:09:59.700 interesting, which is some of the most exciting research that's happening right now is this

00:10:04.460 interdisciplinary research. And you know, because you spent time in the academy, there tend to become

00:10:09.380 these silos within universities. But when you look at what's really interesting that's happening,

00:10:14.760 it tends to be the people who are stepping outside of those silos.

00:10:17.920 Now, the way you described it a moment ago, it was more avoidance of negative that got the job done.

00:10:25.120 Can we talk a little bit about, and I think we're going to come back to this over and over again,

00:10:28.460 but the more examples we have, the better. You can almost think of like a two by two,

00:10:34.060 positive and negative, giving and taking. So give a carrot, give a stick, take away a carrot,

00:10:42.060 take away a stick. This is like in my very simple framework, take away a stick. Disgust is bad,

00:10:47.540 we're going to remove disgust. How do you think about, or what does the science tell us about that

00:10:52.640 four square? I'll tell you what the research says. And just to give a little bit of context,

00:10:56.560 the reason why this is important is because every habit that we have in our life, and about 40 to 45%

00:11:02.380 of what we do every day is habits. And this comes from research by Wendy Wood at USC. Every habit in

00:11:07.340 our life has three components. There is a cue, which is like a trigger for that behavior to start.

00:11:12.660 Then there's a routine, which is the behavior itself, what we think of as the habit.

00:11:16.260 And then there's a reward. Every habit in your life delivers a reward, whether you're aware of it or not.

00:11:21.320 And so you're right, there are negative rewards and there are positive rewards. But negative rewards

00:11:26.800 and positive rewards act very differently. And to be most powerful, often we have to put them in

00:11:31.760 combination with each other. So let's start by talking about negative rewards. You would think

00:11:35.880 that the threat of something unpleasant happening would be the most powerful negative reward. Peter,

00:11:42.580 if you don't run today, I'm going to hit you with a cane. That's actually not what the science tells us.

00:11:46.760 What the science tells us is that the best way to use negative rewards is to establish the pain and

00:11:54.120 punishment prior to the behavior, and then remove the tension of it afterwards. So I'm going to give

00:12:00.320 you an example. When I was in Iraq, one of the things I learned about was the extraordinary

00:12:04.720 interrogation techniques that were used by the military. And stories came out, they would take

00:12:09.420 people and terrorists, and if they weren't giving them information, they would put them in a little box

00:12:13.540 and lock them up in this physically uncomfortable position. That's not actually what happened.

00:12:17.400 What happened is you capture the person, you put them in the box, and then you tell them,

00:12:22.800 I will let you out of the box if you give me the information I want. The presence of a negative

00:12:28.080 reward or a punishment is much more powerful when we feel it than when we anticipate it. When we put it

00:12:33.560 that way, it makes sense. The problem is negative reinforcement is about 1 20th as effective as positive

00:12:41.220 reinforcement. So I have to hit you with a pain 20 times to equal the motivation that you'll feel

00:12:48.440 if I let you have a really nice smoothie after you go for that run.

00:12:52.300 Sorry, say that again, Charles. Did you say negative reinforcement is 1 20th?

00:12:57.020 As effective as positive reinforcement.

00:12:58.240 And we define effective as likely to produce the desired outcome.

00:13:02.880 Yes.

00:13:03.360 1 20th?

00:13:04.420 1 20th.

00:13:05.520 I would have guessed 1 half. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that's a staggering difference.

00:13:10.980 It's a staggering difference. And it sometimes gets complicated by scale because you might really

00:13:15.580 hate getting hit by a cane a lot more than you enjoy drinking a smoothie. But we know that if

00:13:20.920 those two things are comparable in your head, I'm going to have to hit you 20 times to equal the

00:13:25.580 motivation you'll find from drinking that smoothie. And that's a normal distribution. There's different

00:13:30.080 behaviors and different tolerances among individuals. But the reason why this is important is

00:13:34.960 when there are negative rewards or punishments available to us in the environment, then we should

00:13:43.320 take advantage of those. If I know that you feel a sense of disgust and I can take advantage of that

00:13:48.980 to help you build a habit of washing your hands, I should go ahead and do so. But that's not enough

00:13:54.240 on its own. I have to pair it with a positive reward where I'm creating a scent in that soap that

00:13:59.980 makes you feel like you're clean, that makes you feel like you're doing something virtuous.

00:14:03.380 I have to reemphasize to you, you're doing this for your kids. Every time you wash your hands with

00:14:08.320 soap, you are a good parent.

00:14:10.140 So that's the ice cream. Taking the scent away, taking the flowery scent away is not hitting.

00:14:19.900 We're replacing it with a different scent. The problem with the flowery scent is that it's

00:14:23.400 too associated with luxury. So I need a scent that smells a little bit more medicinal

00:14:28.060 to believe that it's doing its job.

00:14:30.340 Interesting.

00:14:30.940 Yeah.

00:14:31.540 Let's shift gears just briefly. And before we come back to this and think about it through

00:14:34.940 the lens of parenting, because it's the first thing that probably comes to many of

00:14:38.340 our listeners' minds as we think about the words reinforcement, positive and negative

00:14:42.760 reinforcement. So your child is misbehaving. Bedtime routine is a disaster. They don't want

00:14:48.780 to brush their teeth or whatever it is. There's a punishment that you could allocate for that

00:14:53.340 behavior. You could say, look, Johnny, if you don't go to bed now, you do not get to play

00:14:57.700 Xbox tomorrow.

00:14:58.680 Right. That's a punishment. There's a reward, which is if you do this thing, I'm going to give

00:15:05.460 you an extra 15 minutes of playing Xbox tomorrow. Based on what you just said, is it safe to say

00:15:11.960 that offering 15 minutes of extra Xbox is significantly more likely to produce the desired

00:15:18.420 outcome?

00:15:18.960 Absolutely. And I think as parents, we know this. Any parent listening knows this, right?

00:15:23.060 Your children, we're talking here about permanent behavior change. We don't want them just to brush

00:15:27.520 their teeth tonight. We want them to brush their teeth every night. A positive reward, positive

00:15:32.460 reinforcement is going to be much more powerful at ingraining that habit in their life. Negative

00:15:37.680 reward, it might work tonight.

00:15:39.900 Do you have a sense of why this is from an evolutionary perspective? Because this seems awfully hardwired.

00:15:44.980 Yeah. I don't know exactly the answer to that. And I'm not sure anyone does. I'll tell you what

00:15:49.700 the hypotheses that I've heard are. One of the things we know, as you know, is that our brain tends to

00:15:55.320 over-notice negative outcomes. And that's good because that means that if something can kill us,

00:16:01.900 we're going to avoid it. But as a result, we actually are very good at discounting that reward

00:16:08.960 very quickly. We have a very accurate mental representation of how painful a reward is going

00:16:16.180 to be and whether we should avoid it or not. Our sense of a negative reward, negative reinforcement,

00:16:22.380 is very finely tuned. Our sense of positive reinforcement is not. And as a result, there's

00:16:28.480 an opportunity there to take advantage, to kind of arbitrage that difference within our brain,

00:16:33.140 where when I give you a positive reward, you actually enjoy it more than you ought to.

00:16:39.240 Here's a great example. We know this from slot machines. The way that a slot machine gets you hooked

00:16:44.820 is they give you a consistent stream of rewards every 10, 15 minutes, every 10, 15 pulls,

00:16:50.920 and then they mix into that intermittent unexpected rewards because that unexpected reward gives me

00:16:57.500 that dopaminic reaction, that reward sensation much, much bigger than the actual prize that I'm

00:17:03.420 getting. And so what we can do, slot machines take advantage of it in a negative way, but we can take

00:17:07.460 advantage of it in a positive way and say, if I give you a reward, you're going to love it even more

00:17:13.880 than you'll hate that punishment. And that gives me an opportunity.

00:17:16.640 So now going back to the military example, how did you come to understand the ways in which

00:17:23.920 a myriad set of behaviors? Because as you said, a soldier is able to do so many things that

00:17:29.400 basically become autonomic that might be very counterintuitive. In fact, might be counter to

00:17:35.080 the value of your own life. Absolutely.

00:17:37.500 Moving this direction as opposed to that direction under threat.

00:17:40.920 Absolutely. Or training people to kill, which the many people have a natural reaction to not kill.

00:17:45.500 So how does the military do it?

00:17:47.500 Yeah. How do they employ this reward punishment leverage?

00:17:51.460 So one of the things that they do is they pay very, very close attention to teaching cadets

00:17:56.440 to respond to cues. One would think if I was saying, okay, if a bomb goes off, what are you

00:18:02.180 supposed to do? Let's talk about the behavior that you do when a bomb goes off. The thing about a bomb

00:18:06.760 going off is that a bomb going off is a little bundle of cues. And we need to talk about which cues

00:18:13.320 you should pay attention to and which ones you shouldn't, which ones should trigger an autonomic

00:18:16.480 behavior. So in Iraq, the issue with bombs going off, IEDs, was dust. When there was an explosion

00:18:23.540 of dust, that is when you should react. And we're going to practice that. So we're going to take you

00:18:28.760 out into the field and we're going to use ordinance that does not actually produce sounds, that does

00:18:33.480 not produce fire. What we're going to do is we're going to put stuff in the ground that creates a huge

00:18:38.060 cloud of dust. And we're going to train you to react to that. Because we have found that dust is a more

00:18:43.580 predictable and reliable indicator of when you should behave than the noise of an explosion or being

00:18:48.580 able to see the fire.

00:18:50.240 And to be clear, the noise could be coming from anywhere you don't know where it's coming from.

00:18:55.900 It could be a false alarm. It could be something that's a town away.

00:18:59.560 That's exactly right. And it's oftentimes overwhelming. The thing about like a visual stimuli

00:19:03.440 in this context is that it's very, very recognizable. Whereas an audio stimuli, it's

00:19:10.460 hard to tell.

00:19:11.280 It's hard to localize.

00:19:11.640 It's hard to localize, but it's also so overwhelms you that it can kick in that fight or flight

00:19:15.500 instinct that we're trying to avoid. So that's the first thing that they do is they pay a lot

00:19:19.260 of attention to cues and they think really, really hard about that training. In one of my other books,

00:19:23.660 Smarter, Faster, Better, there's a chapter about bootcamp for Marines. And it's probably the most

00:19:29.920 scientifically well-fined tuned training you will find on earth because it takes in hundreds of

00:19:37.780 thousands of people every year and we have to train them to be Marines. The other thing that

00:19:42.420 they pay a lot of attention to is how do we reward that behavior in a way that will make it automatic?

00:19:48.320 We mentioned that a habit is a cue, a routine, and a reward. That's known as the habit loop.

00:19:53.280 But what happens in our brain to form that habit loop is that the basal ganglia, which every animal

00:20:00.300 on earth has a basal ganglia, the basal ganglia's job is essentially to make habits. Because without

00:20:05.820 those habits, we essentially can't evolve. We just spend too much time in cognition. And what the

00:20:11.440 basal ganglia helps encourage, and this is oversimplifying dramatically, is it takes that cue,

00:20:16.460 that routine, and that reward, and it puts them in a kind of circuit where the neural synapses

00:20:22.640 connecting the behavior centers of those three items becomes thicker and thicker and thicker,

00:20:27.320 which means that as a result, an electrical impulse can travel down that synapses faster.

00:20:31.280 So if I'm the general, my goal is to take these soldiers and to change their brain so that when

00:20:37.580 they see smoke, they react immediately, which is they pull out their gun, they look for the threat,

00:20:42.760 they go through the mental checklist of look for these five things. And then I want to have a reward

00:20:47.980 for them that's predictable and consistent. Now, in that situation, there's not a natural

00:20:53.420 reward. I have to create that reward. So one of the things that I do is I have them train as a unit.

00:20:58.560 And as soon as they all take position, they all say to each other, good job, good job. I'm in

00:21:03.760 position. Good job, good job, good job. They're all positively reinforcing each other. That becomes a

00:21:08.580 reward that can build this behavior, which is why looking at the unit or the platoon is so important

00:21:14.780 in how we train soldiers is because oftentimes the rewards that are reinforcing our habits

00:21:19.700 are social rewards that we're getting from other individuals.

00:21:23.440 And during training, let's say it's the first day they're going through this drill

00:21:27.000 and two of the guys fall out of formation. They fail to get in position.

00:21:31.320 The absence of being able to say good job, is that sufficient? Or is there also a punishment of,

00:21:37.940 hey, you two guys, you were in the wrong spot. Let's go do it again.

00:21:40.900 Well, it's the Marines, right? So certainly the drill sergeants,

00:21:45.280 they have a certain reputation to uphold about yelling at people. But no, it's actually-

00:21:50.720 But it's not doing that much, correct?

00:21:51.800 It's not really doing that much. It's helping people correct. It's creating sort of that,

00:21:55.300 instead of a wicked feedback system, a good feedback system where I'm learning very quickly.

00:22:00.000 It's actually me seeking out that reward. One of the things that you'll find if you look at

00:22:04.180 surveys of why people fight, inevitably they will say, I joined because of patriotism,

00:22:09.420 and I stayed in the military because-

00:22:12.360 Camaraderie.

00:22:12.880 Because of camaraderie, because of the guys next to me. I couldn't go home. I'd have to take care

00:22:16.180 of them. That's really encouraged by the military. And that becomes the dominant,

00:22:20.520 overwhelming, positive reinforcement, is that you act for your fellow soldiers. And when one of them

00:22:24.940 turns to you and says, good job, good job, what he's really saying is, you helped protect me,

00:22:28.920 and I'm going to help protect you. And that feels amazing.

00:22:31.340 So when you think about the number of people that make it through the various forms of training,

00:22:37.440 and whether it be Marines, Special Forces, elsewhere, et cetera, are they screening for

00:22:43.620 the capacity to be able to form these habits? Or is there point of view that we can basically

00:22:50.240 instill this in anyone, provided some basic set of criteria of aptitude or psychological well-being

00:22:58.080 is present?

00:22:58.680 It's the latter. And I'm kind of curious in your work, how that plays out.

00:23:02.540 That's exactly why I'm asking, right?

00:23:03.960 Yeah. Well, because what they believe, and the science tells us this is true,

00:23:07.060 humans are habit machines. We literally have evolved a brain that is fantastic at making habits.

00:23:13.820 And so we can take almost anyone, assuming a baseline, physical readiness, and mental capacity,

00:23:19.940 we can take anyone and we can teach them to be a good soldier. Now, some people are going to be

00:23:24.280 elite soldiers, right? Some are going to become Special Forces. They might have an aptitude,

00:23:28.080 where they're more comfortable with willpower, they're more comfortable with grit, they're more

00:23:32.140 comfortable experiencing discomfort. And so they might be able to create habits faster. They might

00:23:36.000 understand intuitively or through learning how to affect their habits. But we can do this with

00:23:41.260 anyone. Which actually, I'm curious, when someone comes to you, they are showing a habitual behavior

00:23:47.040 that you think is negative. They want to race and you want to race. Are there some people whom you

00:23:52.100 believe like, it's just not going to happen? Like, I can't help this person?

00:23:55.240 Well, the truth of the matter is, I just don't think this is an area where I personally have

00:24:00.180 enough expertise. And therefore, I'd be hesitant to judge the success or lack thereof for a patient

00:24:08.640 because I don't think I'm a good enough coach. I'll tell you, I have a very, very basic framework

00:24:14.860 on habit, which is one of the reasons I'm excited about this discussion is I'm looking to bring

00:24:20.320 many more insights into what we do. But the way I talk to patients about it as I look, there's

00:24:24.840 broadly speaking, additive and subtractive habits. So if you're smoking, if you're drinking too much,

00:24:31.200 I want to take away something, a habit of removal. Conversely, let's say you don't exercise at all,

00:24:37.680 or you barely exercise, and we want to increase the amount of exercise you do, we want to add

00:24:41.660 that thing in. I sort of have two different strategies for how to do that. For the former,

00:24:45.920 it really comes down to default environment manipulation. So if a person wants to eat less

00:24:51.860 junk food, my view is you have to actually take some pretty significant steps to reduce the amount

00:24:58.000 of junk food that is around you. Absolutely.

00:24:59.920 It sounds obvious. And sometimes it's very difficult to do because if you don't control

00:25:03.920 your environment, it's hard. If you do control your environment, it's easier. And if you're in an

00:25:08.460 intermediate state, you know, where you have kids and the kids eat a lot of junk food,

00:25:12.160 but you don't want to be eating like the mini wheats all the time, then it gets a little tougher.

00:25:15.920 But you can exert willpower for briefer stints. For example, when you're at the grocery store and

00:25:21.360 you have to make the decision of what to buy, but taking an easy example, if you live alone,

00:25:26.080 if you're a single person, you control the food environment in your house. And that might mean

00:25:30.740 one hour a week, you have to control your willpower when you're in the grocery store.

00:25:35.320 Yeah. But if you do that, it gives you the luxury of being surrounded by healthy choices for

00:25:40.760 the other 167 hours a week. Absolutely. And so that willpower muscle, you can either use it for

00:25:45.020 other things or you can relax. Yeah. You just have to flex it briefly.

00:25:47.640 Yeah. On the other end of the spectrum. And again, this has always been my way of doing things.

00:25:52.780 And I don't think it's unique because I've read other people talk about the exact same idea. So

00:25:56.600 clearly others have thought of this as well. When adding new habits with people, we tend to start

00:26:01.840 very small. And the win is basically defined by showing up, not by any performance.

00:26:08.360 The science of small wins.

00:26:09.880 Yeah. So if a person says, Peter, I hate, I had this discussion two weeks ago or last week,

00:26:14.540 actually. I hate doing cardio, Peter. I love strength training. I love being in the gym,

00:26:19.940 but this whole zone two thing you want me to do, it's so painful.

00:26:22.660 By the way, this speaks to my heart.

00:26:24.220 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:25.220 And the patient said, but Peter, you've convinced me, like, I know I need to do this. I just don't want

00:26:30.980 to. And I said, no problem. All I want you to do this week is three 15 minute sessions

00:26:38.520 on a stationary bike. I don't actually care how many Watts you're pushing. I don't want you to

00:26:43.800 wear a heart rate monitor. I don't want to track anything other than time. Can you get on for 15

00:26:48.900 minutes? I want you to pick your favorite podcast. And I've got some great recommendations for you.

00:26:54.020 And I want you to just get on a stationary bike for 15 minutes, listen to this great podcast. And even

00:26:59.340 if at the end of 15 minutes, you want to ride more, don't just get off. I want you to do that

00:27:03.760 three times. And then let's discuss that in a month. And this tends to be a quite productive

00:27:09.160 way to do it because then you can start to increase the duration and then you can start

00:27:13.320 to add other parameters around performance. Okay. Now we're going to actually start paying

00:27:16.660 attention to the level of exertion and are we getting you in the right spot? But if I just try

00:27:21.420 to say, all right, we're going to go from nothing to four hours of zone to a week and somebody

00:27:25.320 who doesn't like it, yeah, the likelihood of success is pretty low.

00:27:27.940 So there's a researcher, Katie Milkman at Wharton University of Pennsylvania, who studied

00:27:33.320 exactly what you're talking about quite extensively. How do we link a reward to the behavior so

00:27:38.220 that you're experiencing the reward during the behavior? And she actually uses audio books,

00:27:42.060 much like you use podcasts. And when she was doing this research, it was right when Harry

00:27:45.920 Potter had come out. She loves Harry Potter. And so she made a rule. She can only listen to

00:27:50.100 the Harry Potter audio book when she's on the stationary bike. And she found that it just

00:27:54.380 completely transformed her attitude towards doing this behavior that she previously really

00:27:59.760 did not like.

00:28:01.800 Yeah. Even for me, that is kind of the case. And again, I'm far enough along in my journey

00:28:07.760 in my life. Those things have become so ingrained in me that I will do them. But there are days

00:28:12.240 when I really don't feel like getting on a stationary bike because I do most of my zone two

00:28:16.340 indoors because it's easier, frankly, than trying to hold a constant level of output outdoors.

00:28:20.980 And frankly, some days it's just really boring. But there are two or three podcasts that I am

00:28:26.860 addicted to. And that's when I listen to them. I actually am looking forward to listening to the

00:28:32.080 podcast.

00:28:33.160 My guess is, and tell me if you think I'm wrong on this, my guess is that in addition to giving

00:28:36.940 yourself a reward during that behavior, you're also rewarding yourself afterwards.

00:28:41.940 Well, for me, the reward after is the feeling. I'd love to talk about this as it pertains to

00:28:46.720 exercise. Anna Lemka, who I'm sure you're familiar with her work, she talks about how for many people,

00:28:52.560 the discomfort of exercise creates that imbalance in dopamine homeostasis such that post-exercise,

00:28:59.360 many of us experience that subtle shift where we actually have, if not a euphoria, certainly a

00:29:04.800 better feeling. And so for me, I always know that no matter how lousy I feel or how uninterested I am,

00:29:11.400 and it's usually that I'm just too busy. Usually it's, I just want to do work for another hour. I

00:29:16.020 don't really want to get on my bike, but I know that I'm getting this reward after of how I feel.

00:29:21.860 Yeah. And what's interesting is what the research tells us, that's very real. The runner's high is a

00:29:26.960 real thing. What's interesting is, and anyone who once didn't exercise and now does exercise who's

00:29:32.740 listening knows this intuitively, the first couple of times that we tell someone to exercise,

00:29:37.660 they do not anticipate the runner's high. And so as a result, it's a difficult motivating factor.

00:29:43.480 My mom hates exercise. And I always say, you're going to feel so good afterwards. And she says,

00:29:47.240 you know what? I just don't feel good afterwards. Now she actually does feel good afterwards,

00:29:50.320 but she tends to forget it. She engages in hyperbolic discounting very actively around

00:29:54.840 this positive reward. But one of the things that happens when we start exercising is that we convince

00:29:59.900 ourselves that we're going to feel better afterwards. An extrinsic reward, like giving myself a nice

00:30:05.940 smoothie, congratulating me, calling Peter. And he tells me you did such a good job for getting on

00:30:10.100 the bike three times this week. That external reward moves to an internal reward where it's the

00:30:16.380 feeling of accomplishment and it's the runner's high, the euphoria that I'm getting that motivates

00:30:20.320 my behavior. But I have to learn the value of that intrinsic reward because you usually can't

00:30:26.240 convince me of it without me having experienced it.

00:30:28.840 If you were to consider a group of 10 individuals who are similar in most observable ways externally,

00:30:36.100 right? You want all of them to create a new habit in a domain that is entirely foreign to them.

00:30:41.780 Are there attributes of these people that would allow you to predict who is more likely to be

00:30:47.000 successful? For example, does willpower, which might form the basis of the initial, for lack of a

00:30:53.520 better word, activation energy, getting over that hump the first few times, does that factor into it?

00:30:58.260 I mean, truthfully, I don't even think I understand the science of willpower. So maybe we can spend

00:31:01.720 some time on that if it's helpful.

00:31:03.520 The answer is absolutely. I'm going to caveat the answer by saying there are certainly behavioral

00:31:08.580 characteristics that make it easier for some people to understand how to change their habits

00:31:14.180 and adopt new habits. There does not seem to be a great deal of evidence that there's genetic

00:31:19.540 reasons to predict that. Some researchers will say there is slight genetic variations. We think that

00:31:25.200 some people are more prone to willpower than others are, but it's so small and insignificant in

00:31:31.320 comparison with the behavioral training that you have, the environment that you've grown up in.

00:31:36.580 If you have parents who teach you willpower habits, if you're someone who is an athlete,

00:31:43.140 and so you have a team that's taught you how to push yourself a little bit harder when pushing

00:31:47.640 yourself is hard, you already have an intuitive sense of how to adjust your own habits. And so

00:31:53.600 as a result, if you're in a room with someone who has none of that background, they've never played on

00:31:57.580 a team sport, their parents let them do whatever they wanted, it's going to take me longer to change

00:32:02.480 that second person's habits because I'm going to have to train them more. And the training just

00:32:06.740 takes time.

00:32:07.860 That makes sense. Okay. So low heritability.

00:32:10.300 Yes, exactly.

00:32:11.120 But high environmental and behavioral exposure as a child.

00:32:13.840 Absolutely. And the research is pretty consistent on that.

00:32:16.760 So not to digress, but again, I think a lot of people in our audience are parents. I mean,

00:32:21.620 this sounds like just good parenting one-on-one, but let's double click on it a little bit. What

00:32:25.680 do those of us with young kids need to do to enable our kids to become the type of adults who can make

00:32:34.320 behavior changes and create better habits?

00:32:37.000 The single most powerful thing we can do is we can teach them how willpower works and to build

00:32:41.760 willpower habits because a willpower habit actually doesn't tax the metaphor of the muscle,

00:32:47.520 willpower muscle that exists inside our head. And so Angela Duckworth, who probably many of your 1.00

00:32:51.600 listeners are familiar with because of grit, she's done a lot of research on this. One of the things

00:32:56.660 that's really powerful is to explain and demonstrate to kids how to diagnose the cue,

00:33:02.180 routine, and reward so that they can begin editing their own habits.

00:33:06.640 So I have a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old. And one of the things that I do is I'm very

00:33:11.940 ostentatious in how I reward myself for hard behavior. This is actually kind of counterintuitive

00:33:17.840 because we're dads, we're supposed to be stoic. We go out and we run a half marathon and like,

00:33:22.660 it's no big deal. So what I do is exactly the opposite. I go out and I run not even a half marathon.

00:33:27.540 I just go and I run four or five miles. I come home and I said to my kids, oh man, that was a hard

00:33:32.160 run. But I push through it. Now you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to have this really yummy

00:33:36.120 smoothie I've been looking forward to. For the next 15 or 20 minutes, I'm just going to lay on

00:33:40.400 the couch and enjoy myself because I feel so good right now. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to

00:33:44.640 model for them. Giving yourself a reward, focusing on that reward is a powerful way to reinforce or

00:33:51.060 change your own behavior. And I'll do the same thing with cues. Oftentimes, some of the cues that I

00:33:56.140 use for exercise or for other things aren't visible to my children because I'm putting my running

00:34:01.360 shoes next to my bed. So I see them when I wake up in the morning and they don't understand the

00:34:04.840 significance of that. Or I'm engaged in a ritual before I start writing that they don't see.

00:34:11.380 So what I'll do is I'll be very explicit with them and say, I need to start writing in 15 minutes.

00:34:16.620 Here's what I'm going to do for the next 15 minutes to get ready for that. I'm teaching them,

00:34:21.520 think about the cues in your life. Think about the rewards in your life. If you focus on those two

00:34:25.840 things, you can create almost any routine, any behavior that you want or change any behavior that you want.

00:34:31.360 So the cues in that sense are just as important for the positive behaviors as the negatives.

00:34:37.400 I think many of us probably associate cues with the negative, meaning be aware of the cue. If I'm

00:34:44.240 trying to quit smoking, what's my cue to smoke? How do I need to spot it in advance? But you're

00:34:48.980 paying just as much attention to... It's funny. I don't know that I really think of cues on my

00:34:53.480 positive behaviors. I know they're there. I guess I'm just not even aware of them.

00:34:56.580 Looking at your life. Okay. So let me ask you, before you work out, what do you do before you

00:35:00.580 work out? Make my electrolyte drink. Okay. So that's a preceding behavior.

00:35:05.200 Yeah. It's a preceding behavior. It's a ritualized behavior that's become a cue for you.

00:35:08.660 It's not a negative cue. Forward to making that elect. Does it feel like a little sense of like

00:35:12.240 anticipation as you're making it? Like I'm going to go work out?

00:35:14.980 No, because interestingly, and people will be so surprised to know this about me, but at least

00:35:20.300 for the past year or two, I feel I'm so busy that I don't have the desire to work out until I'm in the

00:35:28.160 gym. That's interesting. Or on the bike. So in other words, it used to be that I couldn't wait

00:35:31.460 to work out, but something has happened in the last two years where I really have to kick myself

00:35:38.480 into the gym. Now, when I'm 15 minutes in, I feel great and I'm delighted to be there and there's

00:35:44.160 know where I'd rather be. But the 15 minutes before I go into the gym, which includes making

00:35:50.740 that drink, extracting myself away from my computer and doing my warmup, I'm like, that is actually,

00:35:58.440 it feels like pure willpower, but also I guess I benefit from enough muscle memory of just,

00:36:03.600 I've done this my whole life. Yeah. I guess I'd have to think about how-

00:36:06.860 Let me pause at a hypothesis and you can tell me if you think this is right.

00:36:09.440 My guess is that that proceeding behavior of making the electrolyte drink and doing the

00:36:14.320 stretches, that was a very ineffective cue at one point in your life. And the effectiveness of

00:36:19.720 that cue has diminished over time, but you found other cues, which is that one of it might just

00:36:24.620 be a sense of anticipation that you're going to feel good after 15 minutes.

00:36:27.240 I think that's a lot of it.

00:36:28.260 Yeah. It might also be that you know that you're going to put on your podcast. The cue of hitting

00:36:32.140 start on the podcast is what gets your head in that place where you can start exercising and

00:36:36.660 then experience- Well, it's interesting. I only do the podcast for zone two.

00:36:40.120 Okay.

00:36:40.540 It's the only thing. In the gym, for some reason, I can't lift weights and concentrate on something

00:36:45.920 else. That's fascinating.

00:36:46.880 So I listen to music in the gym, which doesn't get me excited.

00:36:50.900 That would actually suggest that you are using more willpower in the gym because that muscle,

00:36:55.540 this is an inexact metaphor, but we can think of willpower as a muscle. And like all muscles,

00:37:00.780 it gets stronger the more we practice using it, but it also gets fatigued in the short term.

00:37:06.660 And so this is why, if you look at data on when accidents happen in surgery, they most

00:37:12.740 often happen when a surgeon has been either in his second or third surgery or her second

00:37:17.520 or third surgery, or when it's a very long surgery, they've been using their willpower

00:37:21.500 for so long, they get fatigued. If you look at the number of affairs that happen among lawyers

00:37:26.140 and doctors, they most often happen when someone has been at the office after nine or 930. And

00:37:31.640 for years, people thought, oh, you get to the evening and it's like kind of romantic.

00:37:34.500 No, it's that after nine or 10 hours of exerting your willpower in your office,

00:37:39.360 your guard is down, your muscles weaker. And so when someone comes up and they kiss you,

00:37:44.080 instead of pushing them away, you kiss them back. Thinking about our willpower muscle,

00:37:49.480 both strengthening it, but also protecting it when we need it is critical to being able to be the

00:37:55.400 people that we want to be.

00:37:56.260 And so part of that then is recognizing when you're vulnerable.

00:38:00.120 Yes.

00:38:00.680 I mean, you used an extreme example of having an affair, but also vulnerable to fall. So let's

00:38:06.460 use a less extreme example of, I really want to eat less dessert.

00:38:10.340 Yeah.

00:38:10.640 Right. I really just want to eat less.

00:38:12.060 Or let's use smoking.

00:38:12.920 Okay.

00:38:13.360 Smoking is a great one. James Prochaska at the University of Rhode Island has spent his whole

00:38:17.040 career and the data that we have on smoking cessation is enormous. It vastly outpaces almost

00:38:22.780 everything else. Okay. So let's talk about what happens. Nicotine, as you know, is an addictive

00:38:28.580 substance, but we're only addicted to nicotine for about a hundred hours after our last cigarette.

00:38:33.860 By that point, nicotine is out of our bloodstream. We don't have a physical dependency on nicotine.

00:38:38.240 And yet we all know people who smoked for years, quit, and they crave a cigarette a decade later

00:38:44.100 after they have breakfast in the morning.

00:38:46.020 I didn't actually know that, Charles. So four days after you smoked your last cigarette or had

00:38:52.420 your last exposure to nicotine, you no longer have a physiologic need for nicotine?

00:38:59.180 Yeah. You have completed withdrawal.

00:39:00.920 I had no idea of that.

00:39:02.640 But what you still have-

00:39:04.320 You still have the cue and you remember the reward.

00:39:06.180 Right. Exactly. The habit loop still exists in your brain. If you have a cigarette with every

00:39:10.140 morning cup of coffee, as soon as you pick up that cup of coffee, your brain is craving that

00:39:14.660 nicotine. And that feels just like an addiction, a physical addiction. In fact, it's in some ways more

00:39:20.280 powerful than a physical addiction. So what Prochaska did is he looked at how people quit smoking. And

00:39:25.640 this gets to the point you were raising before about learning. He found that on average, a smoker

00:39:31.560 needs to quit seven times in order to actually quit. So a committed smoker, somebody who's been smoking

00:39:38.640 for years, they will give up cigarettes seven times before it actually works. Which raises this kind

00:39:45.620 of interesting question. What is happening in those seven times? Like why seven instead of four?

00:39:50.020 What's happening? What the research tells us is that the first time I give up cigarettes,

00:39:54.300 I focus on willpower. I say like, I'm going to resist these cigarettes. I'm throwing them out.

00:39:58.440 I'm going to change my environment a little bit. But all those cues are still there. The craving for

00:40:02.160 the reward is still there. And when my willpower gets taxed, my mother-in-law comes to town. I've had a

00:40:07.440 really tough day at work. My willpower is really, that muscle has been exercised all day.

00:40:12.320 That's the moment that I give in and I pick up a cigarette and I say, to hell with it. I'm going

00:40:16.300 to start smoking again. And just to be clear, what happens when you have that first cigarette?

00:40:21.800 Why can you not on that first cigarette go, Hey, it was just a lapse. I'm exhausted. Tomorrow's a new

00:40:27.600 day. Well, it's because you don't have a plan. So you're caught off guard by this relapse. And as a

00:40:34.120 result tends to shake our faith in ourselves, even if it's almost subconscious, it tends to shake our

00:40:39.580 faith in ourselves that we can't quit. Now that's the first time.

00:40:42.380 I want to interject here. This is something that we try to talk a lot to our patients about.

00:40:47.580 Because again, we're not dealing with something that's as binary as smoking. Let's just say it's

00:40:51.620 exercise. Look, we've set a plan that you're going to do something for 30 minutes every day.

00:40:56.200 And then you're going to have that day when you don't. What we tend to spend a lot of time coaching

00:41:01.120 on is absolutely positively under no circumstance. Do you judge yourself for that day? The next day,

00:41:08.340 just get back on the horse and don't let one bad day be two. And then it's fine. Because I think

00:41:14.140 what we see is a lot of times a person will go six days of their routine. They miss a day,

00:41:19.340 they beat themselves up, and then they're done. They're like, well, forget it. I screwed up.

00:41:23.820 It can happen in the reverse.

00:41:25.020 Yeah. Well, and it makes sense, right? Because we're talking about rewards and positive rewards

00:41:28.840 and negative rewards. I miss a day and I start beating up on myself. I'm flooding my brain with

00:41:33.920 negative rewards, with recriminations, with feelings of shame. My brain pays attention

00:41:38.580 to what gives me positive rewards and negative rewards. And it's saying, this exercise thing,

00:41:43.100 it's a sucker's game. Because even if I feel good for a couple of days, I'm going to feel terrible

00:41:47.520 when I miss it. So you're exactly right. We cannot engage in that self-blame.

00:41:51.740 So this poor smoker, his mother-in-law who nags him comes into town.

00:41:56.900 His willpower is exhausted. He's been dealing with her all day long.

00:42:00.080 He lights up, sneaks outside in shame.

00:42:02.240 Yes. So here's what happens. You do that once, you do that twice, you do it three times. Here's

00:42:07.120 what's happening around the third or fourth time. And this is what gets to your exerciser as well.

00:42:11.860 Suddenly people stop looking at it as a moral lapse and they start looking at it as a scientific

00:42:16.740 experiment. Okay. Here's the data that I've observed. I do a pretty good job of avoiding

00:42:21.080 cigarettes until something really stressful happens. So I need to, ahead of time, figure out

00:42:26.920 when that stressful thing occurs, what am I going to do instead of smoking? Because if I don't have

00:42:31.700 a plan in place, what's known as an implementation intention, if I don't have a plan in place,

00:42:36.220 I'm going to pick up the cigarettes. So here's my plan. Instead of beating up on myself,

00:42:40.940 I'm going to write down that the next time my mother-in-law comes to town, I am going to have 0.61

00:42:45.600 some sweet candy in the house because I know I'm going to have an urge to put something in my mouth.

00:42:50.080 I'm going to want some type of quick boost reward and sugar can provide that to me, the novelty of 0.99

00:42:54.320 taste. I'm going to have that candy in my house. And when she's driving me crazy, I'm going to walk

00:42:59.140 over, pick up a piece of candy and go outside and eat it. So what happens is that over time,

00:43:04.220 the reason why it takes seven times to quit smoking, or the reason why your clients and your patients

00:43:08.840 have these moments of willpower failure is because instead of looking at that as a failure,

00:43:14.160 we have to look at ourselves as scientists who are conducting experiments and paying attention to the

00:43:18.920 data. My wife is a scientist and you're a scientist. So, you know, if every experiment that a scientist

00:43:24.360 does succeeds, they're a terrible scientist. The goal is to figure out where it succeeds and where

00:43:29.480 it fails and learn from the failures. We have to look at our own lives that same way and say,

00:43:34.300 I meant to go run today and I didn't. Let me try and figure out why. And then I'll come up with a

00:43:40.560 plan for the next time. Next time this obstacle emerges, I know what to do without having to worry about

00:43:47.120 it. Is it the case you think that people are able to kind of do that on their own? Or is this

00:43:52.240 the enormous opportunity to coach a person through that, to create an accountability partner, for

00:43:57.780 example, and say, look, I want to hear about it when you fail just as much as I want to hear about

00:44:02.160 it when you succeed. And when you fail, I'm going to direct all of the inquiry towards learning.

00:44:07.720 What did you learn? Right. It's incredibly powerful because it's going to speed up that feedback loop.

00:44:12.320 There are people who quit smoking on their own without ever talking to another person about quitting

00:44:15.900 smoking. So these guys are the outliers. They're absolutely the outliers. And it's taking them

00:44:20.220 longer to actually quit than someone who takes advantage of the social aspect of habit formation,

00:44:26.060 where I know that I can get rewards and I can get learnings from other people in my life

00:44:30.460 more effectively than I can find it in myself. The truth of the matter is, let's take alcohol as an

00:44:35.640 example because AA is such a well-studied and interesting model. There are lots of people who engage in

00:44:40.800 what's known as spontaneous recovery, where they will try and quit drinking and they'll relapse and

00:44:45.900 eventually they stop drinking. But people who engage in AA, because it's basically habit

00:44:50.860 replacement, those people end up quitting drinking much faster. So we all have the capacity to do this

00:44:57.020 on our own. But when we do it in an environment where we know that we're taking advantage of the

00:45:01.960 cues and rewards that make behavior change easier, it goes faster and it feels better.

00:45:06.940 What is the overall success of AA for alcohol abstinence? Or, I mean, I guess AA does not support

00:45:14.340 harm reduction. It's really about abstinence. That's absolutely right. So we don't know. AA is very

00:45:19.500 extensively studied, but because it's anonymous, we don't have double-blind studies. We don't have

00:45:24.420 a lot of longitudinal data. That being said, the estimates seem to be that for about 40% of people

00:45:31.180 who come into AA, they can achieve lifelong abstinence if that's their goal. And 40% isn't great. That still

00:45:39.220 means 60% of people, but it's pretty good for behavior change. What's interesting about AA is

00:45:44.360 AA, much like the military, is built around asking people to identify the cues and rewards in their

00:45:50.560 life and then changing the behavior that corresponds to that old cue and finding a new behavior that

00:45:55.480 delivers something similar to that old reward. The 10 principles of AA, the reason why there's 10 of

00:45:59.960 them is because there's 10 commandments in the Bible. Bill W., the guy who came up with AA,

00:46:04.440 he had no training in psychology or science whatsoever. The thing that makes AA successful

00:46:10.540 is that when you walk in, you stand up and you say, my name is Charles and I'm an alcoholic.

00:46:16.260 And then at some point you tell your story. And when you're telling your story, you're reminding

00:46:20.660 yourself of all the cues that prompt you to drink. One of the steps is I make amends. I go to all the

00:46:25.560 people that I've wronged. That teaches me what those cues are. I'm learning. I'm looking at my life as a

00:46:29.960 scientist. And then oftentimes the reward for drinking is a relaxed, socialized experience.

00:46:36.920 So when you go to an AA meeting, you have a relaxed, socialized experience. Absent alcohol,

00:46:43.160 but you're talking to other people, you're communing with other people, the same thing you get at a bar.

00:46:47.900 AA is a habit change machine that doesn't have to express itself that way.

00:46:52.840 I don't know much about AA, but the little bit I know suggests that people will go for life.

00:46:57.160 They might not go as frequently, but I know people that are, have been sober for 20 years

00:47:02.580 that are still going to a meeting twice a week.

00:47:04.400 You're exactly right. You're exactly right. So oftentimes people will develop a habitualized

00:47:08.940 behavior around AA and they keep up with that habit for life. Just as frequent and actually

00:47:13.320 more frequent is that people will commit to AA. They'd say like 90 meetings in 90 days.

00:47:19.700 So they'll commit to AA at the beginning and then it will taper down over time. They'll start going to

00:47:25.200 one meeting a week and then one meeting a month. And then, you know, they move to a new place and

00:47:28.640 they don't know where the new meeting is. But what they have learned is when I'm in that moment

00:47:33.620 where I think I'm going to relapse, where my willpower muscle seems tired, where the cues

00:47:37.960 around me are prompting me to drink, I'm going to go to a meeting instead of go to a bar.

00:47:42.900 And so the AA, even if I'm not going consistently, if it's ingrained in my psychology, it's a way to

00:47:49.340 avoid drinking. It's very, very powerful. And I can activate that anytime in life.

00:47:53.360 Let's go back to childhood.

00:47:55.260 Sure.

00:47:55.720 Because I think this is such an interesting place. Maybe I'm incorrect. I'm assuming that,

00:48:00.180 again, a lot of these seeds are sown in how we're raised. And in the case of your kids,

00:48:04.440 they're getting actually kind of like a masterclass because they've got a parent who's one of the

00:48:08.920 world's experts in it.

00:48:09.900 They would not say it was a masterclass. They would say I'm a little heavy handed,

00:48:12.700 but thank you for that.

00:48:13.400 But you're being deliberate in how you're coaching. So for those of us who want to take a bit of that,

00:48:19.440 I really think like people always ask me, like, what do you want for your kids? And

00:48:22.720 that's an interesting question, right? I don't have any aspiration for what I want them to be

00:48:27.160 professionally. Like, it's not like, oh, I want this kid to be that. And this kid to be that. I

00:48:31.120 mean, you want your kids to be well-adjusted and happy, but it's hard to imagine them doing that if

00:48:37.460 they don't have some command and control over themselves. You could argue that this is one of

00:48:42.640 the most important things that we want our kids to have.

00:48:46.480 Yeah.

00:48:46.900 And yet I don't feel like we have any adequacy in the training for it.

00:48:49.980 I think you're right. I think that this is something, if this was more of a curriculum

00:48:53.860 in schools, if it was something we taught parents, and that's one of the reasons I wrote The Power of

00:48:57.120 Habit is I wanted to empower parents to teach their own kids this, to recognize things in their

00:49:02.660 own life. I think that a number of us understand intuitively some aspect of this. A lot has been

00:49:09.060 written about the growth mindset, Carol Dweck's work out of Stanford. One of the things that she

00:49:13.360 emphasizes is teaching children a sense of agency. That instead of saying, when you bring home an A

00:49:18.920 on your report card, instead of saying, oh, you're so smart, which is something you don't have control

00:49:22.640 over, to say, oh, you must have worked really, really hard, because that's something you do

00:49:27.320 have control over. I'm reinforcing your sense of agency. When we do that intuitively or deliberately,

00:49:33.300 one of the things that we're doing is we're teaching our children that they have control

00:49:36.720 over their habits. You went and you worked really hard to get that A. You developed a habit of studying.

00:49:44.500 You used your willpower. I'm going to positively reinforce that by recognizing it. Whereas if I

00:49:49.220 say, you must be really smart, you got that A, I'm not positively reinforcing your belief that you can

00:49:54.560 change your behavior. So in addition to explaining to kids and being ostentatious, showing off the cues

00:50:00.180 and rewards in our own life and how we change our own habits, the way that we give rewards to our

00:50:05.220 children also reinforces for them whether they believe that they are in control of their willpower or

00:50:11.180 not. And I suppose the other side of that is how do we handle our own failures in front of them?

00:50:16.940 Absolutely. Do we even admit our own failures? There's a model of fatherhood from the 1950s that

00:50:22.920 you don't burden your family with your ups and downs. Dad's a steady rock. But all the research

00:50:29.000 tells us one of the best things you can do is if you screwed up, and I try to do this all the time,

00:50:33.280 I come home and I'm like, oh man, I called this guy today and I just completely screwed up this

00:50:37.520 interview because I want them to know. And then I say, but the thing I realized from it is that next

00:50:42.540 time I call, I need to have something to eat before I call because that's going to help me.

00:50:45.620 I'm modeling for them. A failure is not a failure. A failure is a data point. And I'm a scientist about

00:50:51.000 my own life. What do we know about the length of time or the amount of friction it takes to create a

00:51:00.260 habit and the difficulty in breaking it? Maybe that doesn't make sense. I'll try to come up with an

00:51:05.740 example. If it takes a long time to really create a habit around exercise or meditation,

00:51:13.340 let's pick something new. Not an easy thing to do, but let's say over years and years and years,

00:51:18.400 you take a lot of time to build that muscle memory up. I assume that's creating some sort of

00:51:22.740 physiologic headroom that makes it much harder for you to erode that down.

00:51:27.020 Yes, absolutely. So what's happening when you're meditating is that, as we mentioned,

00:51:32.060 there's these neural pathways that connect the synapses associated with the cue and the routine

00:51:36.660 and the reward, they're becoming thicker and thicker and thicker over time. What's interesting

00:51:40.740 is they almost never become significantly thinner. So if you develop a meditation habit and then you

00:51:46.560 stop meditating, your life changes, the cues, when you come back to meditation, you will fall back into

00:51:52.340 it much more quickly than the average person. So we know that creating habits, both good and bad,

00:51:57.680 creates this neural pathway that we need to be conscious of. But to your question of how long

00:52:03.520 does it take? The answer is we actually don't know. There's this myth, this old wives' tale that

00:52:07.740 takes 21 days to build a habit and it takes 30 days to break a habit. What the research tells us is that

00:52:13.500 there is no number because different people have different thresholds and different kinds of habits

00:52:18.660 have different timelines associated with them. If you want to create a habit of eating chocolate,

00:52:23.400 you can probably do it in a couple of days, right? It's an immediate positive response.

00:52:28.660 If you like chocolate, it's something you enjoy. The cues are plentiful around you. You just put

00:52:32.620 chocolate bars in your house. But if you want to build an exercise habit, it's going to take a

00:52:36.120 little bit longer. But here's the important thing is that regardless of how long it takes to build that

00:52:41.220 habit or change a habit, every day you do it, it will get a little bit easier. And you might not feel

00:52:47.140 that increase in ease the first couple of days, but what's going to happen is I'm going to push

00:52:51.780 myself to exercise day one, day two, day three. I'm going to relapse on day four. I'm going to

00:52:55.260 not do it. But instead of beating up on myself, I'm going to look for the science. What went wrong

00:52:58.860 here? What's my plan for next time? And then I get to day 12 or I get to day 20 or I get to day

00:53:03.680 365. And it occurs to me, exercising is really easy for me now. Like I hardly even think about it.

00:53:09.540 It just happens almost kind of automatically.

00:53:11.540 Now, what about the negatives? So if you take two individuals, one who has been smoking for a year,

00:53:17.520 a pack a day for a year, and one who has been smoking a pack a day for 20 years,

00:53:22.580 is it necessarily the case that the latter is going to have a much more difficult time quitting?

00:53:29.000 Probably because it's a much more ingrained behavior, but this is where individual differences

00:53:34.540 come into play significantly. Because if that first person, if they're an athlete, if they've worked on

00:53:40.600 other habits in their life, if they've strengthened that muscle around habit change,

00:53:44.640 they might be able to rely on that to give up smoking. Whereas the 20-year smoker doesn't.

00:53:50.440 But yes, in general, the longer and more consistent a behavior becomes,

00:53:54.520 the more reinforced it becomes in our brain.

00:53:57.740 And does that mean that, let's just assume both of these individuals are able to quit smoking,

00:54:02.420 it's five years later, both of them are at a bar and they both light up a cigarette.

00:54:07.180 Are they both equally susceptible to relapse? Or is the 20-year person more susceptible because

00:54:15.400 his neural connections are more hardwired?

00:54:18.980 Well, there's a lot of compounding factors there. So when the 20-year-old smoker lights up

00:54:23.060 his cigarette, we're focusing on the habit loop associated with nicotine use. But there's probably

00:54:27.460 other habit loops that he has developed over time, which is he might feel much more intense sense of

00:54:32.240 shame over smoking than the one-year smoker. He might have emphysema or developing health problems.

00:54:40.220 And those are creating mental habits for him that are countervailing the positive reinforcement of

00:54:45.200 the nicotine. The answer to your question is it's really hard to say universally. What we do know is

00:54:50.480 that the more consistent a reward, whether it's a reward that rewards a positive behavior or a negative

00:54:55.800 behavior, the more consistent that reward and the more consistent that cue, the faster the habit will

00:55:00.620 take hold and the stronger the grip it'll have on us. But when we're trying to change it or create a new

00:55:06.460 habit, there's so many other variables that we can't predict how long it's going to take, but we do

00:55:13.060 know that any habit can be changed. Is there a rule of thumb that says on average, it is more or less

00:55:20.200 difficult to break habits than to create habits? The science doesn't address that question. What we do

00:55:26.420 know is that it takes a different technique to build a new habit than to change an old habit. If I want to

00:55:33.420 build a new habit, if I want to start running, what I need to do is I need to sit down, come up with a

00:55:37.800 cue, come up with a reward. By the way, all cues fall into one of five categories. It's a time of day,

00:55:43.180 a particular place or environment. It's a certain emotion you feel. It's the presence of certain other

00:55:49.080 people, or it's a preceding behavior that's become ritualized. So tomorrow I want to start running.

00:55:54.680 I've never run before. I'm going to take advantage of as many of those as I can. So my plan is set my

00:56:00.920 alarm for seven o'clock. I want to be at the door by seven 30 running and I'm gonna put my running

00:56:05.200 shoes and my running clothes on my floor next to my bed. So I see them when I wake up, it's super easy

00:56:09.240 to put them on. I know what I'm going to wear. I'm going to ask my friend, Jim, to meet me on the

00:56:14.220 corner. We're going to run together. I'm creating as many cues as I can. If you can tap into all five,

00:56:18.900 you're in the money. Some of them are going to stick. Yep. And then when I get home,

00:56:22.480 I have already decided what reward I'm going to give myself. I'm going to have a nice long shower.

00:56:27.140 I'm going to drink a smoothie. I'm going to take 15 minutes to check social media or whatever else

00:56:31.580 delights me. So that's how we build a new habit is we choose a cue and we choose a reward and we link

00:56:37.060 it to a behavior we want to encourage. For a bad habit, a habit that we want to extinguish,

00:56:41.720 our nomenclature is incorrect. We often talk about breaking a bad habit, but because that neural

00:56:47.960 pathway exists in our brain, I've smoked for 20 years, I can't just extinguish those neural

00:56:53.500 connections. What I need to do is instead of thinking about breaking a bad habit or extinguishing

00:56:57.440 it, I have to think about changing that habit. And in that case, what I do is I identify the cue

00:57:02.660 that prompts this behavior I want to change. I identify the reward that that behavior is giving

00:57:08.140 me. And I'm going to simply insert a new behavior that corresponds to that old cue that delivers

00:57:14.240 something similar to that old reward. And I'm going to let my brain eventually shift,

00:57:20.820 keep the habit loop inside my head, but change the behavior, the routine.

00:57:25.060 I love this framework so much. So let's go back to the first one because it has so much

00:57:29.480 applicability. So new habit, want to do something new. You've identified what the behavior is. That's

00:57:35.200 the thing. The playbook is pretty straightforward. I got to come up with as many cues as possible.

00:57:41.500 So if I'm going to do single cue, not that likely I'll succeed out of the gate,

00:57:45.400 but boy, you get five of them, four out of five of them, it's great. And obviously some of them

00:57:49.520 are more than others. So I know for our patients, the cues that tend to be very powerful are other

00:57:54.520 people. People never want to let people down. So we always think that one of the most powerful cues

00:57:59.860 is an accountability partner. Sometimes we have people that literally hire trainers for the sole

00:58:05.220 purpose that they don't want to be embarrassed that they've not shown up. It's the only reason.

00:58:09.440 You're kind of describing me right now. But you're right. The more cues that we can come

00:58:14.440 up with, the better. And some will have more salience than others. We'll play with that and

00:58:18.460 figure out which ones work for us. And then how do you help a person think about how to gauge

00:58:24.180 the magnitude of the reward? Here's an area where you could get a little extreme.

00:58:29.580 Yes.

00:58:30.360 I'm not going to embarrass myself with examples of things I've done in this department,

00:58:33.900 but my wife could tell you some really embarrassing stories of how Peter can reward himself.

00:58:40.200 Yes, exactly. So the first thing to do is to say, I have to give myself a reward,

00:58:45.060 which is actually harder than it sounds. So if you think about how most people start exercising,

00:58:50.400 instead of having this, like, I'm going to take a nice shower and I'm going to drink smoothie,

00:58:54.080 they go for a run and they get home and they're late. Now I'm rushing. I'm taking as quick a shower as

00:58:59.120 I can because I got to throw breakfast on the table for the kids and I'm running late to take

00:59:02.680 them to school. I'm actually punishing myself for exercising. And my brain pays attention to

00:59:08.100 that punishment. It says, I don't want to exercise anymore. This is a sucker's game.

00:59:11.700 So the first and most important step is to actually recognize I have to reward myself and I have to

00:59:16.520 create the time or the space or the resources to let myself have that reward and enjoy that reward.

00:59:23.540 Now, the next question that you asked, how big should it be? One of the things that we know

00:59:28.400 is that one of the most powerful impacts on this is how immediate that reward is. That in general,

00:59:35.760 if I give myself a reward right away, if I eat sugar and it tastes good, it gives me that boost as soon

00:59:40.260 as it hits my tongue, that's going to be a more powerful reinforcement than if it's something where

00:59:45.900 I'm working out every day and three weeks from now, my muscles are going to be stronger.

00:59:49.160 So the more immediate we can make the reward at first, the better. And we can oftentimes have a

00:59:55.480 smaller reward if it happens quickly than having to have a bigger reward that comes later in time.

01:00:02.080 Now, I mentioned though, that this is at first, and this is really important because

01:00:05.800 as I mentioned before, what happens with rewards is they almost always, if a behavior becomes a habit,

01:00:12.280 they almost always move from extrinsic to intrinsic. So at first, the reward I'm giving myself

01:00:18.500 is I'm letting myself have a smoothie. And that smoothie might not be that healthy.

01:00:22.740 You have got me very curious about your smoothie situation. You bring it up a lot.

01:00:27.060 I do.

01:00:27.460 There's something going on in Santa Barbara.

01:00:29.400 So I'll tell you, I love smoothies. I put peanut butter in my smoothie. I'm taking all this

01:00:37.440 healthiness and I'm erasing it by putting the peanut butter because I've already got protein powder in

01:00:40.820 there. I don't need any more protein. But to your point, I'm increasing the magnitude of the reward

01:00:46.600 that I get from this particular reward. But over time, as you mentioned, what's going to happen is

01:00:50.680 your craving for that smoothie is going to go down as your brain begins to realize,

01:00:56.360 oh, actually, when I run, I feel great afterwards. I feel endorphins. I feel dopamine. I feel these

01:01:02.260 endocannabinoids. There's this soup of good feeling in my head. Your brain starts saying,

01:01:06.780 I don't actually need the smoothie. I don't crave the smoothie quite as much. I don't need that smoothie

01:01:10.060 because I just feel good afterwards. That's the reward. So the reward has moved from extrinsic to

01:01:14.100 intrinsic. And that's a really important transition because that means the behavior

01:01:18.420 becomes self-reinforcing without external rewards. So let's think of a behavior where there is

01:01:26.300 absolutely positively no obvious link to a short-term reward. So we're going to have to

01:01:34.560 fabricate one. Does it need to make sense? So the smoothie kind of makes sense after the run

01:01:41.080 because you are glycogen depleted. That's the perfect time to have a smoothie. You're most

01:01:44.940 insulin sensitive. You actually can dispose of glucose the most easiest. If you're going to have

01:01:48.920 a smoothie any time of day, that's the time to have it. Okay. Now I come to you and I say, Charles,

01:01:53.320 I'm three years out of college. I technically make enough money that I could start putting money

01:01:58.880 into my 401k. I just don't want to, man. Because honestly, I know my employer matches and I know that

01:02:06.220 it's leverage dollars and I know all the intellectual reasons why. But the truth of the matter is,

01:02:10.800 if I start putting money into this 401k, I have less money to buy things now.

01:02:15.480 Absolutely. And it's going to pay off in 40 years.

01:02:18.520 Yeah. It's hard for me to get excited about 40 years from now.

01:02:22.180 Yeah.

01:02:22.780 So how would you coach me into making that decision, especially around the cues and the rewards?

01:02:32.020 Yeah. I love this question because there's actually been a bunch of research on this,

01:02:35.680 particularly out of researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Wharton.

01:02:38.160 So what they did is they went into a series of communities in South America. They asked this

01:02:43.380 exact question, how do we get people? And the reason why they were in South America is because

01:02:47.460 they wanted people who are in a cash-based economy where there wasn't a lot of credit cards.

01:02:51.040 How do we get people to save more, increase their savings rates? When we know that the reward for

01:02:56.240 savings is oftentimes far off in the distance, particularly if you're a low income. They had two

01:03:01.480 groups. The control group, they set up a box for them that they could put savings into. And they

01:03:07.060 said, we'd like you once a week to come in and save some money. And by the way, we're going to

01:03:11.860 tell you all there are good reasons to save. You should save because eventually you want to send

01:03:15.320 your kids to college or you want to buy that new truck. And we're going to help you. We're going to

01:03:18.880 help you. We're going to have a saving device for you. That's the control group. With the experimental

01:03:22.880 group, they do the exact same thing, except there is a secretary who works in that bank,

01:03:27.920 who every single time someone comes in and they put money into that box, they say, man,

01:03:33.220 this is the fourth week in a row you've come in. I'm so impressed to see you. Your kids are going

01:03:37.120 to go to college. They're going to be amazing kids. I just think about someday in the future,

01:03:40.980 like they're going to buy you a new home. You are a great parent. Second group, the experimental group,

01:03:46.400 savings rate went up over 40%. They were saving 40% more money than the first group. Not a bigger payoff,

01:03:53.560 simply someone positively reinforcing. So what happened there? It's a long-term

01:03:57.540 behavior, but we need short-term rewards. And so the researchers were manufacturing a short-term

01:04:03.900 reward in the form of social reinforcement. Has the following experiment been done as an extension

01:04:10.440 of that where you have a third arm that gets the same reinforcement for a period of time,

01:04:17.640 and then the secretary goes away after X number of months to see if the shift from extrinsic to

01:04:24.340 intrinsic maintains the same savings rate? So I haven't seen that experiment in this particular

01:04:29.440 setting, but in other settings, absolutely. And what is the period of time that you need

01:04:34.780 to remove the extrinsic reward? And make it intrinsic? Yeah.

01:04:38.300 I think it would probably depend on the type of habit we're talking about and the type of individual.

01:04:43.900 Yeah. There's not one answer.

01:04:45.200 Yeah. I don't think there's one answer, but we do know that at some point it will move from extrinsic to

01:04:49.360 intrinsic. One of the things we do know is that social rewards actually become intrinsic much

01:04:54.340 faster. If I start working out and I know that Peter's going to tell me I'm doing a great job

01:04:58.640 and I look forward to that, eventually that sense of pride that I feel, I'm just going to get it

01:05:03.120 without you having to tell me I'm doing a great job. Social reinforcement, social rewards, sense of

01:05:07.580 pride, particularly mental habits, become intrinsic much, much faster. That's something we can leverage.

01:05:13.760 We can use those social rewards to move extrinsic to intrinsic. What other ways are there besides

01:05:20.360 social reinforcement to reward very long-term behaviors like savings?

01:05:26.260 So I'll tell you what I do. I have a spreadsheet. I've had it for seven or eight years now. And I use

01:05:32.440 Simplify. I used to use Mint. I use Vanguard. I have all the websites that consolidate all of my

01:05:36.980 financial information. Once a week, it takes me about 15 minutes. I update my spreadsheet. I create a

01:05:42.460 brand new set for this week. I input all the numbers. Here's my bank balance. Here's my Vanguard

01:05:47.480 balance. Here's my private equity balance. And then I look at whether it's gone up or down.

01:05:52.240 And you know what? I love it. I look forward to this.

01:05:55.100 But many times it's going down if you're based on the stock market.

01:05:57.920 Absolutely. And when it's going down is when I tend to like not do it because part of my brain knows,

01:06:02.640 ah, the market's down. I just don't want to even be reminded of it. I'm going to wait another

01:06:06.020 four or five days.

01:06:06.120 But what is the frequency at which you save money? Do you have an automatic every one week or every month

01:06:12.360 I am automatically, mindlessly, without thinking about it, putting X dollars into-

01:06:16.460 The answer is yes. It's because my income is more stochastic because I write and do things that

01:06:21.060 deliver outsized rewards sometimes and sort of long periods without reward. But yes, absolutely.

01:06:26.060 But it's based on a percentage of what comes in.

01:06:28.380 Anything that comes in, any new money that comes in goes immediately into my Vanguard account.

01:06:33.220 And I've never taken money out of my Vanguard account.

01:06:35.860 So what is it specifically, Charles, that you are getting rewarded by if the number isn't

01:06:40.400 monotonically going up? What is giving you the joy?

01:06:43.520 What's giving me the joy is I feel a real sense of responsibility and I feel a relief from tension.

01:06:47.760 We mentioned before that one of the most powerful rewards is relieving tension. I put you in the box

01:06:52.900 and I tell you, if you give me information, you can come out of the box. I'll remove the tension.

01:06:58.060 And for me, when I went to HBS and I became a journalist, I was the lowest paid member of my class

01:07:04.420 for the next seven years. I started a company before I became a journalist. I used to sell blood

01:07:08.540 in order to make payroll. Money and security for me is a real thing. And to look at that spreadsheet

01:07:14.280 and say like, oh, it went down by 2% this month, but it's okay because that number, that number in

01:07:20.360 the bottom is still big enough that I don't have to worry. That relief of tension is enough of a

01:07:24.620 positive reinforcement to make saving a really positive experience for me. And here's the other

01:07:29.960 thing that I do in that spreadsheet. I say, here's how much money I've made in the last year.

01:07:34.360 Here's how much money I've made in the last two years. Here's how much money I've made in the last

01:07:37.240 three years. And I have those right next to what my total net worth is. Because even if my net worth

01:07:41.880 goes down this week, because the market took a tumble, those numbers, one, two, three years,

01:07:46.960 those are still positive. And I just look at those and I think I made that much in three years.

01:07:51.340 Now, do you play other scenarios forward? Like, and this is how much money I'm saving for being able

01:08:00.280 to help my kids go to college or what are these other activities? Or do you start to reverse

01:08:05.120 engineer? And at this rate, I will be able to work for free. I'll be able to do whatever I want work

01:08:11.820 wise and not be dependent on a paycheck by age X. That's exactly right. I'm creating anticipation

01:08:17.080 for future rewards. Which is very intrinsic at this point.

01:08:21.260 It's very intrinsic. And it's actually surprisingly powerful.

01:08:24.280 Do you remember the first extrinsic thing you had to do? Was the spreadsheet exercise

01:08:29.260 sufficient initially as the sole extrinsic motivator?

01:08:33.820 It's a really good question. I have to think back because it's been so long now.

01:08:37.420 It was for me. I'm a spreadsheet junkie. And I remember in medical school,

01:08:42.640 just as I'm getting ready to finish and start residency, it's my first real paycheck.

01:08:47.560 I mean, again, I think we made $32,000 a year. So it's not like you were rolling in money,

01:08:51.960 but I remember doing the math and being like, okay, Hopkins is going to match my,

01:08:56.940 it was called a 403B, I think, because we were in, I think a university is,

01:09:00.600 it's the same as a 401K. And I just remember thinking like, I'd read all these books and

01:09:05.040 it's like, it's free money. Like you got to take it. But it became a game to me. So I gamified how

01:09:11.460 little I could spend. So it was sort of embarrassing. I would be like, look, I technically

01:09:16.760 don't need to spend money on food because I could just eat all the crap in the hospital for free.

01:09:20.740 There's always a free meal in the hospital. I don't actually have to buy clothes because I could be in

01:09:24.860 scrubs 24 seven. And so I had this huge budget that I would line item and it, I really had

01:09:30.760 repayment of student loan, my truck loan, my rent. It was relatively finite. And so discretionary money,

01:09:38.020 most of it could go into savings. But yes, I made that spreadsheet and I obsessed over it.

01:09:44.100 So it's interesting to say that you were the same way.

01:09:45.800 Oh, absolutely.

01:09:46.480 I thought I was very unique in doing that.

01:09:48.100 Well, what I love about what you just said is you said, I gamified it.

01:09:50.720 But the way games work is that it delivers rewards to us. That's why we play a game. It

01:09:55.880 has a reward schedule. And the way that you gamified it is you came up with a spreadsheet

01:10:00.600 because you can't play a game without a game board. You need some way of keeping track of

01:10:03.940 whether you're winning or losing. You created for yourself a game board where you could gamify

01:10:09.860 saving.

01:10:11.240 This is interesting. I never really thought of it that way. I assume people have already figured

01:10:14.740 out a way to do this for young people. I'm sure there must be someone out there who has

01:10:18.000 cracked the code on gamifying savings.

01:10:21.020 If so, I have not found them. There's a lot of companies trying.

01:10:23.220 The fact that you and I independently have done the same thing.

01:10:26.220 But I think that there's a powerful aspect to that, which is, I think the reason why it was

01:10:30.440 so powerful for us is because we felt a sense of agency and choice over it. We came up with this

01:10:35.820 model. We thought about what works for us. And even though we were both using spreadsheets,

01:10:39.880 I'll bet you our spreadsheets were pretty different.

01:10:41.540 Sure. Yeah.

01:10:42.020 Like I think that we were measuring different things. We were investing in different things. We were

01:10:45.360 getting rewards. I know they were because your spreadsheet is more sophisticated because it's

01:10:49.260 focusing on your returns. I was return agnostic. I was focusing on contribution. So my spreadsheet

01:10:57.460 focused on the spend and how big could I make the contribution number?

01:11:01.740 Right.

01:11:02.220 But went to Vanguard was like out of my hands. I was like, they're going to do their thing.

01:11:05.760 They're going to do their thing.

01:11:06.340 I'm going to pay attention. Yeah.

01:11:07.720 And there's probably something about your psychology and my psychology where that contribution,

01:11:11.980 that sense of willpower and of sacrifice feels very, very rewarding to you, that it might feel

01:11:17.240 less rewarding to me, but a sense of over time return.

01:11:21.000 And it could have been age related.

01:11:22.360 I'm sure it probably was because you're probably as return sensitive as I am now. Right.

01:11:25.760 Yeah. Yeah.

01:11:26.620 Let's go back to the creation of other habits that are not immediately rewarding because unfortunately

01:11:32.480 that again is in many ways, the mainstay of health habits. Now, some things that we want

01:11:40.880 people to do for health provide both short-term and long-term value. And it's easier for people

01:11:45.040 to anchor to the long-term value. So easy example of that would be, Hey, Sally, look, you're 30 pounds

01:11:50.280 overweight. And I have to be honest with you. I don't particularly care that you're 30 pounds

01:11:54.840 overweight from the standpoint of your weight, but you're also very insulin resistant as a result of

01:12:00.900 it. And I know that if you can lose 30 pounds, it's actually going to improve your health.

01:12:06.020 You're going to become more insulin sensitive. Your risk of diabetes, cancer, heart disease

01:12:09.220 is going to go down. This is what I care about. And Sally might say, yeah, I mean, in the abstract,

01:12:15.080 I agree with all of that, Peter, but look, I'm only 30 years old. What I really care about is being

01:12:19.300 30 pounds lighter. So I look great in a bathing suit. And so here you have a situation where both

01:12:25.720 I can, and the patient can care about the same outcome, but for different reasons. And there's a

01:12:32.620 great overlap, which is great. The way we're going to address this is we're going to make these

01:12:36.260 changes in your diet, these changes in your exercise. And there's a win for both of us,

01:12:41.020 because in six months, you're going to have the body that you want to have. And I'm going to have

01:12:46.300 the numbers I want to have to feel confident that your risk of chronic disease is down.

01:12:50.520 But for some things, it's very difficult to find the short-term win and you have to grind away at

01:12:57.000 doing something for a long period of time. Now I'll take a very simple example, which is taking

01:13:01.360 medication. It's not a huge ask, but you'd be amazed if you're not familiar with this,

01:13:06.920 you might already be familiar with the literature on compliance of medication use. It's shockingly

01:13:10.960 low. So let's take something that you don't even feel. So the medicine truly has no bearing on how

01:13:15.920 you feel, which is blood pressure medication. Even though the mainstay of therapy for blood

01:13:19.820 pressure is weight loss and exercise, elimination of sleep apnea and things like that, there's still a

01:13:25.160 sizable portion of the population that has what's called essential hypertension. And no matter how

01:13:29.060 much they fix their weight and they exercise, they just have hypertension. And if you don't fix it,

01:13:33.780 you're really setting them up for the risk of heart attack, stroke, and even Alzheimer's disease.

01:13:38.700 So I say, Charles, I really need you to take this medication and I need you to take it twice a day.

01:13:43.460 By the way, I'd also like it if you could check your blood pressure three times a week at home so

01:13:47.560 that I know it's working and do I need to adjust it up or down? Now, for whatever reason, I might be able

01:13:52.220 to get 50% of people to do that. How can I create a reward around that? What type of reward

01:13:58.980 would you envision?

01:14:00.460 Okay, so let's talk about what's been done because I think this is the key question and

01:14:04.120 it's a really interesting one. Afterwards, I want to ask you what you have done that you

01:14:07.200 found has worked. So one of the interesting things that's happened in the last five years

01:14:10.820 is that vitamin use has gone up significantly. More people are taking vitamins now than before.

01:14:15.580 And researchers have looked at why. And what they discovered was the big thing that changed

01:14:20.180 vitamin use is making them gummies because you can put a little bit of sugar on the exterior

01:14:25.420 of a gummy. So what they're doing is they're creating an immediate reward for eating that

01:14:29.460 vitamin. They're incentivizing the behavior. Let's take teeth brushing. There's a whole chapter

01:14:33.640 in Power of Habit about the history of tooth brushing because if you went back 100 years,

01:14:38.360 a little bit over 100 years, turn into the last century, what you saw is that there were tons

01:14:42.680 of toothpaste companies and almost nobody had a tooth brushing habit. And then this one guy comes

01:14:48.320 up with a formula for how to get people to brush their teeth. What he does is he adds a little

01:14:53.160 bit of mint to the toothpaste. So it makes your gums tingle when you use it. Now that's actually

01:14:58.940 a pain response. But what he's saying is when you brush your teeth, you're actually doing something

01:15:03.460 good. You can feel it working. You can feel it on your gums doing its job. You're protecting your

01:15:08.440 teeth. He's creating a positive reward even out of a pain response. So the number one thing we can do

01:15:13.560 is we can try and manufacture a short-term positive reinforcement, some type of positive reward

01:15:20.460 that's going to incentivize that behavior. That's not possible with everything. So the next thing

01:15:25.280 that we could do is we can work on people building a mental habit associated with that behavior

01:15:30.440 that does deliver a reward. So savings is a great example. Taking my heart medication.

01:15:35.520 So if I'm taking heart medication and it's kind of a pain, the pill's dry, it's like taking it with

01:15:40.840 fish oil. So it's like this.

01:15:42.180 Yeah, that's a great example.

01:15:43.900 And you get that like weird fish burp all day long. There's all these negative reinforcements.

01:15:48.100 So what do I do in order to incentivize that behavior? Every time I take that pill, I think

01:15:52.980 to myself, you know what? I'm going to be around for my grandkids. I'm creating a link

01:15:57.840 inside my head by exploring the why that gives me a positive reinforcement. I feel a sense of

01:16:02.540 responsibility. I'm a responsible person. I'm going to be there for my kids.

01:16:05.540 Now that strikes me as an exceptional intrinsic reward in the long run. Would you lead with that?

01:16:12.580 Absolutely.

01:16:12.900 Is that strong enough as an extrinsic out of the gate first 90 day version?

01:16:17.060 It's going to take willpower. The thing about rewards is that we usually have to experiment

01:16:20.980 with them because we're often very bad at anticipating how rewarding a reward is going

01:16:25.060 to be. There's some people who say, I'm going to go for a run and then I'm going to have

01:16:27.920 a kale smoothie. That's not a reward.

01:16:29.660 They don't realize how disgusting kale is.

01:16:30.920 It's disgusting. It's disgusting. Nobody wants that. That's why I put the peanut butter

01:16:34.020 in. So we have to experiment with rewards to try and figure out which reward is salient for

01:16:38.960 me. And for me, thinking about my kids, thinking like I'm a responsible dad, I'm taking

01:16:43.120 this pill, I'm doing it for my sons, I'm going to be there for them. That is a

01:16:46.880 very salient reward. For someone else, it might not be. And they have to find that thing.

01:16:50.880 And the way that we find it is we experiment with different rewards and we just see which

01:16:55.060 one sticks.

01:16:55.880 We're in this era of AI and AI chatbots and AI agents. You've already talked a lot about

01:17:02.180 how social reinforcement is huge. I go back to the experiment you described in South America,

01:17:08.340 40% increasing savings by simply having that woman there to just tell you what a good job

01:17:15.020 you were doing when you were saving. Is there a belief, has it been demonstrated that an

01:17:19.500 AI agent can be as rewarding as a human being?

01:17:23.200 So the research is so nascent on this. My latest book is actually about the science of

01:17:27.100 communication. And so this question of AI has come up a lot. And I also cover AI for

01:17:32.760 the New Yorker now. This question of whether an AI system can be as good a conversationalist

01:17:38.240 as another human. We don't really know. We're only two years into the generative AI

01:17:43.040 experiment. What we do know is that I can create a reward for myself that's built around

01:17:49.840 this ritualized behavior within AI. If I create that spreadsheet and I feel a sense of accomplishment

01:17:55.320 from filling it out, I can get the same sense of accomplishment by getting into a ritualized

01:17:59.700 behavior with AI. Hey, AI, you told me that I should run two miles today and I ran two miles.

01:18:04.280 We know that it's going to respond by saying, good job. You're doing a great job. You're

01:18:07.940 thinking about your health for the long term. Now, is the power there the AI system? Well,

01:18:13.980 the AI system can automate it. But the real question is, do I invest in the pride I feel

01:18:18.920 from being told that by an AI? And for some people, the answer is yes. For other people,

01:18:22.380 the answer is going to be no. So the answer to your question is, yeah, AI is great because

01:18:27.260 AI can help automate certain rewards. It can automate certain behaviors. But whether that reward

01:18:32.360 is salient to me, whether that behavior is salient to me really depends on me and I have the power

01:18:38.520 to choose. Yeah. I'm just trying to think that's really interesting because I know that, I mean,

01:18:44.480 I've already figured out ways to use AI as a reward for me and for my kids. Like how so?

01:18:50.980 So my boys and I love to just do Q&A sessions with chat GPT. Just go down the rabbit hole of,

01:19:04.480 okay, what is the most valuable baseball card ever sold? Okay. It's this one. Why? What was the PSA on

01:19:12.860 it? Okay. But why was Mickey Mantles worth less than Babe Ruth's or whatever?

01:19:17.060 Can I ask you a question about that? So all of those questions you could have just asked Google

01:19:21.240 before chat GPT, you could have just done a Google search. What is it about doing it with

01:19:26.220 chat GPT that feels more pleasurable to you? Great question. Now, of course, today you're

01:19:33.440 absolutely correct in that Google today is mostly powered off Gemini. If you're using the right

01:19:38.400 version of Google, you're actually getting Gemini to do the work and it's using a great version of

01:19:42.400 Gemini. My favorite thing I like to do with chat GPT or with Grok or whichever one, all the agents are

01:19:48.520 really good is I like to ask history questions because, you know, I was an engineer in college

01:19:53.240 and I was one of those guys who, even though I think in engineering school, you had the option

01:19:58.580 to take electives. I didn't take any, I just took more math. Interesting. So I kind of feel like

01:20:02.980 I didn't learn anything. I mean, I learned my craft, but I didn't learn about history.

01:20:08.100 And furthermore, because I grew up in Canada, I really know nothing about U.S. history.

01:20:12.600 Oh, that's interesting. So I didn't, I don't even have the equivalent of high school history.

01:20:15.840 So my U.S. history knowledge is not what I wish it was. And so when I'm talking to an AI,

01:20:23.220 it's like having a private tutor. Now that's assuming that the hallucinations aren't so bad.

01:20:28.720 Still, it's really exciting to say, can we talk about this part of the civil war? Like,

01:20:33.900 what was it about Gettysburg that was the turning point? And then ask really complex

01:20:38.840 questions. Like what would have happened if this had happened instead of that? And how pivotal was

01:20:44.420 this battle? And so, yes, that for me is like a drug sitting down, spending an hour talking with

01:20:52.040 a chat bot about that type of a topic. And also I think part of it is the talking it's, I can talk

01:20:57.940 and I can listen. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And so here's what I hear you saying and tell me if

01:21:01.760 I think this is right. There's sort of two rewards of this providing to you. The first is

01:21:05.900 you have a very personalized search engine. It's answering the question you're asking instead of

01:21:10.260 you having to like put a vague term in and try and figure out where the answers are. But number two,

01:21:15.340 it's mimicking, perhaps even authentically having a form of communication that we have been

01:21:20.680 habituated to that we enjoy a lot. When you and I are in conversation right now, and I'm sure you

01:21:26.460 know this, our bodies and our brains are changing to match each other. Our heart rates are matching

01:21:30.280 each other. Our breath patterns are matching each other. The neural activity in our brain. And

01:21:33.760 there's a guy named Yuri Hassan at Princeton who's done amazing research on this. Our brains are

01:21:38.100 looking more and more similar. And because our brains have evolved to be good at communication,

01:21:42.860 to be a pro-social species, we both feel a dopaminic response to that. We feel better. We feel good after

01:21:49.900 a good conversation. Now, if you're having a conversation with AI, do you have that same matching? Maybe,

01:21:55.840 maybe not. But we do know that I'm in the habit of feeling good when I have a good conversation.

01:22:01.660 Even if I'm having a good conversation with a chatbot, I'm going to get some of those glimmers

01:22:06.420 of the same great feeling I get from talking to Peter. And that's going to make that conversation

01:22:11.380 easier for me and more natural and feel more fun. Yeah. I think there has to be something there.

01:22:17.040 And I wonder if it is in how much it triggers the proximity to what is real. And I'll give you a silly

01:22:23.740 example of why I think there's something to that. With Chad CPT, you get to pick the voice you're

01:22:28.700 talking to. Oh, that's interesting. Right. And I've tried them all out, but there's, I don't

01:22:33.420 remember the name of the one I'm using, but it's a British guy. I don't know what it is about discussing

01:22:38.660 history with a British guy, especially when you get into World War II history. Like if you want to

01:22:42.540 talk about World War II history with an older British man, it's awesome. It's fantastic. I don't

01:22:47.920 think it would be nearly as enjoyable if I was talking about it with someone that didn't conjure up

01:22:52.220 whatever image of wisdom that I'm gleaning out of this. Some 16-year-old San Diego surf chick. 1.00

01:22:58.800 Yeah, exactly. Totally different experience. Yeah. Could be the exact same information,

01:23:03.180 but there's an auditory component to it that is lighting me up in a way.

01:23:06.700 And I think it's playing on old habits that you have. There's communication habits. I'm sure I

01:23:10.360 just feel exactly the same way that like you listen to someone with a British accent and you just think

01:23:14.960 they're smart. And by the way, I know lots of British journalists who like are not that smart.

01:23:19.680 Right, right. I know. It's the old Trump though, right? Like as Americans, we think like it's

01:23:24.460 metaphysically impossible to have a British accent and not be brilliant.

01:23:27.540 Yes. Yes. And it works every time and they use it to their advantage every time they come over to

01:23:31.620 the United States. But I think what's happening there is it's taking advantage of these mental

01:23:36.360 habits. And we've talked a lot about behavioral habits today, but most of the habits that exist in

01:23:43.440 our lives are mental habits. They're habits that we don't even recognize as habits because they're

01:23:50.040 happening inside our brain. And they are incredibly powerful. They make you believe that a chatbot is

01:23:56.140 more intelligent if it has a British accent than if it has a San Diego accent. These mental habits

01:24:00.720 make me believe that when someone cuts me off in traffic, a perfectly appropriate response is to

01:24:06.520 get angry, which does not benefit me, does not change the situation. I know that I should be zen

01:24:12.000 about it. It compels me to behave a certain way. So let's say more about that. Let's say more about

01:24:18.140 the mental habits. I read something the other day, which didn't surprise me one bit because anybody who

01:24:25.220 has meditated will know this. We have an average of, I believe, 47 thoughts per minute. Wow.

01:24:33.340 Almost one per second. If you don't meditate or you haven't spent some time doing mindfulness

01:24:39.540 meditation, you would think that's impossible. But if you've ever done the exercise of sitting

01:24:44.120 there, focusing on your breath, watching every single time you are distracted by a thought,

01:24:49.720 you'll be like, yep, I can believe it's 47 times a minute. That actually sounds small to me based on

01:24:53.920 my meditation. So we've got this crazy thing that is just a thought generating machine that we can't

01:24:59.780 control, but thoughts are not thinking. So what translates us from thoughts to thinking?

01:25:05.160 How do we form better habits or reformat maladaptive habits around that? You give a great example,

01:25:13.240 by the way, of the reaction to getting cut off, an anger reaction.

01:25:17.760 That's absolutely right. So the way that we can influence our mental habits is that we have to

01:25:23.020 deliberately choose to figure out what the cue is. And then we have to give ourselves a reward

01:25:27.640 afterwards. They operate by the same principle as behavioral habits or physical habits,

01:25:31.400 but it's a little bit more tricky. So oftentimes let's take innovation. Innovation is one of the,

01:25:36.860 a mental habit that's studied. Why do some people manage to innovate on demand much better than

01:25:43.600 others? We can all be innovative, but some people, they need the muse to strike. It takes them years.

01:25:48.260 And as other people, you walk in and you say, hey, look, I need 30 great ideas by tonight and they

01:25:51.820 can sit down and they knock them out. So what's happening there? When researchers have looked at the

01:25:56.480 lives of serial innovators, what they found is that the most important part of that is that oftentimes

01:26:03.540 the people who are really good at it have built up what's known as a contemplative routine

01:26:08.040 to spur that innovation. Now, these contemplative routines can be something like every week I sit

01:26:14.740 down and I reflect on all the good ideas I had last week, just for 30 minutes. And I try and think

01:26:21.600 of good ideas for next week. Or the contemplative routine can be whenever anyone asks me to come

01:26:27.200 up with 30 ideas, the first thing I do is I go take a walk. Then I just think about it in my head.

01:26:31.660 I'm not writing anything down. I'm not committing myself to anything. I'm just letting it percolate

01:26:34.720 a little bit. I have a routine that I know works for me to spark contemplation. Because when you think

01:26:41.200 about it, when it comes to mental routines and when it comes to mental habits and when it comes to

01:26:45.060 success, the most successful people throughout history are the people who can get themselves to

01:26:51.360 think most deeply. Making the right choice is so much more powerful than executing really well on

01:26:59.300 the wrong choice. So the question is, particularly in a fast-paced world like today, how do we get

01:27:04.540 ourselves to think more deeply? This is the killer app for our brain. And the way that we get ourselves

01:27:09.900 to think more deeply is to build these contemplative routines that we automatically fall into. Because

01:27:15.380 those contemplative routines push us to think more deeply. And I can give you an example of this if

01:27:20.260 you'd like. I described this in Smarter, Faster, Better. There was a plane, Qantas Flight 32, was a plane,

01:27:26.120 an Airbus A380 that took off from Singapore to Sydney in the early 2000s. Perfect takeoff. The captain

01:27:32.960 was a great captain. About 10 minutes into the flight, one of the fan blades and one of the jet engines

01:27:38.040 detaches, and it punches this enormous hole in the wing. It also hits another fan blade,

01:27:44.000 and that fan blade explodes. And it was like the shrapnel from a bomb going off inside the plane

01:27:48.460 wing. So within about 12 seconds, there's 14 major systems that are needed to keep a plane aloft.

01:27:54.120 Within about 12 seconds, 12 of those systems had gone offline. No hydraulics, no fuel, no measurements

01:28:01.920 on anything. So the captain, a guy named Richard Dukrebny, he has to figure out how to land this plane

01:28:07.200 safely. This is the worst mid-air mechanical disaster in modern aviation. So what does he do

01:28:11.900 at that moment? What he does at that moment is there's all these alarms going off inside the

01:28:16.660 cockpit. There's all these red flashing things on his board. The computer is telling him, you have to

01:28:21.080 do these 10 things. And as soon as you do those 10 things, you have to do five more things. You have

01:28:24.140 to do 13 more things. What he does is he takes his hands off the controls for a second. He closes his

01:28:29.820 eyes and he says to himself, I'm telling myself a story about the plane that I'm flying. And the story in my

01:28:36.680 head is the Airbus A380. And it's really complicated because I have to think about fuel lines. I have

01:28:42.720 to think about hydraulics. I have to think about brakes. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going

01:28:46.080 to change the story inside my head. I'm going to change the mental model that I'm using on where

01:28:49.780 to focus. And I'm going to pretend I'm flying a Cessna. Now a Cessna is the plane that he learned

01:28:54.900 to fly on. It's the plane he feels most comfortable in. And he actually sort of announces this to air

01:28:59.760 traffic control and to his other pilots. And they freak out because they're like, why is this guy

01:29:03.680 talking about flying a Cessna? He's in an Airbus A380. But that moment of contemplation allowed

01:29:09.100 him to access that muscle memory, those habits of flying. And he lands the plane safely. They

01:29:15.580 touch down. All 469 passengers get off. About half an hour later, there's not one injury on

01:29:20.980 board. Now they've tried to recreate this landing again and again in simulators almost every single

01:29:26.340 time it crashes. So what did Richard Dukrebny do differently? Why was he able to land that plane?

01:29:31.220 And I've asked him. And what he'll tell you is he'll tell you,

01:29:33.680 he actually doesn't know or remember exactly what he did in the moment.

01:29:37.600 But by changing that mental model in his head, by engaging in this contemplative routine,

01:29:42.160 which felt supernatural to him to say, I need to be in charge here. I need to stop reacting.

01:29:46.720 I'm going to choose to pretend I'm flying a Cessna. That unlocked all of these learned habits

01:29:53.740 of safe flying that allowed him to land that plane.

01:29:56.880 Tell me more about him outside of the airplane. What kind of a man was he? What were his

01:30:03.400 past times? This story is so impossible to imagine that I can't believe he's a normal

01:30:10.660 guy.

01:30:11.880 So he's not a normal guy. He was trained to fly by the Australian military, Australian

01:30:17.140 Air Force. And anyone who's learned to fly in the military, they know that a huge part of

01:30:22.740 it is learning technical skills, but a huge part of it is also learning these mental habits,

01:30:26.060 these mental skills. And in particular, learning how to train your focus based on building mental

01:30:31.980 models. And the way that a mental model works is as we go through life, everything we do,

01:30:36.760 there's a little story inside our head that we're telling ourselves. And our brain is comparing that

01:30:41.820 story to what's actually happening to help us figure out what to pay attention to. There's so much that I

01:30:47.980 could pay attention to right here, right? There's bright lights, there's your expressions,

01:30:50.840 there's a camera, there's wood paneling. I need to figure out where to actually focus.

01:30:56.660 And so what my brain does is it creates a mental model where it says the story of right now is that

01:31:01.440 I'm having a conversation with Peter. So I'm going to focus on Peter. I'm going to be very, very attuned

01:31:07.140 if something changes unexpectedly in your demeanor and very unattuned if something changes outside to

01:31:13.420 the light, because it doesn't matter to me right now. So when you're learning to fly in the military,

01:31:17.280 they tell you, be really deliberate about how not only you build mental models, but how you

01:31:22.420 challenge your mental models. And so the morning before that flight, before Qantas flight 32 took

01:31:27.420 off, Richard DeCrebny did this thing that he did before every single flight. He's in the shuttle from

01:31:33.900 the hotel to the airport and he turns to his co-pilots and he says, because he's the captain, he says,

01:31:39.540 what's the first words out of your mouth if we lose engine two? Where are your eyes going to go

01:31:43.200 first? Where are they going to go second? What are you going to do with your hands? If we lose

01:31:47.260 engine three, how are your words going to change? In other words, what he's doing is he's saying,

01:31:52.200 tell me a story about how we will react if there is an emergency. And if you listen to the cockpit

01:31:59.180 recordings from when that hole appeared in the wing, what you hear is you hear all these pilots

01:32:03.820 talking to each other in calm, collected voices. There's not an ounce of panic in their voice. It's

01:32:09.700 as if they had practiced this a thousand times because of course they had. They had practiced it in

01:32:13.980 those rides from airports or in the simulator. But that's not the only thing that DeCrebny did.

01:32:19.180 The thing that made DeCrebny special is that when he would ask his co-pilots to tell him those

01:32:23.960 stories, he would argue with them. That's what you're going to say first after engine two. Why

01:32:28.340 are you going to say that? Why shouldn't we say this? You're going to move your hands left and then

01:32:32.760 right. Let's talk about like, why not right? And why not left? He was in the habit of challenging

01:32:38.800 his own mental models and other people's mental models. And that challenge is what allowed him

01:32:44.500 in the panic of that moment. Imagine you're flying a plane and all of a sudden all your alarms light

01:32:49.620 up. It's so easy to become reactive. It's so easy to fall into just, I'm going to do what the

01:32:54.300 computer's telling me. I'm not going to think about this. I'm not going to challenge the story

01:32:58.220 inside my head, but he's in the habit because he practices it with other people of challenging not

01:33:03.780 only their stories, but his story. What fraction of pilots are behaving that way?

01:33:10.300 Particularly military trained, a huge fraction. Now there's a really interesting study,

01:33:14.820 particularly out of South Korea, that in some cultures, there's too much deference given to the

01:33:20.400 captain. And so as a result, they're engaging in less challenging of each other's mental models.

01:33:24.900 And there's been a lot of interventions to try and change that.

01:33:28.060 The tragedy on Canary Island, if I recall, there was a KLM flight and it was

01:33:33.640 the KLM flight that was at fault. Everybody I think died on that flight. It was a similar issue,

01:33:39.280 wasn't there? Where the captain who was there, if I'm not mistaken, he was the most impressive

01:33:45.600 captain in their entire fleet. But a similar situation was not heeding the input from less

01:33:52.180 senior people in the cockpit. That's exactly right. And sometimes there's an Air France flight. I don't

01:33:56.700 know if you remember, it was from- Brazil.

01:33:58.720 Brazil. Yeah. And so we have the cockpit recording of what happened there. And if you listen to it,

01:34:03.640 there was nothing wrong with the plane the entire time. It was that the pilots became what's known

01:34:08.920 as tunnel focus. All I do is I pay attention to the most obvious inputs and I stopped challenging

01:34:15.060 that story in my head of what's going on. So they actually caused the plane to stall and then it fell

01:34:19.580 into the ocean. It happens all the time.

01:34:21.720 So have you interviewed Sully Sullenberger?

01:34:24.460 No. So it's interesting. I spent a lot of time talking to Richard Dukrebny and me and Sully

01:34:28.540 share a speaking agent. They're both very similar. These guys are engineers, engineers. Like you talk

01:34:35.240 to Dukrebny, he's not a guy you'd go have a beer with. He is really difficult to talk to. First of

01:34:40.360 all, he believes there's a process for everything and there's a right answer and there's a wrong

01:34:44.180 answer. And when I bring something up, he'll be like, nope, you got that exactly wrong. Let me tell

01:34:47.940 you where you got it wrong. This instinct to challenge mental models is so ingrained in him that

01:34:53.720 comes out all the time. And they actually have this expression in the Australian air community,

01:34:58.260 and that might be in the US too, that when someone's a really good pilot, they're known

01:35:01.980 as an asshole pilot because they're so uptight. They're such an asshole. They challenge everything

01:35:07.320 you say. They're always picking a fight with you about whether you're doing the right thing.

01:35:10.640 That guy's an asshole, but he's a great pilot as a result. It means you don't want to have a beer

01:35:15.220 with him, but you definitely want him flying your plane.

01:35:18.200 Super interesting. What are some less dramatic examples of how this manifests?

01:35:23.720 In the lives of those of us who don't carry in our hands, the lives of 400 passengers.

01:35:30.180 So let me ask you a question. So what do you do to get ready for each week?

01:35:34.100 A process you go through or what is it that you do?

01:35:37.920 Every Friday afternoon, I make a list of everything I'm going to accomplish on Saturday and Sunday.

01:35:44.940 And every Sunday I make a list of everything I'm going to accomplish Monday through Friday.

01:35:50.200 So I have two lists, a five-day week list and a two-day weekend list.

01:35:55.000 And they include the most important things that have to be done. Now, not things that are automatic.

01:36:00.600 So I don't write my workouts and stuff because those are kind of on cruise control, but it can be

01:36:06.000 anything as mundane as got to go to Dick's Sporting Goods and get a set of baseballs.

01:36:11.540 The old baseballs are getting beat up. Need to finish working on this newsletter. Need to prepare

01:36:16.320 for this podcast. Need to take my daughter here. It's just basically, it's how I kind of organize

01:36:22.560 the blocks of the week.

01:36:24.100 And why does that feel good to you? You would end up taking your daughter anyways. You'd probably

01:36:27.200 see the baseballs and be like, oh, that's right. I got to go to Dick's. There's something about that

01:36:30.120 list. That's a contemplative routine for you. What reward is it providing?

01:36:33.360 Well, I am someone who, it's weird, and this has always been the case, even in school, high school.

01:36:40.360 I really enjoy checklists and I enjoy checking things off a list. There is a dopamine hit that

01:36:47.140 I am getting. Absolutely. I have a box and I write what I'm going to do. And then if it's in progress,

01:36:53.420 it gets a single line through the box. And then when it's fully done, it gets the X through the box.

01:36:58.200 I love that.

01:36:58.800 So for example, if one of the things was connect with Charles this weekend. Okay.

01:37:03.920 Let's say I call you tomorrow and we talk for five minutes, but then you have to run.

01:37:11.060 I would put us half slash through it, which is all right. We partially connected,

01:37:14.320 but we haven't fully connected. So I know that I still have to come back to it and connect with

01:37:18.260 you. And if I don't, then it goes on the next list of the week or something like that.

01:37:21.520 So here's what I love about that. There's a need for cognitive closure that all of us feel.

01:37:26.000 The research on people who'd make to-do lists find that 60% of people when they're writing a to-do

01:37:30.780 list will write down something they have already completed because it feels so good to check it off.

01:37:35.800 So I used to do that.

01:37:37.420 Okay.

01:37:37.720 I stopped doing it about 20 years ago, but I did. I used to take great pride in sneaking

01:37:43.400 in a couple wins out of the gate.

01:37:45.420 So what you've done, that need for cognitive closure, it can push us to like do the laundry

01:37:50.000 when we don't need to do the laundry because we just want to feel some sense of accomplishment.

01:37:53.740 You have actually redirected it through a cognitive routine to be a very positive influence in your

01:37:58.200 life. I'm going to create the goals that I actually want to accomplish. I'm going to create

01:38:02.260 a system where I can satisfy that need for cognitive closure, and I'm going to have a tracking device in

01:38:07.060 order to do it. The reason why that's useful is because you have a routine around it. You have this

01:38:11.440 cognitive routine that on Friday afternoons, you're doing the weekend list. On Sunday, you're

01:38:16.160 doing the week ahead list. For me, my cognitive routine is every day when I come home from work,

01:38:21.220 I tell my wife about my day in excruciating detail, and she is bored to death by it. She does not care

01:38:28.080 how this interview went or what came out of this meeting, but I'm not doing it for her. I'm doing

01:38:32.760 it for me because as I'm describing my day, I'm paying attention to this went well. Why did it go well?

01:38:39.080 This didn't go as well. What do I need to do differently next time? I have a cognitive routine

01:38:44.100 of describing my day to my wife that provides me with a dividend.

01:38:48.040 Does she understand that?

01:38:49.160 Oh, absolutely. She tunes me out. She doesn't pay any attention. She knows that I'm describing the

01:38:53.420 day for my benefit, and she does the same thing to me, and I kind of tune out sometimes what she's

01:38:58.100 saying about her day.

01:38:59.320 Interesting. You know, it's funny. I sometimes worry that I'm too rigid in having these lists,

01:39:05.640 and that, especially the weekend list, maybe would my life be better off without it? And even though

01:39:12.080 I would have to give up some productivity, would I be less wed? Because sometimes I get a little

01:39:16.900 dogmatic.

01:39:17.620 Yeah.

01:39:17.940 Right?

01:39:18.320 We get up tight. We feel bad.

01:39:19.540 Yeah. I get up on Sunday and I'm like, dude, you didn't get much done yesterday. You've loaded

01:39:23.440 the deck for today.

01:39:24.660 Yeah. I think that's a really good instinct, and I think it's worth experimenting with.

01:39:28.540 One of the things that we know, so the way that I write articles for The New Yorker

01:39:32.140 is historically, and I do this with books too, I will write an outline that's almost

01:39:36.640 as long as the article itself, just to make sure I understand them.

01:39:39.760 In bullet point?

01:39:40.680 No, actually in a narrative to my editor.

01:39:42.580 In prose?

01:39:42.600 Okay.

01:39:42.920 Yeah. I write a letter to my editor. I do all the reporting, and then I put it aside,

01:39:46.740 and I just write my editor a letter saying, this is what I think I'm going to say.

01:39:50.520 And it's easier because the stakes are very low, and I don't have to return to the reporting.

01:39:54.220 If I get something wrong, it's okay. And that's worked really well for me, particularly

01:39:58.100 in writing books and writing long-form pieces. But I do think it's impacted negatively my creativity.

01:40:04.320 There's something about having more options and having that sense of risk that sometimes

01:40:10.540 pushes you to figure out how to say something in a new way, or pushes you to figure out how

01:40:15.400 to say something in a kind of fun way that didn't occur to you before. And so I play a lot

01:40:20.540 with rigidity and freedom in trying to find that right balance. And my guess is that you

01:40:27.800 do too in many of the things you do. I know that intellectually you do. Like I listened

01:40:31.060 to the show, and there's some questions that you ask that you ask everyone. And there's

01:40:35.780 some lines of inquiry you go down that are clearly like the right line of inquiry. But

01:40:39.720 then sometimes you ask a question that comes out of nowhere, or you ask something that's

01:40:42.800 kind of unexpected that causes the guests to say something they didn't anticipate they

01:40:45.820 were going to say. I think intellectually, you're engaging in that same exploration versus

01:40:50.560 exploitation process that's at the core of all information gathering.

01:40:55.820 I want to go back to this contemplative routine idea, because the first thing that came to my

01:41:00.140 mind when you described it is going back to something that Ryan Holiday wrote about the

01:41:06.900 stillness is the key. Have you read that book?

01:41:08.740 Yeah. And I'm a huge fan of Ryan. I think he's great.

01:41:10.980 Obviously, Ryan has written more books than I can count, but that is my favorite. Stillness

01:41:15.800 is the key is my favorite. It's the one I've gifted the most. It's a book I go back to. I'm

01:41:21.280 actually due to reread it. It's probably been two years since I last read it. So I'm due to reread

01:41:25.180 it. And it's something that my brother does so well. My brother, his superpower is making

01:41:32.500 stillness time. He's very disciplined about this. He is very disciplined about time to think.

01:41:41.700 Tell me how he does that. Like, tell me a little bit more. If I was watching him, what would

01:41:44.540 it look like? Well, you would actually think at the surface, it's quite selfish. He'll say

01:41:49.960 for the next two hours, he'll tell his wife and his kids, I need to be left completely alone.

01:41:56.240 And I need to go for a walk with no phone, with no anything. I'm going to walk in the fields. He lives

01:42:03.020 on a farm and he's like, and I'm going to just be with my thoughts and with nothing else. And then I can

01:42:11.840 come back and do my best work. But he forces that in. And I think I am convinced that all of us could

01:42:20.720 do better work if we did that. And yet I struggle to do it. There's a bit of a trap that I fall into,

01:42:27.260 which is, yeah, but think about how much more I could get done in those two hours.

01:42:31.260 Yeah.

01:42:31.420 Like I don't have the two hours to be still.

01:42:33.360 Right. So Cal Newport has done a lot of work on this. One of the mistakes that we make,

01:42:37.960 and this is just a cognitive heuristic that we fall into, is that we look at some types of

01:42:43.580 activities as being unproductive because they don't yield immediate dividends.

01:42:48.560 This actually is part of the whole habit system.

01:42:50.680 It absolutely is. It's about building those habits to recognize deep productivity, deep work.

01:42:55.840 And so one of the things that I'm sure it happens to me, I'm sure it happens to you,

01:42:58.660 is that I say, if I could take a walk in the woods for two hours, what do I have to show for it?

01:43:05.360 Whereas if I sit down and I pound through these emails for two hours, my inbox is half the size

01:43:10.140 it used to be. It feels really like an accomplishment. Now, of course, all that does

01:43:13.680 is create more emails for me. And it turns out half of those I could have ignored. So what I need to do

01:43:18.760 is I need to train my brain. And my brain oftentimes doesn't believe me. I know intellectually

01:43:24.520 taking that walk in the woods is going to yield dividends that I'm going to be able to do

01:43:28.320 better work. But my brain, there's a part of my brain that looks at my stated preferences,

01:43:33.200 what I believe and want to be true. And another part of my brain that looks at revealed preferences.

01:43:38.480 How do I actually behave? And that revealed part of my brain is saying,

01:43:41.800 you never take walks. You always sit down and do your email. You must think that doing email is

01:43:46.960 more valuable than taking a walk. So I have to convince myself, convince that revealed preference

01:43:51.900 is part of my brain. No, the walk is really good. If I take this walk, I'm going to get more work

01:43:56.300 done. I'm going to be able to get through those emails faster because I'm going to hit delete on

01:43:59.100 more of them. This actually is a productivity enhancer. We have to hack our own brains sometimes.

01:44:05.980 We have to remind ourself of a reward. Oftentimes the salience of a reward increases simply because

01:44:11.740 we tell ourselves it is a reward. And we have to take advantage of that to try and sometimes play

01:44:17.920 with our own brain because we'll act sometimes in not our best interests.

01:44:21.620 What do you think is the relationship then between productivity and habit? How implicit and

01:44:29.460 how explicit is it? So I think it's huge. I think it's huge, but let me be very clear how I mean that

01:44:34.620 because oftentimes the things that we do out of habit are not the productive things, but our habits can set

01:44:42.060 us up to be productive. As I mentioned before, the most important element of productivity is deep

01:44:49.780 thought because making the right choice, making the right decision, spending my time on the right

01:44:55.260 task right now yields many more dividends than simply getting something done. It's the difference

01:45:00.280 between productivity and busyness. So the question is, how do I set myself up to make better choices?

01:45:06.860 Well, the way that I do that is I build habits that give me not only the time and space to make a

01:45:12.560 choice, but the prompt to make a choice. Because there's a lot of times that I'm going to avoid making a

01:45:16.740 choice if I can. My brain doesn't like making choices. It costs energy. It feels like it's

01:45:20.900 depleting me. So my brain is going to say, oh, you walked in the cafeteria. Don't get the salad. Just

01:45:24.960 get the sandwich you get every single time. You know, it's going to, you're going to like it.

01:45:27.800 So how do I build a habit that allows me the space to make that choice and the prompt to make that

01:45:33.400 choice? That's why habits are so important is not because they make us productive. It's because they

01:45:38.880 allow us to be productive. Say more about the decision fatigue, because I think that's something that

01:45:44.740 many people listening to us right now can relate to. I have become much more aware of it in myself

01:45:51.280 recently. And I don't think it's age related per se. I think it's just complexity related. So the more

01:45:58.200 things you're juggling, the more I find myself unable to make simple decisions. And it's like,

01:46:05.900 I can't tell you how internally frustrated I get sometimes when I'm asked to make decisions.

01:46:12.640 So there's two things happening there and you're exactly right. Decision fatigue is real. We've seen

01:46:17.980 it in actually at this point, hundreds of studies that the more decisions you have to make in a day,

01:46:22.600 the more fatigued you get. There's some elements that play into this. The first is structuring

01:46:27.400 decision design. So president Obama, in one interview, he said that the most important habit

01:46:31.840 that he developed when he was president is he bought 12 of the same suits and shirts. So every

01:46:37.500 morning when he woke up, he knew exactly what he's going to put on. There's no other options in his

01:46:42.180 closet. He just has to grab one of them. And he said, the reason why is because the day was so

01:46:48.380 exhausting with decisions and each of the decisions he made was so important that he had to preserve

01:46:54.140 his ability to make decisions and avoid that fatigue. So the first thing is how do we design

01:46:59.900 our decisions so that we're only having to make the important ones and we're making the less

01:47:05.700 important ones automatic things where we don't have to make a choice. The second thing that happens

01:47:09.820 is that decisions are harder to make in a hot state than they are in a cold state. So if you're

01:47:16.200 hungry and you go into the cafeteria, it's going to be a lot harder for you to choose that really

01:47:22.080 healthy salad over that really tasty sandwich because you're in a hot state. Now in a cold state

01:47:28.740 that morning, when you just had breakfast, if you say my implementation intention is I'm going to eat

01:47:32.900 a salad today. When I walk in, I know which salad I'm going to get. It's a lot easier to make that

01:47:36.860 decision. So here's what I think is happening. Number one, you don't have a mental heuristic in

01:47:41.320 place to say, I'm going to curate the decisions I have to make. And you probably do now, but like

01:47:46.200 the first time it comes up, you don't have the heuristic. And the heuristic is when my wife 1.00

01:47:49.740 asked me where to go to dinner, I'm just going to choose one of them. I'm not even going to like

01:47:52.920 think about like, which one is the best one. I'm just going to choose one. So I'm going to create

01:47:56.700 a decision structure for myself that allows me to focus on the most important decisions and ignore

01:48:01.040 the smaller ones. Secondly, I'm going to ask her not to ask me to make that decision at the end of

01:48:06.040 the day when I'm exhausted and I've been making choices all day long. Yeah. I'm going to say,

01:48:10.660 look, I'm in a hot state right now. I can't think about where to go to dinner. I'm thinking about

01:48:14.020 other stuff. But if you ask me two hours from now, after I've had a beer and I've started watching TV,

01:48:19.020 I think I'll be ready to answer that question. You're so right that that's the obvious answer.

01:48:24.120 And yet you feel, or at least I feel like, how can I not be more gracious? Oh, right. Like I feel

01:48:30.760 embarrassed that I would have to say that and obnoxious. Absolutely. But it's true of everybody

01:48:37.040 in my life. Sometimes my assistant will email me and say, we're having an offsite and can you pick

01:48:42.880 your lunch? And I'm like, I can't. And it sounds silly, but like if it comes through on text, it's

01:48:47.640 even more debilitating. Yeah. Cause then I have to click the menu and see the menu and it's like a

01:48:52.800 restaurant. And I'm like, I wish you could read my mind and you knew what I wanted. I don't want to

01:48:58.400 have to do this. It's very Canadian of you that you feel a sense of guilt around telling someone

01:49:02.800 you can't make the choice right now. Part of our brain, particularly for successful people,

01:49:07.140 everyone listening to this podcast, you and I, when we are successful, our self-definition

01:49:12.220 becomes rooted in success instead of failure. We are the type of people who have been successful

01:49:18.180 because we make good decisions. And so we beat up on ourselves when we can't make a decision. We

01:49:23.040 beat up on ourselves when we have a human frailty or a human weakness. But you know this from

01:49:27.760 training athletes, the key is not to not have frailnesses. The key is to recognize your

01:49:33.860 frailnesses, plan for them and strengthen your behavior around the frailness. Every single one

01:49:39.640 of us makes bad decisions. And if our self-definition is I'm someone who like, every time everyone asks

01:49:45.840 me a question, I can give them the right answer. Then we're setting ourselves up for failure.

01:49:50.220 It's been 12 years since you wrote what is, I think, arguably the most authoritative text

01:49:56.380 on habit creation. How much have you stayed up to date on the science of habit? And if so,

01:50:03.320 how much has changed in the last 12 years? If you were to rewrite that book today,

01:50:08.140 what are two or three things that you think might be different or that were just outright missing?

01:50:14.000 I've tried to keep very current on the literature around it. And the fundamentals haven't changed.

01:50:19.720 The fundamentals have been true for thousands of years about a cue, a routine, and a reward,

01:50:23.520 how our brain works and forms habits. What has changed is our understanding of how much influence

01:50:30.160 we can have over those cues and rewards by influencing our environment. So I'll mention

01:50:34.840 another author, David Epstein. Wonderful. He's a wonderful writer.

01:50:37.620 I had him on the podcast six, seven years ago.

01:50:39.420 Yeah, he's great. He's great. And he talks a lot about current research, looking at environments where

01:50:46.300 we have a lack of resources and environments where we have a lot of resources. And environments where we

01:50:51.540 have a lack of resources oftentimes produce better outcomes, but not all resources are created equal.

01:50:57.760 If I tell you, you have a time limit on coming up with a new idea and your time limit is five minutes,

01:51:02.760 that's not going to be helpful. But if I tell you, Peter, you can't spend more than two days on this,

01:51:07.440 that is helpful. So what we're learning a lot about is how to use constraints, how to create what are

01:51:12.680 known as wicked environments where the feedback is ambiguous. It takes a long time to arrive and it's

01:51:20.920 not being delivered in a social context versus helpful contexts or good contexts where the feedback

01:51:28.800 is immediate. It's very, very clear. And it's being delivered to me oftentimes in a social context,

01:51:34.480 which reinforces it. We're learning a lot about how these different environments influence our ability

01:51:41.060 to act in different ways. And this is at the core of behavioral economics. We've known for a long

01:51:46.700 time that the decision architecture matters, that environment matters. But what we're learning is we

01:51:51.800 can get much more precise. So if I was writing the power of habit today, one of the things that I would

01:51:56.000 include is a chapter on thinking much more deliberately about your environment, not just I'm going to put

01:52:03.580 apples on my desk so that when I have a craving to eat something, I eat one of those apples instead of a

01:52:08.000 donut in the break room. But also, I'm going to structure my day so that I make my most important

01:52:13.060 decisions in the morning because I know that that's when my decision making is strongest. I'm

01:52:17.360 going to structure my day so that I go and I take a walk in the afternoon because I know that if I do

01:52:21.660 that, I'm going to do better work that evening. I think that one of the things that we are learning

01:52:25.480 is our environments matter much more than we thought they did. And it's worth paying attention to that.

01:52:30.140 Do we have a greater sense of appreciation for the social component today than we did then?

01:52:35.600 Obviously, it was strong and well understood then, but it almost seems to me that, and I don't know

01:52:40.780 if it's just coincident with social media, but we just understand the power of social influence.

01:52:47.420 And that's actually one of the reasons I wrote Super Communicators is because what I came to

01:52:51.720 realize is that when we focus on habits, we tend to focus on ourselves. But most of our most important

01:52:57.260 work, both for ourselves and professionally, is work that we do in conjunction with others.

01:53:02.520 The value of my life and your life is largely based on the conversations we have with our

01:53:07.720 spouses and our kids. That's whether we feel good or bad. And so what I realized is by focusing

01:53:12.300 on habits exclusively, I'm missing this incredibly important part of what makes people successful

01:53:17.220 and happy, which is how do we interact with other people? We are living in a golden age of

01:53:22.660 understanding communication like never before because of advances in neural imaging and data

01:53:26.960 collection. We can see inside people's brains as they're having a conversation. We know what's

01:53:31.700 happening there. And we're learning in a tremendous amount about what kinds of social reinforcement

01:53:36.720 are positive and which kinds aren't and which kinds are powerful, more powerful than other kinds.

01:53:42.540 So I'm not going to ask you if you're working on another book, because I know you might not want

01:53:46.880 to talk about it, but you're always in a state of learning. Is there something that is brewing

01:53:51.660 as the next evolution in your thinking?

01:53:53.640 Yeah. And in fact, I'll tell you what the next book I want to write and invite listeners to reach out

01:53:57.600 to me if you think there's something I should know about. So I think AI is really, really interesting

01:54:02.320 and really, really important. Now, I'm not one of those guys, and I interview a lot of these guys,

01:54:06.880 who says AI is going to change every single part of life. It's going to revolutionize everything.

01:54:10.960 I think there's a lot of humanness that's really important to us. But I do think that AI has the same

01:54:17.400 potential that the first industrial revolution and the second industrial revolution had, that the wide

01:54:22.460 adoption of the internet had. And what's interesting to me is if you look at the history of nonfiction

01:54:28.460 literature, what you see is that there were these moments of real discovery, and someone wrote a book

01:54:35.400 that explained to us how to think about it. One of my favorite examples is The Right Stuff.

01:54:39.840 Many people have seen the movie. The book is fantastic. It's written by Tom Wolfe. It's an amazing book.

01:54:45.440 And what he's really writing about is he's not writing about the science of the Apollo missions.

01:54:50.220 He's writing about the psychology of the people who are designing those rockets and are getting on

01:54:56.400 those rockets. His basic question is, what kind of a person is willing to strap themselves to a rocket

01:55:02.100 before we knew that this was safe and easy and send themselves into space before we knew we could

01:55:07.500 survive there? Why? Why is someone willing to do that? Why are people competing for the opportunity

01:55:12.160 to do that? And he found a lot of interesting answers. That's what I'm wondering right now about AI.

01:55:16.740 And we might be a little bit too early in the process to really have any conventional wisdom

01:55:21.980 or takeaways. Why do some people see the world differently in a way that allows them to develop

01:55:28.140 these generative AI systems and other AI systems that are so potentially transformative? And most

01:55:33.480 importantly, how will it change how the rest of us think? How will it change our definition of self?

01:55:39.320 How will it change how we work? Those are really interesting questions. So that's what I'm hoping to

01:55:43.280 write about in the next book. And I think there's probably going to be a lot of lessons in it

01:55:46.120 about how we ought to behave.

01:55:49.380 What do you think about the importance of purpose to our species?

01:55:54.180 I think it's incredibly important. And here we get like a little mystical, right? Because

01:55:58.500 we don't know why purpose seems to light up so many parts of our brain, but we know that it does.

01:56:05.200 We need a why. That story that's inside our head, that mental model that tells us what to pay

01:56:10.640 attention to and what to do next. We are a storytelling species. We look for correlative

01:56:17.280 links in life. I told this one funny joke. And so the girl fell in love with me. I started running

01:56:23.460 every single day. And then, you know, I got in better shape and I was able to give up smoking.

01:56:28.580 That might be correlation and not causation, but we look for those causal links. We want them to exist.

01:56:34.240 We make sense of the world by telling ourselves a story about the world. At the core of most stories

01:56:39.280 is the why. Why is the knight getting on his horse and going to fight the dragon?

01:56:44.580 There's got to be some reason for it. There's got to be some motivation. He wants to win the hand of

01:56:47.820 the princess. Why do you remain faithful to your spouse? There's temptations all around.

01:56:54.240 Our biology tells us that we should probably not be faithful, but there's a why there that's at the

01:57:00.020 core of our story. And the reason why that story is so important is because it's our self-identity.

01:57:04.240 It is how we make sense of ourself as an individual in this world. And if we had to reinvent our

01:57:10.840 self-identity every morning, it would be exhausting. That's actually what schizophrenia is.

01:57:15.360 One of the contemporary ways of looking at schizophrenia is that it's someone who has

01:57:19.660 biochemically a more difficult time telling themselves a consistent story from day to day.

01:57:25.440 And it's awful. And so the purpose, that why is so important because it grounds us in our story

01:57:33.040 and that tells us who we are. So many of the stories then about AI's power and potential is that

01:57:41.300 many of us will not be necessary from a, at least a work perspective. And so let's just assert that

01:57:49.080 there's some truth to this. And again, I would put myself and my career near the top of the list of

01:57:53.600 things that could be outdone. So what do we make of a world in which many people no longer have a

01:58:00.900 professional why? Is it something that could be substituted with a personal why? In other words,

01:58:06.760 is there a world in which I'm no longer necessary in any way, shape or form for any of the things I do?

01:58:13.080 AI will do a better job at podcasting. AI will do a better job at doctoring. AI will do a better job

01:58:18.080 at everything I do. My kids will be too old to need me as a parent. I'll become so obsessed with chess

01:58:24.780 that that will become my why. Does that work?

01:58:27.540 What I would suggest is two things. We've always had this concern. There's always been this concern

01:58:31.260 that each technological leap forward will mean that work disappears and it's never come true.

01:58:36.380 It just means that work changes.

01:58:38.100 Changes, right.

01:58:38.700 The second thing I would argue is you're already there. I mean, look, at this point,

01:58:42.860 you don't need to work for the paycheck.

01:58:44.580 No, that's my point.

01:58:45.220 Yeah. You've got enough money.

01:58:46.360 But I still choose to work.

01:58:47.140 You choose to work. You call it work, but it's also stuff that you would probably do in your

01:58:51.760 spare time, even if it was uncompensated, even if you thought of it as fun.

01:58:55.920 I enjoy this.

01:58:56.740 You don't take ads for this podcast. You have made a decision. This is a hobby for you.

01:59:01.840 Very impactful, very successful hobby, but it's not work, but you define it as work. You feel a sense

01:59:07.580 of obligation to it because it fulfills a purpose for you. I am not worried about AI spreading

01:59:14.300 and us losing our ability to create purpose.

01:59:17.960 Is that a contrarian view or do you think most people would share that view? And I ask that not

01:59:21.800 knowing the answer.

01:59:22.520 I think if you were in Silicon Valley, it would be a contrarian view, but I will say a lot of the

01:59:26.820 people who work on AI, they are not very close to normal life. They're not living the lives that

01:59:32.200 you and I live. And so I think they're possibly rightfully worried about issues that you and I don't

01:59:37.600 worry about quite as much. I would say among the broader population, particularly among scholars,

01:59:42.540 my view is more in the mainstream, that there's a recognition that this hand wringing over losing

01:59:48.120 the need for work has always existed with us. Elevator operators. Basically, elevators have

01:59:53.740 been taken over by AI, really dumb AI, but like it's an AI. It used to be that every elevator you

01:59:58.520 got on, there had to be someone there who stopped it at the right floor. There are not people walking

02:00:03.040 around right now who say like, ah, man, if I could only be an elevator operator, my life would be so

02:00:07.520 much better because they found something else to do. They found something that was equally

02:00:12.600 meaningful to them. Our human ability to find purpose and manufacture purpose and create purpose

02:00:18.700 is infinite. And as we move into a new world with different technological challenges and different

02:00:24.180 technological opportunities, we will find that purpose. Because the truth of the matter is,

02:00:28.520 maybe someday AI can raise your kids. Maybe your kids get old enough and they don't call you anymore

02:00:32.700 and say, hey, dad, I need your advice on this, but they still need you as a dad. They're still going

02:00:37.700 to mourn you when you pass away. There is something elemental and human about being human. And that

02:00:45.240 can't be taken from us. Do you think AI needs to internalize the value of human life for us to be

02:00:53.720 able to coexist with it? Or is there an actual risk, an existential risk to our species if AI doesn't

02:01:01.520 understand our uniqueness? I have no idea. There are certainly some people who are smarter than me

02:01:08.060 who feel like they can answer that question more authoritatively and say, yes or no, it's a huge risk

02:01:12.300 to us. It's going to kill all of humanity. There's other people who say, actually, AI is such an alien

02:01:17.860 when it eventually does reach this point of AGI or super intelligence or the moment where Skynet becomes

02:01:24.820 real, that it's such an alien form of thinking and form of cognition and form of sentience that it

02:01:31.460 won't really care about us the same way we don't really care about ants. So there's people on both

02:01:35.800 sides of this. The answer is, I have no idea. I actually don't even know what AI actually is.

02:01:41.300 Defining AGI, artificial general intelligence, is really, really hard. Second of all, I don't know

02:01:46.380 how AI is going to be exploited. I mean, right now we use it to have fun conversations about history

02:01:51.240 with our kids. But if you think back to the internet, when the internet first started, nobody thought that the

02:01:57.020 really important, financially productive and impactful way to use it would be to sell everything

02:02:04.280 through one store and to allow people to basically shout at each other on social media. It wasn't the

02:02:11.220 technology that gave rise to those either advances or weaknesses. It was people like Jeff Bezos seeing

02:02:18.940 the world in a new way that the technology empowered. We're not at the stage yet where people are seeing the

02:02:24.280 world in a new way because of the AI, but they're going to. And they're going to use it in ways that

02:02:28.840 surprise us that we can't anticipate. And until they start doing that, I don't know that I can

02:02:32.580 answer your question. Yeah, which I think brings me back to one of the most exciting things that I

02:02:40.620 would love to see AI have a huge impact on is one of the things that we as humans have the biggest

02:02:46.500 challenge with, which is behavior change and help encouraging and helping people to change

02:02:50.940 behaviors, which kind of brings it all full circle, right? Which is if there is an AI agent that can

02:02:56.980 be the most powerful tool for behavior change, as powerful as having you stand next to a person

02:03:06.340 24 seven as their behavior coach, then you really change lives. And do you think we're going to see

02:03:12.900 that? Is that an achievable outcome? Honestly, I think Charles, you're in a better position to answer

02:03:19.220 that because I think you have a far better and a deeper knowledge of the science because the real

02:03:24.740 question is, do we have the data for how to do this under perfect circumstances that can serve as

02:03:30.920 training data through this vehicle? Because if you take a step back and ask, is the LLM platform the

02:03:37.780 right platform? I think the answer is yes for this application. We can debate whether the LLM is the right

02:03:42.960 platform for all applications of AI. It may or may not be, but given the transformer in 2017,

02:03:48.740 that took us down this path, but I have to believe it's the right platform for this problem.

02:03:53.840 So now the question becomes, do we have enough training data? Do we know what the solution space

02:03:57.900 looks like? Do we have the data to train it? And if so, then it comes down to how important is an

02:04:03.320 actual human in this element versus the words. So I'm going to add one more element to the formula

02:04:11.500 that you just described. The solution space assumes that delivering the knowledge is the bottleneck.

02:04:17.940 I need something to deliver me the right knowledge at the right moment very, very easily.

02:04:21.500 Not necessarily. It could be that, well, it depends how you define knowledge. I was thinking

02:04:26.340 about this more broadly, which is, let's say I need help changing my habits. You standing next to me,

02:04:33.080 you will provide me with knowledge. You'll provide me with accountability. You'll provide me with

02:04:37.200 reassurance.

02:04:37.960 So here's the thing that I'm going to suggest is that there's a step before that,

02:04:41.200 which is, are you actually motivated to change? I mean, because the truth of the matter is,

02:04:45.260 if you say like, sure, I'd love to lose 10 pounds, but it doesn't really matter that much to me.

02:04:49.980 It doesn't matter how much I stand next to you, how much positive reinforcement I give you. If you

02:04:54.360 don't have fundamental motivation to make that change, it's probably not going to happen,

02:04:58.300 or at least not in a profound and lasting way. And so now the question becomes,

02:05:02.580 AI can certainly deliver the information to me. It can certainly deliver the positive reinforcement.

02:05:07.760 It can certainly deliver all the subsequent parts of the formula. Can AI generate motivation

02:05:13.400 in me to change?

02:05:15.440 What fraction of people who fail to make change fail because that is missing or because all of

02:05:23.860 the coaching, queuing, behavior modification that follows is missing?

02:05:27.180 So let me ask you, how many copies of your book have you sold at this point? Outlive?

02:05:31.100 Uh, almost 3 million.

02:05:33.080 3 million. That's a lot. Okay. So 3 million people who have gotten fantastic information.

02:05:37.500 Maybe some didn't read it.

02:05:38.540 Maybe some didn't read it. As long as they bought the book,

02:05:40.900 how many of those 3 million do you think made the change that they wanted to make

02:05:46.020 after reading the book?

02:05:47.960 I'd like to believe that many people have made a change.

02:05:51.580 Yeah.

02:05:52.120 But probably very few have made every change.

02:05:55.060 And what I would suggest is that the people who are picking up that book,

02:05:58.060 they're motivated to begin with.

02:05:59.300 That's a selection bias out of the gate.

02:06:00.680 Yeah. So here's what I would say. I would say,

02:06:03.680 I think this motivation question is the most important one.

02:06:07.720 It's the inception question.

02:06:09.000 It's the inception question. It's a necessary prerequisite. It's not sufficient on its own,

02:06:12.720 but it's a necessary prerequisite. And there's a lot of people who pick up your book,

02:06:16.260 and I'm going to include myself in this, who say,

02:06:17.740 I really want to do everything Peter tells me. Like, I want to be super healthy. I want to work

02:06:22.040 out every day. I want to live forever. And I read the book and I say, I'm going to do this.

02:06:25.900 But I have motivation for 15% of it or 20% of it or 50% of it. But then on the other 50%,

02:06:33.520 I don't have the motivation yet. And the question is, how do I generate that motivation?

02:06:37.760 It's not your job to generate the motivation for me. You can give me the argument. You can tell me

02:06:42.840 why this is important and you're persuasive and maybe that will motivate me, but ultimately you're

02:06:48.160 delivering me the information I need once I'm motivated. So that motivation part is a real

02:06:52.640 question. Now let's look at someone like Tony Robbins. What does Tony Robbins deliver? He delivers

02:06:58.560 the motivation. If you listen to what Tony Robbins says about financial stuff, and I think the world

02:07:03.080 of Tony Robbins, I think he's had a huge impact on people's lives. I don't think his advice is the

02:07:07.500 most sophisticated advice on the face of the planet. I think his ability to motivate people is

02:07:12.120 incredibly sophisticated. And as a result, he's changed a lot of lives. What do you think? Does

02:07:16.780 that make sense? Yeah. So what do you think is the element of that? And does it work uniformly or is

02:07:24.980 there a susceptibility? Is there a subset of people for whom that style of motivation works?

02:07:31.540 So we know that there are people for whom that style of motivation works and other people for whom

02:07:35.420 it doesn't. And it might just be taste. It might just be habituation.

02:07:39.260 Like there's a really funny meme of him at a, I don't know, one of his,

02:07:43.960 whatever they do things. And he's getting this guy to roar like a lion. Like it's the funniest

02:07:48.860 thing I've ever seen. It's just like, again, there's a subset of people for whom that roaring

02:07:53.360 like a lion is going to change his life. And then there's a subset of people that look at that and

02:07:56.920 yeah, that's not for a million dollars.

02:07:59.140 That doesn't change anything. That doesn't, that's not going to change anything.

02:08:01.680 Right. It's actually going to make it, I'm going to be demotivated because this seems so silly.

02:08:05.260 That being said, anyone who's listening, you should go to a Tony Robbins thing. Even if you don't

02:08:09.060 believe it or enjoy it, it's just the spectacle of it is amazing. What he does on a stage is really

02:08:13.820 astounding. So I think what you're asking is like, what do we know about the science of like

02:08:17.880 creating this motivation?

02:08:18.740 Yeah. Do we know that there are some people for whom the way he delivers a message is the turnkey

02:08:26.880 to make this happen? And if I sit there and listen to him, give a talk, it makes a ton of sense. It's

02:08:31.420 very inspiring. It seems like, yeah, that'll make sense. I always think of that as the easier problem

02:08:35.940 to solve. I think the harder problem is the one that you're trying to solve, which is, okay,

02:08:42.420 Tony might get you to realize you need to quit smoking. Quitting smoking is hard.

02:08:46.320 How do I come up with a plan for that?

02:08:47.580 They're both necessary and neither is sufficient.

02:08:50.480 I think that's right. I think that's right. One of the things that we do know about motivation

02:08:53.840 is much like rewards, it tends to be very different from person to person. And so the

02:08:59.800 only way to really figure out what motivates you is to experiment. My guess is if I was to ask you,

02:09:05.940 what motivates you to work out every day?

02:09:08.340 It's many things. There's the cognitive piece of it, which is I really, really believe what I preach

02:09:14.520 daily, which is exercise as a tool is the single most important tool in both magnitude and direction

02:09:23.400 at lengthening life and improving quality of life. So in as much as I want to live longer and live

02:09:32.740 better, exercise is as important, if not more important than anything I could do.

02:09:37.080 Let me ask you, those motivations that are getting you to work out every day,

02:09:39.820 are those the same motivations that would have worked on you when you were 20 years old?

02:09:43.420 No, not at all. It wasn't even on my mind when I was 20.

02:09:45.480 Right. As a result, what we need as a motivation changes over time. It changes from situation to

02:09:50.440 situation, the environment, the choices we make. So it's not like we can say like this one form of

02:09:56.600 motivation is the right form of motivation. What we can say is motivation is really important.

02:10:01.000 We know that motivation has certain characteristics, but we also know that it is something that is

02:10:06.140 incredibly adaptive in people's lives and that they find motivation from different sources throughout

02:10:10.740 the course of their life. Yeah. That's a really good point is that what got you here yesterday isn't

02:10:16.240 going to get you there tomorrow necessarily. Yeah. And it might be when you're 70 years old.

02:10:20.740 I just turned 50. You're 52. Is that right? 52. Yeah. 52. We're in the same place for the first time

02:10:26.280 that road is really realistic. And because you've written so eloquently about it, I'm sure you've

02:10:31.080 thought about it a lot. No, no. I'm long past that. I mean, I might have 30 years left on it.

02:10:34.920 Yeah. It's real. It's real. That also has an impact. And what motivates you 20 years from now

02:10:40.500 might be different from what motivates you today. But what's important is if you're paying attention

02:10:45.160 and nurturing that motivation, if you're conducting experiments to see what does motivate you and what

02:10:49.020 doesn't motivate you, it's when we stop thinking about it that we get into trouble.

02:10:52.880 Charles, this has been super interesting. And I know it's kind of funny that I've read

02:10:57.340 Super Communicators last summer, last spring, actually, when it came out. But really what I

02:11:02.000 wanted to talk about today was a book you wrote 12 years ago. So I would recommend everybody read

02:11:06.780 everything you've written. But this is, in some ways, I think this is the book that I think can

02:11:11.460 have a greater impact on people's lives. It's an exceptional book. And I hope that we've spurred people

02:11:16.960 to kind of go back and try to apply it. Because in many ways, what you've written about is the

02:11:21.380 bookend of what I'm trying to write about it. I'm trying to write about the what you need to do.

02:11:25.640 But at the end of the day, if you can't create habits around these things, it is difficult.

02:11:30.900 Well, thank you for having me on. And thank you for those kind words. I'm such a huge fan of you

02:11:34.560 and of the show. And it's just an incredible honor to be here. So thanks.

02:11:38.560 Well, thank you for coming out. And I'll have to think of

02:11:40.840 a good smoothie place in Austin to send you. I want to reward you for sitting through this.

02:11:46.080 As long as they've got peanut butter, then I'm good.

02:11:49.440 Thank you, Charles.

02:11:50.180 Thank you.

02:11:51.560 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. Head over to

02:11:55.860 peteratiamd.com forward slash show notes. If you want to dig deeper into this episode,

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The Peter Attia Drive - August 11, 2025

#360 ‒ How to change your habits： why they form and how to build or break them ｜ Charles Duhigg, M.B.A

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