January 4, 2021 • 42 mins
If you’re wanting to know how to make a New Year’s resolution actually stick this year, then this is your episode! Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He is also author of bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better, and he’s the host of Slate’s podcast How To! As a business and self-help expert, Charles explores habit formation and the science of productivity in order to help folks on a day-to-day basis. We’re excited to have him join us on this episode to talk about how we can implement better habits when it comes to our personal finances, and how we can lead a more productive life in general.
During this episode we enjoyed a Boysen in the Yard by Wrecking Bar Brewpub. And as we’ve kicked things off with a bang in 2021, we could really use your help to spread the word- let friends and family know about How to Money! Hit the share button, subscribe if you’re not already a regular, and give us a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Help us to spread the word to get more people doing smart things with their money in these difficult times!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I and
Matt and today we're talking about the Power of Habit
with Charles do Higg. Charles Duhigg is a Pultzer Prize
(00:27):
winning journalist who writes for The New Yorker, in New
York Times Magazine, and other publications. He is also the
author of bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better,
and he's the host of Slate's podcast how To. As
a business experts self help expert, Charles explores habit formation
and the science of productivity in order to help folks
(00:49):
on a day to day basis. We are excited to
have him join us to talk about how we can
implement better habits and particularly when it comes to our
personal finances and how we can lead a more productive So, Charles,
thank you for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks
for having me h Charles, We're we're glad to have you.
End every episode of this podcast, Matt and now we
talk about money, but at the same time, we drink
(01:11):
a craft beer. And that's because we are fans of
people prioritizing something that matters in their financial life. Uh,
in the here and now. While they're also saving and
investing well for the future, so I want to know.
That's kind of our splurge. What is your splurge? What's
your craft beer equivalent? My craft beer equivalent? Um, I
mean I I buy a lot of like gadgets I
(01:32):
find like I I love to to to check out
the latest gadgets and and uh and play with them.
So that's probably my splurge. What was the last gadget
you bought? Then that's a good question. Um, well, I
just bought an e bike, so yeah, you work in
our language. It has not arrived yet, but when it does,
I'm excited to check it out. Did you happen to
(01:54):
purchase the new Radwagon. No I didn't. I actually did
buy from rad though. I bought the the not the
rad Runner. They got like a city one or something
like that. Not the City Um the in fact here,
let me look at up. I can't remember exactly which
one it was. It's the one with the fat wheels
where you can kind of ride over maybe you're able
(02:14):
to ride over that rover. That's what I bought, the
rad Rover I heard. It feels like that you're like
biking on a sofa because it's so comfortable, it's like
a cat. I've got the rad Wagon. So Charles, just
heads up, you're gonna love it. Do you like it? Oh?
I love it? Man. I put my one year old
on the back. We we bike all over town. It's
the greatest thing in the world. Yeah. I mean, just
(02:35):
e bikes in general are amazing. They are are such
a way forward for individuals to be able to take
on bike commuting. Uh, even losing a car, like cutting
a car from their lives. You know, just the ability
to get across town with an e bike is completely
changed the game. We're huge fans of it. Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, Charles,
I saw that you've been featured. You've been a guest
(02:56):
on the now defunct Colbert Report. Yes, I've actually in
the audience before. Was that a fun experience for you?
What was that like? Yeah? It was great. It was great.
I mean, he's he's a fantastic host, and um and
the whole show is kind of fun. You know. I
think anytime the shows like that like it, it actually
goes by very very quickly. Um and so, but now,
were I really enjoyed it? It It was fantastic. Yeah, he
(03:18):
was that was kind of an incredible role that he
had for those years. It might not work, um, Matt
and I were discussing as well right now in today's time.
But it was so good when he because it was
a parody back then. But today it's like, oh no,
like all folks are taking it that extreme in real life.
It's it's almost not as funny anymore, whereas you know,
years ago it was hilarious exactly, U, Charles. Let's talk
(03:40):
about your podcast. We're fans first of the name of
your podcast, by the way, you're one word away from
the perfect podcast name. But let's talk about some of
the topics you've covered on your podcast. How too. There's
one really interesting one that you did, um not too
long ago about convincing people to give you money. You
highlighted that con artists and folks that run on profits
is being especially good at this. So what do you
(04:02):
what did you learn in that episode about how to
effectively get people to give you money? Well, we had
on this this woman named Maria Konakova, who wrote a
book about con artists and about how con artists work.
Who actually she just published another book called The Big
Bad about her learning to become a poker professional. And
and what Marina Maria says in her book which is
(04:23):
really interesting, and she points out that you know, the
con artists kind of operate according to a formula, and
part of that formula is basically knowing who their mark
is and what their mark wants to here, and then
tailoring their pitch to that and giving it a sense
of exclusiveness, giving it a sense of scarcity, um, giving
it something where they believe that they are they are
(04:45):
they're helping other people, although they are also helping themselves.
So one of the one of the best cons is
something where where the person is going to make money.
They believe that they're going to make money. By giving
you some money, they're going to make more money. But
it's also like, well, you're also helping, like the chill Aldren, right,
You're helping like you know, some someone off in another country. Um,
you're doing a real favor to them because that way
(05:06):
they can dress up their own greed and kind of
this need for virtuousness. And what's really interesting is that
when you talk to folks who do nonprofit fundraising, a
lot of the tactics are very very similar that that
you need to tell people that even though they're giving
money to a cause, like to a nonprofit, you need
(05:27):
to tell them how it's going to benefit them. But
then you dress it up in this you know, you're
making the world a better place and we're gonna put
your name on a building. So it's really all about
sort of like about how awesome you are, but we're
gonna we're gonna let you have a self righteousness that
allows you to to feel like you're doing this for
the for the right reasons. And so that was really
(05:47):
interesting is to sort of figure out like, like what
we know is that we know that there is the
psychology behind why people how people treat their money. Right,
you guys know this, And so a lot of the
the tactics that con artists use aren't that dissimilar from
the tactics that that fundraisers use, even when they're doing
it for a good cause. Yeah, and even in a
(06:09):
less con artist type of way, you can use those approaches.
You can use those tactics when it comes to like say,
asking for a raise, right, you know, if you are
trying to convince your employer that how it is that
you are helping them, how you're helping the company. Well,
that's literally what you need to do when you actually
are asking for a raise the chars. More recently, I
think my favorite episode was one that you did about
(06:29):
a seeing virtual schooling, you know, on Zoom What did
you what did you take away from that episode about
how to think about our kids and screen time and
you know, these COVID times. Well, it's really hard, right,
I mean, I think that like kids are suffering right now,
way more than than we even understand. I have two
children myself, and they've been doing virtual school. Now they're
(06:49):
back in and well one of them is back in
day to day school and the other one is still
virtual schooling. It's really really challenging. And and I think
that one of the things that we've learned is just
that this interact ativity is really important, That being being
with other people is really important. If you can't be
with other people, that figuring out how to foster conversation,
you know, I've found this on my own doing Zoom calls.
(07:11):
I'm sure you guys have to that one of the
challenges is that you lose all of this kind of
ease of what's known as back channeling within psychology that
people saying yes, sort of showing with their body whether
they're following along or they're distracted. Even when people are thinking,
it's harder to know that on zoom. If you're sitting
in a room with someone, oftentimes we use eye contact
(07:33):
to signal when someone else should feel free to speak, right.
We tend not to look at each other in the
eyes when we're speaking, but then when we finished the thought,
we tend to look at someone else in the eyes,
and that's kind of a an almost unconscious signal that
that person can go ahead and start speaking. The problem
is on Zoom if someone's you know, if you're sitting
in a room with someone and they're looking off into
the corner, which is totally normal, you could look in
(07:54):
the corner and see that they're not looking at anything,
and you know that they're sort of just thinking about
what they're saying. On Zoom, if they're looking off into
a corner, it looks like they're distracted or we don't
know what they're looking at. And so this distance communication
has been really challenging in some ways. I think it's
actually more challenging with Zoom than it is without Zoom.
I think verbal communication is actually easier in some respects
(08:16):
than verbal plus video. And so when it comes to
kids and Zoom school, one of the things that we've
learned is that you really have to spend some time
thinking about how are you going to keep that kid engaged?
How are you going to make it easier for them
to pay attention, because it's just so hard, so easy
to get distracted and to kind of tune out. Yeah,
now that's that's true. I found that with my kids,
(08:36):
and especially a kindergartener, trying to get used to UM
school in the first place, much less school virtually. It's
um it's pretty rough. It's pretty rough. Charles. Let's talk
about habits for just a little bit. Your best selling book,
The Power of Habit. It's just really really good and
so many great stories we've in there that brought your
points home. But what kind of actually spawned your initial
(08:59):
interest in taking on that subject in general? Well, you know, um,
I was. I was just interested. And I had this
basic question, which is like, if I'm if I'm so
smart at other stuff? Right? I had? I had gone
to Yale for college and to Harvard Business School for
to get my m b a. And and yet there
were all these things, I still felt like I had
struggled with so much, right, Like I struggled to eat
(09:20):
more healthily, I struggled to make myself exercise more. And
I just kept on thinking like if I'm so smart,
like why is it so hard to do these things
that I see other people do all the time? Right,
Like why is it hard for me to master my habits?
And so so the goal of writing the book was
in part just to educate myself, like how do habits work?
If I understand them better, will that help me understand
(09:42):
how to control my own habits? And it turns out
that we we are, and we're living through this sort
of golden age of understanding habit research that that for
the first time, because of advances in neurology and other
psychological sciences, that there was this ability to understand and
observe habits at the mo some my neute level. And
so once I started looking into that, I thought it
(10:02):
was fascinating and decided like, that's that's what I want
to write a book about, because I wanted to learn
it for myself but then also share it with other people. Yeah,
personal growth, Right, that's a great excuse to dive into
that research, and in your book as well, you side
a study that shows that like around daily activities are habits,
Like we don't even think about them, right, And so
does this mean that like half of our lives are
(10:24):
like we're just reacting to cues. Uh, and you know
we're kind of doing things just mostly without thinking. Makes
me thinko'me a robot or something. Yeah, So it's fort
And what it means is, I mean to be clear,
what a habit is. A habit is a choice that
you make at some point and then you stop making
the choice, but you continue doing it. Right, So, so
the first time that you walked into the um, you know,
(10:47):
walked into the cafeteria work, you decided to go get
a sandwich instead of a salad, even though the salad
was was healthier, and then you just kept on doing
that without kind of consciously making the decision. What we
know is that our brains are designed to actually basically
kind of stop stop spending so much energy when we're
in the grip of a habit. That's why habits are
so useful, is because they free up cognitive capacity for
(11:09):
other tasks, even when we're driving to work or walking
down the Street. So what that means is that you
know of what we do every day. At some point
you made a decision on how to spend that time,
but then you just kind of continued on autopilot with
according to that decision without reconsidering it. And so the
(11:30):
more that you can sort of analyze your own habits
and say like, oh, look, I'm doing this behavior because
of a habit and there's a queue and there's a
reward that's driving that activity that routine, the more control
you get over actually making making the habits that you
want to have rather than the ones that just kind
of emerge without our permission. Charles, we want to talk
(11:52):
more about habit formation and get your tips on breaking
bad habits, and this of course applies to how we
handle money at the same time. We'll get to some
of that right after this break. All right, we are
back from the break talking with Charles do Hig about
(12:14):
habits and Charles, you write about specifically the habit loop
in your book, but I'd love to discuss how we
can break bad habits that we might have fallen into.
Right um, bad habits they can call it cause us
to spend money, maybe emotionally waste time on social media
other things. Right, you write how habits can develop into
even a massive gambling addiction that's almost impossible to curb.
(12:37):
You give an example in your book. So how in
the world do we actually kick a bad habit? Well,
the first thing is is to to to realize that
thinking in terms of breaking a bad habit is exactly
the wrong way to think about it. And that's part
of the lexicon. Right we say, like, I want to
break a bad habit, but that's not how habits work.
We can't we with willpower, you might be able to
(12:58):
extinguish a habit you don't like for a little while,
but as soon as you feel stressed or as soon as,
like you know, you have a moment of weakness, it's
going to come back because that neural pathway is still
in your brain. So the way to think about it
is as changing a bad habit, replacing one behavior with
another behavior, rather than breaking that bad habit. And to
to do that you have to understand how habits work.
(13:19):
And you mentioned the habit loop. So the thing about
habits is that every habit has three parts. There's a
queue which is a trigger for an automatic behavior to start,
and then the routine, which is the behavior itself, and
then finally a reward. Every habit in your life, whether
you're aware of it or not, is delivering a reward
to you, and and a part of your brain known
as the basical ganglia exists to kind of recognize that
(13:40):
reward and make that that chunk of behavior, that Q
routine reward easier and easier to do for you. So
if you have a bad habit and you want to
change it, the first thing to do is to identify
the que and the reward. Try and figure out, you know,
what is triggering this behavior and what reward is it
delivering it to me, and then find a new behavior,
(14:02):
a new routine that you can insert into that habit
loop that corresponds to that old queue and that delivers
something similar to that old reward. So for many people,
let's take smoking as an example, right, because we think
of smoking as a as a particularly pernicious habit, an addiction,
and and nicotine is addicting. It's actually less addicting than
(14:23):
we sort of popularly know. It is. About a hundred
hours after your last cigarette, nicotine is out of your blood,
your blood system, your bloodstream, and people are no longer
physically addicted to nicotine. So it's less the drug and
it's more the habit. Is what you're saying, Well, yeah, exactly.
People get in the habit of smoking, and so you know,
weeks after giving up cigarettes, years, they still feel that
(14:45):
urge for a cigarette when they're sitting down with their
morning coffee. You know, if you have that urge years
after giving them cigarettes, that's clearly not a physical addiction,
that's a habit dysfunction. But but habits exist in the
same part of our brain as addictions, and so they
feel very, very similar. And so if you want to
of up cigarettes, you can. You can just go cold
turkey and throw them away. But a better thing to
do is to try and figure out, Okay, what reward
(15:07):
is smoking giving me? And for many people it's that
um smoking provides a break from work, right, so you
need something else that's going to provide a break from work,
some some new routine that delivers similar reward. For some people,
smoking actually calms them down, right, It's the nicotine has
a kind of calming effect, in which case they need
to find something else to calm themselves down. And for
(15:27):
some people it's um it's gives them a little bit
more energy. So they need to start drinking coffee when
they would normally smoke in order to replace that behavior.
But that's kind of the point, is that you don't
break a bad habit, you change it. And once you
change it, then that that change becomes much more sustainable.
And what about just forming a new habit, like just
(15:48):
out of the blue? Right? Um? And And we're in
a time of year where people are probably particularly thinking
about starting a new habit and creating, you know, some
change in their lives. And so you know, a lot
of our listeners particularly are like, how can I maybe
spend more mindfully this year or actually stick to a budget.
If they're looking to start from scratch to create a
good habit right now, where do you suggest they start?
(16:10):
So this is a great question. We actually just recorded
a podcast episode about this, it's gonna be gonna be
coming out next week about how to create good spending habits.
And and there's a couple of things that people should
keep in mind. Number one is is you know, first
of all, you just have to have the basic like
sort of money hygiene. So like, if you have debt,
you should be paying down your debt. If you you
(16:32):
should absolutely have a budget, Like if you don't have
a monthly and a weekly budget, then and if you're
not tracking what you're spending, then you don't know what
is going on in your own finances and you can't
possibly be on top of it. So so there's some
basic money hygiene stuff that everyone should do. But then
(16:52):
on top of that, like the question is how do
we think about the habits, you know, a lot of
the spending that we do. So when people finally you
get their budget and they and they track what they've
spend every week, what they see is they see that
they're wasting a lot of money, right, They're oftentimes wasting
money on things like going to Starbucks. They're wasting money
on you know, buying, particularly during the pandemic, buying things
from Amazon. One woman, this woman we were talking to yesterday,
(17:14):
I said, she feels anxious if she doesn't have an
Amazon package coming, which which sounds ridiculous, but I totally understand,
right because I think lots of people feel that way.
And then and then on top of that is this
this question of what are the rewards that these are providing?
You know, people spend too much money going to restaurants
and on food. That's always something that people overspend on.
(17:35):
They buy too much food, or they buy food from restaurants,
or they're going to you know, um, Whole Foods rather
than the local grocery store that's cheaper. And so once
you know what your habits are by tracking what you're
actually doing, then you can start asking yourself, Okay, so
what rewards are this actually providing? Right? Am I buying
(17:55):
because I'm bored during the pandemic? The answer is often yes,
people are bored. They need a break from like their
zoom calls, their online and they go to Amazon, or
they go to one of these websites that like has
like you know, here's like the ten new things you
should buy, or extra Instagram, which is just constantly feeding
you stuff to buy two now, yeah, exactly exactly, And
(18:16):
so like, are you buying stuff because you need it?
Are you buying stuff because you're bored? Chances are you're
buying stuff because you're bored very often, and so then
the question becomes Okay, so the answer is not to
just say I'm going to stop going to those websites,
because you're still going to be bored the answer is
to say, how do I come up with something else
that solves that boredom? How do I come up with
something else that provides the reward that I used to
(18:39):
get from shopping, which is some novelty, some sense of
excitement about the future. And there's lots of different ways
to do that, right, Like, once you once you pose
the problem that way, you can say, oh, instead of
instead of like, you know, if I'm bored, instead of
like going and surfing to the website, I'm gonna let
myself watch ten minutes of TV. Right, I'm gonna turn
on a TV show and I'm gonna watch it on
my computer. Instead of going to Amazon, I'm just for
(19:01):
ten minutes. I'm gonna go to our Instagram for ten minutes.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna watch The Queen's Gambit
for ten minutes, right, and like I'm gonna set a timer.
But the point is that, like that's a cheaper way
of solving your borda. And the more that you break
it down and you say, what rewards is this spending
giving me, the more you're gonna get closer to figuring
out a way to make it easier for yourself. Right, Yeah,
(19:23):
you shared another example to where it's just snacking can
be a habit when in reality you realize that you're
not hungry, you're just looking for some socialization. I know
I kind of fall into that same trap when I
you know, I'm sitting here working, I have a tendency
to to think, Okay, maybe it's time for another coffee,
but what I really need is just a break. And
so even just standing up grabbing a kettlebell, which is yeah,
it's also a healthy kind of thing to do. But
(19:44):
like doing some kettle bells wings gets the blood flow
and and all of a sudden, I'm feeling ready to
continue working. Absolutely absolutely so, Like I think that's exactly right. Like,
like we want something, we want an excuse to stand
up and walk around, and the easiest way to stand
up and walk around is to walk over to the
kitchen and get something to eat. But like you just
as easily stand up, and once you realize that what
you really want is to stand up and walk around,
(20:04):
you can stand up and walk around the other direction
and pick up a cattle bell, or you know, just
go outside and walk around the block, walk away from
the fridge. Exactly uh. Well. In your book To the
Power of Habit, Charles You, you also credit community and
peer pressure as reasons why certain habits tend to remain sticky.
Given the increased isolation so many of us have felt
(20:25):
during the pandemic, and obviously the decrease in in person community,
how have you seen that impact individuals in the you know,
the way they exhibit habits and behaviors. Well, I think
that strangely, like actually people feel are feeling. Many people
are feeling a stronger sense of community during the pandemic.
They tend you know, one of the things that undermines
(20:47):
community is um not spending enough time with the same
group of people. So so one of the things that
we know is that like having a community doesn't It
doesn't matter how many people are in the community. It
matters how much time you're spending with those people. And
so in many of our daily lives, you can be around,
you know, a hundred people in a day, a d
people in a day, but you're not really interacting with
(21:10):
many of them for more than a couple of minutes.
If you take like alcoholics Anonymous as an example, one
of the important things about alcoholics Anonymous is that it's
very stable. It tends as a state, it has a
it typically has a very stable time. It happens the
same time every day, very stable UM structure. It usually
opens with someone telling a story about themselves, and you know,
(21:30):
you sort of say these similar these similar things each time.
And equally importantly, you tend to have a pretty stable
group of people there, so you see the same people
usually each time you go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that
stability is an important part of why that community feels supportive.
So one of the things that's happening right now with
(21:51):
the pandemic is you're exactly right. We see less people
and so our community has shrunk, but we tend to
spend a lot more time with the people that we
see because we're at home with them um and so,
or we're on zoom calls with them all day long.
And so what we found is that for some people,
community has actually been strengthened in some ways. Now, that
doesn't mean it's easier, right, that doesn't mean that like
(22:14):
like that community feels really invigorating, UM, because you have
to put work into a community and it's not supposed
to feel like fun all the time. But for people
who feel like they're missing community. I think that's part
of the solution is to find find people to touch
base with, the same people to touch base with on
a regular basis. So to have a regular, you know,
(22:35):
once a week zoom call with your friend where you
guys know you're going to get on at Friday at
noon every every week and you're gonna have a zoom
lunch together. That's really important. Charles. You also end up
boiling a whole lot down to the power of belief.
You know, why is beliefs so important? And how do
we develop like a deeper sense of belief in ourselves
in order to affect change? Well? Is so so belief
(22:55):
believing that you can change is really important to making change,
um effective. And what we know about belief is that
the best way to actually to to actually learn to
believe in yourself is to practice believing in in anything. Right,
like so again to return to Alcoholics anonymous. Not that
a A is like perfect, but but there's a lot
(23:16):
of sort of interesting lessons there. Um. One of the
one of the steps in A is that they tell
you to believe in a higher power. Now they don't
say it has to be religious They don't say it
has to be God. It could be like, you know,
my higher power is democracy. But but they do encourage
you to believe in something larger than yourself. And I
think the reason why that's so important is because basically
(23:38):
what they're doing is they're getting people to practice believing
in things, and eventually that muscle, that believing muscle, gets
strengthened and people can learn how to believe in themselves.
And so the thing that like, I think is really
helpful if if people are struggling with things is and
they want to build up their capacity to believe that
they can change is what's known as the science of
small winds. Basically to take these baby steps. What we
(23:59):
know about change happens is that most change happens because
people have small, incremental, nonlinear successes that lead up to
a big change. So so instead of saying I'm going
to go around a marathon, they say tomorrow morning, I'm
going to go for a walk around the block. And
they go for a walk around the block and it's
not that hard, and they they they have this small wind, right,
(24:22):
I go in for a block and they believe, like
I am, I'm the kind of person who can go
for a walk around the block and then the next
day they say, okay, so I went for a walk
around the block. Now I'm gonna go around the walk
for two blocks, and they do that, and eventually they
get so tired of just walking there, like I'm gonna
take a jog, and I'm gonna jog for half a mile,
and these small baby steps the science of small winds,
that is how we learn to believe in ourselves is
(24:43):
by practicing belief in smaller, low stakes cases. And that's
really really important because we can do that for anything,
whether it's saving money or getting in better shape. As
long as you can sort of find some ways to
take baby steps, then you know that you're going to
be in a position where you can train yourself to
believe that change as possible. Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome.
I love that insight from the book for sure, and
(25:05):
it really is powerful. It's something that we can use
to our advantage. Charles, we have just a few more
questions for you in including what it looks like to
create a to do list that we can actually um
take charge of and and do well that will actually
influence us for the better. And we'll get to some
of those questions right after this break. All right, we're
(25:30):
back to the break talking with Charles do Hig about habits,
and Charles, before we talk about, you know, kind of
optimizing our life, I wanted to touch real quickly too.
On keystone habits. You mentioned that in your book. Uh,
you mentioned how they can kind of create habit momentum
in your life, you know, And so can you share
what keystone habits are and why it is that they're
so important? Yeah, So keystone habits. One of the things
(25:50):
that we've learned from research on habits is that some
habits seem to matter more than others because when they
start to change, they set up a chain reaction that
changes other patterns as well. So an example of this
is exercised, right, for many people exercises a keystone habits,
and when they start exercising habitually, what happens is they
start eating more healthily as well. They're they're eating habits
change and and that kind of weirdly makes sense to us. Right,
(26:13):
everyone's kind of experienced that you go for a run
in the morning, and then when you go to have lunch,
it's easier to get the salad rather than the unhealthy hamburger.
But what's interesting is that when we look at people
who have started exercising habitually, for many of them, when
that habit starts, they also start using their credit cards less.
They tend to procrastinate less at work. They this is
(26:34):
my favorite finding, they do their dishes like, wash their
dishes on average twenty minutes earlier in the day on
they've exercised. And and that makes lesson to it have
sense to us, right like none of us think of
of ourselves is going out for a run and think like, oh,
I'm gonna keep my amex in my pockets today rather
than taking it out. And yet what we know is
that the same way that the exercise habits change eating habits,
(26:56):
they change other patterns in our lives as well. And
that's because for many people exercises a keystone habit. It
changes how we see ourselves and that change has an
almost subconscious influence on other choices that we make. And
so for many people that the question is, how can
you identify the keystone habits in your life the changes
you can make that will set off a chain reaction
(27:18):
that will change other patterns. And the answer is to
look for those changes that kind of seem irrationally scary. Right.
For the reason why exercise is such a powerful keystone
habit for so many people is because oftentimes, um it's
it's it's not a keystone habit for people who are
like high school athletes, like people who are accustomed to
seeing themselves as athletic, usually will not see a big
(27:42):
change in their life when they start exercising on a
regular basis after like a period of inactivity. But it's
for people who were not high school athletes, the people
who never thought of themselves as athletes, when they start running,
you know, three times a week, they start subtly thinking
of themselves as a different kind of person. They start
thinking of them is the kind of person who manages
to run three times a week, and that that kind
(28:05):
of person doesn't spend recklessly, that kind of person doesn't
eat unhealthily. And so the key is to look for
those types of change that seems irrationally scary to you.
And that's usually a clue that if you change it,
it will change yourself image a little bit, and that
that will have an impact on the other patterns in
your life. So, are there any things that you found
(28:25):
in going through all the research and through writing your
book that any keystone happens that particularly affected how we
handle our money. So thinking of yourself as a saver, right,
like the like like somebody who. So, So here's how
I do my money. I use Mint to track all
of my purchases right sizing all my bank accounts every
(28:46):
single week. Once a week, I sit down and I
have a spreadsheet on Excel, and I fill in all
these things in the spreadsheet with how much money is
in my is in my bank accounts, how much credit
card like, how much is on my credit cards right
now out? How much is in my four oh one K,
how much is in my investments I have like you know,
ten or twelve cells that I fill in on that spreadsheet.
(29:07):
And then there's a little formulas that tell me how
much I spent compared to last week, how much more,
how much money is in whether my net balance is
up or down from last week, how much money I've
made overall, except you know, how much how much more
is on my credit card or less on my credit card?
And and so this is a habit for me. I
do it every single week. And the thing that it
(29:29):
does is it makes me very, very aware of the
money patterns in my life. It also makes me think
of myself as someone who thinks about money, who thinks
about like and cares about where my money is going.
And I think in part that's why writing a budget
and tracking your own spending is so powerful, is because
(29:49):
not only does it give you the data to kind
of see what's going on and see where you're spending
too much, but if you do it regularly, if you
stick with that budget, if you look each day to
see what you spent on or each week, you start
thinking of your off as the kind of person who
cares about where their money is going. And that kind
of person, that kind of person does not make frivolous
purchases quite as easily. And so the number one keystone
(30:11):
habit for people around money that can change how they
spend is to create a budget and update their budget regularly,
because that habit not only gives you information, but it
also changes how you see yourself when it comes to money.
I love that. Yeah, That change and identity is what
happens there. Charles. In your book Smarter, Faster Better, you
talk more about focus in an age of information overload,
(30:34):
in the world of personal finance, you know, information can
be blinding, and so how do we filter the information
that is helpful versus the stuff that we should probably ignore.
The first thing to understand is that is that more
information is not better. Oftentimes it's worse. Right. You can
you can overwhelm yourself with with information and basically not
(30:57):
learn anything as a result. So the key is that
you really don't want more than at the most three
data points that you're paying attention to, and it's pretty
and like if you have lesson three, that's even better.
So like at first you can just say, look, I
want to I want to compare um, you know my
my bank account balances this week with the same time
(31:18):
last week, and see if they've gone up and down.
And I want to compare you know how much I
spent on food this week with how much I budgeted
for food this week, and just starting small that way,
and really like like focusing in on that because that
whatever we focus on, we're gonna be able to change.
And if you focus on if you have fifteen categories
(31:39):
in your budget, and each week you look at all
fifteen categories and you're trying to figure out what's going on.
If you do that at first, you're not gonna make
any changes. You're gonna be so like overwhelmed by the
amount of information you have. So the key is at
first choose one or two, at most three data points
to pay attention to. Now, over time you might get
(32:00):
to a place where you can do more data points. Right,
you know, two months down the road, you're like, Okay,
now I'm looking at two other things. I'm looking at
food and I'm looking at you know, how much I'm
spending on commuting. But but only once I get food
under control do I start paying attention to that commuting budget.
The key is to not let yourself feel productive because
(32:22):
you're looking at a lot of data and not actually
get anything done. The less data you are looking at,
the higher the odds that you're actually gonna change what
you're paying attention to. That's that's great stuff. Yeah, I
want to ask you to Charles about to do list. Um,
they're just kind of one of these simple but typically
they ineffective sometimes and super effective depending on how you
use them. Um, but they can be used really well.
(32:43):
And you've talked about how you create a better to
do list that that actually helps us get more done. Like,
what's the trick to making it to do list? It's
actually successful. Yeah, So it's very similar to focus, which
is that that what we know from studies is that
most people create to do lists that have like twenty
or thirty things on them because what they're actually using
their to do list is as a memory aid rather
(33:03):
than rather than trying to remember things. They put it
on a piece of paper, and that's great because it's
much easier to remember things when they're written down than
trying to carry them around in your in your brain.
But then they make this mistake, which is they say, Okay,
this memory aid that I've developed, that's my to do list,
and that's that's not the right way of doing things
because what will happen, and we know this from studies
is that oftentimes people will look for the easiest things
(33:25):
on that list too and do them because it feels
so good to cross them off. So I think you
mentioned that sometimes people write something down that they've already
done just so they can put People who write to
do list, they'll write down a task they've already completed
because it feels so good to cross the guilty. So
the key is like you should have a memory aid
that's a piece of paper, But then you should have
(33:46):
another piece of paper, which is your to do list,
and you should not have more than three things on
that to do list. And what should be on that
to do list is number one, the most important thing
to do today. Number two, if you get that first
thing done, the next most important thing to do. And
number three what you suspect is the is the most
important thing for tomorrow, but you might change it when
(34:07):
you write tomorrow's to do list. And you write a
new to do list every single morning. And the goal
of a to do list is not to simply help
you remember things. It's to prioritize things. And that's why
you never want more than three things on it is
because the the act of writing it to do list
is to force you to to decide what is the
most important thing I want to get done today, and
(34:27):
then putting that as the top priority and ignoring everything else. Yeah,
there's a difference between doing the things that you need
to do right now versus just all the things that
are in your mind that you want to have a
list of somewhere else. But that's not necessarily your to
do list. Exactly right. So, Charles, thank you so much
for taking the time to hang out with list today.
Where can people find more about you and your podcast?
They can find so if they just look for how
(34:47):
to by how to with Charles do Hig on Slate,
they can find the podcast wherever they listen to podcasts,
and they can find out more about me or about
the power of habit or smarter fester better just by
googling any of those. Its are going to Charles Doohig
dot com or um see doohig on Twitter if you
folks on to follow me. Awesome. Thanks again for your
time today, Charles, We appreciate it. Take care, Joel May.
(35:09):
What a great conversation we just had here with Charles
about habits and you know, in particularly this time of
the year, as folks are basically thinking through like how
can they become a better person this year, how it
is they can stick to their New Year's resolutions. Talking
about habits and how they're formed and how it is
that we stick to them is so important, Uh soth.
I'm glad we had this conversation today. Man, what was
your big takeaway today? One? I'm just proud of Charles
(35:30):
for getting an e bike because the bikes are the future.
So and of course he gets a rat Rat power bike.
I mean, everybody is getting those bikes these days. They're
so affordable. So even though Charles and I have never
met in person, we can be best friends. It works. Um,
you have that kindred spirit exactly. And yeah, it was
definitely hard to pick one takeaway from this episode. Man,
it was jam packed full of knowledge and just a
lot of interesting insight. But I think my biggest one
(35:53):
was that small winds are so important. And you know,
one of the things that he said was if you're
not a natural budget or if you kind of hate
budgeting in particular, or or really anybody like you should
focus on fewer data points. And I think when we're
trying to come up with a budget and you and I,
I don't know, maybe six months ago we had an
episode where we talked about different styles of budgeting for
(36:13):
different personalities and we mentioned simpler being better. Um, a
lot of focus us what they need right, and that
was echoed in this conversation that the simpler your budget,
the more effectively you're gonna be able to stick to it.
So concentrate maybe on a few data points that most
negatively impact your budget. Um. And if you can just
over the course of a few months pay attention to
those two or three things where you find yourself overspending, UM,
(36:37):
then you don't necessarily have to have just this robust
budget that you're chaking in on on a weekly basis
that's overwhelming you that you're not gonna be able to
stick to. If instead you focus on just a few
data points, I think it will help you be able
to actually find budgeting as a useful tool um. In one.
So yeah, I don't know, that was my big takeaway,
(36:58):
But yeah, there's a lot of goals in this one.
So what was good? It was good? No, Yeah, I
mean it's certainly the power of focus, right, you know,
to focus on a few of those things and make
sure that you succeed at those things versus getting bogged
down by all the details. I mean, it's something we
talked about even in our year end review episode. But
for me, my big tig away man was kind of
when we talked about Keystone habits. And he writes more
about this in his book, but you know, he he
(37:19):
elaborated more here in the conversation. How when you start
doing something that's really scary to you. How you when
when you have this irrational fear of doing something. I
have lots of irrational fears matter, but it should you
should pay attention to those things, you know, like when
you feel that way about something, it's like, Okay, what
is it about this thing that makes me feel that way?
And he's pointing out that as we confront those fears
and as we change our behaviors, we also change our identity.
(37:42):
You know. Uh. In particular, he highlighted exercise. For a
lot of people, they see that as this scary thing,
like how do you get to the point where you're
just going to work nine to five and working versus
you know, seeing the people on the weekends running marathons
or triathlon It's that kind of thing. There's a wide
chasm between those two points. Yeah. I thought one of
the most interesting things that he said about exercise, which
is always the thing he goes through my mind, is
(38:04):
I don't have enough time to do that. But what
he what he the point he made was that you
people that exercise actually have more time in their lives.
It's fascinating how the dishes sooner in the day. Yeah,
it's It's fascinating how that works. And so I need
to stop using that as an excuse and start working
on my habit. Yeah. Yeah, And so I just love
the fact that by confronting these fears, though, how you
literally start thinking of yourself differently. You know, you start
(38:25):
exercising a little bit, you go for a run around
the block, and all of a sudden, I am an exerciser,
Like that's just it becomes a part of your identity.
And I love that. Uh. And the same thing when
it comes to like looking at your money. He knows
that by looking at his money once a week that
has changed the way that he views his own personal finances.
You know, he then sees that, oh, I am a saver.
This is who I am. It becomes a part of
(38:46):
who you are. And when you have a sense of
identity like that, you are invested to stick with it,
no doubt. So yeah, I hope that information was helpful
to all of our listeners as they're looking to either
you know, kick off a new habit this year, um
in particular, in all likelihood, if they're listening to this
show a positive habit, positive habits and in regard to
their personal finances, or really just any habit. This was
(39:07):
a conversation that I think can can help you potentially
stick to some of those New Year's resolutions that you
might have already made. Um, all right, now, let's get
back to the beer that we had while we were
talking with Charles. This one was called Boys in the
Yard Milkshake I p A. And the reason it's called
it's actually boys in. I love a good boyson berry
pun and so that's what this one was. It was
(39:27):
literally an I p A with boys and berries tossed
in from a local brewery down the street from us
called Wrecking Bar, a brewpub. Matt Warrior thoughts on this beer, man, Yeah,
I Reckon Bar is one of our favorite local brewpubs
here in Atlanta. And Dude, one of the first things
that I thought of, as you mentioned, you know, the
boys and berries is like, what is a boys in?
It makes me thinking of that a little bitch head
for joke, But like, boys and berries aren't something you
(39:50):
regularly see, you know. It's it's not like a typical
berry that you would pick up at the grocery store,
at least if you have. It's not one that I
have either, Like strawberries, blueberries. Yeah, yeah, you some raspberries.
I'm getting crazy. It's it's like one of those berries
that you cook with that that find their way into
beers or other dishes like that. But I've never had
a boison berry on its own, And like, what is
(40:10):
a boison tree or bush? Like, I'm curious to know.
But I really enjoyed this one. Man. This was, like
you said, a milkshake, I p A. So it was
kind of creamy. It's got some of that lactose sugar
in there, but it also had some of that fruitiness
that Boyson berry ads. Not having had a boison berry separately,
I can't necessarily pick it out, you know. I'm like, oh,
I can really taste the boys and berry notes. I
(40:31):
taste fruit and so therefore that makes me think, oh
that must be boys and must be. But I did
enjoy it. This is one that you just picked up
a couple of days ago, and they just can this.
So it's really fun to to have a really fresh
crisp I PA like this. Uh, really enjoyed it, man, Yeah,
what are your thoughts? Yeah? Man, I love the smooth
vibe of a milkshake. I p A. That lactose smoothness
(40:51):
just kind of um is a different mouth feel which
I enjoy from time to time. And yeah, the Boysonberry
action combined with the hops, it's just kind of fast
nating flavor profile. And yeah, I think it can be
done poorly. The milkshake I p a, but this one
was done quite well. So yeah, I love everything. Wrecking
Barr puts out one of, like you said, one of
our favorite local breweries. Um so yeah, another winner today. Um.
(41:14):
By the way, one thing Charles said that we haven't
talked about. He mentioned The Queen's Gambit. Everyone. If you
if like you're late to the game on this, you
should totally watch The Queen's Game. But such an excellent,
excellent show on that. You burned your way through the
full first season by oh yeah, oh yeah. I don't
know if there's a second season coming, but if there is,
I'll be watching. Nice man. Yeah, that's that's not one
that Kate and I have started yet, so we didn't
get to that over the holidays, but maybe we were.
(41:34):
Well soon you you should. Yeah, Well, folks can find
our show notes up on our website at how the
Money dot com. We'll make sure to link to Charles
podcast and his books as well, where you can learn
more about the different things he has written about. Yeah,
and by the way, every other Monday, when we're not
interviewing somebody, Matt and I are answering your listener questions.
And especially if you're a new listener and you're kind
of trying to figure out how money works or you've
(41:56):
got some questions about your personal finances. Well, we'd love
to take your question on an upcoming episode. Just go
to how to money dot com slash ask simple instructions
there to send a voice memo our way and hopefully
we can take your question on an upcoming episode. All right, man,
that's gonna do it for this episode though, So until
next time, best Friends Out, Best Friends Out.
Welcome to How the Money. I'm Joel and I and
Matt and today we're talking about the Power of Habit
with Charles do Higg. Charles Duhigg is a Pultzer Prize
(00:27):
winning journalist who writes for The New Yorker, in New
York Times Magazine, and other publications. He is also the
author of bestsellers The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better,
and he's the host of Slate's podcast how To. As
a business experts self help expert, Charles explores habit formation
and the science of productivity in order to help folks
(00:49):
on a day to day basis. We are excited to
have him join us to talk about how we can
implement better habits and particularly when it comes to our
personal finances and how we can lead a more productive So, Charles,
thank you for joining us today on the podcast. Thanks
for having me h Charles, We're we're glad to have you.
End every episode of this podcast, Matt and now we
talk about money, but at the same time, we drink
(01:11):
a craft beer. And that's because we are fans of
people prioritizing something that matters in their financial life. Uh,
in the here and now. While they're also saving and
investing well for the future, so I want to know.
That's kind of our splurge. What is your splurge? What's
your craft beer equivalent? My craft beer equivalent? Um, I
mean I I buy a lot of like gadgets I
(01:32):
find like I I love to to to check out
the latest gadgets and and uh and play with them.
So that's probably my splurge. What was the last gadget
you bought? Then that's a good question. Um, well, I
just bought an e bike, so yeah, you work in
our language. It has not arrived yet, but when it does,
I'm excited to check it out. Did you happen to
(01:54):
purchase the new Radwagon. No I didn't. I actually did
buy from rad though. I bought the the not the
rad Runner. They got like a city one or something
like that. Not the City Um the in fact here,
let me look at up. I can't remember exactly which
one it was. It's the one with the fat wheels
where you can kind of ride over maybe you're able
(02:14):
to ride over that rover. That's what I bought, the
rad Rover I heard. It feels like that you're like
biking on a sofa because it's so comfortable, it's like
a cat. I've got the rad Wagon. So Charles, just
heads up, you're gonna love it. Do you like it? Oh?
I love it? Man. I put my one year old
on the back. We we bike all over town. It's
the greatest thing in the world. Yeah. I mean, just
(02:35):
e bikes in general are amazing. They are are such
a way forward for individuals to be able to take
on bike commuting. Uh, even losing a car, like cutting
a car from their lives. You know, just the ability
to get across town with an e bike is completely
changed the game. We're huge fans of it. Yeah, I'm excited. Yeah, Charles,
I saw that you've been featured. You've been a guest
(02:56):
on the now defunct Colbert Report. Yes, I've actually in
the audience before. Was that a fun experience for you?
What was that like? Yeah? It was great. It was great.
I mean, he's he's a fantastic host, and um and
the whole show is kind of fun. You know. I
think anytime the shows like that like it, it actually
goes by very very quickly. Um and so, but now,
were I really enjoyed it? It It was fantastic. Yeah, he
(03:18):
was that was kind of an incredible role that he
had for those years. It might not work, um, Matt
and I were discussing as well right now in today's time.
But it was so good when he because it was
a parody back then. But today it's like, oh no,
like all folks are taking it that extreme in real life.
It's it's almost not as funny anymore, whereas you know,
years ago it was hilarious exactly, U, Charles. Let's talk
(03:40):
about your podcast. We're fans first of the name of
your podcast, by the way, you're one word away from
the perfect podcast name. But let's talk about some of
the topics you've covered on your podcast. How too. There's
one really interesting one that you did, um not too
long ago about convincing people to give you money. You
highlighted that con artists and folks that run on profits
is being especially good at this. So what do you
(04:02):
what did you learn in that episode about how to
effectively get people to give you money? Well, we had
on this this woman named Maria Konakova, who wrote a
book about con artists and about how con artists work.
Who actually she just published another book called The Big
Bad about her learning to become a poker professional. And
and what Marina Maria says in her book which is
(04:23):
really interesting, and she points out that you know, the
con artists kind of operate according to a formula, and
part of that formula is basically knowing who their mark
is and what their mark wants to here, and then
tailoring their pitch to that and giving it a sense
of exclusiveness, giving it a sense of scarcity, um, giving
it something where they believe that they are they are
(04:45):
they're helping other people, although they are also helping themselves.
So one of the one of the best cons is
something where where the person is going to make money.
They believe that they're going to make money. By giving
you some money, they're going to make more money. But
it's also like, well, you're also helping, like the chill Aldren, right,
You're helping like you know, some someone off in another country. Um,
you're doing a real favor to them because that way
(05:06):
they can dress up their own greed and kind of
this need for virtuousness. And what's really interesting is that
when you talk to folks who do nonprofit fundraising, a
lot of the tactics are very very similar that that
you need to tell people that even though they're giving
money to a cause, like to a nonprofit, you need
(05:27):
to tell them how it's going to benefit them. But
then you dress it up in this you know, you're
making the world a better place and we're gonna put
your name on a building. So it's really all about
sort of like about how awesome you are, but we're
gonna we're gonna let you have a self righteousness that
allows you to to feel like you're doing this for
the for the right reasons. And so that was really
(05:47):
interesting is to sort of figure out like, like what
we know is that we know that there is the
psychology behind why people how people treat their money. Right,
you guys know this, And so a lot of the
the tactics that con artists use aren't that dissimilar from
the tactics that that fundraisers use, even when they're doing
it for a good cause. Yeah, and even in a
(06:09):
less con artist type of way, you can use those approaches.
You can use those tactics when it comes to like say,
asking for a raise, right, you know, if you are
trying to convince your employer that how it is that
you are helping them, how you're helping the company. Well,
that's literally what you need to do when you actually
are asking for a raise the chars. More recently, I
think my favorite episode was one that you did about
(06:29):
a seeing virtual schooling, you know, on Zoom What did
you what did you take away from that episode about
how to think about our kids and screen time and
you know, these COVID times. Well, it's really hard, right,
I mean, I think that like kids are suffering right now,
way more than than we even understand. I have two
children myself, and they've been doing virtual school. Now they're
(06:49):
back in and well one of them is back in
day to day school and the other one is still
virtual schooling. It's really really challenging. And and I think
that one of the things that we've learned is just
that this interact ativity is really important, That being being
with other people is really important. If you can't be
with other people, that figuring out how to foster conversation,
you know, I've found this on my own doing Zoom calls.
(07:11):
I'm sure you guys have to that one of the
challenges is that you lose all of this kind of
ease of what's known as back channeling within psychology that
people saying yes, sort of showing with their body whether
they're following along or they're distracted. Even when people are thinking,
it's harder to know that on zoom. If you're sitting
in a room with someone, oftentimes we use eye contact
(07:33):
to signal when someone else should feel free to speak, right.
We tend not to look at each other in the
eyes when we're speaking, but then when we finished the thought,
we tend to look at someone else in the eyes,
and that's kind of a an almost unconscious signal that
that person can go ahead and start speaking. The problem
is on Zoom if someone's you know, if you're sitting
in a room with someone and they're looking off into
the corner, which is totally normal, you could look in
(07:54):
the corner and see that they're not looking at anything,
and you know that they're sort of just thinking about
what they're saying. On Zoom, if they're looking off into
a corner, it looks like they're distracted or we don't
know what they're looking at. And so this distance communication
has been really challenging in some ways. I think it's
actually more challenging with Zoom than it is without Zoom.
I think verbal communication is actually easier in some respects
(08:16):
than verbal plus video. And so when it comes to
kids and Zoom school, one of the things that we've
learned is that you really have to spend some time
thinking about how are you going to keep that kid engaged?
How are you going to make it easier for them
to pay attention, because it's just so hard, so easy
to get distracted and to kind of tune out. Yeah,
now that's that's true. I found that with my kids,
(08:36):
and especially a kindergartener, trying to get used to UM
school in the first place, much less school virtually. It's
um it's pretty rough. It's pretty rough. Charles. Let's talk
about habits for just a little bit. Your best selling book,
The Power of Habit. It's just really really good and
so many great stories we've in there that brought your
points home. But what kind of actually spawned your initial
(08:59):
interest in taking on that subject in general? Well, you know, um,
I was. I was just interested. And I had this
basic question, which is like, if I'm if I'm so
smart at other stuff? Right? I had? I had gone
to Yale for college and to Harvard Business School for
to get my m b a. And and yet there
were all these things, I still felt like I had
struggled with so much, right, Like I struggled to eat
(09:20):
more healthily, I struggled to make myself exercise more. And
I just kept on thinking like if I'm so smart,
like why is it so hard to do these things
that I see other people do all the time? Right,
Like why is it hard for me to master my habits?
And so so the goal of writing the book was
in part just to educate myself, like how do habits work?
If I understand them better, will that help me understand
(09:42):
how to control my own habits? And it turns out
that we we are, and we're living through this sort
of golden age of understanding habit research that that for
the first time, because of advances in neurology and other
psychological sciences, that there was this ability to understand and
observe habits at the mo some my neute level. And
so once I started looking into that, I thought it
(10:02):
was fascinating and decided like, that's that's what I want
to write a book about, because I wanted to learn
it for myself but then also share it with other people. Yeah,
personal growth, Right, that's a great excuse to dive into
that research, and in your book as well, you side
a study that shows that like around daily activities are habits,
Like we don't even think about them, right, And so
does this mean that like half of our lives are
(10:24):
like we're just reacting to cues. Uh, and you know
we're kind of doing things just mostly without thinking. Makes
me thinko'me a robot or something. Yeah, So it's fort
And what it means is, I mean to be clear,
what a habit is. A habit is a choice that
you make at some point and then you stop making
the choice, but you continue doing it. Right, So, so
the first time that you walked into the um, you know,
(10:47):
walked into the cafeteria work, you decided to go get
a sandwich instead of a salad, even though the salad
was was healthier, and then you just kept on doing
that without kind of consciously making the decision. What we
know is that our brains are designed to actually basically
kind of stop stop spending so much energy when we're
in the grip of a habit. That's why habits are
so useful, is because they free up cognitive capacity for
(11:09):
other tasks, even when we're driving to work or walking
down the Street. So what that means is that you
know of what we do every day. At some point
you made a decision on how to spend that time,
but then you just kind of continued on autopilot with
according to that decision without reconsidering it. And so the
(11:30):
more that you can sort of analyze your own habits
and say like, oh, look, I'm doing this behavior because
of a habit and there's a queue and there's a
reward that's driving that activity that routine, the more control
you get over actually making making the habits that you
want to have rather than the ones that just kind
of emerge without our permission. Charles, we want to talk
(11:52):
more about habit formation and get your tips on breaking
bad habits, and this of course applies to how we
handle money at the same time. We'll get to some
of that right after this break. All right, we are
back from the break talking with Charles do Hig about
(12:14):
habits and Charles, you write about specifically the habit loop
in your book, but I'd love to discuss how we
can break bad habits that we might have fallen into.
Right um, bad habits they can call it cause us
to spend money, maybe emotionally waste time on social media
other things. Right, you write how habits can develop into
even a massive gambling addiction that's almost impossible to curb.
(12:37):
You give an example in your book. So how in
the world do we actually kick a bad habit? Well,
the first thing is is to to to realize that
thinking in terms of breaking a bad habit is exactly
the wrong way to think about it. And that's part
of the lexicon. Right we say, like, I want to
break a bad habit, but that's not how habits work.
We can't we with willpower, you might be able to
(12:58):
extinguish a habit you don't like for a little while,
but as soon as you feel stressed or as soon as,
like you know, you have a moment of weakness, it's
going to come back because that neural pathway is still
in your brain. So the way to think about it
is as changing a bad habit, replacing one behavior with
another behavior, rather than breaking that bad habit. And to
to do that you have to understand how habits work.
(13:19):
And you mentioned the habit loop. So the thing about
habits is that every habit has three parts. There's a
queue which is a trigger for an automatic behavior to start,
and then the routine, which is the behavior itself, and
then finally a reward. Every habit in your life, whether
you're aware of it or not, is delivering a reward
to you, and and a part of your brain known
as the basical ganglia exists to kind of recognize that
(13:40):
reward and make that that chunk of behavior, that Q
routine reward easier and easier to do for you. So
if you have a bad habit and you want to
change it, the first thing to do is to identify
the que and the reward. Try and figure out, you know,
what is triggering this behavior and what reward is it
delivering it to me, and then find a new behavior,
(14:02):
a new routine that you can insert into that habit
loop that corresponds to that old queue and that delivers
something similar to that old reward. So for many people,
let's take smoking as an example, right, because we think
of smoking as a as a particularly pernicious habit, an addiction,
and and nicotine is addicting. It's actually less addicting than
(14:23):
we sort of popularly know. It is. About a hundred
hours after your last cigarette, nicotine is out of your blood,
your blood system, your bloodstream, and people are no longer
physically addicted to nicotine. So it's less the drug and
it's more the habit. Is what you're saying, Well, yeah, exactly.
People get in the habit of smoking, and so you know,
weeks after giving up cigarettes, years, they still feel that
(14:45):
urge for a cigarette when they're sitting down with their
morning coffee. You know, if you have that urge years
after giving them cigarettes, that's clearly not a physical addiction,
that's a habit dysfunction. But but habits exist in the
same part of our brain as addictions, and so they
feel very, very similar. And so if you want to
of up cigarettes, you can. You can just go cold
turkey and throw them away. But a better thing to
do is to try and figure out, Okay, what reward
(15:07):
is smoking giving me? And for many people it's that
um smoking provides a break from work, right, so you
need something else that's going to provide a break from work,
some some new routine that delivers similar reward. For some people,
smoking actually calms them down, right, It's the nicotine has
a kind of calming effect, in which case they need
to find something else to calm themselves down. And for
(15:27):
some people it's um it's gives them a little bit
more energy. So they need to start drinking coffee when
they would normally smoke in order to replace that behavior.
But that's kind of the point, is that you don't
break a bad habit, you change it. And once you
change it, then that that change becomes much more sustainable.
And what about just forming a new habit, like just
(15:48):
out of the blue? Right? Um? And And we're in
a time of year where people are probably particularly thinking
about starting a new habit and creating, you know, some
change in their lives. And so you know, a lot
of our listeners particularly are like, how can I maybe
spend more mindfully this year or actually stick to a budget.
If they're looking to start from scratch to create a
good habit right now, where do you suggest they start?
(16:10):
So this is a great question. We actually just recorded
a podcast episode about this, it's gonna be gonna be
coming out next week about how to create good spending habits.
And and there's a couple of things that people should
keep in mind. Number one is is you know, first
of all, you just have to have the basic like
sort of money hygiene. So like, if you have debt,
you should be paying down your debt. If you you
(16:32):
should absolutely have a budget, Like if you don't have
a monthly and a weekly budget, then and if you're
not tracking what you're spending, then you don't know what
is going on in your own finances and you can't
possibly be on top of it. So so there's some
basic money hygiene stuff that everyone should do. But then
(16:52):
on top of that, like the question is how do
we think about the habits, you know, a lot of
the spending that we do. So when people finally you
get their budget and they and they track what they've
spend every week, what they see is they see that
they're wasting a lot of money, right, They're oftentimes wasting
money on things like going to Starbucks. They're wasting money
on you know, buying, particularly during the pandemic, buying things
from Amazon. One woman, this woman we were talking to yesterday,
(17:14):
I said, she feels anxious if she doesn't have an
Amazon package coming, which which sounds ridiculous, but I totally understand,
right because I think lots of people feel that way.
And then and then on top of that is this
this question of what are the rewards that these are providing?
You know, people spend too much money going to restaurants
and on food. That's always something that people overspend on.
(17:35):
They buy too much food, or they buy food from restaurants,
or they're going to you know, um, Whole Foods rather
than the local grocery store that's cheaper. And so once
you know what your habits are by tracking what you're
actually doing, then you can start asking yourself, Okay, so
what rewards are this actually providing? Right? Am I buying
(17:55):
because I'm bored during the pandemic? The answer is often yes,
people are bored. They need a break from like their
zoom calls, their online and they go to Amazon, or
they go to one of these websites that like has
like you know, here's like the ten new things you
should buy, or extra Instagram, which is just constantly feeding
you stuff to buy two now, yeah, exactly exactly, And
(18:16):
so like, are you buying stuff because you need it?
Are you buying stuff because you're bored? Chances are you're
buying stuff because you're bored very often, and so then
the question becomes Okay, so the answer is not to
just say I'm going to stop going to those websites,
because you're still going to be bored the answer is
to say, how do I come up with something else
that solves that boredom? How do I come up with
something else that provides the reward that I used to
(18:39):
get from shopping, which is some novelty, some sense of
excitement about the future. And there's lots of different ways
to do that, right, Like, once you once you pose
the problem that way, you can say, oh, instead of
instead of like, you know, if I'm bored, instead of
like going and surfing to the website, I'm gonna let
myself watch ten minutes of TV. Right, I'm gonna turn
on a TV show and I'm gonna watch it on
my computer. Instead of going to Amazon, I'm just for
(19:01):
ten minutes. I'm gonna go to our Instagram for ten minutes.
I'm gonna go and I'm gonna watch The Queen's Gambit
for ten minutes, right, and like I'm gonna set a timer.
But the point is that, like that's a cheaper way
of solving your borda. And the more that you break
it down and you say, what rewards is this spending
giving me, the more you're gonna get closer to figuring
out a way to make it easier for yourself. Right, Yeah,
(19:23):
you shared another example to where it's just snacking can
be a habit when in reality you realize that you're
not hungry, you're just looking for some socialization. I know
I kind of fall into that same trap when I
you know, I'm sitting here working, I have a tendency
to to think, Okay, maybe it's time for another coffee,
but what I really need is just a break. And
so even just standing up grabbing a kettlebell, which is yeah,
it's also a healthy kind of thing to do. But
(19:44):
like doing some kettle bells wings gets the blood flow
and and all of a sudden, I'm feeling ready to
continue working. Absolutely absolutely so, Like I think that's exactly right. Like,
like we want something, we want an excuse to stand
up and walk around, and the easiest way to stand
up and walk around is to walk over to the
kitchen and get something to eat. But like you just
as easily stand up, and once you realize that what
you really want is to stand up and walk around,
(20:04):
you can stand up and walk around the other direction
and pick up a cattle bell, or you know, just
go outside and walk around the block, walk away from
the fridge. Exactly uh. Well. In your book To the
Power of Habit, Charles You, you also credit community and
peer pressure as reasons why certain habits tend to remain sticky.
Given the increased isolation so many of us have felt
(20:25):
during the pandemic, and obviously the decrease in in person community,
how have you seen that impact individuals in the you know,
the way they exhibit habits and behaviors. Well, I think
that strangely, like actually people feel are feeling. Many people
are feeling a stronger sense of community during the pandemic.
They tend you know, one of the things that undermines
(20:47):
community is um not spending enough time with the same
group of people. So so one of the things that
we know is that like having a community doesn't It
doesn't matter how many people are in the community. It
matters how much time you're spending with those people. And
so in many of our daily lives, you can be around,
you know, a hundred people in a day, a d
people in a day, but you're not really interacting with
(21:10):
many of them for more than a couple of minutes.
If you take like alcoholics Anonymous as an example, one
of the important things about alcoholics Anonymous is that it's
very stable. It tends as a state, it has a
it typically has a very stable time. It happens the
same time every day, very stable UM structure. It usually
opens with someone telling a story about themselves, and you know,
(21:30):
you sort of say these similar these similar things each time.
And equally importantly, you tend to have a pretty stable
group of people there, so you see the same people
usually each time you go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and that
stability is an important part of why that community feels supportive.
So one of the things that's happening right now with
(21:51):
the pandemic is you're exactly right. We see less people
and so our community has shrunk, but we tend to
spend a lot more time with the people that we
see because we're at home with them um and so,
or we're on zoom calls with them all day long.
And so what we found is that for some people,
community has actually been strengthened in some ways. Now, that
doesn't mean it's easier, right, that doesn't mean that like
(22:14):
like that community feels really invigorating, UM, because you have
to put work into a community and it's not supposed
to feel like fun all the time. But for people
who feel like they're missing community. I think that's part
of the solution is to find find people to touch
base with, the same people to touch base with on
a regular basis. So to have a regular, you know,
(22:35):
once a week zoom call with your friend where you
guys know you're going to get on at Friday at
noon every every week and you're gonna have a zoom
lunch together. That's really important. Charles. You also end up
boiling a whole lot down to the power of belief.
You know, why is beliefs so important? And how do
we develop like a deeper sense of belief in ourselves
in order to affect change? Well? Is so so belief
(22:55):
believing that you can change is really important to making change,
um effective. And what we know about belief is that
the best way to actually to to actually learn to
believe in yourself is to practice believing in in anything. Right,
like so again to return to Alcoholics anonymous. Not that
a A is like perfect, but but there's a lot
(23:16):
of sort of interesting lessons there. Um. One of the
one of the steps in A is that they tell
you to believe in a higher power. Now they don't
say it has to be religious They don't say it
has to be God. It could be like, you know,
my higher power is democracy. But but they do encourage
you to believe in something larger than yourself. And I
think the reason why that's so important is because basically
(23:38):
what they're doing is they're getting people to practice believing
in things, and eventually that muscle, that believing muscle, gets
strengthened and people can learn how to believe in themselves.
And so the thing that like, I think is really
helpful if if people are struggling with things is and
they want to build up their capacity to believe that
they can change is what's known as the science of
small winds. Basically to take these baby steps. What we
(23:59):
know about change happens is that most change happens because
people have small, incremental, nonlinear successes that lead up to
a big change. So so instead of saying I'm going
to go around a marathon, they say tomorrow morning, I'm
going to go for a walk around the block. And
they go for a walk around the block and it's
not that hard, and they they they have this small wind, right,
(24:22):
I go in for a block and they believe, like
I am, I'm the kind of person who can go
for a walk around the block and then the next
day they say, okay, so I went for a walk
around the block. Now I'm gonna go around the walk
for two blocks, and they do that, and eventually they
get so tired of just walking there, like I'm gonna
take a jog, and I'm gonna jog for half a mile,
and these small baby steps the science of small winds,
that is how we learn to believe in ourselves is
(24:43):
by practicing belief in smaller, low stakes cases. And that's
really really important because we can do that for anything,
whether it's saving money or getting in better shape. As
long as you can sort of find some ways to
take baby steps, then you know that you're going to
be in a position where you can train yourself to
believe that change as possible. Yeah, yeah, no, that's awesome.
I love that insight from the book for sure, and
(25:05):
it really is powerful. It's something that we can use
to our advantage. Charles, we have just a few more
questions for you in including what it looks like to
create a to do list that we can actually um
take charge of and and do well that will actually
influence us for the better. And we'll get to some
of those questions right after this break. All right, we're
(25:30):
back to the break talking with Charles do Hig about habits,
and Charles, before we talk about, you know, kind of
optimizing our life, I wanted to touch real quickly too.
On keystone habits. You mentioned that in your book. Uh,
you mentioned how they can kind of create habit momentum
in your life, you know, And so can you share
what keystone habits are and why it is that they're
so important? Yeah, So keystone habits. One of the things
(25:50):
that we've learned from research on habits is that some
habits seem to matter more than others because when they
start to change, they set up a chain reaction that
changes other patterns as well. So an example of this
is exercised, right, for many people exercises a keystone habits,
and when they start exercising habitually, what happens is they
start eating more healthily as well. They're they're eating habits
change and and that kind of weirdly makes sense to us. Right,
(26:13):
everyone's kind of experienced that you go for a run
in the morning, and then when you go to have lunch,
it's easier to get the salad rather than the unhealthy hamburger.
But what's interesting is that when we look at people
who have started exercising habitually, for many of them, when
that habit starts, they also start using their credit cards less.
They tend to procrastinate less at work. They this is
(26:34):
my favorite finding, they do their dishes like, wash their
dishes on average twenty minutes earlier in the day on
they've exercised. And and that makes lesson to it have
sense to us, right like none of us think of
of ourselves is going out for a run and think like, oh,
I'm gonna keep my amex in my pockets today rather
than taking it out. And yet what we know is
that the same way that the exercise habits change eating habits,
(26:56):
they change other patterns in our lives as well. And
that's because for many people exercises a keystone habit. It
changes how we see ourselves and that change has an
almost subconscious influence on other choices that we make. And
so for many people that the question is, how can
you identify the keystone habits in your life the changes
you can make that will set off a chain reaction
(27:18):
that will change other patterns. And the answer is to
look for those changes that kind of seem irrationally scary. Right.
For the reason why exercise is such a powerful keystone
habit for so many people is because oftentimes, um it's
it's it's not a keystone habit for people who are
like high school athletes, like people who are accustomed to
seeing themselves as athletic, usually will not see a big
(27:42):
change in their life when they start exercising on a
regular basis after like a period of inactivity. But it's
for people who were not high school athletes, the people
who never thought of themselves as athletes, when they start running,
you know, three times a week, they start subtly thinking
of themselves as a different kind of person. They start
thinking of them is the kind of person who manages
to run three times a week, and that that kind
(28:05):
of person doesn't spend recklessly, that kind of person doesn't
eat unhealthily. And so the key is to look for
those types of change that seems irrationally scary to you.
And that's usually a clue that if you change it,
it will change yourself image a little bit, and that
that will have an impact on the other patterns in
your life. So, are there any things that you found
(28:25):
in going through all the research and through writing your
book that any keystone happens that particularly affected how we
handle our money. So thinking of yourself as a saver, right,
like the like like somebody who. So, So here's how
I do my money. I use Mint to track all
of my purchases right sizing all my bank accounts every
(28:46):
single week. Once a week, I sit down and I
have a spreadsheet on Excel, and I fill in all
these things in the spreadsheet with how much money is
in my is in my bank accounts, how much credit
card like, how much is on my credit cards right
now out? How much is in my four oh one K,
how much is in my investments I have like you know,
ten or twelve cells that I fill in on that spreadsheet.
(29:07):
And then there's a little formulas that tell me how
much I spent compared to last week, how much more,
how much money is in whether my net balance is
up or down from last week, how much money I've
made overall, except you know, how much how much more
is on my credit card or less on my credit card?
And and so this is a habit for me. I
do it every single week. And the thing that it
(29:29):
does is it makes me very, very aware of the
money patterns in my life. It also makes me think
of myself as someone who thinks about money, who thinks
about like and cares about where my money is going.
And I think in part that's why writing a budget
and tracking your own spending is so powerful, is because
(29:49):
not only does it give you the data to kind
of see what's going on and see where you're spending
too much, but if you do it regularly, if you
stick with that budget, if you look each day to
see what you spent on or each week, you start
thinking of your off as the kind of person who
cares about where their money is going. And that kind
of person, that kind of person does not make frivolous
purchases quite as easily. And so the number one keystone
(30:11):
habit for people around money that can change how they
spend is to create a budget and update their budget regularly,
because that habit not only gives you information, but it
also changes how you see yourself when it comes to money.
I love that. Yeah, That change and identity is what
happens there. Charles. In your book Smarter, Faster Better, you
talk more about focus in an age of information overload,
(30:34):
in the world of personal finance, you know, information can
be blinding, and so how do we filter the information
that is helpful versus the stuff that we should probably ignore.
The first thing to understand is that is that more
information is not better. Oftentimes it's worse. Right. You can
you can overwhelm yourself with with information and basically not
(30:57):
learn anything as a result. So the key is that
you really don't want more than at the most three
data points that you're paying attention to, and it's pretty
and like if you have lesson three, that's even better.
So like at first you can just say, look, I
want to I want to compare um, you know my
my bank account balances this week with the same time
(31:18):
last week, and see if they've gone up and down.
And I want to compare you know how much I
spent on food this week with how much I budgeted
for food this week, and just starting small that way,
and really like like focusing in on that because that
whatever we focus on, we're gonna be able to change.
And if you focus on if you have fifteen categories
(31:39):
in your budget, and each week you look at all
fifteen categories and you're trying to figure out what's going on.
If you do that at first, you're not gonna make
any changes. You're gonna be so like overwhelmed by the
amount of information you have. So the key is at
first choose one or two, at most three data points
to pay attention to. Now, over time you might get
(32:00):
to a place where you can do more data points. Right,
you know, two months down the road, you're like, Okay,
now I'm looking at two other things. I'm looking at
food and I'm looking at you know, how much I'm
spending on commuting. But but only once I get food
under control do I start paying attention to that commuting budget.
The key is to not let yourself feel productive because
(32:22):
you're looking at a lot of data and not actually
get anything done. The less data you are looking at,
the higher the odds that you're actually gonna change what
you're paying attention to. That's that's great stuff. Yeah, I
want to ask you to Charles about to do list. Um,
they're just kind of one of these simple but typically
they ineffective sometimes and super effective depending on how you
use them. Um, but they can be used really well.
(32:43):
And you've talked about how you create a better to
do list that that actually helps us get more done. Like,
what's the trick to making it to do list? It's
actually successful. Yeah, So it's very similar to focus, which
is that that what we know from studies is that
most people create to do lists that have like twenty
or thirty things on them because what they're actually using
their to do list is as a memory aid rather
(33:03):
than rather than trying to remember things. They put it
on a piece of paper, and that's great because it's
much easier to remember things when they're written down than
trying to carry them around in your in your brain.
But then they make this mistake, which is they say, Okay,
this memory aid that I've developed, that's my to do list,
and that's that's not the right way of doing things
because what will happen, and we know this from studies
is that oftentimes people will look for the easiest things
(33:25):
on that list too and do them because it feels
so good to cross them off. So I think you
mentioned that sometimes people write something down that they've already
done just so they can put People who write to
do list, they'll write down a task they've already completed
because it feels so good to cross the guilty. So
the key is like you should have a memory aid
that's a piece of paper, But then you should have
(33:46):
another piece of paper, which is your to do list,
and you should not have more than three things on
that to do list. And what should be on that
to do list is number one, the most important thing
to do today. Number two, if you get that first
thing done, the next most important thing to do. And
number three what you suspect is the is the most
important thing for tomorrow, but you might change it when
(34:07):
you write tomorrow's to do list. And you write a
new to do list every single morning. And the goal
of a to do list is not to simply help
you remember things. It's to prioritize things. And that's why
you never want more than three things on it is
because the the act of writing it to do list
is to force you to to decide what is the
most important thing I want to get done today, and
(34:27):
then putting that as the top priority and ignoring everything else. Yeah,
there's a difference between doing the things that you need
to do right now versus just all the things that
are in your mind that you want to have a
list of somewhere else. But that's not necessarily your to
do list. Exactly right. So, Charles, thank you so much
for taking the time to hang out with list today.
Where can people find more about you and your podcast?
They can find so if they just look for how
(34:47):
to by how to with Charles do Hig on Slate,
they can find the podcast wherever they listen to podcasts,
and they can find out more about me or about
the power of habit or smarter fester better just by
googling any of those. Its are going to Charles Doohig
dot com or um see doohig on Twitter if you
folks on to follow me. Awesome. Thanks again for your
time today, Charles, We appreciate it. Take care, Joel May.
(35:09):
What a great conversation we just had here with Charles
about habits and you know, in particularly this time of
the year, as folks are basically thinking through like how
can they become a better person this year, how it
is they can stick to their New Year's resolutions. Talking
about habits and how they're formed and how it is
that we stick to them is so important, Uh soth.
I'm glad we had this conversation today. Man, what was
your big takeaway today? One? I'm just proud of Charles
(35:30):
for getting an e bike because the bikes are the future.
So and of course he gets a rat Rat power bike.
I mean, everybody is getting those bikes these days. They're
so affordable. So even though Charles and I have never
met in person, we can be best friends. It works. Um,
you have that kindred spirit exactly. And yeah, it was
definitely hard to pick one takeaway from this episode. Man,
it was jam packed full of knowledge and just a
lot of interesting insight. But I think my biggest one
(35:53):
was that small winds are so important. And you know,
one of the things that he said was if you're
not a natural budget or if you kind of hate
budgeting in particular, or or really anybody like you should
focus on fewer data points. And I think when we're
trying to come up with a budget and you and I,
I don't know, maybe six months ago we had an
episode where we talked about different styles of budgeting for
(36:13):
different personalities and we mentioned simpler being better. Um, a
lot of focus us what they need right, and that
was echoed in this conversation that the simpler your budget,
the more effectively you're gonna be able to stick to it.
So concentrate maybe on a few data points that most
negatively impact your budget. Um. And if you can just
over the course of a few months pay attention to
those two or three things where you find yourself overspending, UM,
(36:37):
then you don't necessarily have to have just this robust
budget that you're chaking in on on a weekly basis
that's overwhelming you that you're not gonna be able to
stick to. If instead you focus on just a few
data points, I think it will help you be able
to actually find budgeting as a useful tool um. In one.
So yeah, I don't know, that was my big takeaway,
(36:58):
But yeah, there's a lot of goals in this one.
So what was good? It was good? No, Yeah, I
mean it's certainly the power of focus, right, you know,
to focus on a few of those things and make
sure that you succeed at those things versus getting bogged
down by all the details. I mean, it's something we
talked about even in our year end review episode. But
for me, my big tig away man was kind of
when we talked about Keystone habits. And he writes more
about this in his book, but you know, he he
(37:19):
elaborated more here in the conversation. How when you start
doing something that's really scary to you. How you when
when you have this irrational fear of doing something. I
have lots of irrational fears matter, but it should you
should pay attention to those things, you know, like when
you feel that way about something, it's like, Okay, what
is it about this thing that makes me feel that way?
And he's pointing out that as we confront those fears
and as we change our behaviors, we also change our identity.
(37:42):
You know. Uh. In particular, he highlighted exercise. For a
lot of people, they see that as this scary thing,
like how do you get to the point where you're
just going to work nine to five and working versus
you know, seeing the people on the weekends running marathons
or triathlon It's that kind of thing. There's a wide
chasm between those two points. Yeah. I thought one of
the most interesting things that he said about exercise, which
is always the thing he goes through my mind, is
(38:04):
I don't have enough time to do that. But what
he what he the point he made was that you
people that exercise actually have more time in their lives.
It's fascinating how the dishes sooner in the day. Yeah,
it's It's fascinating how that works. And so I need
to stop using that as an excuse and start working
on my habit. Yeah. Yeah, And so I just love
the fact that by confronting these fears, though, how you
literally start thinking of yourself differently. You know, you start
(38:25):
exercising a little bit, you go for a run around
the block, and all of a sudden, I am an exerciser,
Like that's just it becomes a part of your identity.
And I love that. Uh. And the same thing when
it comes to like looking at your money. He knows
that by looking at his money once a week that
has changed the way that he views his own personal finances.
You know, he then sees that, oh, I am a saver.
This is who I am. It becomes a part of
(38:46):
who you are. And when you have a sense of
identity like that, you are invested to stick with it,
no doubt. So yeah, I hope that information was helpful
to all of our listeners as they're looking to either
you know, kick off a new habit this year, um
in particular, in all likelihood, if they're listening to this
show a positive habit, positive habits and in regard to
their personal finances, or really just any habit. This was
(39:07):
a conversation that I think can can help you potentially
stick to some of those New Year's resolutions that you
might have already made. Um, all right, now, let's get
back to the beer that we had while we were
talking with Charles. This one was called Boys in the
Yard Milkshake I p A. And the reason it's called
it's actually boys in. I love a good boyson berry
pun and so that's what this one was. It was
(39:27):
literally an I p A with boys and berries tossed
in from a local brewery down the street from us
called Wrecking Bar, a brewpub. Matt Warrior thoughts on this beer, man, Yeah,
I Reckon Bar is one of our favorite local brewpubs
here in Atlanta. And Dude, one of the first things
that I thought of, as you mentioned, you know, the
boys and berries is like, what is a boys in?
It makes me thinking of that a little bitch head
for joke, But like, boys and berries aren't something you
(39:50):
regularly see, you know. It's it's not like a typical
berry that you would pick up at the grocery store,
at least if you have. It's not one that I
have either, Like strawberries, blueberries. Yeah, yeah, you some raspberries.
I'm getting crazy. It's it's like one of those berries
that you cook with that that find their way into
beers or other dishes like that. But I've never had
a boison berry on its own, And like, what is
(40:10):
a boison tree or bush? Like, I'm curious to know.
But I really enjoyed this one. Man. This was, like
you said, a milkshake, I p A. So it was
kind of creamy. It's got some of that lactose sugar
in there, but it also had some of that fruitiness
that Boyson berry ads. Not having had a boison berry separately,
I can't necessarily pick it out, you know. I'm like, oh,
I can really taste the boys and berry notes. I
(40:31):
taste fruit and so therefore that makes me think, oh
that must be boys and must be. But I did
enjoy it. This is one that you just picked up
a couple of days ago, and they just can this.
So it's really fun to to have a really fresh
crisp I PA like this. Uh, really enjoyed it, man, Yeah,
what are your thoughts? Yeah? Man, I love the smooth
vibe of a milkshake. I p A. That lactose smoothness
(40:51):
just kind of um is a different mouth feel which
I enjoy from time to time. And yeah, the Boysonberry
action combined with the hops, it's just kind of fast
nating flavor profile. And yeah, I think it can be
done poorly. The milkshake I p a, but this one
was done quite well. So yeah, I love everything. Wrecking
Barr puts out one of, like you said, one of
our favorite local breweries. Um so yeah, another winner today. Um.
(41:14):
By the way, one thing Charles said that we haven't
talked about. He mentioned The Queen's Gambit. Everyone. If you
if like you're late to the game on this, you
should totally watch The Queen's Game. But such an excellent,
excellent show on that. You burned your way through the
full first season by oh yeah, oh yeah. I don't
know if there's a second season coming, but if there is,
I'll be watching. Nice man. Yeah, that's that's not one
that Kate and I have started yet, so we didn't
get to that over the holidays, but maybe we were.
(41:34):
Well soon you you should. Yeah, Well, folks can find
our show notes up on our website at how the
Money dot com. We'll make sure to link to Charles
podcast and his books as well, where you can learn
more about the different things he has written about. Yeah,
and by the way, every other Monday, when we're not
interviewing somebody, Matt and I are answering your listener questions.
And especially if you're a new listener and you're kind
of trying to figure out how money works or you've
(41:56):
got some questions about your personal finances. Well, we'd love
to take your question on an upcoming episode. Just go
to how to money dot com slash ask simple instructions
there to send a voice memo our way and hopefully
we can take your question on an upcoming episode. All right, man,
that's gonna do it for this episode though, So until
next time, best Friends Out, Best Friends Out.
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