Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 402: How To Work Around Your Own Irrationality | Richard Thaler

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

This episode explores how to make the infernally difficult challenge of habit formation a little easier, with guest Richard H. Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2017 for his pioneering work in the fields of behavioral economics and finance. Thaler is the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Decision Research. He is also the co-author, with Cass R. Sunstein, of Nudge: the Final Edition.In this episode, Dan and Richard discuss what a nudge is as well as its opposite – which Thaler and Sunstein call sludge. They also discuss other fascinating concepts, including: choice architecture, mental accounting, libertarian paternalism, bounded rationality, and how the lessons of behavioral economics can lead to a happier lifeThe Anti-Diet Challenge kicks off today in the Ten Percent Happier app. If you’re not already a Ten Percent Happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that’ll give you access to the challenge, along with our entire app. Click here to get started.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello. Today, it's an episode all about how to make the infernally difficult challenge of habit formation a little bit easier. As many of you know, you may have heard me say this before, evolution did not bequeath modern humans a mind that is particularly good at behavior change.

Our racing minds are good at scanning for threats, food, and mates, but not so good at consistently flossing our teeth or whatever. This may sound pessimistic, but knowing this brute fact that we're not really wired for easy adoption of long-term healthy habits. Knowing that can be liberating. It can free you up from any internal storytelling you might be doing about how you are uniquely dysfunctional when it comes to adopting healthy habits or breaking unhealthy ones.

This episode is a little bit different from our usual fair. We often talk here about the downsides of technology, but in today's episode, we're going to offer a more optimistic counterpoint. My guest is Richard H. Thaler. He won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences back in 2017 for his pioneering work in the fields of behavioral economics and finance. He is the Charles R. Walgreens Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and

Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business where he is the director of the Center for Decision Research. And he is the co-author alongside Cass Sunstein of a book called Nudge, The Final Edition. In this episode, we talk about what is a Nudge, what is the opposite of a nudge, which Thaler and Sunstein call sludge. We also talk about a bunch of other fascinating concepts, including choice architecture, mental accounting, libertarian paternalism, and bounded rationality. And finally, we talk about how the lessons of behavioral economics, Thaler's specialty,

can lead to a happier life. One quick item of business here, for many of us, one of the hardest areas to make change is the zone that includes diet, exercise, and perhaps most importantly, our attitudes about diet and exercise in our body. As you may remember all last week, we ran a series called the Anti-Diet Series.

Today, Monday, December 6th, over on the 10% happier app, we are launching the Anti-Diet series. Today, Monday, December 6th, over on the 10% happier app, we are launching the Anti-Diet Challenge. It features intuitive eating expert Christy Harrison. I will say the principles that Christy teaches in this challenge have made a huge difference for me. I hope you give them a shot to join the Anti-Diet Challenge, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps, or go visit 10%.com. That's all one word spelled out. If you already have the app,

just open it up and follow the instructions to join. And if you're not already a 10% happier subscriber, you can join us by starting a free trial that will give you access to the challenge, along with everything else that's in the app, which I think you will love. Okay, we'll get started with Richard Thaler right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives,

but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelli McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace?

Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Professor Richard Taylor, welcome to the show. Thanks. Happy to be here. I'm going to ask you a lot of questions which entail getting you to define terms. Because in researching you, you're all these great terms that I want to learn about. So let me start at the high, high level here. What is behavioral science?

Behavioral science is a term that at least I use to capture both behavioral economics and psychology and related social science. And I use it because the term behavioral economics, let's define that, that is economics that has been enriched by the understanding of behavioral science, which means psychology and related disciplines. And I make this distinction because behavioral economics has gotten kind of trendy

and people started calling basic findings from psychology behavioral economics, which they're not. So I'm just an economist who has psychology friends and I don't want to steal their thunder by claiming everything they know as part of behavioral economics. So what are the kinds of things you look at when you're a behavioral economist? You know, there was a guy called Herb Simon who was a polymath, nobody worried in economics, who abandoned economics to do things like artificial intelligence. But he wrote a little article about behavioral economics and he said that the term sounds like a plionasm, which is a $20 word that means redundant phrase. dollar word that means redundant phrase. And he said, why do we need the adjective behavioral? What other kind of economics could there be? And then he answers his own question that standard economics has nothing to do with human behavior. Standard economics is based on a fictional

creature that goes by the Latin term homo-economicus. I call them econs. And these fictional creatures are really smart, give them 20 mortgages, they'll immediately figure out which is the best one. They have no self-control problems, they've never had a hangover, and they actually care about other people unlike the homo-economicus who only cares about themselves. So a behavioral economist is somebody who studies humans rather than econ. So homo-economicus behaves with a sort of perennial rationality, always optimizing, always making the smart decisions according to a sort of math. Whereas an actual human being has hangovers,

has complications, has biases in their lives, and that's what you're looking at. Right, I sometimes joke that we study home or economicists, because our people are more like Homer Simpson than they are like home or economicists. Okay, so here's another term. What is a nudge?

So a nudge as my co-author, Cass Sunstein, and I define it is some feature of the environment that attracts our attention and altars our behavior without requiring us to do anything or providing an economic incentive. So one way to think about it is nudges work on humans, but wouldn't work on e-cons. So an example, maybe the most important example in terms of practical applications,

is that 401K plans, it used to be that you had to fill out some forms and make some choices in order to join. And we eventually convinced most companies to switch to something called automatic enrollment, which means unless you fill out some forms, you're in. Now that wouldn't affect an econ because an econ would say, wow, the company is matching my saving contributions. It's a no-brainer. I'll fill out a couple forms. What's the big deal? But humans sometimes procrastinate, and if there are a lot of choices, that makes it even worse.

So nudges help people achieve their goals without forcing anybody to do anything. goals without forcing anybody to do anything. Just to be clear here, you're talking about goals just in an economic or financial or business sense? No, so GPS is the ideal niche. So both Sunstein and I have a terrible sense of direction. We get lost all the time. If we turn on GPS, we don't get lost, but we get to pick our destination, and we get to change our mind. So we would like a world that is as easy to navigate as streets

are if I have my GPS device. And that would include everything in life from choosing your portfolio to deciding when to retire to possibly choosing a spouse or when to have kids or whether to listen to your podcast. Who would be designing this world? I mean, it seems like if there were some centralized government office of nudges, that could lead to some sort of tyranny, right? Right, which is why we would never propose such a thing. So there's one other term we should define, which is choice architecture. So choice architecture is the environment in which one chooses. in which one chooses. And we're surrounded by choice architecture. So there are various places I can listen to your podcast, Spotify or Amazon or Apple. Now each of those has choice architecture. And they are nudging. You know, if you like this podcast, you might like this other one. On some of them, if you were listening to one episode,

the next one will start playing. So the world is nudging us constantly. And there are competitive pressures for choice architecture to get better. So if you think about companies like Apple and Google and Amazon, they have gotten huge in part because they're good at choice architecture. So you buy an iPhone, you turn it on, you don't have to read a 50 page instruction manual. It works. You cook on Amazon and you want to find a copy of a good book to read, say, Nudge, the final edition, just to pick an example. You type that in and bingo. There it is.

And it will suggest, oh, if you like this book, here are five other books. Now, they could be nudging you to buy books that they make more money on, or they could be nudging you to buy books that they actually think you will like. There are good reasons to suggest that they have incentives to do the latter, because if they keep recommending books that you hate, then you're going to stop paying attention to their recommendations. But that's not to say that nudges are always good. And so as long as we're defining terms, let's introduce one that's new to this version of the book, the final version, I might add. We called it that to make sure we

never do it again. It was a lot of work. We include the term sludge. Now, the mantra of nudge is if you want people to do something, make it easy. Sludge is the opposite. It's gunk. It's stuff that slows things down. The government is full of sludge. The whole tax process is sludge-ridden. In Sweden, you file a tax return by text message. You get a text saying, we owe you 10,000 crore, or if you agree, click here, and the money will appear in your account. That's it. Wouldn't that be nice? Going to the DMV is a sludge-ridden process, but there's private sector sludge as well. A very nice article about our book appeared in The Times of London, which has a paywall that invites you to subscribe for a month for a mere pound.

But then you're automatically renewed at 27 pounds a month. And to unsubscribe, you have to call them. You have to call London during London business hours, not on a toll-free line. And it's not going to be a fast process. So that is sludge. Amusingly, this article in the Times mentions that feature of their subscription process, which I dared the author to include, and much to my surprise, he did, we'll see whether their subscription processes improve. I call these

the hotel California subscriptions because you can try to quit, but you can never leave. Let me step back for a second because I have a million other questions about terms and nature of nudges. Let me just ask a question, I kind of wish I had asked earlier, which is so what? Like, why is this so interesting to you? Behavioral economics nudges, what keeps you, you know, for so many decades and so successfully and so impactfully doing this work? Well, I think behavioral economics is fun. And, you know And when we decided to rewrite this book, which our publishers have assured us no one has ever been stupid enough to do this before, take a successful book and for no good reason, rewrite it.

But I told Cass, we're only gonna do this if it's fun. And we're only gonna put chapters in that are fun for us to write. And we hope that that means that there'll be fun for people to read. And I probably should have been a psychologist rather than an economist. But I like watching what people do and kind of find it a bit amusing and totally fascinating. So it's kept me interested all these years. What are some of the main things you've learned about human nature and how to live a happier life via your chosen field? Well, one thing we might talk about is what I call mental accounting is a term I coined, and it refers to the way people keep track of

their financial decisions, and economists have this word, fungible. And what fungible means is, for a rational person, money has no labels. So if all of a sudden you win a pool at the office and have a thousand dollars, you react to that exactly the same way as if you log onto your retirement website and notice that you're a thousand dollars richer. Now, no human has ever reacted that way, right? A thousand dollars from the office football pool sounds like a windfall, a thousand dollars in your retirement account, which hopefully has

some more zeros behind it isn't even noticeable. Now, some of mental accounting we do by choice. There's a wonderful little clip that your listeners can find if they Google Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman and Mason Jars or mental accounting. And they're talking about when they were starving young actors. And Hackman goes over to Hoffman's house one night and Hoffman says he needs some money, could he loan him a little money? And then Hackman goes into the kitchen and he says, why do you need money? You have all these mason jars that are stuffed with cash.

There's plenty of cash here. Why do you need alone for me? And Hopkins says, well, there's no money in the food jar. And so hackments will go, well, you can take some of the money from the other jar and put it in the food jar. And no, you can't do that. And that was the way he learned to do mental accounting from his parents. And that was the way he learned to do mental accounting from his parents. And that

physical kind of mental accounting is still very common in many countries around the world. It's sort of gone out of fashion in the US in a physical sense, but it's still going on in your head. And if you think about the whole idea of a retirement savings account, the reason why it works is not because it has a tax benefit, which is what economists stress. It's because it's viewed as off-limits. So that's for your retirement. You don't borrow against your retirement account You don't borrow against your retirement account to go to the Bahamas for a week. But if all of a sudden you got to check in the mail unexpectedly, woohoo party time. I mean economists think of mental accounting as something stupid. And in some cases it is, but it also can help people. So having budgets is useful. I think, since this is a podcast

about being happier, I think couples that are reasonably well off, defined, however. So they are not struggling to get within their budget every month. I think many of them would be happier if they each had a separate account that they could use however they see fit. I don't mean to do something behind their partners back, but just without reporting. So my wife's a photographer. If she wants to buy a new lens, she buys it, and I don't see the bill.

I'm a golfer. If I want to buy a new golf club, she doesn't see that bill. And that makes us quarrel less. I mean, we can afford the lens and the golf club. And she might think it's stupid to pay $500 for a new driver, but if she doesn't see it, it's not going to hurt her. Much more of my conversation with Richard Thaler right after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life.

But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and

thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. What are their lessons from behavioral economics? Have you incorporated into your own life

in ways that you feel have enhanced your life? Well, you know, I have a little mantra to myself which is it's only money which you can say it's easy for me to say because I have enough money but it's very easy to be irritated by a financial mishap regardless of how small it is in the grand scheme of things. And, you know, I got a parking ticket a couple months ago from one of these meters where

you use an app and the meter showed that I had time left, but I got a ticket anyway. I appealed and lost, although I sent them a copy of the receipt. I said, okay, it's only money. I just don't allow myself to get emotionally upset about relatively small amounts of money. My definition of relative is small, maybe higher than some other people would be, because I've been fortunate financially. But I think there are lots of things in the world that can make us upset. And if we can be less upset about some of them, that's good for us.

How does behavioral economics inform that it's just money mantra. Well, one mistake that people make is what economists call the sunk cost fallacy, SUNK. And the idea is, if you've paid for something, that money is sunk. So there's an old story, I tell. Back when I was in graduate school, living in Rochester, New York, and a friend of mine and I got tickets to an NBA basketball game in Buffalo back when they had a basketball team. And somebody gave me two tickets. And then there was a snowstorm. And we decided it was crazy to drive to Buffalo, which would be an hour drive in Goodweather

and God knows how long in a blizzard. And my friend Jeffrey said, yeah, we're not going. But if we had paid for those tickets, we would be going. And I said, no, Jeffrey, that's a sunk cost. Going to the game would not get that money back. But that's a mistake many people make. This is a problem that businesses face and households face and governments face.

And we should all learn, don't cry over spilt milk. That's good advice. So let's go back to nudges for a second. Yeah. Because I don't want to give nudges short shrift. No, re-wrote the whole book. I be I be kidding. Although. By the way, speaking of some costs. Some costs, right? Right. So how do you use nudges in your own life? Well, we all use nudges. I'm in the midst of what is now a book tour which you spend sitting in your office

talking to people like you. But keeping track of where I have to be would be impossible without a calendar and our phones are nudges. We sent it alarm to get up in the morning. We have reminders that you have a podcast at 10, better get down to the office, and I make sure that all my bills get paid automatically because I'm absent-minded. So I try to make everything in life as automatic as possible. And I'm trying to reduce the number of mistakes

that I make by making it automatic. Are there downsides of this automaticity? Yeah, there can be. There's a question of how much attention you should be paying, say to the money in your 401k. I often tell people the best strategy is to send up a diversified portfolio and then check out it's doing once a decade. Now obviously this is somewhat tongue in cheek and checking once a decade is not optimal, but it's better than daily, which is better than hourly. So you want optimal vigilance, and that will be individual specific. But people are fetishizing over their retirement account, trade too much. And there's lots of evidence that the more you trade, the worse you do. But it sounds like a downside to nudging would be,

if you set your life up where you were getting a lot of nudges to fetishize over the every jot and tiddle in the stock market, then you're gonna be looking at your accounts to the extent to which, I mean, might make you unhappy, unnecessarily anxious, or trade more than his wise. I just to continue with this, it seems like if you've got too many notifications on your phone, urging you to check Twitter, Instagram, the New York Times, every five minutes, then you may not actually be living your life. You'll have your

nose and your screen. Am I on the right track here? So if you could take all of our phones, but all of our lives, even dare I say the government in the UN, what kind of healthy nudges would you be encouraging us to be doing at the individual and at the societal level? Well, I think it's going to be individual-specific. My wife needs fewer news notifications because she cares too much.

Other people need more notifications because they're not paying enough attention. So one of the things we talk about in the book is a company that a former student of mine started that helps people deal with their credit cards. People run up credit card balances that are too big, average American consumers through credit cards and owes more than $10,000 and is paying a lot, a lot of money for that. If they use his app, just called Tally,

he takes over the process and make sure you pay your bills on time and nudges you to pay them down and pays off the higher interest rate one first. And does everything that you would do if you knew how to do it and remembered to do it. So you know, some of us need nudges to exercise more. Most of us need nudges to eat a bit less. The technology is it's easier to make some things automatic than others. So there's no way to set your diet on automatic. If I go down to the cafeteria, then I may have good intentions and be aiming for the salad bar, but that pizza looks really

good. And so, I mean, that's why people who have real diet problems are often helped by getting meals delivered or buying pre-packaged dinners that have a limited number of calories because that's a self-control device. Now, if they have a gallon of ice cream in the freezer, that's not going to help. So, would you qualify, you use the term self-control device, you know, pre-packaged meals, et cetera, et cetera, would you qualify that as a nudge? Yeah, absolutely. If I have money taken out of my account every month and put into the retirement account, and I've signed up for that, that's a nudge.

And you can nudge yourself. I call those nudges, self nudges. And it's smart to do that. And we don't have to have other people nudging us. We can nudge ourselves. What does a snudge look like? Because most of what you've described seems like taking advantage of technological and other external means

of setting up automaticity in our lives to get us into the right direction, or in some cases the wrong direction, what would a snudge look like? Well, a snudge could just be deciding to download one of those apps. Got it. If you're trying to reduce your intake of alcohol not having it around the house, you know, people are trying to quit smoking know that they cannot have any cigarettes at home. It seems, and I'm going to try this and please tell me if I'm wrong, that the core of this

philosophy is to recognize that we are frail, irrational creatures, and that we can take advantage of nudges or tweaks to our environment that will push us in the right direction. Yes, that's it. Who needs a book? Interview over. Right. Much more of my conversation with Richard Thaler right after this. Well, along those lines, what is libertarian paternalism? It's a phrase that only the authors of this book like.

First of all, it sounds like an oxymoron, right? It sounds self-contradictory. And it does because we usually think of paternalism as being coercion, but we think of paternalism as just trying to help people. So again, a GPS device helps you. It helps you get where you want to go. Libertarian, we use as an adjective. So, we mean paternalism that is not required. So, that's our philosophy that we think there are many

circumstances in which we can implement policies that will help people without forcing anyone to do anything. Now I should hasten to say that we don't think we can solve every problem that way. One of the things we did when we decided to rewrite Nudge is to completely rewrite the chapter on climate change. And to make clear that a problem like this will not be solved just by nudging. It's too big. And we're way too far from where we need to be. So we think like every economist I know, people joke that every economist is a

two-handed economist on the one hand, on the other hand, there are some things every economist agrees about. One is that we need to have a carbon tax and it should be big. And behaviorally, I would suggest starting small and ramping it up over, say, a decade or so. But we have to get the prices right. I'm still an economist. And if the prices are right, then people have the incentives to buy more fuel-efficient cars, to insulate their addicts, to adjust their thermostat, to live closer to where they work, or maybe work from home. So getting the prices right has to be the first thing.

But yes, there are lots of nudges, and they help. They're not big enough to get us all the way. So I'll give you one example. If you send people in their utility bill, a message about how much energy they're using compared to their neighbors in similar sized homes, then the people are using a lot reduced by two or three percent. Now, you might say, well, it's not very much. And that's

true. It's not very much. It's only 2 or 3%. But that helps. And we're going to solve this problem 2 or 3% of the time. And as President Obama used to like to say, better is good. Meaning, if we can make it a little bit better, that's good. And we should do everything we can to take small steps on the way to big changes. A few more terms from your book before I let you go. Bounded rationality. That's just a fancy word for life is hard. We're the smartest species, but the world is tough. And so, our intelligence is limited and some problems are too hard to expect us to solve

them on our own. Hence the need for nudges. Correct. So along those lines, you also use terms like bounded willpower and bound in self-interest. I assume that's in the same sort of bucket. Right. We have some self-control, but we all have our weaknesses. And those are the ones that we have to figure out how to help ourselves.

It's interesting, because I can hear some ways in which I don't know if you'll view this as an appropriate connection to draw, but I interviewed a gentleman named Roman Mars recently as the host of a very, very popular show and podcast called 99% Invisible, and he studies infrastructure, the built world as he calls it.

And he is fascinated by the fact that there is this kind of beneficent paternalistic world of designers out there who are trying to make your life easier by anticipating your needs at a stop sign. It's or at a stop light, et cetera, et cetera, or where the place where you push a wheelchair up onto the sidewalk, et cetera, et cetera. And it sounds like there's a link between that and choice architecture. Absolutely. I'll give you another example.

The building I'm sitting in right now, home of the Boost School of Business at the University of Chicago where I work. There are three floors where there are faculty offices. And they are connected by open stairwells. And that makes us feel like we're all in the same place because fire stairwells are very off-putting. Nobody likes to go into those. Whereas an open stairwell is inviting. Yes. And in normal times, when the building is bustling, I'm on the middle of those three floors. I will sometimes hear one of my colleagues on a floor above or below me. And oh, I wanted to talk, oh, you know,

and I'll go chase that guy down because there's been something I've been meaning to ask him about. So good architecture is also good choice architecture. The people who design supermarkets have a plan for the way you're going to walk through it. And it's a combination of making it convenient for you and profitable for them. So the stuff that's within reach at the checkout counter, it's not an accident that it appeals to toddlers sitting in the shopping cart.

And it's not an accident that it's the sort of stuff people buy on impulse. So that's more sludge, making it profitable for them. But on the other hand, I find that there are some supermarkets that are so big that I find them off-putting to go to because the task of shopping takes too long. And if you missed something, if you were supposed to buy olive oil and you missed it when you were going down that aisle and you're now eight eight aisles over. One of the ways in which Amazon is crushing retail is they've made it very easy to shop. And if you forgot all of well, the last time you were

there, you can buy it the next time. And it's one click. We live in a world where there are, and this is my term, not yours, although maybe it is a term you use, there are malicious nudgers out there, people who are nudging us to do things that are not good for us, but profitable for them. You have any advice about how to navigate a world where there are players out there reaching us with messages that might hit us in the wrong direction? Well, yes. I mean, the new chapter on sludge is kind of about that. And before you subscribe to something, look and see what it takes to

unsubscribe. Before you join that gym, find out what you have to do to quit. So if we start to become aware of the ways in which we're being manipulated, then we can cut some of that off and we can avoid some of those things. We can send our browser to reduce the number of ads we get, things like that. Final question from me, we're constantly changing world technologies always evolving. What do you believe is the future of nudges?

I know you're not gonna write this book again, but nudges will continue to evolve. What do you believe is the future of nudges? I know you're not going to write this book again, but nudges will continue to evolve. What do you see as the future? Well, I think technology is the future. So for example, let's talk about diabetes. The first training thing about diabetes is that it's mostly preventable by the patient. If you control your diet and your medication, then it's a very manageable disease. And yet, many patients fail to do that.

The technology exists to put something in your body that will monitor your blood sugar. And beep your phone or your watch if your blood sugar has gone out of filter. And it'll be completely unobtrusive unless things are out of whack. The technology I think exists or is on the verge of existing to go the next step, the verge of existing to go the next step, which would be to alter the blood sugar. Now, all of this sounds very scary, and it potentially could be. But one of the reasons we rewrote this book, or wrote the new one, is one of the iPod. Remember those? Yes, I do. So almost as good as the Walkman.

Yeah, exactly. Now, 2008, when we wrote the original version, we had each just gotten our first smartphone. It's only 13 years ago. Just think how much life has changed. The next 13 years will have just as many changes. And mostly those changes have been good. We get lost less often. Technology is making our lives better, but there are traps for each one. So it's great that we have so many shows we can stream, but the fact that the next episode starts automatically is potentially a trap if you don't have the self-control to turn it off.

Can we close by? Can I just nudge you to plug your book and anything else that you've got going on? Well, the book is called Nudge, the final edition, and it's about two-thirds new. Really written from cover to cover, and we hope people enjoy it because we wanted it to make it fun. Well, it's fun to talk to you, and I appreciate your time. Thank you. And congratulations on the new-ish book. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thanks again to Richard, and thanks as well to the folks who work so hard to make

this show a reality. Two and a half times a week. They include Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justine Davy, Kim Baikama, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Poient. We get audio engineering from our friends over at ultraviolet audio. We will see you all on Wednesday for an unusually powerful episode, which includes both just an extraordinary personal story and some incredibly practical advice about how to be stronger. That's coming up on Wednesday. Also, I just want to give you a heads up about something special

that's coming on Friday. As you know, we do bonus episodes on Friday. And this week we have a really special bonus. We're gonna be dropping a full episode of a new podcast that you may have heard me talk about. It's called 20% Happier, and it's hosted by my friend and colleague, Matthew Hepburn. And in this episode, you're gonna hear Matthew work

with a meditation student. It's kind of mindful eavesdropping where you get to hear Matthew work, one-on-one with a student. And the issue this student has is one that I think will be familiar to many of us. It's about striking the balance between ambition and peace of mind or calm or happiness.

So can you be ambitious and happy simultaneously? You're gonna hear Matthew and his guest explore that coming up on Friday. here Matthew and his guest explore that coming up on Friday. Hey, hey prime members, you can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at WONDERY.com slash survey.