 So if they fail urine test in six months for nicotine or codenine, so it's like a real test, you can't just lie and say I quit smoking. And then, you know, people could put zero dollars in and in some sense, like an economist say, of course, put zero dollars in, why would you risk any of your money in case you don't quit smoking? But the reason you risk some of your money is if you don't, you're going to just put off that plan to quit smoking. You're an procrastinate indefinitely. But if you put your money where your butt is, and that is a joke that they made in the title of the paper, believe it or not, you realize you might quit because you don't want to lose the money. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Now you brought up another hurdle that I know many of us face in that procrastination. So impulsivity will lead to procrastination. And I know for myself, there are certain areas where I'll procrastinate and there are certain areas where I have the motivation to attack it. So what does the science show us around procrastination? And what are some strategies that we can use to overcome it? Yeah, and that was such a great way of asking the question because you're exactly right that impulsivity does lead to procrastination. So sort of first of all, you can for procrastination also use the strategy of trying to make it fun the Mary Poppins approach. But another way to tackle procrastination is basically to so one way is like the carrot. That's what we've talked about. You make it more fun to do the things so you won't put it off. The other is the stick. So you make it painful not to follow through. And by the way, this is sort of how other people manage us. This is how governments manage us when they know there's something that we ought to get done, but we might be tempted not to like we ought not to speed for instance, but we might be tempted to speed like we get fined, not going to let you do that. You're going to get penalized, right? Or we might be tempted not to get our work done and to play on social media. So our bosses like it's due on Friday at five, you know, so you can't just put it off and put it off and never get to it. So and you know, there's a penalty, like you're going to disappoint your boss, maybe lose your job if you don't hit that deadline. So the world other people are often structuring incentives in order to provide that stick if we procrastinate. But what's interesting is we can do the same to ourselves. We just rarely think to and doing this, creating incentives or penalties for yourself. If you fail to achieve your goals on time is called a commitment device. And economists have studied this strategy, they find it like peculiar that people will actually penalize themselves for bad behavior, like why would you do that? But it turns out to help people achieve their goals at a higher rate. And one of my favorite examples of a commitment device and just how powerful it is was studied by Dean Carlin and Jonathan Zinman looking at smoking cessation, trying to help people quit smoking, which is something that's really hard to do. And they randomly assigned people to two experimental groups. One group of people was just given the standard stuff like, here, here's how you quit, try to use these tools and quit smoking. And the other group got all the standard stuff to help you quit smoking. Plus they were given a savings account that they could put money into. So it had no money in it, but people could put their own money into it. But if they did not quit smoking in six months, any money they put into that account would disappear. So if they fail urine test in six months for nicotine or codenine, so it's like a real test, you can't just lie and say I quit smoking. And then, you know, people could put zero dollars in and in some sense, like an economist say, of course, put zero dollars in, why would you risk any of your money in case you don't quit smoking? But the reason you risk some of your money is if you don't, you're going to just put off that plan to quit smoking. You're going to procrastinate indefinitely. But if you put your money where your butt is, and that is a joke that they made in the title of the paper, believe it or not, you realize you might quit because you don't want to lose the money. So a fraction of people did use this tool. But what's more interesting is comparing the two groups, those who had access to the tool and those who didn't, you see a 30% higher quit rate among the folks who had a way to penalize themselves if they didn't successfully quit smoking. So that's just one strategy. You can form what's called a cash commitment device. There are other ways like you, you know, tell someone you're going to do it by this date, and then you create shame. You can sign a pledge and so on. But the cash commitment has the most teeth. And I think it's a really cool tool. And there's websites like stickstckk.com and bminder.com. PS, I do not make any money from those websites. I just think they're cool where you can go put money on the line and, you know, choose a referee who will hold you to it, hold your feet to the fire so that you will have extra motivation not to procrastinate when it comes to achieving your goals. This feels like it aligns completely with Daniel Kenneman's work on that fear of loss being way more impactful than whatever we could gain. Of course, we want a six pack, but losing money, losing to our friends. When I first moved to New York to start the company, I wasn't cooking. I was eating a lot of takeout. I had gained a lot of weight and me and two friends made a bet. We pledged one full paycheck, which at that point was really painful. And whoever lost the most weight got the other two buddies paychecks. And sure enough, we all three of us blew past our goals. And it wasn't just competing with friends, but that financial commitment definitely supercharged our efforts in that. So it's such a great highlight. And I'm so happy that there are services that'll do exactly that. Hold your money and hold you accountable. Although you can do with your friends too. So I love, I love the way you solve this problem. You don't have to give money to one of these services. Your friends will certainly be happy to hold your cash for you. Of course, now you risk the friendship if something goes wrong. So maybe you do want to give your money to these services. We drop great content each and every week. And we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. I certainly have read some books and seen some research talking about how you have to be careful what you're going to incentivize yourself with. You certainly, if you're on a diet, you don't want to be rewarding yourself with a certain cheat day or well, if I don't drink all week, I can drink on Saturday. These things will only, I think they tend to muddy the waters from what I've seen and dilute any of the stick or carrot that it's supposed to act as. I mean, it's certainly the case that you have to be thoughtful about how you incentivize yourself. So temptation bundling actually is an area where I've always sort of laughed about like, you know, if your goal is to get fit and you reward yourself for every gym visit and you sort of temptation bundle with some really unhealthy treat, that's not going to turn out to be in your best interest, even if it motivates you to go to the gym. So absolutely in all of these cases, when you're thinking about these tools, you want to make sure they aren't actually undermining your, your higher order goal just to get to a micro goal that's like, that's on the list. Now, one of the hurdles that I think is a little tougher to admit, even for myself personally is laziness. There are certain areas of my life where I do not feel lazy at all, but there are some that my fiance and partner certainly feels that I'm lazy. So when it comes to laziness being that hurdle to the change that we really want, what does the science show us as a strategy or two that we can fight through that? Well, first, I just want to tell you, I think you should embrace laziness because I think it gets a bad rap and laziness is kind of awesome, right? Like it's this feature of human behavior that we evolve because it means that we can get to the fastest, most efficient solution, right? You don't want your algorithms on a computer to take a long time to return. You want them to be lazy and efficient and look for that shortcut. And I think it's great that humans are lazy. It makes complete sense, but it's, it's just something that we have to be aware of, like all of our other features and think about how can we use it to our advantage rather than our disadvantage. And when it comes to change, obviously, which can be effortful, being really aware of this feature of human nature that we like to take the path of least resistance is important. There's sort of two ways that I think about harnessing laziness and turning it from a limitation into an asset when you're trying to make a change. The first is really simple and it relies on probably the most successful finding from the behavioral science literature in the last, I'll say 30 years, sort of our blockbuster discovery, which is that people will accept defaults passively. And that has this huge impact on behavior. What do I mean by default? I mean, like, you know, when you get a new computer, what's the browser that's installed that you just open automatically? Like, I don't know what, what are the fonts that are in the background? What's the background? My background is still the same background that my computer came with. Those are the defaults, or you go to some coffee shop and you order a latte. Do they put 2% milk, 1% cream? I don't know. Whatever it is, they have some default and you can always override it be like, excuse me, I'd like my, I'd like my latte like this, or you can change the computer's settings. But most people won't. A lot of the time will just passively accept the default. So that's a major finding. It's been used actually to get people to save more for retirement. Turns out if you default new employees into automatically saving for retirement, having a portion of every paycheck deducted and put in a 401k, it dramatically increases saving rates over defaulting them not into saving, but making it really trivially easy to become a saver by just like checking a box. So we can structure our own environments to take advantage of this tendency because we take that path of least resistance. We're lazy. We go with the default. If we can set up our lives, so the default option is the healthy option or the option that aligns with our long-term goals and our goals around change can be really effective. Right. So like what you keep in your pantry, those are the default snacks. What your browser homepage is, whether it's social media or a newspaper where you want to be reading more great news coverage of some topic, we can structure our lives so that the path of least resistance is better aligned with our goals. And I think we don't spend enough time thinking about doing that. The other thing is habits. Habits are like our defaults for repeat behavior. And we talked a little bit about those already and when we're building them, it's actually really important to have some flexibility and sort of experiment and explore what's the right time is the best time so that you can find and build that flexibility into your life. So it's like, I'll always go to the gym. I've built a way that I get there no matter what, but in general, the rule for building habits from research is you want to find consistency of to some degree, like a few times that might work for you, cues that might trigger you to do it. You want to engage in the behavior repeatedly and you want to reward yourself when you succeed, whether it's by announcing it on social media to friends or buying yourself a treat that doesn't hopefully compromise your long-term goals. If you repeat a behavior enough and reward it, eventually it does become habitual. You start doing it more automatically and less effortfully. And that's another way that we can lean into laziness and let those habits take over and make everything easier.