 So it sounds like your friends come to you a lot when they're struggling Decision-making how has your research influenced your own decision-making patterns? so Very much You know one one thing about my friends if you if you start studying decision-making your friends always think that you're doing an experiment on them So no matter no matter what happens right people come to dinner. They always think like you know What's the catch here? What's going on? Is this wine really this wine or is the change the label and you know, so But in terms of my own decisions, I would say that there are kind of three types of decisions There's the little decisions the big decisions and the repeated decisions or habitual decisions And on the little decisions, I don't think I've changed that much right? It's it's a lot of effort to change all the little decisions I do notice things right so I go and I say oh, isn't it fun that that you know There's a medium coffee that is this big or isn't it fun that they're putting a really expensive item on the menu So I notice those things but often they they work on me just as well, right? It's a little bit like visual illusions if you notice visual illusion. It doesn't mean you you're not susceptible to them So that's that's one category the category of big decisions Those I think I'm better on and and I think I'm better on that because I Understand a little bit better all the biases that would come into them I think about them more carefully and and I think about what would maximize my well-being buying a house is an example So so when you buy a house There's some standard decisions that mistakes that happen to people So so one is what is called anchoring anchoring is the idea that the your previous decision Influences your next decision. So if you bought an expensive house, you're likely to buy an expensive house again so and Imagine that you have two people who are moving to Pittsburgh. One of them is moving from LA very expensive Housing market one of them is moving from some Small town in Texas where the housing market is very cheap And let's imagine those people have the same level of wealth and so on What would happen to those people is that the LA person everything will look so cheap to them And they'll buy a very big house the Texas person everything would look crazy expensive for them And so on even though they have the same Financial resources so for example when I moved to Durham from Boston Everything looked very cheap to me, but I knew about these bias and I could try to overcome it I would try to think okay. Let's not focus on pricing Let's think about what do I want from a quality of life or another example with housing We know that if people live close to a grocery store They actually are healthier because if you live far away from a grocery store and you make your trip to the grocery store Only once in a while you buy less fresh fruit and vegetables and you eat more frozen meals And that's very unhealthy if you live in a short distance to a grocery store You end up eating much much more healthy So so you can see how even understanding what influences our decision can can make your decision better So that's that's on that side and then we have the middle decision Which we said what about repeated decisions and repeated decisions could be little decisions, but they show up a lot and here too I think knowing Something about decision-making could be very helpful so for example If you think about the temptation of overeating right a temptation of having a muffin in breakfast or Stuff like that if it's a one-time thing you might fail But if you think about it as what habits do I want to create now? You can say let me work on this habit. Let me strengthen the habit Let me create a process from it and so on and now you could take away bad habits and create good habits So just as an example for myself. I I basically Move to a habit of no breakfast very tempting to eat A cross on with with your morning coffee You spend some time in Europe. You think that's the right thing to do and not not the most healthy thing in the world I changed that but but not just did I change it? I did something else I actually love espressos and and what they do is I I use the the the morning Espresso to create another activity in the office. So my usual ritual is I come in I make my Espresso I get to my desk and I start working on something thoughtful. I don't open email I don't open a browser. I work on something that I actually want to make progress on today and and that ends up being an Incredibly useful thing because if you say, you know, how many hours of productive work do we get a day? We all have to admit not enough a lot of our days hijacked by all kinds of things including social media So I not only just drink coffee and not have something I use that coffee as a reward for something else that I want to do So for habitual decisions, I I think very carefully about the environment and about Temptation and what habit do I want and how they build on each other? And I try very much to create a system around that. Yeah, I think everyone Focuses on Motivation willpower and they don't realize that creating habits are actually more helpful to eliminate those decisions entirely So the morning coffee, you know, don't have to go scrambling through the kitchen to figure out what you're gonna cook for breakfast The coffee is now tied to something pleasurable for you and you avoid the meal altogether But imagine every morning having to get up and say, well, am I gonna have an orange today? Or that croissant looks good. Even that little decision saps your willpower and ultimately leads to you over eating Yeah, and and it's it's this is kind of the creating rituals and habits And you made a decision at some point, right? Or may you made some some sequence you build it over time what you do But once you've made it, you're not Reexamining it and that's that's a way to take small decisions and to say instead of making the small decision every time Let's create a ritual. Let's create a habit Let's create the repeated behavior and that would help us control our behavior It will take away from the making lots of different decision and making it One big decision of what ritual to have and then it will self-inforce itself