If Books Could Kill - June 15, 2023


Atomic Habits

Topics
marginal gains marginal gains concept habit development framework willpower depletion choice architecture in cafeteria experiments
The World is Flat The Rules

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour

Words per minute

184.39

Word count

11,233

Sentence count

452

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

88

sentences flagged

Hate speech

50

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
00:00:00.100 Michael. Peter. What do you know about a book called Atomic Habits?
00:00:05.020 So little that I've managed to hold on to my worst habit,
00:00:08.600 waiting until the last minute to come up with a zinger for my podcast.
00:00:25.240 All right. Atomic Habits by James Clear.
00:00:29.620 Now, I imagine you do not know who James Clear is.
00:00:33.260 I know literally nothing about this book.
00:00:34.560 All I know is that it's like one of our most requested books.
00:00:37.380 Yeah.
00:00:37.580 But I've never seen it in the wild.
00:00:39.340 James Clear is a guy who starts doing self-help blogging in like 2012.
00:00:46.080 He doesn't have any formal education or training on the topic.
00:00:50.020 I think he's just like got an economics degree and maybe an MBA or something.
00:00:54.280 Just a guy saying stuff.
00:00:55.440 Just a guy on the internet saying stuff.
00:00:56.820 We love those.
00:00:57.560 He's prolific.
00:00:58.220 He posts a few times a week very consistently, gains a big following, and he leverages that
00:01:04.840 sort of niche popularity into this book, which has sold somewhere north of 15 million copies.
00:01:12.740 How does this happen?
00:01:13.920 It's so baffling to me.
00:01:15.580 I don't know.
00:01:16.080 And it only came out a few years ago.
00:01:17.580 It doesn't even have like a great title.
00:01:19.400 I feel like World is Flat or like Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
00:01:22.480 You sort of get what they're about.
00:01:23.540 but Atomic Habits, I don't even know if it's about like me ending my bad habits or me like
00:01:28.760 getting new good habits. It's about both ostensibly. The full title of the book is
00:01:34.760 Atomic Habits, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. When he says
00:01:42.220 atomic habits, he means atomic in the more literal sense, meaning like tiny habits.
00:01:48.320 Oh. Yeah. Going into it, I sort of assumed it was more like habits that are going to nuke your stupid fucking life.
00:01:56.500 Yeah, like atomic bomb habits. Right. Not like atomic nuclei habits. 1.00
00:02:00.520 He says, quote, habits are like the atoms of our lives.
00:02:04.740 Each one is a fundamental unit that contributes to your overall improvement.
00:02:08.600 At first, these tiny routines seem insignificant, but soon they build on each other and fuel
00:02:14.420 bigger wins that multiply to a degree that far outweighs the cost of their initial investment.
00:02:20.380 Okay, I'm with him so far.
00:02:21.780 You know, we all have little habits.
00:02:23.480 They can be a force for good in our lives or a force for evil.
00:02:26.980 Fair enough.
00:02:27.460 I mean, look, I want to say going into this, I am a man, a person of ADHD, a POADHD.
00:02:34.140 so i i went into it eyes open heart open ready to absorb some knowledge and i i will say there
00:02:42.540 there are some interesting things in this book it's very easy to read uh although also terribly
00:02:49.200 written at the same time he just he just has this like gratingly repetitive style of writing
00:02:54.520 again he's like a blogger and i think in fact part of the book's origin story is that he
00:03:00.700 started a blog in order to get into the habit of writing more, which makes sense because the
00:03:06.260 chapters really do read like a string of blog posts. I like how you said blogger like it was
00:03:11.380 a slur. He is a blogger. I mean, I think you're reading that correctly. I have a disdain in my
00:03:20.600 heart. Wait, what are your what are your bad habits, Peter? What what what sorts of habits
00:03:24.420 like specifically were you trying to break? Yeah, well, we can we can build this around
00:03:28.460 uh my terrible life i would say i am messy okay i lack structure i'm a procrastinator
00:03:36.100 i went into this looking for little tips that would help with either of those so we're starting
00:03:40.940 with diagnosis peter and then by the end of the episode we'll we'll have your whole arc your
00:03:45.880 character development where you are now as measured through whether you've put up the shelf
00:03:50.020 as measured through the shelf the one proxy indicator we have on this podcast how functioning
00:03:54.300 is peter god damn it i will never no book no book can get me to put up the shelf 0.95
00:03:59.620 listeners are so fucking invested in this that like there's no way you can put up the shelf now 0.98
00:04:05.000 this is the only reason that my wife listens to our podcast she's like is he talking about 0.98
00:04:10.100 the fucking shelf this time shelf updates so let's get into the the book he starts off by 0.95
00:04:20.080 telling a pretty gruesome story about how in high school he was accidentally hit in the face with a 0.97
00:04:25.480 baseball bat oh god he has a long recovery including lots of hospital time and physical
00:04:32.040 therapy this story is from what i can gather substantively untethered from the rest of the book
00:04:38.600 okay it has no real connection to the the substance of the book and i think i have a theory as to why
00:04:44.980 it's in here. If you're like Malcolm Gladwell, or a Cass Sunstein or whatever, you don't need to
00:04:51.480 convince your audience that you're worth listening to, right? You're already established, you're
00:04:56.240 published, you have a fancy degree, whatever it might be. But if you're just some blogger,
00:05:01.400 you don't have any of that, right? So right off the bat, you need to justify your book to the
00:05:06.580 reader. Here's why you're listening to me. I sort of think that's what he's trying to do here. He's
00:05:11.640 telling a story of like this harrowing experience that he overcame in order to convey the image of
00:05:17.940 someone who has something to say about the world yeah because it's not it's not connected to any
00:05:22.140 habit in particular i guess no he recovers he like goes off to college to play baseball in college
00:05:28.420 he was a baseball player um and then in it's in college where he starts saying i had good habits
00:05:33.660 okay it also might just be the most interesting thing that's ever happened to him and he was like
00:05:37.000 well i'm gonna put it in my book yeah as a person who very few interesting things have happened to
00:05:40.680 and only has like four anecdotes.
00:05:42.740 I defend this practice.
00:05:44.400 Like, here are my things.
00:05:45.760 We then get to the first real chapter,
00:05:48.720 and it kicks off with a story about the British cycling team.
00:05:52.640 Gotta open with an anecdote.
00:05:54.040 So according to Clear,
00:05:55.580 British cycling has long been a mediocre team.
00:05:59.820 But in 2003,
00:06:02.220 they hire a new performance director, Dave Brailsford.
00:06:06.760 This guy has a new strategy,
00:06:09.040 which he calls the aggregation of marginal gains, meaning making a large number of small
00:06:15.980 improvements.
00:06:17.080 Oh, he's moneyballing.
00:06:18.060 He's sort of moneyballing.
00:06:19.340 So they upgrade the seats.
00:06:21.420 They upgrade the uniforms, the team's pillows and mattresses, their recovery strategies.
00:06:27.300 They emphasize proper handwashing so that team members get sick less often, right?
00:06:32.520 There's all these little things.
00:06:33.840 Happy birthday.
00:06:34.100 And in the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, they win more gold than anyone else.
00:06:41.240 And British cycling is generally dominant in the sport for most of the next decade.
00:06:46.660 Anytime you tell me that Britain is good at something, I get skeptical.
00:06:49.480 I'm like, I want to see receipts.
00:06:50.860 I've seen their Eurovision entries.
00:06:54.760 You're still building up anticipation for our Eurovision episode.
00:06:58.340 Yeah, this is what I'm dropping little hints.
00:07:00.640 I'm dropping hints.
00:07:01.420 To illustrate the idea of marginal gains, he includes this chart, which I am going to send to you. 0.90
00:07:07.940 Now, one of the problems with trying to convey what this book is like to you is that it's very hard to explain to a listener how dumb these charts are. 0.74
00:07:17.800 Oh, OK. 0.99
00:07:18.580 I love dumb charts. 0.97
00:07:20.220 Do your best to explain what you're seeing here. 0.94
00:07:22.720 So the up and down axis is results and the left and right axis is time.
00:07:29.500 So we're talking about getting good results over time, and then he's got a dotted line, and above the line is 1% improvement, and below the line is 1% decline. 0.96
00:07:41.700 And so, oh my fucking God, okay, it's becoming clear to me.
00:07:46.200 So it says, figure one, the effects of small habits compound over time. 0.99
00:07:53.540 For example, if you can get just 1% better each day, you'll end up with results that are nearly 37 times better after one year.
00:08:03.140 So the chart is basically just like two arrows.
00:08:08.660 One of them goes up and like one of them goes down.
00:08:11.540 This is just a chart of results over time where the arrow goes up.
00:08:16.880 Yeah, it's not like it doesn't quantify results or time.
00:08:20.380 it's just like if you get better at something every day yeah you'll be much better at it at
00:08:26.380 the end of the year which again he could have just said like in a sentence right it's not this is not
00:08:31.040 difficult like to understand at all so what he's saying here is that if you get one percent better
00:08:36.800 each day for one year you will due to math yeah end up 37 times better by the time you're done
00:08:46.420 but like there's no skill that you can improve one percent every single day for 365 days it's
00:08:55.640 ridiculous concept this is just taking the idea of compound interest and pretending that it applies
00:09:01.320 to skills and applying it to something qualitative right yeah applying it to like personal habits
00:09:05.900 doesn't just doesn't make any sense like i'm trying to cook at home more rather than eating
00:09:10.020 out. And at the end of the year, I'm cooking at home 37 times more. 37 times better. So by the
00:09:17.760 end of the year, you are a three star Michelin chef. By the end of the next year, you are the
00:09:22.220 greatest chef in human history by a wide margin. You're going to be the best procrastination
00:09:27.000 avoider. And then, yeah, to prove his point, he throws in a chart so stupid. It looks like it's 1.00
00:09:31.980 ripped from like a multi-level marketing pitch or something. It's just arrow goes up. And then I
00:09:37.340 guess the takeaway from the chart because the whole point of infographics like this is like
00:09:41.040 at a glance to tell a story yeah the takeaway from this is like improving is better than declining
00:09:46.680 yeah this is like a big complaint i have about this book which is like there's a fine line 1.00
00:09:51.180 between simplifying things for a general audience and treating me like i'm a fucking asshole you 0.98
00:09:56.900 know so it's also worth noting that this idea of getting one percent better every day is a 0.98
00:10:03.540 bastardization of the original concept the cycling team's idea was that small improvements in various
00:10:10.100 different areas will result in noticeable change in the aggregate so like you improve your bikes a
00:10:16.600 little bit you improve your sleep a little you improve the hygiene a little bit right but clear
00:10:21.200 is talking about a one percent improvement of the same skill every day which is not the same thing
00:10:25.860 nor is it realistic right so i actually think there was like this more useful and interesting
00:10:30.360 idea that he just turns into something silly is the story about the british cyclists correct 0.68
00:10:35.520 huh interesting instinct you have there okay okay no no it's not i'm too fucking pilled from 0.61
00:10:44.020 reading these books as soon as you hear a cute little story you're like yeah no sorry off to 0.72
00:10:48.480 wikipedia i go exactly as as soon as i heard that story i was like a cycling a cycling team with no
00:10:58.060 history of success implements a bunch of small improvements and then becomes the most dominant
00:11:02.760 team in the world by a wide margin yeah and they're kind of obvious improvements too like
00:11:07.140 let's do a little bit of everything that's probably something all coaches are saying all the time
00:11:10.120 again the story that clear tells is that this guy dave brailsford is made the performance
00:11:14.540 director for british cycling in 2003 he promotes this marginal gains concept and they start winning
00:11:20.100 a huge amount what actually happened is that in the late 1990s the government massively increased
00:11:26.260 their funding in 1994 the uk institutes the national lottery state-sponsored lottery and
00:11:32.560 in the following years they start to apportion out proceeds across british sports in the mid
00:11:37.800 90s the cycling team has barely any funding by 1999 they're receiving 2.5 million pounds annually
00:11:44.760 clear mentions that when brailsford arrived in 2003 british cycling had only won one gold medal
00:11:52.100 since 1908. What he doesn't mention is that that gold medal was in the year 2000,
00:11:58.520 right after the funding started pouring in. So Brailsford is a widely respected cycling coach.
00:12:05.480 And I think his methods are widely respected within the sport. From what I can gather,
00:12:09.580 the team was very, very successful under him. So I'm not saying that this is total bullshit, 0.98
00:12:14.440 that there's nothing to this or anything like that. But if you look at the marginal improvements 0.95
00:12:18.720 he made, it's like better bikes, better mattresses, physician consultants, like those aren't
00:12:24.420 philosophical changes as much as they're just costly resources that they could now afford.
00:12:29.120 I also I love that we're now so sick of the one weird trick books that we're getting like
00:12:34.360 every weird trick at once books do it all. And it's like, I just don't know that like
00:12:40.780 weird tricks are really the way to solve problems. It's probably just like bread and
00:12:44.960 butter stuff of like dedicate resources and hire staff right right although to be fair this does
00:12:50.020 explain why britain is so good at transphobia just like a bunch of little little people saying
00:12:54.400 little things at every level little tweaks make everything a little more transphobic you get that
00:12:58.900 guys in america we're trying to increase our transphobia by one percent every day but in
00:13:03.600 britain they know the real trick is to improve across a broad array of phobias
00:13:09.000 all right so he starts to talk about how changing your identity is fundamental to seeing lasting
00:13:20.620 change he says research has shown that once a person believes in a particular aspect of their
00:13:26.380 identity they are more likely to act in alignment with that belief identity change is therefore the
00:13:32.860 north star of habit change okay now this does have some support in the scientific literature
00:13:38.520 there's research showing that people who use language that identifies themselves as like a
00:13:44.980 healthy eater, for example, are more likely to make healthy eating choices than people who say
00:13:49.620 they want to make healthy eating choices. People who say that they are voters are more likely to
00:13:56.420 vote than people who just say that voting is good. But then the obvious question becomes,
00:14:00.760 well, how do you change your identity, right? How do you change your identity in a way that
00:14:04.300 makes you more likely to engage in certain habits. What Clear says is that regularly engaging in a
00:14:10.840 certain behavior will make you identify with it. Okay. Quote, the more you repeat a behavior,
00:14:16.580 the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. So you need to become a
00:14:20.900 shelf putter upper to identify as a shelver. I'm just going to keep doing this all episodes. So
00:14:26.140 if you're following along with his formulation, the key to developing habits you want is to change
00:14:32.280 your identity around those habits and you change your identity by developing the habits you want
00:14:38.340 right it's circular right he's saying if you want to like eat more fiber you need to identify as
00:14:44.640 somebody who eats a lot of fiber but then how do you identify that way you need to start eating
00:14:50.640 more fiber yeah so basically once you like reduce the fraction it's just if you want to eat more
00:14:56.080 fiber you should eat more fiber it seems like he's implying that what you want to do is just
00:15:00.640 start actively identifying as a person who does the stuff that you want to do. But he doesn't
00:15:06.500 cite any research showing that that works. So it seems like he's just fucking up the correlation
00:15:11.140 and causation, right? Like, yeah, the people who identify as voters are more likely to vote.
00:15:16.840 Sure. But that's not necessarily because they're identifying as voters. It's the other way around,
00:15:21.600 right? Right. It could be I identify as a voter because I vote every time. Exactly.
00:15:25.480 it's just an accurate description of me right it's just a feedback loop and i'm trying to
00:15:31.500 learn how to hop in there right let me double dutch into that loop but he's not really telling
00:15:35.440 me how yeah so there there are some useful formulations in this book and i will talk
00:15:40.300 about them but first i want to talk about how much noise there is this is another book where
00:15:46.440 there are a couple of useful concepts but you could pack them into a few pages to give you a
00:15:52.580 general sense of how convoluted it is, I'm going to send you just a few of the ways that he describes
00:15:59.300 habits throughout the book. He says, habits are how you embody your identity. Habits are the path
00:16:06.460 to changing your identity. Habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the
00:16:11.780 problems and stresses you face regularly. Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience.
00:16:17.400 Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop.
00:16:20.600 Habits are modern-day solutions to ancient desires.
00:16:24.300 Habits are automatic choices that influence the conscious decisions that follow.
00:16:29.180 Habits contain multitudes.
00:16:31.080 Habits are so many things when you think about it.
00:16:33.920 And that's before we get to the metaphorical descriptions of habits.
00:16:38.520 Again, this is not an exhaustive list.
00:16:40.480 Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
00:16:43.440 Habits are a double-edged sword.
00:16:45.320 Habits are like the atoms of our lives.
00:16:47.640 Habits are the backbone of any pursuit of excellence.
00:16:51.740 Okay.
00:16:52.220 All of this together is confusing.
00:16:56.080 It creates the impression generally that he is rambling, that he's saying whatever comes to his mind.
00:17:03.540 He's trying to turn what should be a BuzzFeed listicle into a book.
00:17:08.240 Maybe this is the river that you're leading me to.
00:17:10.500 but he also seems to be using the word habit to refer to kind of different things that like you
00:17:17.100 know if you bite your fingernails or something that's kind of compulsive behavior that you don't
00:17:20.420 feel like you can control whereas something like voting is something you do very seldom and it's
00:17:26.800 like a much more deliberate act and then you could also talk about habits in this like very broad way
00:17:33.020 of like i have a habit of like you know serial monogamy yeah those are also just like those are
00:17:37.120 just kind of like parts of your personality at that point. They're not really, you know, small
00:17:40.920 repeated behaviors. They're part of your identity. Yeah. Cause these things, all of these little
00:17:47.560 definitions of habits could be true, but they're describing different things. Like habits are how
00:17:53.760 you embody your identity. Okay. But I do actually bite my fingernails and I'm trying to stop.
00:17:58.600 That's not really how I embody my identity. That's just like compulsive behavior.
00:18:01.840 I do think that one problem with the book is that he buckets habits of all different types together.
00:18:10.040 Yeah.
00:18:10.160 It leads to dynamics where he describes things like voting and smoking and not cleaning your room all in the same breath.
00:18:21.320 And you're like, is this really a framework that works for all of these things?
00:18:25.340 And is that really the best framework for each of these things?
00:18:28.520 and because his work is sort of rooted in behavioral psychology concepts he ends up
00:18:37.140 talking about habits and behavior as basically the same thing another another habit i'm trying
00:18:42.060 to break is cursing genuinely because like feedback to both of my podcasts is that like
00:18:47.300 you curse too much and i can't listen with my kids but like i don't know that that's a modern
00:18:51.440 day solution to an ancient desire maybe it is i don't know well you can bring your cursing down
00:18:57.380 to zero uh you you're still with me and i'm not working on that at all so we have not discussed
00:19:02.420 this sorry that your kids are getting too cool by listening to our podcast so clear describes what
00:19:12.080 he calls the four stages of habit cue craving response reward okay you have the cue something
00:19:20.660 that triggers a craving for a reward you respond to the cue and that gives you the reward right i
00:19:26.940 see a pamela paul column i get on a microphone with you i shout i shout about it and before you
00:19:32.020 know it it's f-bombs everywhere so over time you learn to associate the cue with the reward this
00:19:39.080 is sort of your basic pavlovian kind of thing and he uses this framework to provide his basic
00:19:45.720 strategy for developing a habit make it obvious make it attractive make it easy and make it
00:19:53.620 satisfying. These four steps are the heart of the book. Each one has several chapters dedicated to
00:19:59.780 it. And I'm going to walk you through them with the caveat that he is sort of meandering and the
00:20:07.920 concepts overlap quite a bit. So at times you may wonder which section of the book we're actually in
00:20:14.680 or what the overarching theme is or why we're talking about a certain topic. And I just want
00:20:20.380 you to know that that's not my fault as a podcaster. That's actually his fault as an
00:20:25.100 author. The key to any podcast episode is to apologize for it being bad in advance because
00:20:29.840 then it doesn't count. That's right. We're going to give you a fucking tone poem of an episode.
00:20:34.420 So step one, making it obvious. This is about clarifying in your mind the habit that you are 0.99
00:20:41.920 trying to develop. Okay. He says that you should rely on what are called implementation intentions,
00:20:47.540 meaning you plan out specifically where when and how you will implement a habit okay so you'd say
00:20:55.660 like when i wake up i will work out for 30 minutes or whatever right the the key is identifying the
00:21:01.240 exact context where and when you'll engage in the habit and that creates a situational cue for you
00:21:08.520 to follow okay there is research on this the majority of the work that i found about this is
00:21:14.900 about eliminating rather than building habits. But this is a real concept. This is a real thing
00:21:20.740 that could probably make your life better, right? You're sort of clarifying to yourself in what
00:21:25.980 context you will engage in a certain habit, a certain behavior. Right. He also talks about
00:21:31.720 habit stacking, where you try to use this methodology to link the habits you want to
00:21:37.500 one another. So you say, when you wake up, you will work out for 30 minutes and then you will
00:21:42.640 floss. Right. So the first habit becomes the cue for the second habit. And these two habits you
00:21:48.660 want to cultivate become linked in your brain. I'm not going to bite my nails and I'm going to
00:21:53.900 speak like a BBC anchor after that. I'm not going to say any curse words. I make the Pavlov
00:21:59.400 comparison because I felt like it was sort of apt, but also because it does feel throughout the book
00:22:04.440 like you're being told to train yourself like a dog. Yeah. A lot of the book is about building
00:22:08.600 habits by creating associations in your brain, which will like over time make those habits feel
00:22:13.760 second nature. And on one hand, it's interesting because you're sort of making the machinations of
00:22:18.220 the human mind work for you. Right. And on the other, you're utilizing the same basic tactics
00:22:22.760 we use to make a dog rollover. Right, right. It's inherently degrading, perhaps, but also maybe the
00:22:28.440 single most practically useful tidbit in this book. So I don't know that it would actually
00:22:33.900 work though, because if you're doing it to yourself, like the reward and punishment don't
00:22:39.760 work when they're not external stimuli. And like Pavlov's dogs, you know, the saliva at the bell
00:22:46.060 was an involuntary response. Right. And you can't really give that to yourself in the same way. And
00:22:52.060 like, it's very similar to the nudge thing where they were like, we're going to take your money
00:22:55.380 and give it back to you if you stop smoking. But if it's my money, it's very different than like
00:23:00.460 someone paying me to not smoke. There's a general sense I got throughout this book that it feels
00:23:05.660 like he's taking the problem of I can't form this habit I want to form and just kicking it one step
00:23:13.440 down the road where he's like, well, what you need to do is engage in this activity that creates a
00:23:19.080 cue that your brain will associate with the habit over time, which makes sense in a vacuum. But if I
00:23:25.680 had the discipline to do that, then I wouldn't have this problem to begin with.
00:23:31.780 Yeah, exactly.
00:23:32.160 It requires the same amount of willpower, just willpower to do something different.
00:23:35.440 Right.
00:23:35.780 Like a year ago, I downloaded one of those Chrome extensions that like blocks certain
00:23:40.660 websites so that I wouldn't be on Twitter all the time.
00:23:43.000 I was like, OK, I don't have the willpower to do this.
00:23:44.560 I'm going to download this thing that like doesn't let me check Twitter between nine
00:23:47.020 and five or whatever.
00:23:48.140 But then I would just turn off the blocking extension because it's like one click.
00:23:53.700 Right.
00:23:53.800 So it's like, ultimately, I don't have the willpower to not go on Twitter.
00:23:57.280 And it's the same thing.
00:23:58.580 I don't have the willpower to leave the block extension on.
00:24:01.700 If I want to, I'm trying to think of a way to give him a little bit of credit here.
00:24:04.180 I do think that the habit stacking idea is sort of interesting because, for example,
00:24:10.020 a very simple one is like brushing your teeth and flossing, which like I do back to back
00:24:15.460 every single night.
00:24:16.700 Yes, and I wouldn't think of that as being habit stacking, but it is right.
00:24:22.140 I guess.
00:24:22.680 I think there are ways in which it might be easier once you are already doing something
00:24:27.560 to add a good habit onto that and combining those two activities has made it something
00:24:33.680 that I don't even think about.
00:24:34.880 But then I also wonder if there's like a depletion of willpower problem here too.
00:24:38.680 If the habits aren't from the same category, because if I go to the gym, I come home and
00:24:43.820 I'm like, okay, I'm in like good habit mode.
00:24:45.460 I'm now going to floss my teeth. 0.73
00:24:46.900 It's like, well, I already fucking did something today that I don't want to do. 0.80
00:24:50.060 And then I'm going to skimp on the habit thing because I'm kind of out of like virtue. 0.89
00:24:54.260 Yeah.
00:24:54.540 Again, it feels like what he's saying is like, if you just get yourself to do it a little
00:25:00.300 bit, it won't feel difficult for the rest of your life, which I think is fair enough.
00:25:05.140 But that initial hurdle is what we're all trying to get over.
00:25:08.540 Yeah, that's the hard part.
00:25:09.300 It isn't quite as good at telling you how to get over that.
00:25:12.300 Right.
00:25:12.740 Another part of making it obvious is changing your environment.
00:25:16.860 Okay.
00:25:17.080 I'm going to send you a little tale that you might be vaguely familiar with.
00:25:21.760 It says,
00:25:22.580 Anne Thorndyke, a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston,
00:25:27.200 had a crazy idea.
00:25:28.940 She believed she could improve the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and
00:25:32.860 visitors without changing their willpower or motivation in the slightest way.
00:25:36.840 In fact, she didn't plan on talking to them at all. 0.99
00:25:40.180 Thorndyke and her colleagues designed a six-month study to change the oh, fuck off. 0.98
00:25:44.680 Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study to alter the 0.98
00:25:48.420 choice architecture of the hospital cafeteria.
00:25:51.980 They started by changing how drinks were arranged in the room.
00:25:55.860 Originally, the refrigerators located next to the cash registers in the cafeteria were
00:26:00.580 filled with only soda.
00:26:01.520 The researchers added water as an option to each one.
00:26:05.440 Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next to the food stations throughout
00:26:09.580 the room.
00:26:10.080 Soda was still in the primary refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations.
00:26:16.540 Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital dropped by 11.4%.
00:26:22.260 Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased by 25.8%.
00:26:26.940 They made similar adjustments and saw similar results with the food in the cafeteria.
00:26:31.800 Oh man, we're back to nudges.
00:26:33.400 We're back to cafeteria nudges.
00:26:35.220 Part three, baby.
00:26:36.520 our listeners demanded a part three keep going they said it's very funny to me that those nudge 0.82
00:26:45.000 episodes were so fucking packed that we didn't even get to the fact that the guy who came up 0.71
00:26:50.160 with this idea of choice architecture for food turned out to be like a giant fraud and like me 0.79
00:26:55.100 and aubrey did an entire episode on him one sink yeah like we don't have time in the nudge episodes 0.97
00:26:59.580 the father of this entire field is like totally full of shit and has been utterly disgraced but 0.98
00:27:04.900 Like, that's like a footnote considering all the other bad shit we came across in that 1.00
00:27:08.640 book. 0.93
00:27:09.300 And by the way, he also uses another nudge favorite, the example of the little fly stickers
00:27:14.400 in the urinals in airports.
00:27:16.280 80% less spillage.
00:27:17.780 That's right.
00:27:18.240 A real statistic, a totally real statistic that people can measure.
00:27:21.540 Real thing.
00:27:22.260 We've been sort of like mapping out the shared features of these self-help books, but this
00:27:27.140 made me come up with a new theory, which is that maybe it's more than that.
00:27:31.660 maybe these books are so similar that we are moving toward a future where they share the same
00:27:37.380 lessons the same anecdotes and eventually converging upon a single book yeah one book
00:27:43.500 to rule them all one self-help book to govern human society this has utterly ruined my social
00:27:50.300 life i will say because like as we're always saying these books are oftentimes just fodder
00:27:54.780 for like little cocktail party chatter and like fun facts and like when you talk to people you
00:27:59.960 don't know that well you know you're at like a dinner thing with a friend and they mentioned
00:28:03.140 like oh yeah i saw like some study said that like cafeteria choices go down when you move the things
00:28:07.760 that i'm like do they though am i gonna go in on this or am i just gonna leave it the worst part is
00:28:14.040 when someone knows that you do this podcast and someone else doesn't and the person who doesn't
00:28:19.420 is like hey have you have you read atomic habits i really like that and then the other person will
00:28:23.440 be like actually peter thinks you're dumb as hell here it comes give it to him peter denying me the
00:28:29.720 opportunity to just be like, yeah, good book. Thanks. Please let me back away from this social 0.97
00:28:34.880 interaction quietly in the bushes. Right. And this whole section of the book is a really good
00:28:40.040 example of how much the scientific support for the concepts that he mentions fluctuates. So like
00:28:46.000 implementation intentions has real support in the literature. But then you have this like
00:28:51.500 cafeteria situation that's not even really a study, right? There's no control group. There's
00:28:55.400 no effort to do research they're just sort of observing what happened in one cafeteria location
00:29:00.980 there's another story in the section about how homes with energy meters in prominent locations
00:29:06.980 within the home were more likely to conserve energy and the source for that is a book from 2015
00:29:14.720 where the author wrote that she was told the story at a conference in 1973 oh perfect perfect like oh
00:29:23.740 my god bro like you've got to be kidding me with this i also love the weird mobius strip of what
00:29:28.960 is essentially a cocktail party anecdote then ending up in one of these books and then becoming
00:29:33.580 a cocktail party anecdote again like 40 years later right right ashes to ashes dust to dust
00:29:41.000 the endless cycle of this story that probably isn't even real it probably isn't true yeah this
00:29:45.700 is also a good time to mention that like again he mentions these sort of psychological concepts
00:29:52.180 and he'll sometimes provide some science to back those up and yet when it comes time to give you
00:30:00.120 practical advice it sort of flops like he uses this choice architecture concept to give
00:30:06.280 recommendations like quote if you want to remember to take your medication each night
00:30:11.700 put your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom counter okay if you want to drink
00:30:17.060 more water fill up a few water bottles each morning and place them in common locations
00:30:21.760 across the house those are reasonable piece of advice they're also super obvious yeah like oh
00:30:28.920 this is the inspiration i needed to finally stop putting my nightly medication under my bed right
00:30:33.180 right it just feels like when he actually needs to come up with some hot tip to give you all he
00:30:38.840 can do is say something that you've definitely read before or had already thought of this is
00:30:44.080 the fundamental tension of all self-help books is that there is very little advice that you can give
00:30:48.700 to everyone and it's all kind of been said before yeah okay you're trying not to drink soda okay
00:30:54.140 don't buy soda so you don't have it in the house so you're not tempted okay that's like decent
00:30:59.000 advice but it's really fucking obvious and like any listicle on the internet yeah like i'm trying
00:31:03.260 to stop drinking soda we'll tell you that's like gonna be the first thing they tell you again it's
00:31:06.600 it's more like a little fact about human psychology than it is useful advice yeah and considering the
00:31:13.940 cafeteria anecdote is talking about food probably as good a place as any to note that clear uses
00:31:20.680 dieting and weight loss as examples of desirable habits throughout the book yeah i was gonna say
00:31:25.900 probably there's like a carelessness with which he talks about this stuff that like skims past
00:31:32.380 a massive amount of pertinent science right at one point he's talking about heightening
00:31:37.720 your awareness of bad habits and he says this i'm gonna send it to you i knew this part of the book
00:31:43.740 was coming uh if you eat a chocolate bar every morning acknowledge it almost as if you were
00:31:49.820 watching someone else if you binge eat simply notice that you are eating more calories than
00:31:54.940 you should ah finally we're telling people who binge eat not to do that yeah it's not behavior
00:32:00.420 that causes them any distress be aware of the calories you're in like come on man have you 0.78
00:32:05.080 tried feeling like a piece of shit just and you know i mean i don't want to digress too much but 0.98
00:32:12.220 yeah he just sort of like very flippantly talks about food and like smoking for example in these 0.99
00:32:19.680 offhand ways as if they are interchangeable yeah with every little habit good or bad that we might
00:32:26.260 have and it's just shitty science and you know not woke i would say politically incorrect just
00:32:37.040 Say what you hate about it, Peter. 0.95
00:32:40.820 All right.
00:32:41.660 We are now on to step two of his four-part system, make it attractive.
00:32:47.660 This section is mostly more dog whispering to yourself, more self-dogification.
00:32:53.860 Okay.
00:32:54.020 Lear talks about ways to link dopamine responses in your brain to good habits.
00:33:00.380 Dopamine, of course, the chemical released by your brain that makes you feel good and
00:33:04.540 it gets released when you're doing stuff you enjoy.
00:33:06.540 so he's saying that you can associate things that give you dopamine with good habits that's i'm not
00:33:12.180 gonna get that from not cursing he recommends what he calls temptation bundling where you pair
00:33:18.020 things you like with habits you want to build okay so i don't know like commit to giving yourself 0.98
00:33:24.560 some sort of a little treat after you clean your room right like a literal fucking dog but what if 0.99
00:33:29.720 it's a chocolate bar and then i'm obligated to feel like shit afterwards but maybe you deserve 0.99
00:33:34.280 the chocolate bar because you have been a very good boy so an example he gives and this is a 0.96
00:33:40.300 perfect example of how like he gives you this concept and you're like oh okay like like how 0.96
00:33:44.520 and then he gives you the worst fucking example you've ever heard in your life okay he gives 0.61
00:33:49.140 this example of an engineer who wrote a program so that netflix would play when he was cycling 0.99
00:33:55.420 on his stationary bike at a certain speed but would stop if he dropped below it that's a that's 0.99
00:34:02.580 a fucking great idea holy shit speed three sad man on a bike 0.99
00:34:09.080 look whatever works for you you know yeah i do have to say this sounds to me like it would make 0.99
00:34:18.200 netflix miserable more than it would make exercise fun i don't know again it would not i mean it
00:34:23.580 would not work in the long term it feels like a cute idea but eventually you're just gonna be 0.99
00:34:27.300 like oh fuck it i'm just gonna disable this fucking stupid thing i would rather be on the 0.99
00:34:30.480 actual bus in speed than be like desperately trying to pedal hard at the end of my workout 1.00
00:34:36.980 to catch the last two minutes of Great British Baking Show or something.
00:34:42.300 I'm trying to think of other like good habits.
00:34:45.260 It's funny, in my own life, I can only think of like bad habits that I'm trying to break.
00:34:49.180 I think that you're probably, and this is sort of implicit and very occasionally explicit
00:34:53.860 throughout the book, that we have all sorts of good habits, but you're not noticing them
00:34:58.340 because they have become second nature to you and therefore what you're trying to achieve is like
00:35:03.440 shifting the habits that you don't have into that category right of second nature habits that you
00:35:08.980 don't even think about you just do this thing like i do actually go to the gym in the mornings
00:35:12.500 right it's not like hard for me to do that because it's like i'm like bursting with energy after 0.81
00:35:15.920 drinking the whole fucking pot of coffee but you you also are probably like you know i told you i'm 0.69
00:35:20.300 relatively messy you're probably neater than me but you would you might not think of that as a 0.99
00:35:26.180 good habit you have, even though it is. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I just think I'm like a
00:35:29.700 normal level of messy. Well, that's also probably true, but I'm still below you.
00:35:36.380 All right. I've sent you something. Okay. He says, you can make hard habits more attractive
00:35:41.960 if you can learn to associate them with a positive experience. Sometimes all you need
00:35:46.480 is a slight mindset shift. For instance, we often talk about everything we have to do in a given day.
00:35:52.020 You have to wake up early for work. You have to make another sales call for your business.
00:35:55.460 you have to cook dinner for your family. Now imagine changing just one word.
00:36:00.460 You don't have to. You get to. You get to wake up early for work. You get to make another sales
00:36:07.920 call. You get to cook dinner for your family. By simply changing one word, you shift the way you
00:36:13.900 view each event. You transition from seeing these behaviors as burdens and turn them into
00:36:19.340 opportunities oh this is like democratic consultant brain where he thinks that like
00:36:25.320 the magical power of language you can change one tiny thing and completely
00:36:29.800 change like the the meanings that you attach to that term if this works for you like if you if
00:36:36.340 you say oh i get to wake up early for work and that convinces you that it's good you have a
00:36:42.680 docile brain like i don't know how else to put it if all you needed to compel yourself to do
00:36:50.040 difficult things was to mentally be like this is good yeah like why do you why do you need a book
00:36:55.460 about it yeah it's like i hate doing my taxes so this year i'm gonna call it like petting puppies
00:37:01.340 because like i love to pet puppies but like ultimately you still have to sit down for a
00:37:06.340 whole saturday and look at a bunch of receipts and like pay turbo tax 100 bucks right like it's
00:37:11.700 the activity that people object to and avoid. It's not like the term you use to refer to the
00:37:19.020 activity. I think it's probably worth pointing out that his source for this is his college
00:37:24.080 strength and conditioning coach. Okay. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Whatever. Okay. There is a chapter in
00:37:33.180 this section dedicated to eliminating bad habits. And this is, despite the fact that it's half the
00:37:39.720 book title, the only chapter that is fully dedicated to eliminating bad habits. And it is
00:37:45.160 one of the more pseudoscientific portions of the book. You recall the line about habits being the
00:37:52.340 product of ancient desires? Yes. He says that your cravings are manifestations of deeper
00:37:58.380 underlying motives. Quote, look at nearly any product that is habit forming and you'll see
00:38:04.660 that it does not create a new motivation, but rather latches on to the underlying motives
00:38:09.860 of human nature.
00:38:11.060 OK.
00:38:11.680 So he's saying, for example, that you might have a craving for junk food, but deep down,
00:38:17.460 that is the product of an ancient desire to avoid starvation.
00:38:22.620 I mean, yes, sure.
00:38:24.100 Maybe.
00:38:24.440 On some level, I don't know.
00:38:25.620 Some of the other examples he gives are that the habit of browsing social media is driven
00:38:31.360 by the underlying motivation of connecting and bonding with others true and the habit of playing
00:38:37.820 video games is driven by the underlying motivation of achieving status and prestige no my playing
00:38:45.140 video games is my hatred of bokoblins and moblins no my ancient brain wants to be a five foot two
00:38:52.600 italian plumber with a nine foot vertical this i say it's pseudoscientific because i like i don't
00:38:59.020 have any particular problem believing that this is true to some degree but there is no science that
00:39:05.860 he cites to back it up what he cites is a tweet oh really and it is one one of several citations
00:39:12.940 to tweets what's the tweet the tweet is literally like the the middle of a tweet thread about other
00:39:18.760 stuff it's yeah because at that point you might as well just not cite it right like if you're 0.77
00:39:22.800 citing a fucking tweet it's like citing wikipedia or something it's like it makes you look worse 0.71
00:39:26.180 than just not having a footnote there there are citations to tweets and reddit posts throughout 0.99
00:39:31.700 the book no way it's bizarre also these things like you can't really debunk these things because
00:39:37.420 they're not it's not clear that they're like true or untrue it's just like a way of looking at
00:39:41.160 something that's why i say it's so pseudoscientific because like it's it feels different than the
00:39:45.940 times when he like stretches the science yeah he's just sort of speculating in a way where
00:39:51.520 you're like, yeah, maybe that's right. I don't know. It feels like, yes. Okay. Our craving for
00:39:56.680 like certain types of food is almost certainly like a chemical thing that evolved from way back
00:40:01.920 when I, I get that, but, um, you're just saying it. I, you know what I mean? Like, where's the
00:40:06.440 science? What's the explanation and what does this do for me? And this is also another dinner
00:40:09.880 party thing where if somebody was telling me this, like, Oh, I started thinking of my junk food
00:40:14.580 addiction as part of like my primal self or something. And that helped me stop eating junk
00:40:19.340 food, I'd be like, great. Like I'm not, I don't want to, I don't need to take that away from
00:40:22.580 anybody. Like if that's an understanding and an analysis that helps you, that's fine. But it's
00:40:27.040 not in any way scientific or generalizable. Right, right. Step three, make it easy. And this is of
00:40:34.420 course about how you can make it easier to do the habits that you want to do. He talks about how when
00:40:39.520 you do something repeatedly, you activate the neural circuit associated with that activity.
00:40:44.880 So it becomes easier over time.
00:40:47.080 So the key to creating lasting habits is to do them repeatedly, which is now the second
00:40:53.340 time in the book where his primary advice for habit formation is to just do the habit
00:40:57.340 over and over again.
00:40:58.460 Yeah, that's true.
00:40:59.240 I think you should keep flossing.
00:41:01.280 If you if you floss a thousand times, the next thousand will be easier, I suppose, is
00:41:06.140 the tip.
00:41:06.960 Yeah, it's still hard to do flossing the first thousand times, but OK.
00:41:10.240 I'm going to send you another chart.
00:41:11.900 Oh, yeah.
00:41:12.440 And by the way, I'm sending you the best charts because there are multiple charts, again, where you'll look at them and have even having read the chapter, be like, what is he saying?
00:41:23.000 I can send you some of those two just for fun.
00:41:24.640 But this is I'm trying to send you the charts that that are legible in some way.
00:41:29.080 We're trying to be fair.
00:41:29.740 This is a fair show.
00:41:30.660 People say that we're just being mean and dunking, but I'm actually being nice.
00:41:33.880 OK, oh, my God.
00:41:35.240 OK, so it's another line graph with the up and down is automaticity.
00:41:42.440 and the left and right line is repetitions god it's really hard to describe charts it's like a
00:41:48.860 very simple chart but it's basically an upward sloping line that is like the more you repeat
00:41:59.020 something the more automatic it becomes i guess but it's just like that's right that's nothing
00:42:02.880 is labeled and there's like an arbitrary line where like a habit goes over the habit line the
00:42:08.940 style of his chart is like um hand drawn on a napkin yeah which i guess he's just doing to be
00:42:14.440 cute but it also just because they're also so unscientific to begin with it just sort of like 0.83
00:42:20.880 reinforces the general impression that it's bullshit it's also very funny because the line
00:42:25.180 is not straight right he's he's basically saying that like as you do something more it becomes more 0.92
00:42:31.160 automatic for you but rather than just having like a straight 45 degree line he has this like
00:42:36.400 the like sign curve or like log curve thing where like it goes up quickly and then it begins to
00:42:41.900 taper off so it like looks more scientific right but he's also just kind of like drawn this you
00:42:48.440 know there's this isn't there's no data yeah and doesn't help you do it more like i i need step one
00:42:54.880 i need the step one okay tell me if i'm projecting but this whole book reminds me of my best friend
00:43:02.680 in college who was a very lovely guy, but just like kind of a jock and cheerleader type guy.
00:43:10.160 A lot of things in his life had come easy to him. And I remember in college, I was telling him about
00:43:15.040 I had like had feelings for this guy and he like wasn't into me. And I was trying to talk to him
00:43:19.560 about like, OK, what have you done in the past when you develop feelings for somebody and they
00:43:24.000 don't like you back? And he was like, what do you mean? And like it became clear that like this had
00:43:30.580 never happened to him and he was he was like confused he's like oh you just like you have
00:43:36.380 feelings for someone and you tell them and they like you back and then you date for like he just 0.90
00:43:41.300 couldn't compute and i feel like a lot of these especially motivational like rise and grind ass
00:43:49.640 books are written by people who are just very high functioning yeah someone with a lot of energy
00:43:56.080 super extroverted love planning things love having everything kind of neat and in order
00:44:01.880 right and i think people like this go through the world with the same kind of confusion
00:44:08.020 and they're like why don't you just do what i'm doing yeah no i i get the general sense that he's
00:44:14.020 just a high functioning kind of kind of guy in his own telling he there's no phase of his life
00:44:19.400 where he's disorganized or has bad habits or anything right the adversity he overcame was
00:44:23.820 getting smacked in the face with a baseball bat that's not related to habits uh you know he just
00:44:28.460 sort of then transitions into like i was good with habits in college and it's like yeah if you were
00:44:33.820 if you were good if you were organized generally speaking in college then you're just naturally
00:44:39.100 predisposed to organization you're probably just someone who like fine gets a lot of satisfaction
00:44:43.400 right like planning ahead and being organized and like that's all totally fine yeah but those are
00:44:48.620 like the worst people to get to give advice yeah yeah there's a tendency i think a human tendency
00:44:54.220 to chalk this up to like oh i'm productive because of like my system but actually they're just this
00:45:00.360 is basically like a function of their personality right and like that's what they enjoy dedicating
00:45:04.160 themselves to and it's like you can't tell other people to like you should enjoy like doing the 0.94
00:45:08.980 dishes immediately when you're done eating like i don't enjoy doing that i fucking hate doing the 0.92
00:45:13.900 dishes some people like doing that you need to program netflix so that when you're doing the 0.90
00:45:18.080 issues it's playing yeah that's the key yeah no i i think that's right i mean there are just people
00:45:23.260 who are going to be a lot better at this stuff and unfortunately they have nothing to say to us
00:45:28.780 the the filth that clogs the bottom of society's drains yeah my challenge to them my challenge to
00:45:35.500 the people who are like rock climbing twice a day try podcasting twice a week two podcasts
00:45:43.680 That's right.
00:45:44.180 Plus bonus episodes.
00:45:45.160 He talks about reducing the friction around good habits.
00:45:49.500 Like if you want to work out more, you leave your workout stuff out and accessible, for example.
00:45:54.660 If you want to eat certain foods, prep them.
00:45:57.620 Sure.
00:45:57.740 Another little tidbit in this chapter is the two minute rule.
00:46:02.200 If there's something you want to do that takes less than two minutes, do it right now.
00:46:07.480 Okay.
00:46:07.660 i said i wanted to be to include all the things that i thought were like helpful tips as a
00:46:12.500 dedicated adhd or a po adhd i i do think that it would be useful to keep something like that in
00:46:18.160 mind for me also the people always say the food prep thing like on sunday nights make like meals
00:46:23.720 for the week like yeah i'm a guy that loves to cook i fucking hate cooking a million meals in 0.96
00:46:29.000 advance and i hate eating the same fucking thing five days in a row it sounds so easy it sounds so 0.99
00:46:34.040 easy and it's not it's it's not it absolutely sucks the whole week sucks yeah and then you 0.99
00:46:39.740 have to do it the next week exactly you're doing it again yeah if i liked doing that i would already 0.85
00:46:43.700 be doing it i don't know there's something there's also something sort of dreary about it where it's
00:46:48.040 like you know how sunday nights are a moment you have to yourself yeah what if you sort of started
00:46:53.460 the week early yeah what if your weekend ended late sunday afternoon and you're in yeah you're
00:46:58.780 in like productivity mode and like the whole point of sundays for me is not to be in productivity 0.78
00:47:03.400 mode right i just want to watch fucking twitch streams and like pottery youtubers i don't want 0.68
00:47:08.700 to make like three quarts of chili that i'm then going to tediously eat for lunch every day this 0.80
00:47:13.600 week all right the final key to habit formation according to james clear is to make the habit
00:47:22.980 satisfying now this one is a doozy okay he leads off as always with an anecdote and this anecdote
00:47:30.580 is about the slums of Karachi, Pakistan.
00:47:33.720 Now, he talks about a researcher, Stephen Luby,
00:47:36.640 who went to Karachi with the goal of promoting the use of hand soap,
00:47:40.780 which, of course, reduces the spread of all sorts of viruses and infections
00:47:44.640 that are particularly common in dense, impoverished areas.
00:47:48.760 What Clear says is that although these people already used soap,
00:47:53.940 the soap the researchers offered foamed very easily and smelled nice,
00:47:58.760 which made it more pleasurable to use okay in other words it made the habit of hand washing
00:48:04.120 more satisfying and as a result diarrhea rates dropped by 52 percent pneumonia by 48 percent
00:48:11.380 impetigo a skin infection drops by 35 percent this is all great news however this is not the
00:48:19.460 real story yeah i mean there's no fucking way this would ever be the real story this is me at
00:48:24.680 dinner party just like closing my eyes as somebody tells a story and i'm like i'm not going to 0.85
00:48:28.640 respond. I'm not going to respond. I'm not going to ruin this evening for everybody.
00:48:32.360 The real story is that Stephen Luby wanted to research the impact of proper hand washing in
00:48:39.460 these settings. He gets a grant from Procter and Gamble who wanted to test the relative efficacy
00:48:47.480 of some generic soaps versus antibacterial soaps or something like that. They were just testing
00:48:52.820 out their products. The researchers provided soap to the residents, as well as instruction
00:48:59.600 on the benefits of handwashing and best handwashing practices. That includes weekly
00:49:06.220 interventions where they would return to these people's homes to be like, so how's it going?
00:49:11.120 Are you using the soap? Are you using it properly? Sort of, you know, persistently educating
00:49:16.880 them about how to use soap and why soap is so effective. There is nothing in the study about
00:49:24.900 the soap being more satisfying to use than what they were used to. Clear makes it seem like that
00:49:30.360 was the only obstacle, right? He says the problem wasn't knowledge. But like the core of the study
00:49:38.480 was that these field workers were conducting neighborhood meetings and these weekly household
00:49:44.620 to visits to educate residents about these hand-washing practices and explain why it's
00:49:49.720 important and they're also giving people the soap for free right in a poor area right so it's like
00:49:55.180 saying we want people to eat more fruits and vegetables we showed up at their house every
00:49:59.680 week with like a basket of apples and bananas and then like everyone started eating more fruit and
00:50:05.180 at the end you're like they just love eating bananas peeling bananas is like a really satisfying
00:50:09.280 thing for them right it's like well maybe it was sad like maybe people like that but it's like
00:50:12.980 you're giving people something for free and telling them that it's important. Yeah. So the
00:50:16.900 study said that soap was relatively affordable in these communities, but they are like drastically
00:50:23.340 increasing their access to soap in the course of the study. So it does feel like access to soap
00:50:30.240 matters here, or at least might matter. Right. Yeah. So Clear cites a email exchange he had
00:50:37.100 with Steven Luby. And I was like, OK, they must have talked about this or something. Right. There's
00:50:42.500 something else going on here to make him believe that the satisfyingness of the soap is at play.
00:50:47.380 So I reached out to Steven Luby and I did confirm that anecdotally, the researchers thought that
00:50:52.400 the quality of the soap played a role. So, okay, it's not totally made up, right? Yeah. But again,
00:50:59.820 clear makes it seem like it was the decisive factor that he expressly dismisses the role
00:51:05.180 that education played, even though the research was built around persistently educating people
00:51:10.700 about the use and efficacy of hand soap. And not to mention, again, that they had just given these
00:51:16.080 people a large amount of free soap that they might not have already had. Right. It's fitting that we
00:51:21.080 end the book more or less on this anecdote because it is akin to the British cycling anecdote where
00:51:27.340 he takes this one bit that aligns with his framework and then he acts as if that were
00:51:33.740 the magic bullet that solved the problem. Also, it's a bullet that's so magic that it wasn't
00:51:40.580 mentioned in the original study. I'm sure that it was a factor, but it's weird to look at a study
00:51:45.500 that doesn't mention like how great the soaps were and then be like, look how great the soaps
00:51:51.000 were. That's the most important factor. I agree. The whole thing feels odd. And I have to say it
00:51:56.080 feels extra weird when like what we're talking about is like disease in slums, you know, like
00:52:03.860 there's something extra unsettling about pretending that there are like simple solutions to the
00:52:09.820 problems that are associated with severe poverty right once again we are we are down to like
00:52:17.220 resources right like yeah you got to give them stuff you need to educate yeah hire staff right
00:52:22.140 yeah you're going to need to dedicate resources to the problem sorry and at the end of the study
00:52:26.880 all the people in it did a eurovision song and it whipped ass dedicate the resources every every
00:52:34.040 episode a eurovision teaser from mike it's also not even clear what implication this has for
00:52:39.540 people. I guess the idea is that if you want to start like we should buy fancier dental floss if
00:52:44.760 we want to start dental flossing. This is a very confusing chapter because I don't really know
00:52:50.360 what you're supposed to take from it. And when he tries to explain it, it's very convoluted.
00:52:56.120 He talks about like habit tracking, recording days when you do or do not achieve your habit goals.
00:53:03.940 and that can like create a sense of satisfaction he talks about a guy who had like two different
00:53:12.220 things of paper clips one one empty one full of paper clips and every time he like accomplished
00:53:16.580 a task he would move a paper clip over and like the visual of the things that you're accomplishing
00:53:22.700 was satisfying so there are these little little tips he sort of includes but yeah it's like you
00:53:29.280 read that anecdote and it's like okay i guess there's something here even if it is true which
00:53:34.340 is not but yeah also one of the most out-of-pocket anecdotes in this whole book there was a guy in i
00:53:40.020 think the late 70s might have been the early 80s who proposed that in order for a president to
00:53:46.560 launch a nuke there would be a little capsule that would be implanted near the heart of an aid
00:53:54.220 and that capsule would like have the nuclear codes or something along those lines and the
00:53:59.020 president would have to murder by hand the guy to get the codes with the idea being that there 0.98
00:54:07.500 should be some major awful obstacle to launching the nukes i'm into anecdotes now that's a fucking 0.93
00:54:14.100 great anecdote and and this was like escalated i think this was like escalated to the pentagon
00:54:19.020 And they were like, no, that would make it basically dissuade the use of nukes too much.
00:54:23.940 We don't want a president chickening out from the murder.
00:54:27.460 But he was using that as like an inversion of making it satisfying.
00:54:32.200 Right.
00:54:32.640 What's the opposite of making a habit satisfying, making the habit of launching nukes unsatisfying
00:54:39.100 by associating it with murder? 0.99
00:54:41.220 Yeah, that's that's the Friedman shit where he just found a good anecdote. 0.99
00:54:45.980 Yeah. 0.94
00:54:46.420 i was like yeah let's make it a metaphor even though it doesn't really fit i was like what
00:54:50.520 am i learning from this the pentagon did that thing where they were gonna gas people and make
00:54:59.180 them gay and like that's how you should stop biting your nails it's like no that's just a
00:55:03.260 cool wikipedia entry that you read it's a cool it's a cool idea i love the idea of donald trump 0.99
00:55:08.600 having to murder a man with his bare hands like reaching into his chest you know like trump's
00:55:14.020 Like, can we nuke the hurricane? 0.98
00:55:15.080 They're like, sure. 1.00
00:55:15.700 Just kill that guy right there. 1.00
00:55:16.820 Just do the temple of doom. 1.00
00:55:18.240 Yeah.
00:55:20.320 All right.
00:55:21.240 So that's the portion of the book where he's discussing the central premise.
00:55:25.980 And the rest of the book is a section called advanced tactics.
00:55:30.740 Oh, that's really just a wandering series of thoughts vaguely related to habits.
00:55:37.300 There's a chapter about the role of genetics, which is actually slightly less problematic than it sounds.
00:55:42.940 Oh, okay.
00:55:44.160 There's a chapter called The Goldilocks Rule, where he talks about how you need to find
00:55:47.960 challenges for yourself that are not so easy that you become bored, but also not so difficult
00:55:53.420 that you consistently fail.
00:55:55.620 Okay.
00:55:55.960 Which seems in a vacuum like decent enough advice, but it's also kind of weird because
00:56:00.740 one of the four keystones of his process is to make it easy.
00:56:04.640 Right.
00:56:04.820 The final chapter is called The Downside of Creating Good Habits, which is about how once
00:56:10.260 you establish habits you can fall into the rut of not improving those habits which inhibits your
00:56:16.140 ability to quote achieve elite levels of performance yeah what if i stop cursing and
00:56:21.480 nobody wants to listen to show anymore because that's the only reason they were listening was
00:56:24.640 the cursing so but anyway yeah like i i don't know like he starts talking about like challenging
00:56:30.360 yourself and like achieving elite levels of performance and it's like i'm trying to clear 0.71
00:56:34.080 my laundry pile not make it to the olympics so let's fucking relax and and that is that is the
00:56:41.100 whole book he sort of wraps on that on these meandering thoughts and that's that there's a 0.96
00:56:47.240 there's sort of a great paradox to this book in that it pitches itself as a way to organize your
00:56:53.920 life and yet the book itself is like disorganized it's chaotic yeah it's rambling so you can pick
00:56:59.980 up these little pieces of potentially useful advice and i hope that over the course of the
00:57:03.840 episode, I honestly conveyed the pieces that I found interesting. But you can only get that
00:57:09.460 after sifting through a bunch of like unnecessary anecdotes and unsourced scientific claims and
00:57:15.340 contradictions and fabrications. Reading it was sort of like an experience similar to using
00:57:21.380 modern social media, like being on Twitter all day. At the end of it, I was very tired and I
00:57:27.140 had a headache. But I also learned like two new facts and it was unequivocally not worth it.
00:57:33.840 That was the experience.
00:57:35.220 Well, how's your laundry pile, Peter?
00:57:37.820 It's the same.
00:57:38.720 Okay.
00:57:38.980 The real problem is like, okay, I thought about that like habit stacking concept.
00:57:44.860 Okay, what am I doing consistently now that I don't even view as a habit?
00:57:48.660 Yeah.
00:57:48.760 And I just sort of come up short with like what exactly I want to do, but I am going
00:57:52.820 to try to do this a little more.
00:57:55.100 Yeah.
00:57:55.240 I wouldn't say that this stuff doesn't work.
00:57:57.320 I think that it probably works very well for some set of people and, you know, a little
00:58:02.300 bit for others and not at all for others still yeah and i think on some level the authors have
00:58:06.340 to know this that it's like it's ultimately entertainment in a way yeah it's too bad because
00:58:10.400 there's such a like i don't know there's such a need for this kind of thing in society i don't
00:58:14.420 know like a lot of people are really suffering but the only thing that is available is this kind
00:58:18.400 of like generic like take the stairs instead of the elevator style advice yeah the the core problem
00:58:23.580 of these things is that you cannot meaningfully help people unless you understand the specifics
00:58:28.720 of their situation yeah and these books by definition can't right all they can do is like
00:58:34.200 broadcast these messages into the ether and the only thing that is broadcastable is this sort of
00:58:40.980 like it's almost like thinspo it is like yeah make food for the whole week but like you can't
00:58:46.960 that's not really useful for for basically anybody i also really i i really did want to like every
00:58:53.580 time i ran into something i was like that's a good little piece of advice i that is in the episode
00:58:57.920 like there there's nothing that i encountered that i thought was good advice like really good
00:59:02.260 advice that i left out because i wanted to i wanted to be fair and not just because it does 0.98
00:59:07.840 there's a real risk with a book like this of it just being pure like this is fucking dumb yeah 0.98
00:59:12.600 pure dunk but there's there's shit in here i don't know there's you could take something out 0.98
00:59:16.680 of this it's funny that like basically you trying to be like fastidiously as fair to this book as 0.91
00:59:21.380 possible still ends up being a dunk fest i mean there's no other like it's just such a it's such
00:59:26.320 a dunkel book it's like it's just so unserious and it's also it's not clear to me that like books
00:59:32.300 like this are all that like harmful societally like i find them annoying yeah yeah but they're
00:59:37.140 not harmful the way that like nudge was or like clash of civilizations or like even like the 0.84
00:59:42.780 secret yeah on the curve on which we're grading the fucking books on this show it's like yeah 0.99
00:59:47.960 this is giving people kind of asinine advice but it's not like you know the muslims are the problem 0.99
00:59:53.360 with globalization are like terrible shit yeah the overall impact of atomic habits on the culture 1.00
01:00:00.720 is not particularly bad it's just like it's just a book for like shitty productivity youtubers to 0.98
01:00:07.660 be like this book changed how i do the dishes right it's part of the general i think dumming
01:00:13.280 of american society but it's like yeah the the harm of that is like fairly diffuse and it's
01:00:19.280 very hard to lay the blame for that on like any one book basically yeah yeah we're i mean we're
01:00:23.720 at a we're at a point of diminishing returns with any given self-help book yeah exactly and there's
01:00:28.620 been these books are kind of almost designed to be like repackaged and resold to you every year or
01:00:35.740 two i'm gonna put out mine and the cover is gonna be me looking pensively at the camera and the
01:00:42.360 title is gonna be called putting up the shelf i was gonna say just it's just a photo of the shelf
01:00:47.380 No words. Everyone understands
01:00:49.680 exactly what the book is about.
01:00:51.400 New York Times bestseller 2027.
01:00:53.600 That'll be the year after I put it up.