119. Creating a Habit of Curiosity: Interview with Bec Weeks, Cofounder of Pique

Welcome to episode 119 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, you'll learn a little about a different way to use habits.

Through a really cool app called Peak. Ready. Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello.

Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today I'm very excited to be sitting down with Beck Weeks, co founder of the app Peak. Her co founders include Sendhil Mulanathan, who has taught traditional and behavioral economics at mit, Harvard and the University of Chicago, and Michael Norton, another Harvard professor and part of the Harvard Behavioral Insights Group. He also previously taught at MIT and co authored a book called Happy the Science of Smarter Spending. In case you couldn't guess it, Beck got her MBA in Behavioral Science, Entrepreneurship and Social Impact from Harvard University. The whole Peak crew is clearly amazing and I was trying to remember how we first got connected. I'm 99% sure it was via a Twitter conversation that might have happen during Nudge Stock, much like the Behavioral Science Club group that I introduced to you.

On last week's episode with Louise Ward.

It's amazing the great connections you can.

Make when you keep the social in social media.

There are links in the show notes to all the relevant past episodes we're.

Going to talk about today, including that one from last week as well as.

Those on Nudges, the Focusing illusion habits and how to finally change your behavior. You'll also find ways to learn more about and get your own Peak app. There is a special link for you Brainy Business listeners that Beck will share during the show and that's all within the show notes for this episode which can be found within the app you're listening to or at the brainy business.com 119 I had such an amazing time chatting with Beck and could tell from our first conversation we would be fast friends. She's doing such cool things and as silly as it is, she has some stellar Rose Gold headphones that I totally want.

If you're a longtime listener, you know Rose Gold is my jam.

Beyond that of course I love the cool things she and the rest of the Peak team are doing to help people use habits in a smart way to improve their lives.

You are going to love this so I won't make you wait any Longer Beck weeks.

Welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you so much. It's great to be here, Melina.

Yeah. So excited to have you. We have connected and been talking about and actually I think we connected on Twitter. I think that is how we got together and had a chat about your really cool app called Peak, which we will get to as we have our conversation, but would love. I always like to start these just where guests can tell a little bit about you and your background and even though you're here in the States now, not originally from there. So tell us a little bit about you.

Yeah, you might be able to tell just a little bit from my accent that I'm not from these parts. I'm originally from Australia. So I started my career actually very briefly in law before moving into management consulting, which took me then to Harvard to do an mba where I started getting more into behavioral science. I'd taken for example, Bridget Madrian's behavioral science and public policy course, which was a fantastic course and really got me excited about the application of behavioral science in that space. And so when I came to look for something to move to after management consulting, I went to help grow the Australian nudge unit. So it's called Beta, the behavioral economics team of the Australian government. It's the Australian nudge unit at the federal government level. And that was probably the first place where I was officially applying behavioral science in my career. Although I think as you and I had talked about a little bit, Melina, we in management consulting, we'd probably been doing a lot of things like that. We just hadn't called it behavioral science. A lot of things around motivation and incentives and bringing insights from psychology in without perhaps calling attention to that. So Beta was my first place of officially doing that and calling it what it was. And I had a fantastic experience working there that led me to do some further work with Sendamullainathan, who at the same time was having conversations with Mike Norton, which led to where I am today with Peak, which I know we'll get to in a second.

Yeah, awesome. Well, Ann, we do have just as the shout out for Australia is always in the top, I think even 5 for downloads of the Brainy Business podcast. So good to have, I think I'm trying to remember if you are the first from us, first Aussie, I guess.

That we've had here on the representing Down Under.

Yeah, definitely not the last. But excited to be able to do a little shout out there for Australia. So nice.

And there's a pretty big behavioral science community Growing in Australia. Now there's. Aside from the team, the beta team at the federal level, there's lots of other. I think there's about eight or nine other teams inside other departments at the federal level. So for instance, inside the Department of Health and the Tax office, there's also a whole lot of teams at the state level and also of course, outside of public policy as well, lots of interest in behavioral science, including a really big team at one of the big banks in Australia that's doing some great stuff around financial security and serving previously sort of underserved populations. So a really big behavioural community in Australia that's growing every day.

That's awesome. And I think Ogilvy has a decent presence there in the. In Australia as well. So for the actual business side of stuff too, with not. Not all public policy, but absolutely, yeah. So actually I know that we had connected when we were talking in the pre call, we talked about some of the work that you did at Beta.

See, I look at.

I see. I think in beta.

Yeah, it is in America. There's a few things like that. Moving over this, I think when I'm talking to Australians, I would say beta. And I'm talking to Americans, I'd say beta. So yes, Beta, that's right.

So can you talk about some of the projects that you did while you were there? I think those are fascinating.

Yeah. So one of them will probably sound like some of the projects people might have heard about other similar nudge units doing in other kinds of fields. But I think this was the first time applied in this setting. So we were focused on the problem of doctors over prescribing antibiotics. And you know, there are a lot of downstream problems that arise with the over prescription of antibiotics. And so we tested the effectiveness of different kinds of messaging on letters to doctors who were in those sort of top groups of prescribers. And particularly the classic kind of showing a graph that shows you are in the top operational line of prescribing behavior. You might want to rethink that. And really strong effects on that letter. So that was one of the most exciting projects I think that was happening while I was there. And that was in conjunction with the Department of Health. So a really important piece of work. Another piece of work that I think we touched on a little bit that was super interesting was a piece of work around recruitment and the idea of blinding resumes, removing data that indicated gender or minority group status. And I think that what was very interesting there, and just as a good reminder to us all to make sure we're always testing is, you know, that the hope was that we would see, or the expectation, the hypothesis we were testing was we would see that by removing those details from resumes, we would see more women and more minority candidates progressing through this recruitment stage that we were conducting the intervention at. But in fact, that's not what we saw. And I think it just goes to show that probably in that setting, you know, in a setting where everybody is focused on ensuring that we're fully considering the merits of female minority candidates, you know, that was. There was probably already some implicit affirmative action happening. And in fact, testing whether implementing this blind resume intervention would have been effective was very important because it made us stop and think, well, maybe this isn't the setting where we need to. To do this. It's not to say there still isn't. We still want to address the issues of lack of female and minority representation at the upper echelons in the public service. But there must, there's got to be other things we need to try because this doesn't seem to be the thing that's holding candidates back. So what else could be going on? As always, the importance of testing, I think, is probably a key finding from that piece of work.

Right. Well, and that's where I would say, too, is one of the really important pieces being, you know, potentially 20 years ago, the result would have been completely different where it would. But now, because it has become incredibly salient that people are looking for this piece to say, well, I should, you know, get over whatever my bias may be and I should give this person a chance, you know, whatever that happens to be. And I would say too, just because that was the case when that was looked at in Australia doesn't mean that that is going to be overarching in other countries that they would find the same as well, because the context and the biases that exist are important to know and even from one company to the, you know, that that's not going to just be a blanket. Well, we now know that this will never work.

Completely agree, yes, definitely. I think the context matters so much. And, you know, when we thought about, well, maybe it wasn't that unexpected that in the public service, where there's been a lot of attention on this for a long time, that this is. This might be the finding, things could be entirely different in a different company in the same city. And I think the other point you made was a great one, which is things are shifting all the time. You know, I think there's probably, for instance, a Few as people have started to become a bit more savvy about some of the tools that we use from behavioral science to try to nudge people in certain directions. I think even now people can sometimes see when it's happening and it's almost like it's this kind of constantly evolving, ever moving target. You need to understand that a nudge applied 10 years ago isn't going to necessarily work the way it does today because we might have. Our audience might have wised up to what we're doing or it's just we've got to continue to test these things and see if. Do they still continue to work the way we expect that they will.

Right? Absolutely. And yeah, just again, where. Because something worked for XYZ company or whatever, it's just not. None of it is a blanket example there. It's just worth testing like you said. So I just love that example too because it's showing the thing that we all. You assume you're just sure that this is going to be an issue and you're basically going out just to prove what you already know for sure and wrong. But you wouldn't know if you didn't take the time to test. Which shows the importance of.

Absolutely. And I think it's important to say when you're wrong. You know, I think there's. We've all talked about the. Some of the issues with. Part of the replication crisis is the studies that don't show an effect don't get published. And it does mean though that we need to make sure that the experiments that failed to produce a result, we want them to be public so that they add to the evidence base of both things that work and things that don't work. It's important for us to have all of those pieces out there. And you know, that was a big commitment that Beta Beta wanted to make was to make sure that we, the work that we did, whether we did find an effect or not, was going to be added to the community, added to the communal evidence base so that others could continue to build on top of that.

And there is, as you're saying, there is just a non finding or an incorrect or a result that's against the hypothesis, which, you know, those are different things are still. It's very, very important information to have and learn from. Whether you say for non finding then you can say, well apparently the image that we're using doesn't matter or whether we have an image or not doesn't matter. So why put one in? You know that non finding can be just as important. So yeah, learning from everything. There's, there's always a lesson for, for all of that. So.

Absolutely.

Well, let's go ahead and jump in. We'll talk about Peak and what it has been built to do. I know it launched fairly recently, so tell us about Peak.

Great. So I'll take you back a little bit too because I alluded to how it came together. So Peak was, I'll probably say that Sendal Moulaynathan, who some of your listeners might know, behavioral economist who wrote the book Scarcity, he had this conversation with Mike Norton about who is a fantastic academic at Harvard Business School, his background in psychology, and they were having a conversation when they were both at Harvard about how there are so many insights in psychology that can help us lead more fulfilled, happier lives. And yet if you as an academic working in psychology, if you sort of suggest that you might be working in what's broadly defined as a sort of self help category, I think there's kind of a disdain for you amongst your colleagues in that field. It's sort of a dirty word, self help. Even though there are so many insights that can really help people. So, you know, Mike and Sendal were separately having that conversation. I was working with Sendhil at the time on a product. We were trying to show people using their email data in say their Gmail inbox whether they might be exhibiting certain biases, whether towards do they respond quicker to men versus to women or a few other things. And it wasn't as behavioral based. And I was talking to him about I'd love to be work on something that had much more of the core findings from behavioral science wrapped into that. And I think, you know, Sendhil kind of put these two pieces together and said, I think we've got something here we should pull together. And that was the first sort of germ of the idea for Peak. So Peak is our attempt to take these great and very useful findings from psychology and present them to users via an app. So it's a mobile app, present them to users in a way that lets them learn about the concept, sort of experience the concept and live the concept in their life in a small way in an activity that takes just a few minutes and that hopefully has some payoff that's immediate, whether it's connecting you with an old friend or helping you think through a thought process that maybe you've realized may not be the best way to think through something, but that there's a whole lot of different things in the app that all try to Achieve that one goal, which is making you more in touch with your own thoughts, more self aware and more aware of others and how you interact with others. So that's the overarching goal and we try to attack it in a number of different ways with lots of different kinds of activities. Because I think one of the things that is pretty core to Peak is the idea that humans get bored. And I think that there are a lot of apps in this space or products in this space out there that try to get you to do the same thing every day or get you to do the same thing over and over. And when you inevitably fail and break your streak or miss a day, you feel bad and you feel like you're the one that failed. And these products set you up to fail. Because as humans we get bored. And that is I think, a really important part of our psychology that we want to to acknowledge, which is humans crave novelty. And so we wanted to make sure that Peak had variety and had a lot of different things in there that would keep people coming back to try something new. And also that people would have the opportunity to try something that works for them. Even if maybe today's one doesn't work for you, tomorrow might work for you. So the idea is that let's also help you develop. Going back to what we said before about the importance of trying and learning and failing. Let's experiment, let's embrace this idea of an experimental mindset. Try this thing today, maybe it's not your bag. Try this other thing tomorrow, that might be more for you. So that's sort of the core of Peak and what we're trying to build.

Yeah, so the habit is in trying things, it's, you know, being in the habit of being curious and expanding yourself in this process and you know, having a more enriching life in whatever the areas are and being willing to try. You know, it's like the habit of looking for something different and helping exercise that the novelty piece instead of it being a barrier.

Right, Exactly.

Couldn't put it better. And I think that in the short term the habit, in order to do that, we are the sort of facilitator. And so maybe in the short term the habit is come to peak and we'll help you do those things and we have the activities for you. But you know, long term, in a perfect world, maybe the habit becomes so strong and the urge to look around and ask questions and notice has become an internalized habit. That maybe means maybe user doesn't need pick anymore. And that means we will have truly succeeded if people can be doing this in the real world without us. And even when they do come to the app, our goal is not to have you coming to the app and spending 10 hours in the app. The goal is come and exercise that curiosity muscle, have that habit of daily exploration and experimentation and then oftentimes, in fact, the activity that we want you to do sends you back out into the world to do it somewhere else, whether it's having a conversation with a friend or talking to your partner about something that you haven't necessarily thought about talking to them about before. So definitely the habit is exercising that muscle of curiosity, of experimentation, of exploration.

And so for any long time listeners of the show or anyone who's basically ever heard me talk about anything ever, you can potentially appreciate why when I heard about peak and connected with Beck that just said, oh yeah, this is my jam for sure. Because that's the big, I think, problem or trap or whatnot to where we've all been sort of conditioned to make things easier and to streamline and to find the easiest possible path and, you know, whatever that happens to be. And you just, you know, get in the habit of turning off your brain in a lot of ways, you know, and so being able to try the different things even, you know, I've talked about on the show before and when I've done speaking where, you know, studies showing that if you brush your teeth with the other hand for the day or you know, if you typically put in coffee first and then milk, if you were to swap it and put the milk first, that the simplest little thing like that can make it so you're more innovative and creative for the entire rest of the day. And so having the peak habit and for anyone who is going right now, and you might have seen when you were looking at the info for the episode, but that's peak P, I, Q U, E versus the, you know, reaching the peak of a mountain or something. But, you know, it's peaking your curiosity, as that goes. So is there a recommendation to say you, you know, you want people to check and do their peak work in? Is it best in the morning so that you have a good day? Do you, you peak before bed? So your brain is, you know, processing all those neurons differently. What's sort of the ideal state?

It's a great question and I think it is really. It varies person to person. It depends whether you're someone, you know, I'm, I'm not a morning person. I have to sort of drag myself out of bed. And I force myself to do some even just a tiny sort of amount of exercise to try to get things going, just because the morning is not my time. So for me, I save a peak moment for the afternoon when I kind of. I want a break from the work that I'm doing, but I want to do something meaningful that isn't just doom scrolling on Twitter, which is my classic. Otherwise go to and I'm trying to.

But it can work out. So we connected.

So for me it's the afternoon. For some people, they love to start the day with that and kind of kick things off. And it really, you get that feeling of I've done something for myself today and I've learned something before I've even gotten started. For others, it's actually a really nice sort of nighttime wrap up. And even as I'm saying that it's different person to person, it's also different moment to moment because some of the things we have are much more suited to different times of day. And we will suggest that in the moment, for instance, there's a. We have one of the moments in a pack that's all about time. And so our content is organized into these little modules called packs. Some of them are more sort of obvious about what they're helping you do. For instance, there's a conversation pack, which, you guessed it, it helps you think about the way you have conversations and practice conversations. This one is. Maybe it sounds a little bit more abstract, but I think it's actually super relevant for our current moment, which is if anyone has felt that time has just been completely out of whack in the last few months and that you. Some days feel like they're racing by, some days feel like they're dragging by. And the same goes for some months just feel like they went by in a blink. And some months felt like they took about 10 years. This pack is really about that sort of. We call it the psychophysics of time, how time feels. And so one of the moments in that pack helps you try to sort of slow down time and feel it a little bit more by just taking a bit of time each day to log just something that happened. It could be one thing, it could be a couple of things. And it doesn't have to be some major event, just something so that when you, having done this for four days, look back over the course of the last five days, you do actually feel like time did pass. Whereas I think especially right now, when a lot of our days feel the same and some of us aren't really seeing much outside of about four walls, it's easy to feel like nothing happened. And that can feel both. Like therefore time went by in a second or time kind of took a million years. But so, you know, that example we would suggest as you set up that moment and it comes with a bunch of reminders that you then set up. You can schedule them for any time you like, but we would suggest reflect at the end of your day, whenever you're sort of at that point where you're wrapping down, take five minutes and you get to pick when you would schedule that reminder. And that is something that we build into a lot of the content that has you coming back to do something like that. We use reminders. We also use reminders in the app just to. If you haven't got something like that scheduled at the time, there's a chance to schedule a more sort of general come back to the app type reminder, which we call a poke with a cue. And those can be. There are some people who really like to know that those are coming at a specific time that they would say, I always want to have my, my peak moment, you know, at 3pm in the afternoon. But there are other people who would say, just surprise me. And you know, we love that because we know that surprises are send off this little great signal in our brain in the pleasure center that says, oh, surprise. So you can sort of say, if you want to schedule a window, ping me sometime between 10 and 6. Then we'll do that and we'll pop up with something that is hopefully, you know, a little bit funnier too, than your typical, hey, it's time to do peak. I think you'll notice, having looked at the app a little bit, that there's a lot of humor sprinkled throughout it. And that's very intentional. We think that there's no reason why this shouldn't be fun. This doesn't have to be. Just because it's helpful doesn't mean it also can't be enjoyable. And that's a big principle as we've designed this.

Yeah, well, and that's just people wanting to go back or use the app or have that positive affinity toward the organization and the app and what it is that if, if. And of course, you know this. But the. So if you get the poke from peak comes through and that you get the little blip that something silly that makes makes you more likely to want to open it versus, like you said, have you peaked today, which makes you kind of feel bad, and then maybe you don't want to, but you've got that anticipation of, you know, what's waiting for me because I have had these good, they're moments and being able to just thinking even to the habit conversations from like Charles duhigg of the 2pm wanting the cookie and going to get a cookie and you, you're up eight pounds or whatever it is, but realizing it was actually about the social interaction was what he was wanting, but the cookie was the excuse. And you could get the same benefits and actually better just by saying you're gonna go talk to three people or you know, have a 15 minute conversation was actually giving the brain what it wanted that was masked as cookies. So, you know, it may be you just need that brain break at 3 o' clock every day and instead of going to eat chips or whatever, especially now where we are all near our pantries all day long, I've had that for years versus, you know, everyone else is experiencing it all the time now. But where you have those distractions and so can help with that novelty so your brain doesn't get so bored, but you can get some good benefits for sure.

So absolutely. And I think just one more thing that, that sparked for me in what you said just then was the, the other part of Charles's, you know, going to get the cookie and then eight pounds later. I think it's, you will do each of these little moments and maybe hopefully you get something even if it's a small thing out of one, but after you've done it a lot, hopefully it adds up to the eight pounds. In this case it's a good thing. Eight pounds of great peak stuff as opposed to eight pounds of cookie weight. But these are cumulative things where today you've connected with a friend and tomorrow you've had a better conversation with a partner and they build on each other too. So that you look back over the course of time and hopefully you've noticed that wow, these very small, only a few minutes worth of interaction on the app have actually led to something that I'm really grateful for and I'm sort of proud of in a way.

Right when you're able to find, like you said, the things that do work for you. And so if you had the suggestion to connect with a person that you hadn't talked to in a while and to have a phone call with a friend or schedule something or send them a social media note or send a text, whatever, and you realize that that was a huge pick me up for you. Just because peak doesn't tell you to do that tomorrow doesn't mean that you can't or won't or shouldn't then apply that practice. And knowing it was easy enough to do. And so, you know, why not reach out to one person a day or you know, whatever that happens to be because you know that it gave you a little boost or if you do it and you kind of go, oh, that was a time suck, then you don't to do that again. It doesn't work for you.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So talk a little bit about the packs. And I appreciated again, it's one of these funny things where when we are downloading an app, we've gotten into this ease of use culture where you think when I'm downloading this and then I have to answer a lot of questions with so many app producers or you know, companies where you have this like.

Well, we need to make it as.

Easy as possible and we don't want to ask anything because then people aren't going to finish the process and they're not going to want to move forward with us and it's not worth it. But you know, the other side being if you can provide the personalized experience for someone, then they're more likely to get benefit from using it and more likely to come back and you know, if somebody's not going to be an engaged user, it's not worth having them at that point. Right. You want people that are going to use it and have good value. So there is a lot of value in asking those questions. And you still don't want it to be, you know, 100 question process or something, but you know, asking the right ones. And I remember, you know, one specifically that was asking about, you know, reaching out or connecting with people that you don't know or engaging with with others. And the, you know, that humor piece that some of them was like, that's my jam, I want to do that. And some that went, oh, the horror specific language but you know, where you're able to kind of identify with the personality there versus like highly agree, somewhat agree, not the same. And so, you know, the, it's endearing as you're going through the process toward the organization and knowing that they're trying to figure out the right nudges or you know, pokes to be sending your way. So talk about the packs and kind of what those categories are and maybe a little bit about how it's helping people.

Yeah, great. I couldn't resist just talking a little bit more about the onboarding because that's definitely something that we thought a lot about. And all of the points that you made are great ones that we had sort of run through as a team as well. And even I think we say to get started, 20 questions. Just kidding. Four. And we wanted to really.

That's anchoring.

Yeah, exactly. It's way less than you initially thought. Please do it. So just a little hot tip. If anyone is going to download the app, make sure you put your sound on when you do answer those questions. There's a tiny Easter egg in there for you. So we've tried to make sure that, as you said, the questions that people answer, even in those responses, there should be already some indication that this is a product with a cheeky kind of quirky voice. This isn't just your stock standard. Yes, highly agree. I am a procrastinator.

Newsflash, we all are welcome. That's right. It's just on different aspects.

Yep, that's right. So, you know, having answered those questions, you landed a page with a selection of packs which we've then sorted into recommend or neutral or not. Don't quite recommend for you right now. And you can always revisit those answers as well if you have changed and evolved. I think you mentioned that question about how comfortable are you talking to other people? And I think if you had answered, please, please don't make me, but then later you've actually come to feel a little more comfortable with that, you could go and change that and that would change your recommendations. So part of the reason we did sort things into these modules is because back to this idea of maybe not every moment is for every person. We wanted people to feel like they had some sense of, yep, I'm going to give conversation a go and maybe that will be that. Even if maybe this first moment isn't for me, I have made some sort of pre commitment to trying out this pack and you've kind of added it to my packs in order to get to that point. And so that hopefully the idea is that if people have tried that one moment that wasn't quite for them, they will be more likely to give another moment ago in that pack because they have sort of bought into the pack as a module as a concept. And so the packs we currently have in the app are Conversation and Time that I've already mentioned. We've got one around mind wandering at the moment, which I think is a really interesting one because I think mind wandering is so maligned and it actually can be an amazing source of creativity. And it's the way that our Brains make the connection between, oh, the meeting that I had earlier today where so and so talked about that idea, and suddenly I see how it connects to that other thing. You know, it's that background process that's making those connections for us. And I think in a world where we're always very focused on, you know, staying. Maintaining focus on our current activity and maintaining our productivity, I think mind wandering can be sort of maligned as, you know, daydreaming and not being productive. But. But it's super important. So we help people think through mind wandering. There's a pack in there around connecting with your partner. So one of the moments in there helps you think about what are the things that you might notice. For instance, maybe there's something that your partner does that you find super annoying. And they always do that. And perhaps what's actually happening is you're missing the data. You're not noticing when they're not doing that thing. And helping you think about whether that's happening and helping you have a conversation with them about it is something that is in that as an example we're about to release. In fact, I think by the time people listen to this, there'll be a pack on rituals, which I think is super important right now. So one of my co founders, Mike Norton, has done a lot of great research in this space. And one thing a lot of people have talked about at the moment is given where we are, given the fact that a lot of us are suddenly working from home constantly, we've lost a lot of rituals that we didn't even really know that we had. You know, sometimes Mike has this great example where in fact, I might ask you this, Melina, do you clean your teeth before or after you shower? Do you have. Do you always do it one way?

No, but I think more often than not is maybe before, but.

Yep. So. So you're probably in the 30% that says, I don't. I don't have a particular preference. Yeah. The other group is. Is really sort of split between I always do it before or I always do it after. And if you look then at those two groups, about half of them, if you say, okay, today, do it the other way around, they get very mad and they say, that's wrong. I don't want to do it that way. That's not how it goes. My day will not be started off properly if I do it that way. You can't make me. And that is kind of an indication that you've got a bit more of a. Than a habit There you have a ritual, and it has something that's a little bit more powerful than just a habit. And so there are a lot of us have these things that we're not quite aware of, have this kind of ritualistic power. And some of them we've been able to continue while we've been at home, but some of them we haven't. So for people, for instance, who, let's say you're someone who used to commute in to work on public transport each day, and you got to have that 30 minutes where maybe you listened to a great podcast like this one, or maybe you just looked out the window and thought about your day and planned ahead about what you're going to do. You may not have realized that was really important to the way you thought about your day and the way you got set up for the day. So you may not realize that now that you're not doing that, if you're sensing some loss, but you're not quite sure what it is, you know, you don't have to commute anymore, and maybe you've got that time back, but you may not be aware that you've lost that really important part of the commute. And so the rituals pack actually gets people thinking about what are the kinds of things that you might have lost right now. And, you know, in a pre Covid era, we would have also just talked about the power of rituals in general and the idea of inserting some more of them into your day. But I think right now, while people have lost rituals, how can we add them back in? You know, maybe you've lost the ritual of gathering together with some co workers in the break room for lunch. Okay, well, is there something you could add back in to get what it was that you were getting out of that ritual? Maybe it was a social connection. Maybe it was just even the time away from the desk. Whatever it was, what was important to you and how can we help you build that back in? So rituals, I think, is another really important one right now. I'll just mention a couple others quickly, but we've got another pack coming out this week on decision making and helping you think through some of the important aspects of decision making. One about connecting with friends and other sort of slightly weaker social ties called Boost the Bond. So we're always adding new content. We're actually working right now, too, with an author who's another great behavioral scientist, Ashley Willans, who's a professor at Harvard Business School. So she does some fantastic work on time and has a book coming out in October called Timesmart. We're working with her to see if can we turn some of the great content from her book into moments for the app. Because. And this is something that I think a lot of authors are talking about now. Not just academic authors, but all authors who are writing things in this space. I remember hearing Dan Pink voice this idea that he's constantly hearing from his readers. Okay, great. How do I go and do this thing now? And his last book, when, which was another great book on time. I feel like I'm talking a lot about time today, but it's super relevant right now. He talked about how it was very important to him to include a lot of content in that book, not just one chapter at the end, but a lot of things throughout that let people practice what they're doing and try to live the kind of insights that he's talking about throughout the book. And I think that that's fantastic. I think he did a great job there in book form. And I think Peek kind of, we tried to take that even one step further and put it in your pocket, in your phone where you're looking at it day to day. And we can do things like if you want to set a reminder to have downtime or you want to have set a reminder, for instance, to. Ashley talks about the tech time trap and the idea that our technology breaks up, all of our spare time breaks up into this time confetti. So we feel like we get all these little tiny bits and they don't add up to anything. And we feel very discombobulated by it all. So we can remind you we can actually put that calendar item in and say, you know, put your phone down now, which is something that a book can't do. So I think that the idea of the moments is we help you do those things. And I think hopefully there's. There's something in a. There's a pack for everybody and a whole lot of different things to try to see what works for you, what resonates with you.

That's awesome. I know that I'm expecting this was the same for everybody that's listening, but I was having all of my. What I would say is like positive mind confetti. I guess I think that's a little bit. I am one naturally have been always sort of drawn toward that mind wandering. And whether that means I was a perfect fit for marketing and brand strategy and behavioral science and, you know, brain connections and randomness or like, have been conditioned over time, I'm going to just say virtuous cycle for how that all goes. But, you know, for me, it was the going for a run in the morning before I would go into the office and I would see the, you know, where the bus goes by. And I think, oh, that's such an interesting advertisement. I wonder what they were trying to communicate. And if they do, they know that they're leading toward or, you know, I wasn't using terms like nudging and whatnot then, but, you know, I wonder if they're intentionally nudging people toward this or if that was, you know, error on their part and they just don't know what. What it is that they're doing. And then I would be thinking about, well, I wonder what we're doing for this. And that mind wander is just my favorite thing. And so just as a. An aside, and I've talked about this on the show before, but I was. There was a car accident. I was hit by two different cars when I was on the freeway and made it so I couldn't run anymore. And that was a huge gap for me of not having that ability anymore. And it was. I mean, you go through a grieving process where it's not just in the pain that you're in and all of that, but not being able to run anymore was a really big thing. And I think, like you were saying with stuff with COVID and you need to take the time to understand what you're actually losing and grieve what that is and find a way to replace it. And hopefully, you know, we're all going to be able to go back to a. You know, I hate everybody saying, like, not the new normal or, you know, people are sick of that phrase now, but, you know, whatever you want to call it, but being able to find those, you know, moments of joy and fulfillment that aren't just because that's the way you've always done it, but there's a new. There's a new way to find it. And I really love that peak is helping people to find those moments of. Of joy and broadening your horizons and whatnot.

Absolutely. And especially now, I mean, as that must have been horrific and it was very obvious to you what you had lost at the time. And I think for a lot of us now, some of the things are obvious. Some of the things aren't so obvious. So taking time to think about what those things are that have been lost, as you said, mourning them and then thinking about, well, how can I add that back in, Even if it's not in exactly the same way, how can I get some of what I had before that was very important to me. And yeah, if Pete can be a small part of helping people do that, I think I'd be very, very pleased about that.

Yeah.

Well, and I think that too, when we make the realization, any of us, of something that we've lost and you realize it, the cookie example from Charles and my example from the accident, where it seems like it's really obvious now, but in the moment it wasn't. Right. We only hear people's. This is, I guess maybe a survivorship bias thing. Right. But you hear somebody telling their story and you think because it's not. You don't have something incredibly obvious to you in this moment, that you must not have something because everyone who talks about it has that perfect moment of clarity and they've phrased it in this way that you don't have that. So it must not exist. But that's. You just haven't found it yet. But if you're not looking for it, it's. It's a lot harder to uncover those things. So I think I was reminded of talking with Near Eyal on that episode of the podcast. And I had said, you know, he talks about how, you know, the opposite of distraction is traction and if you don't have it. I said, it's so obvious. He said, well, it took me five years, so don't feel too bad. Yeah, it makes you feel better. But I think everyone hopefully has had their interest and if that is in fact the case for everyone, what is the right way to find you and to download and get peak?

Excellent segue. Thank you. So it is getpeek app, forward slash, Brainy, and that is Peak with a Q. So get G E T, P I Q U E app Brainy. You can also find us on all of the various social medias. So look for us as we are, get Peak app in all of the places. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. We would love to pop up and interrupt your doom scrolling and help remind you to come on over and have a little moment with us.

Wonderful. Well, there will be links to all of that in the show notes. Just as with everything, we want to know how this resonated with you and whatnot, which is why that Brainy is in there. So. So do use that if you don't, you know, not the end of the world, but we'd like to know that you found value out of it and everything. And you know, I love to connect with people on the socials. I'm sure that the Peak folks do as well. So do please let us know if you enjoyed the conversation and the show and if you are peeking out.

I love that we're going to use that now.

Nice, nice. I like it. Well, thanks again Beck for joining me. It's been a wonderful conversation and I'm going to let my mind wander now and think about everything we talked about talked about.

Thank you so much Blaine. It was a real treat.

Thank you again to Beck Weeks for joining me on the show today. I love finding companies that are using behavioral economics in a way that isn't the most obvious application of a concept. When thinking about habits, many of us think about changing them, but it's also important to think about how you can use the power of habits to help people introduce. The brain is always going to use its rules of thumb, those heuristics of the subconscious. You can't get rid of them all. So it's really smart to identify what you want to change or help people to change and then find ways to work with and reinforce other habits to help those new ones stick. Peak is perfectly packaged into bite sized pieces that can help your brain to feel good and give you a mental boost. Today I chose the Quick Wins task in the Procrastination pack and along the way it has an option to read a little bit about the science. Tiny, tiny bit of what's helpful to.

Let you know what's happening in the.

Brain to make it be a useful task for you and how it's benefiting you over time and throughout the rest of the day. I learned that checking things off lists and completing things releases dopamine and can make you motivated to go and complete more things like this episode. That pack took two minutes and set me on a great path for the day.

I love Peak and I'm confident you will too if you go to Get.

Peak and that's P I Q U E. So get Peak app Brainy. You can download it and start changing.

Your brain for the better.

There is of course a simple, easy clickable link for you in the show notes atthe brainy business.com 119 thank you again to Beck Weeks for joining me on the show today and for co founding this amazing app. If you in the audience enjoyed the conversation half as much as I did.

I'm sure it was amazing.

Next week on episode 120 we are back with a Behavioral Economics Foundation's episode episode this one will be about pre commitment. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and.

Learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.