284. What is Habit Weekly? Featuring Creator Samuel Salzer (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 284 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. Today's episode is a conversation with Samuel Salzer, founder of Habit Weekly. 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's episode is a refresh of my conversation with Samuel Salzer, founder of Habit Weekly. This episode is getting a refresh today for three reasons.

1.

Samuel is awesome. 2. This episode is sandwiched between two habit weekly award nominees. Merle Van den Aker, who you just heard from on Friday, was a fine panelist for Content Person of the Year, along with myself and lots of other talented folks from around the world. And Carlos Hoyos, who's joining me on the show on Friday, who was the winner of Content Person of the Year in the voting from Habit Weekly readers this past year. According to Samuel and the Habit Weekly team online, there were more than 5, 000 votes. How cool.

So because Carlos and I talk about.

Samuel in the episode and we discuss Habit Weekly a lot, it felt like a good opportunity to refresh this conversation today. The third reason is because this episode originally aired In March of 2020, something tells me that a lot of people might have missed it.

I feel like maybe we were a.

Little distracted with other things going on.

In the world at that time.

So because of reason one, I. E. Samuel's awesome. I wanted to refresh this episode and let you hear from him now because you shouldn't miss out on Habit Weekly.

It's really great.

It's also so fun to how much things have grown at Habit Weekly in these three years. They have a full team of people now and they've been doing the awards for a few years now. I was honored to have been a winner in the inaugural edition they launched their podcast and Habit Weekly pro. They're doing so much and if you don't already know about them, I know you're going to enjoy hearing from Samuel about his work and Habit Weekly in today's episode. And if you want to go check.

Out what they're up to, remember that.

There are handy links waiting for you in the show, notes for everything, including related past episodes, some of which hadn't yet come out when this first aired, as well as books and articles. It's all found within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 284 all right.

Let'S get right to it.

Samuel Salzer, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks, Melina. Really great to be here.

Absolutely. So we connected via LinkedIn, I believe is where we first had gotten connected. And I was really excited to see the work that you've been doing with Habit Weekly, which we will definitely talk about. But I would love if you can just let everybody know, how did you find behavioral economics, behavioral science, a little bit about your background? How did you get here?

Sure, sure. So I started in a very funny enough talking to you today. I started in a very business oriented way. So I have been somewhat of an entrepreneur as far as I can remember. And I started my first business when I was about 16. That was for a long time kind of my goal and to see how I can work in business in the most successful way. And so when I left high school, I got an offer to study in Australia for the Australian School of Business. And so I got a scholarship offer to go to Sydney. And I didn't know much about Sydney at that point, so I pretty much only had seen, I think, Crocodile Dundee. That's all I knew of Australia. And so I, I didn't know much, but I thought I was kind of too good of an opportunity to say no to. And so I jumped up on a plane from Sweden to Australia and went to study kind of a mix of finance, accounting and economics. So you can have like ability to modify your degree quite a lot there. And so I was able to get exposed to quite a lot of things. And then while I was there I got to do some research for a professor and he, in a very sneaky way started to smuggle me books on behavioral economics. And so at that point that was still very kind of new. And he thought that this was something I should kind of be aware of. And much thanks to him. It opened my eyes to this world of, I guess, the nuance of human decision making. So I thought it was fascinating and just how many things there were to really consider when it came to human decision making. Obviously in economics it's very much a feel about how to understand how humans make decisions in the world. And it is what it is in terms of they have to make some form of simplifications because it's so complex. Like if you're trying to make a system and model for the economy, you can only make so many assumptions and you can only make so many detailed thoughts about how we make decisions. So I thought that was interesting enough. And then I got this kind of books on behalf of economics. And it kind of just blew my mind and opened my world to the field that we both know today very well, both of us. And so that was the start. And I think the second part of that was that my mom couldn't meditate or she couldn't get a habit going in terms of meditation habit going. And so she and people around me, I noticed, were struggling with turning their good intentions into good habits or good behavior changes. And I honestly felt that it was quite painful to see people in my life that were trying to start exercising or wanting to lose weight or in my mom's case, wanted to meditate because she was quite stressed in her work. And seeing them fail was very painful because you kind of see their good intentions just turn up in flames or like, just disappear. And so I felt that there must be some better way to apply science to this somehow. And I didn't understand it that much at that point. I had been then exposed to behavioral economics and I wanted to know more about what can we do to support people in making behavior changes in their lives. And so I kind of. I think if I had only already started on my kind of journey down the rabbit hole, that was my fast ticket down. And so by that point, I got really deep down in the science of habit formation and in general, the different theories and models and frameworks in behavioral economics and behavioral science and psychology that helps us understand how humans make changes in their lives and how we can support them through those changes. So I guess that's kind of the short long story to where I am today.

Right. And then eventually you made your way back to Sweden, but it sounds like you're very worldly. We were talking, but you know, before we connected that when you booked the scheduled the time you were in Mexico City, you're currently in Bangkok, but you live in Sweden and just kind of all over the place and obviously Australia, which I'm very jealous of. So thank you. And you were saying, though, but for your own habits. So you've been working on kind of conditioning yourself to get up early, even where you're not much of a morning person.

Right? Well, I guess we are, all of us in these kind of fields are usually the first test subject is ourselves. So we're a little bit like these classic characters from these comic book movies where we experiment on ourselves first. Right. And so luckily I haven't become like the Green Goblin or Hulk, I haven't turned green, but I've done my fair share of self experimentation for sure. But it's been a. Yeah, it's been a fun experience for sure, going through this field.

And.

And so what's been a big part of my journey is kind of going from thinking about it from that perspective in some way to really thinking about how we can scale things. So that's much what I do for work, is thinking about how can we scale baby change. I work mostly with digital products and apps that has millions of users. And then we have to really think about how we can put these principles and practices in a product or service and support people on a very large scale. And so that's what I'm really passionate about these days. And it's really fun to kind of see that progression, so to say.

Right. So you help clients as far as working on instilling some of these habits for their own users for some of this. And were you doing something with behavior change for good or just sort of this upping the initiative, helping people kind of help themselves?

Right. Well, I think in a large scale you can define behavior change for good in different ways. I like it just because it has two different meanings. In terms of it wants to do obviously good, like help people be healthier, wealthier, happier, those kind of things. But also in terms of thinking about the long term for good, it's not only like a small quick fix, but thinking about how can we support people in the long run.

Right.

And so that's been my M.O. and I think it's quite simple in terms of business, many times where you're succeeding, if you help create value for your users or your customers, and if you understand them better and find good solution to their problem, then you have done a good job in creating a product that's probably going to be quite successful. That's definitely a overarching business component. But then I think from a problem component, in terms of what I work with is. Is the fact that changing behavior is often quite hard. And so whether it comes from looking at trying to increase retention or engagement or adherence or growth, all of those metrics come from trying to change some behaviors. And whether we like it or not, behavior is quite complex. And we are complex beings living in complex environments. And so it can be quite tricky to understand how we can do that through our products or our services and so on.

Oh, sorry, go ahead. I got all excited. So I was just, I was curious if you have any sort of go to concepts where you're saying it's complex. There's a lot going on. But are there any concepts that you in your work would go to all the time, whether it's, you know, framing or loss aversion or, you know, anything that always comes up with behavior change?

Sure, there's a lot of concepts. I think it's somewhat context dependent. So obviously in terms of what it comes up to is often what the problem is you're trying to solve, right?

Sure.

I am maybe a little bit different in this regard that I focus really on the underlying principles of what we're trying to do. I think sometimes the misconception of our field is that we have used this very sexy toolbox that you can just kind of get your quick fixes and hacks from and you can staple them on to solve your problems. But I think a good metaphor is if you're trying to build a house, you could just go to builder and ask the builder, like, hey, can you tell me the names of the tools in your toolbox? And the builder kind of goes, yeah, this is the hammer, this is a screwdriver or whatever. And then afterwards like, okay, perfect, I know how to build the house.

Right.

Well, that's not obviously how it works. And I think that's what I like about your podcast a lot, is that you really delve into these concepts in very nice depths. You're not really trying to use like, say the names of them and teach the names, but really help people create a good, solid understanding of what we're actually talking about.

Yeah.

And so I think one of the things that I would say comes up very often is obviously this idea of friction or another way of looking at it, like simplicity. So we have some people talking about it from a simplicity point of view or make it easy point of view, other people talking about reducing fiction point of view. But I like the friction word. I like you had, I think, Roger Dooley, he wrote a book about friction. He's very excited about that word.

Yep. I've interviewed him on the podcast before, so I'll link to that in the show notes for anybody that hasn't listened to yet.

Yeah, yeah. So I like that word because it has two components. Right. So it's both increasing friction but also reducing friction.

Right.

And so obviously the main thing is to reduce friction. That's usually the. For most products that I work with, the thing that they could work on the easiest is just reducing friction in their user journey or their customer journey. But there are a lot of ways to, to make use of increased friction as well, so I like that the world having the possibility to kind of see as a toggle, we can turn both ways, so to say. And so there are moments where we need to increase fiction for perhaps undesired behaviors for the user. I work with projects where we've developed machine learning and AI based app and platform to support people going into surgery that need to stop smoking and drinking. And so for them it was about many ways strategically increasing friction in their life in different ways. And it's interesting to kind of play around with the friction component as used as a way to modify behavior. So I think friction is a big one.

Yeah. And in that case I kind of think of it where it's like a form of partitioning. Right. So where you want to, instead of having the giant bag of Cheetos, you have to have a bunch of mini bags of Cheetos. So each time you open one that you have that tiny little barrier to where you have to think, do I really need another bag? Whereas if it's the giant one, you'll just keep eating way more calories than you would have otherwise.

Yeah, for sure. Funny story, side story. I. One of my vices, whatever you call it, is Cheetos. No, close enough. It's like shits. Like anything salty, but anything, anything in a salty bag is. Me too usually been my, what do you call it? My weakness.

Right, right.

And I'm talking about self experimenting. I had to like really think about how I can manage that in my life. I'm pretty skinny, guys. I don't think people assume that I eat a lot of chips, but there was a time and place, especially when I have always had quite a big exercise component in my life. And so I could get away with probably eating healthy, unhealthy food. And so what I realized that as soon as I had a bag of chips in my home that was.

They were not there anymore.

And so I just had to. My, my friction was as hard as I had to like make sure I didn't have it in my home pretty much. And, and then because once I opened the bag, I knew that it was gonna.

It's over.

It's about.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think it's, it's fascinating, especially with all of us, like none of our different. Like for me, for example, I know everything in the kind of the space. Right. But I can find ways to talk myself into anything at the same time. Like I can. You know, we're very incredibly good at creating stories and narratives in our mind to support whatever thing we really want to do. So in this case, if I want to really, if my body tells me I really want to eat these ships, okay. Even if I know that's not really what I want to do. I came up with the best story to support that. Well, actually, you know, I had a really tough day today and I should, you know, I deserve at least a little chips. I just take a little bit of first. I don't want to go back. And, you know, we create all of these quite interesting stories. So I think that's a fascinating component. But going into some other component, like some other things that I think is generally interesting in this field to apply is I am a little biased because I'm fascinated by habits and thinking about how behaviors form. So I think that's a really interesting component to think about as well in terms of these core components to what makes a behavior happen. And so we obviously have these things where we can boost behaviors through different things. Like you mentioned loss aversion. And we have different ways we can frame a message to make it more motivating or more interesting to engage with. But I'm always fascinated about thinking about what are the core components of a behavior. And so there's different models here, but most basic thing is that obviously there has to be something before the behavior happening. And then you have the behavior and then you have something after. And so what you call the before thing can be called an antecedent. You can call it a trigger activator. This word for it to cube. Yeah. And then what happens afterwards. You can call it reward. But I usually talk about as a consequence because it has again like friction has two components. It can be a reward, it can be a positive consequence, but it can also be a negative consequence. Again, things can. After you do behavior, you can feel worse. And so really digging down to those kind of things and what happens before and after and in between, that's kind of what makes me a nerd in this regard. I really want to understand that to the best degree possible.

Yeah, we definitely love nerds here. I too am a nerd for all things in this behavioral science. And just researching everything. I really like the just that reframe where you're saying just the simple shift of taking the word from reward to consequence makes it feel heavier in a way that's important when you are approaching your own behavior change of getting rid of something that you don't want to do anymore. Where if you're thinking about the the sugar or the dopamine as a reward versus the consequence. If I eat the chips or have a chai tea latte or whatever the piece is. And I just, I also really like how that bring, brings it back to the physics side. Right. That every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It's not quite opposite, but the there is that balance to all decisions kind of coming through and something else happens for every choice that you make. And if you would have gone this way or that way, you know that each individual choice is important. I really stand by that piece. And it's not the. Because I ate chips today, I will never achieve my health goals and I'm terrible and all these, you know, but, you know, so I had a slip up and then I'm going to move on. That that is still really important and, and valid to give yourself that grace that each individual choice matters.

And I think it's fascinating as well how we experience consequences. We have in kind of more traditional or clinical psychology or behavioral psychology, talk a lot about direct and delayed consequences. So we can experience, for example, with something like ships, we experience a really great direct consequence. We feel like, oh, they're tasty, feels good. Our body's like calorie dense food. More of this, please, and then leave. It maybe could only be 30 minutes or maybe the next day and we're like, I shouldn't have eaten those bag of chips. I feel bad. It doesn't really sit well. And so we have kind of a delayed consequence that's maybe feeling bad about ourselves and maybe feeling guilty and all those kind of things.

Right, Right.

And the interesting thing is our brain works very strongly on these direct consequences. And so it's kind of this direct stimuli, the direct reinforcement to the behavior that is really the thing that's guiding the behavior in many ways. And so it's fascinating to see that. And it can play out in obviously many ways where it's also to give another dimension to this. It's often that we're trying to do things that removes a negative thing. So it's not so much like getting something good, but removing something bad. Right. And so when it comes to using social media, I would argue a lot of times it's removing something negative that we use it for. So we might feel bored and that's why you might pick up and scroll through Instagram. Or it might be that we feel uncertain. We're not sure how we stand in our social sphere. We're like, what do people like me? Did I post things that people appreciated? Like what do my peers, what my friends think about me? And so relieving that discomfort is often why perhaps we open the app and so then it's not so much the thinking about it from a reward. Reward in terms of the ships. It's not like, oh, it tastes so good, but it's more like we remove that uncertainty or we remove the boredom or remove that loneliness, whatever we experienced.

Right, yeah, absolutely.

And so I think the consequence also kind of allows for that kind of nuance as well.

Right. And then understanding, taking that moment in this sort of being thoughtful, looking at when are you experiencing that you are scrolling through social media more often than maybe you should, and then trying to find out what the cue trigger activation point, you know, whatever one of those words you were mentioning there, what is making that happen and then what could replace that if that is something you're trying to get rid of and stop doing thoughtlessly. I guess as you end up just constantly avoiding the email that you're supposed to write or the proposal that you need to get out or whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing that you are turning to social media or the bag of chips instead of taking on that challenge, that thing that you're supposed to do. This is where I love and I've been talking a lot in my. In the be Thoughtful revolution about, as we've been talking about mindset, this eat the frog concept, which I would guess that you might be familiar.

Who's the author again?

Oh, ooh, now you got me. I don't know, I forget.

I think I've listened to the audiobook, but it was like 10 years ago.

Right.

And it's. I felt like it was a really kind of old recording, probably.

I think it is an older terminology. I will make sure to link it in the show notes for everyone here. But essentially that concept of eating the frog would be. There's that one thing that you know that you're supposed to be doing, and it is the hard thing that you need to do. And more often than not, whether it's from time, discounting optimism bias, you sort of push that off into that future space to say that I'll do those on Friday afternoon when I have lots of extra time that never really comes and it just stays on your to do list, but it dwells for you for such a long time. Whereas if instead you say, there's only one thing I have to do today, this is the most important thing, and it's eating that frog, doing the big thing that I hate, and then everything is so easy after you've tackled that one thing and so I know for me if I don't work out in the morning, it is real hard for me to do the 6, 7, 8pm I do not want to exercise later in the day, but I feel much better if I'm able to exercise in the morning. So that is one of those, I guess, eating the exercise frog.

Yeah, no, for sure. I think that's a great example.

So I want to make sure we have an opportunity to talk about Habit Weekly and I'm curious how this got started. So recently interviewed Radu and Raluka from Brainytab and I know they had mentioned speaking with you just before that. And so for them they started Brainytab just sort of because they were interested in some of the cognitive biases and just started building something out to help themselves and hoping it might be helpful for others. I have a suspicion that Habit Weekly is sort of the same style of like a pet project that you were looking for resources and figured if I'm putting it all together, I might as well share it with the world. Is my assumption correct in that case?

Sort of, yeah, very close to at least. So yeah, no, I am working kind of at the cutting edge of my field and being very curious about all of the latest things going on. I felt that I was having to look in all these nooks and crannies and like weird spots for good resources.

Right.

And every week was just kind of this mix of 40 newsletters and talk about information overload. I know, right? So Twitter and LinkedIn combined as well and I was like, well this feels like it's very hard to stay on top of this field and I'm sure some other people would probably experience a similar thing. Right. And so I looked around if there was anyone trying to distill the best content on a weekly basis and I couldn't really find anything. And so there were some company run newsletters, but obviously any company would have somewhat of agenda. And so it's mostly like showcasing their own things. And so I thought, well, I'll just start and share some links on LinkedIn. That was kind of my first step. And so that was the first week I just shared like favorable insights of the week and then I had four links. And then for I think the first week it had maybe 20 or so people responding and being like, oh this is great, thanks. Thank for, thanks for doing this. And so, well, okay, I'll do it another week. So thought, okay, if I do another week I should call it something. And I'm like, well, I'm Going to do this on a weekly basis, presumably. So I call it something weekly. I work with creating habit forming products and so people often think about me from a habit perspective. So weekly Habit, Habit Weekly. I was like, well, the domain for Habit Weekly was available, so ta da.

It's amazing how that works.

Yeah, I know sometimes it does. And then I posted again, had really good response. And I think after four weeks people started asking for, could you put together kind of a mailing list for this so we can get in our email inboxes? And yeah, and since then I've done my best to pass that on to my email. Now we're just, you know, like probably you've experienced with your podcast. It's been really amazing to get from all around the world, literally, like I think more than 100 countries now following and great, great feedback. And it's just for me, it's a way for me to kind of give back to the community. So at this point the newsletter has grown into something probably more than I can ever imagine. You know, you have both the best content of the week, but also being able to share great job opportunities at the job board to share the best online courses, the best podcast and all of these kind of things in one place. And I think that's something that I would have loved to have when I started. Like, that would have been my dream.

Right.

It's really, you know, it's a treat to be able to supply that.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's part of what you said, I feel was so striking how many people in business are going at this just for themselves and well, I better set up an email. And it's so hard to grow an email list. You know how many people have others who are reaching out to them and saying, hey, can you please set up a mailing list and put me on it? It's not something that happens all that often. And that's how, you know, you've found something that people really want. And whether that same piece with habits or change. And it doesn't have to be difficult if you understand what drives people and you know, giving, you know, you've got that reciprocity for sure. You're putting obviously a lot of effort into it. We'll have links in the show notes so everybody can sign up. And it's just Habit weekly dot com. But I love that it has like for me being able to go in and you did the book list. So 100 different books and that one was more in behavioral design type change. Right.

Covers a lot of behavioral economics as well. I have a separate including in that list. It's a section if you just want to learn about behavioral economics. They're like the best books in behavioral economics as well.

Right.

And if I remember it was you broke it maybe into like four sort of groups underneath the. And then they were being released over LinkedIn. And then you also have like you said, articles and podcasts that are talking about pieces with behavioral economics, behavioral science and habits. But then also the conferences and the job opportunities and just all these other things that are happening where it would take somebody such a long time. So I'm very thankful. I appreciate and understand how long it must take. Do you, for the most part, do you get stuff sort of sent to you now or is it a lot of still investigatory work on your behalf to put it together every week?

There's definitely some crowdsourcing component, but it's still somewhat of quality control chaos or it's very much still me operating as I did before, but for the good of other people. And so it's tricky because there's so many different sources still in this field. And for me, what I really want to do is just for anyone interested in working with applying behavior change in practice who's interested in not so much only the theory, but really putting it to practice, like how to change behavior in the wild. So to say that they have the best and latest insights every week. And so that's, that's my, my kind of goal. And for that there's no real shortcuts to find those things. Sure, right. So have systems in place. But it's still very much kind of a mix up, mixed bag.

I appreciate that it's not just kind of like you were saying, it's not just academic journal articles. So it's not that you're catering it to others who are researching in the space, which, you know, for me I need that resource as well as I'm looking for things to create for the podcast. But having stuff that's in that application versus academia, which I've said on the show many times, that's really my goal is to bring the field out of academia into application. People need to know what these things are and actually use them. And so I appreciate that you are sharing things that have good sort of that conversational tone. And like you said, not just talking about the very specifically controlled experiment in the lab that was done under these terms, but you know how that might work and apply. I, I really enjoy that piece of it and that it does have that Sort of worldly background. So while you are in Sweden, it's not. Or Bangkok or wherever. Right. It's not that it, that it's only things that are happening in Europe. You know, the conferences and the job opportunities are from all over and like you said, where it's not about you and finding things that are interesting to you specifically so much as anybody who's listening and downloading from wherever might be able to have some piece of value that they'll get each week.

Yeah, for sure. I think the market still is. The US is leading the way and so I can see that as well in my newsletter. Like the, the biggest group of followers are definitely from the US and so that's largely, I think UK and US are still very much in our field, contributing with most of the insights and resources. But it's fun now for some of me doing work here in Bangkok, for example, and spreading insights. I've helped obviously for a couple of years build a field in Scandinavia. And so it's fun now to see more and more of really good work coming from, not only, you know, the things we know traditionally, but also from other places. And so that's, that's really fun. And I think for me as well, what I, what I want is that some people might feel as well if they aren't reading the research and so on. They might be afraid of having heard, like, replication crisis and all these kind of things, like, what can I trust? And so I feel like for me, I can be that kind of safeguard and be like, well, I know all these kind of things, so you don't have to worry about it. So I'm making sure that whatever I put in here, it doesn't have to be research, but it's going to be according to what we know from research. There's nothing here that's going to slip in. That's going to be, you know, pseudoscience, fake news. I'll do my, that's my, my big commitment to try to do my best to avoid that. For sure.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that's why I put so many links in the show notes. And it takes me much longer to create my episodes than I know some other podcasts because I want to make sure I'm doing that due diligence for people. And there isn't this fake news component that you're going in and talking about something that's not quite right.

Yeah, for sure.

So what are you most excited about on the horizon? Whether it's ways that habits are looking out there. What's happening with Habit Weekly, just sort of 2020 and beyond this next upcoming, maybe not the whole decade, I don't know if you thought out that far but what are you excited about?

So personally or more like the field.

In general, however you would like to answer the question.

Sure. So what I'm very excited about. Rewind a little bit here. So with our field, it's a very new field. We've got to be very honest about that. So.

Absolutely.

If you look at something like the book nudge, it only came out, I think it was 2008. Right. It wasn't too long ago and many people working in this field or learning about this field, you know, it's still very early days. And so I have actually as part of what I've been doing for weekly and so on, I been starting to put together insights and thoughts from leaders in the field on what we think is going to happen in the next coming 10 years and what kind of is going to be the future of the field.

Ooh, exciting.

And one I think really apt comparison was that comparing the field to being in our adolescence or like pre adolescence in the 2010-2020 so that we kind of. We had our awkward teenage years.

Woohoo.

In the last 10 years. Yeah. And so I think that's where we had a lot of just a mix of trying to resolve this replication stuff and then a mix of learning these tools and what a nudge is and what a biases and all those kind of things and maybe taking them for us the solution of like well it's only about these names and these tools and I think what we're going to move into now is kind of this more mature stage where it's going to be more about the process and people are going to be more interested about okay, how can I learn about more about the process for applying these things in the best way. And I think that's what I'm excited about in people not only knowing and being able to tell me oh I've heard about this bias or I've heard about this loss aversion or something, but that they're curious and have heard about the more processes for how to apply this in practice in a good way. So they might have come across some of the different frameworks for how to how to work with this in practice and try this themselves in their organization or obviously that's kind of what I'm doing when I work with organizations to help them create a process for this kind of stuff. But even beyond that, I would love for more people in general just being excited and curious about the process behind applying these things because that's where the real the magic happens is when you have a good process for understanding how to both define a behavioral problem to solve, how to collect behavioral insights and how to map on those insights the kind of the tools or the strategies that you have in your toolbox and how to test them in a good way. So all of those kind of components, like being able to have that in your organization and being curious about how to make that work in a good way, I think that's what I'm excited about in the coming year and coming decade or so. And really, I think in the next 10 years this is going to be much more of a better understanding for how any organization can easily start applying these things. And that's. I forgot to say this, but we wrote a book in Sweden, hopefully something that could come out soon in English as well. But the book was all about just helping organizations to make it easy to apply behavioral economics as a part of the process. Like not only the tools, but like how to get the process in their business and how to become more of a behavioral economist and how they work and think.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Well, when it is in English, definitely let me know and we'll make sure to share it can bring you back on to talk about it, but that's so valuable and something I know lots of people are asking about and working to try to help. Like you said, more people to understand enough about the field to where they're not just dangerous, where it's like I've heard about loss aversion and so it's everywhere now. And that's the only concept and I know everything about it where you might be triggering all these other things where if you're using the wrong frame or, you know, whatever that is, it's just kind of causing more of a mess. And we don't want our, you know, the field to fizzle because it feels like it's not real because people aren't applying it properly when they don't have enough knowledge about it. So I really appreciate that sort of kindred spirit in the way that you're sharing information. I think is very much aligned in the way that I try to share information in this very kind of robust way. And here, here's lots of stuff, digestible information that you can use to help apply behavioral economics. So I'm excited to read the book. I'm assuming that you'll get that translated into English before I learn Swedish, so I'll keep it.

Are you practicing at the moment?

No, but, you know, making more international friends. So you can teach me some important words, I guess.

Yeah. It's definitely. Maybe not the first language you would learn, probably.

No, I would say not. It is one of those where they ask, I guess so. Just as a random thought, but. So for me, if I could have a superpower where I've always said I feel like the superpower I would want to have would be to instantly understand and be able to speak fluently and perfectly in every single language that exists. And traditionally, I'm really bad at learning languages for whatever reason.

It's not.

I can pronounce them very well from a background of vocalists and whatnot, but. So do you have. Do you know what your superpower would be?

Just randomly asking what you would want it to be.

I've had this kind of wish, or call it, like, maybe call it a superpower, but the wish to be able to see the world through someone else's eyes. That's been my. That's been my wish for a long time.

Cool.

Yeah. Because I think it's. We live in a subjective world, right. Whatever we see is through our own eyes. I mean, whatever we do, we can't really understand what other people are going through. And everyone is experiencing a different life and a different world than we could ever understand because we only have our own eyes.

Right.

I think that's part of maybe what draw me to my work is just, you know, really trying to understand how the world looked like from someone else's perspective. And I think that's also why I'm a little bit of a. We're talking about nerd before. So one of the things I'm nerdy about as well is probably movies and books.

Oh, me too.

I read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies, and I think what they do in a good book or a good movie can really help show the world for someone else's eyes. Like, show the experience through someone else's perspective.

Do you like the ones where they'll show. So it's like the whole story, and then it kind of starts over from the next person's perspective. And then it starts over and it's a different. And so the day changes so much as you go from one character to the next. That sort of a setup.

Sure.

There aren't too many of those. Ah, there's one I'm thinking about that's like that. But yeah, I love those perspectives. Stories, for sure. They are rare, but it's really. Those are good. I think there's some good crime novels in that regard where you think you understand what happened, but obviously then you see from others back then, like, oh, that's not what happened because you know, you've only seen it from one side of the story.

Oh, absolutely. That's so one of my very favorite musicals. And I had read the book as well. But I love Wicked and my old company was called Defying Gravity, inspired by one of the songs from that. But the just this idea of the story from the other perspective and how very different it is when you are going from Elphaba versus Dorothy or Glinda or whatever. So I love that sort of thing too. So we will find another time that you and I will connect on books and movies and all the greatness of the world. For sure. For anyone that's wanting to find you and Habit Weekly and connect, what is the best way to do that?

Sure. Well, I think a good way is actually Habit Weekly. So habit weekly.com is where you can sign up if you want to learn more about me and the work that I do. And some of the resources that I have as well is through my website. So samuelsalter.com I am somewhat of frequent trying to do the same good I do for my newsletter through LinkedIn and Twitter as well. So if you're interested in kind of getting similar good stuff on your LinkedIn feed or your Twitter feed, feel free to add or follow me there.

Absolutely. And I would say too, I am always very impressed that the it just goes to show, like you said, that you're putting good stuff out in the world and people want to engage and support what you're doing. When you do post on LinkedIn, you have so many comments and thoughts and questions and so much interaction on the posts that you put out there. And I love and admire that. So definitely I have enjoyed being connected with you on LinkedIn and will continue to be there and on Habit Weekly and everything will have links for all that in the show, notes for everyone. And just want to say thanks again so much, Samuel, for joining me on the podcast today.

Thanks for being here.

Yeah, no, it was really good talking to you. And one last advice, if you want to learn Swedish. Yeah, I know in the Muppets they have the Swedish chef.

I don't. He's not actually speaking anything that's even remotely close to Swedish, is he?

No, that's exactly how I speak. So that's the best way to learn.

I feel like I Can't even start to do an impression of what I feel like the Swedish Chef sounds like because I. Oh my gosh, that's hilarious. So you're saying he's actually saying real Swedish words when he's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

Okay, good to know. I'll have to get the, you know, translation on those in the future.

Yeah, that's why you should come to Sweden. People are very entertaining, how they speak on the street.

I love it. I'll. I will. I will watch in awe for sure.

Right.

All right. Thanks, Samuel. I had so much fun talking to.

Samuel about habits and behavior and all the cool things he's been able to learn about by creating Habit Weekly and in your business. I want you to think about one of the points we discussed during our interview. How many businesses create content that people don't want, making newsletters or whatever else because they want to grow their list or serve them themselves, they're thinking about them instead of thinking about the people.

On the other side.

When you're creating something you wish was in the world, whether it's a book or a resource guide for the things that you're interested in, something that you can't find anywhere else, and then you give it to others, they may want even more from you and be willing to engage on a deeper level, like Samuel has seen with Habit Weekly and as I mentioned on the episode success that Neal has seen seen with his books. If you start from a place of sharing, reciprocity will kick in eventually and people will appreciate what you're doing and want to give back to you in.

One way or another.

It becomes a virtuous cycle and it's just good to put good things out in the world. And truly, I highly recommend you subscribe to Habit Weekly so you can get links to the behavioral science conversation going on around the world and and all of you who reach out and ask me about the types of jobs available and if you're interested in attending a conference, there's a lot of content in there and it's scannable, so you can pick and choose which topics and pieces are relevant for you that week. It doesn't necessarily have the same business angle you get from me here on the brainy business, but it's still really, really great stuff. Subscribe and check it out yourself@habit weekly.com.

So what got your brain buzzing as you learned from Samuel today? For me, I'm uber nostalgic about this episode. It's really weird for me, in the best way to think back to what things were like for both Samuel and I when we recorded this episode all those years ago. Habit Weekly and the Brainy business started around the same time and it's been so crazy to watch them blossom and go on their own journeys over the years and then to listen back to our conversation when we had no idea what the coming years had in store. I'm not even talking about COVID which was of course right around the corner from when this aired, but it's just really cool feeling to look back on this episode and reconnect with Samuel in this way.

And you know, I reached out to him for a separate catch up.

Maybe we should have him do a new episode and conversation sometime soon. Let me know on social media if you would like to hear more from him. You can find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And of course give a shout out to Samuel and the Habit Weekly team.

While you're at it.

They are fantastic and so valuable.

There are links to sign up for.

The Habit Weekly newsletter and connect with Samuel and all the related past episodes and books in the show. Notes for the episode you it's all waiting for you within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com28 4 and just like that, episode 284 with habit weekly founder Samuel Salzer is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with the Habit Weekly Awards Content Person of the Year Carlos Hoyos. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don'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. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.