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All right, let's kick off today's show, Johnny. Today we're talking with Dr. Katie Milkman.

Dr. Milkman is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the co-founder of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, a research center with the mission of advancing the world.

She's also the host of the popular Behavioral Economics Podcast Choisology and her newest book, How to Change, the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be has dropped and we're excited to talk about it.

Welcome to the show, Dr. Milkman. In a recent episode we talked about how to help others change and today we're really going to focus on how we can impact our own lives and change.

And I'd love to just kick off with learning a little bit about your origin story and how you settled on the science of change.

Yeah, thanks for asking and thanks very much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

My origin story, oh gosh, it's where to begin. I guess I started getting interested in behavior changes a graduate student when I was actually studying computer science and business of all things.

And I had to take a required microeconomics sequence of classes and in that sequence I was introduced to this pretty new field at the time of behavioral economics.

It was sort of a blossoming area of study and Danny Coniman had just won the Nobel Prize for his path breaking worth with Amos Tversky showing that people overweight losses relative to gains instead of being perfectly raptional optimizers.

And that they make all sorts of other errors and probabilistic judgment. And there was a growing consensus that people seem to be impatient and not very good at optimizing their retirement savings and their credit card borrowing and their eating and their smoking.

And I was completely fascinated because I had always seen people modeled as these perfect decision making machines and here was a field that was saying, wait, wait, people make mistakes, that's normal. And I thought that was so interesting.

But really what I was excited about is, oh, it means there's an opportunity to grow and change. If we recognize that fallibility, then maybe we can actually come up with fixes.

So I think that's when I first got intrigued. I fell in love with the field of behavioral economics, but because I saw that opportunity for growth. And frankly, there was an element of interest in like me search, like, oh, I'm broken.

And we can model that and maybe we could fix it with science. That would be so great. So I think that's kind of where it started. But I can say more about what made it sort of my life's central focus.

If that's, if you think that would be interesting. Yeah, definitely. And then we can jump into the book itself. And I know there's a lot of strategies you outline based on some great research.

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