Charles Duhigg Author of The Power of Habit and Supercommunicators, and journalist at The New Yorker Magazine (and previously at the New York Times.) Also, for one terrifying...

“For guys who like their images that they're such rebels and they do drugs and they can't get along with anyone, the greatest thing that the Rolling Stones have done is they never broke up. ... That's like a billion dollar decision that they made.”

Behavioral Grooves Podcast · October 2026

The hosts end with a desert-island music question. Duhigg picks the Beatles and the Stones, and this is his case for the Stones.

Behavioral Grooves Podcast · 2026-10-05 Listen to the episode → More from Charles Duhigg →

Transcript

Behavioral Grooves Podcast Around 55:19 into the episode

Speaker 3

Einstein at the beach. There's only so many times I'm at the beach, but like, so who would it be? So honestly, so I'm going to pick two bands from the 60s, which I'm, I'm Gen X. I was born in 74. So these aren't even bands I grew up with. Wow. But I will say I keep coming back to them and being like, oh, this is actually, this is even better than I remember, which are the Beatles and the Stones. Yeah. Like, I just find, I've been writing, I've been writing, researching the Beatles background for this project I'm working on now that the Beatles aren't going to actually show up in. But I was reading, there's this great book called What's it called? I think it's called Things Were Never Better. It's a history of England in the 1960s. And it's just so fascinating because what it makes clear is that the Beatles were this emblem of this change that was happening around them. And they actually weren't that good a band at first, right? When they got discovered, they sounded like every other band. It's because of the period and the risks they were willing to take that Revolver and the White Album end up coming out, Sgt. Peppers. And I do find that when I listen to them, they get more and more complex and interesting to me. And then the Stones, just because I love the Stones. I just feel cooler listening to the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones just

Speaker 2

released their 25th album just

Speaker 3

by. I mean, for guys who like their images that they're such rebels and they do drugs and they can't get along with anyone, the greatest thing that the Rolling Stones have done is they never broke up. They've lived. They've continued living and broke up. That's like a billion dollar decision that they made. That's just like, yeah, go do another concert tour. Like that's like, yeah, it's

Speaker 4

amazing. All right, Charles, I have one thing to add to this. So I give people this little cheat hint on this. So as Tim said, it was a, it's like, you get everything in that artist. So you could pick a single Beatle and not just get the Beatles repertoire, but everything they did subsequent. And this also then points to which Beatle do you like? Yeah, McCartney.

Speaker 3

McCartney. McCartney. Yeah.

Speaker 4

All right. Yeah. Okay. I think

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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